Temporarily embarrassed noble

It doesn’t matter what you say you stand for. On the internet, anyone can and does say anything. What matters is what you actually stand for, with actions, not words. When rightoids claim to serve God and Country but proceed to rape and pillage their own land and people in the name of a fat paycheck, leftoids have no trouble identifying that what they actually stand for is big, fat paychecks. It’s time to face hard, sad facts about our metamodern left politics : they are no longer the politics for the poor, the disprivileged, and the dispossessed, but for spiteful tweeters who bemoan they aren’t oppressors. This has started being reflected in elections, and will cause irreparable harm unless there is a course correction. Hint : there won’t be. Buckle up.

I

In the European Parliament, S&D and Greens are far outnumbered by centrist and conservative parties. And in the US, there hasn’t been a president the left can actually say they approve of since, uh, I guess since Kennedy died ; the rest were centrist warmongers at best.

Think about it for a second. There have been multiple recessions since then, the most recent being corona-related, which have depressed the earnings of the working class, to say nothing of the foreign policy disasters in the Islamic world, and yet the political movement which considers itself the most critical of these policies is not dominating politics everywhere. Why ?

At some point, you have to stop falling back to media bias. Yes, media is biased. Yet somehow all I see on the internet — all anyone sees on the internet — is pro-leftist bias, be that Facebook, Twitter, Amazon or Google ; hell, be that the NYT or WaPo. Why, can you name a single big, openly right-wing streamer on Twitch.tv for example ? Answer via email or comments. Rightoids seem to have been banished to gab and YouTube podcasts, which isn’t negligible, but it’s a far cry from every single blue checkmark leaning left.

Somehow, in different times and different countries, the left has overcome worse odds. They have overcome their political opponents literally hunting them down and forcing them into concentration camps. Yet somehow, some way, they can’t manage to win an election proper with candidates they actually like. Why, a lot of the left’s sacred cows are wildly unpopular, especially the new, metamodern cows. At the very least, if you are committed to the cause, this should be grounds for introspection.

II

What does the right support ? If you browse r/conservative and try to parse people’s opinions — not to clip karma bait for your degenerate rageporn clique, but to actually understand people — you will see a lot of sentiment that is vaguely reminiscent of leftist talking points. It turns out, conservative people don’t like getting raped by corporations or waging endless wars, and they like getting paid their fair share at work.

Granted, the parties they support do not necessarily echo the sentiments, but as a leftoid, can you really say your party echoes your sentiments ? I mean, being a communist and voting for centre-right neoliberals is so common it might as well have its own dedicated dating app by now. The reason communists vote centre-right is because they feel like that’s their best option — or, to be exact, that they cannot vote right-wing.

If you look at exit pools and scroll down a little, you will see where the largest gap between red and blue lies : not gender, not location, but skin colour and financial improvement, the latter being more of a statement on how things went overall, and not politics specifically. In other words, if the right stopped being racist for a second, and didn’t get unlucky with a giant pandemic, that would close the gap significantly.

Every party has its own youth and its own dynamics, and young republicans aren’t the flaming racist anarcho-capitalist evangelicals their elders and party leaders are. Betting on team red being a 1960s stereotype forever is out of touch with reality : the very fact that Trump, an outsider, won is evidence that things are changing. Trump being a bad president has more to do with him being stupid, not with being red.

If this change leads to political realignments, team blue should fear it, because they are unlikely to come out on top. Without the pandemic, and with fewer racist statements, Trump would have won. This means that Biden’s victory was handed to him by chance. This isn’t an election strategy. It’s political suicide.

III

To understand why people don’t support the left, look at what the left supports. Some battles are easy : more money to the poor, less money to billionaires, legalising weed and decriminalising homosexuality are things many conservatives also support. With Caitlyn Jenner running as a Republican, that is evidence that conservatives are also warming up to transgendered people.

But when you browse the internet, are those really the politics you are exposed to ? Is your leftist news feed an endless barrage on raising the minimum wage, free healthcare, free weed, taxing the rich and reducing state oppression ? You must be following Secular Talk exclusively for that to be the case. Discourse has been about other stuff ; policy, too, has been about other stuff. When all you talk about is other stuff, and all you act upon is other stuff, then what you are is other stuff.

Identity discourse has taken over the left, and if you haven’t noticed, your IQ can be counted in two hands. It isn’t about transgendered people anymore : it’s about non-binary and neopronouns. It isn’t about racism anymore : it’s about critical race theory and reparations. It isn’t about homosexuality anymore : it’s about being queer. It isn’t about levelling the playing field anymore : it’s about Stalinism and Maoism. It isn’t about freedom or science anymore : it’s about opposing « Western values. »

How often do you need to say « white bad, straight bad, cis bad, male bad, nerd bad, science bad » before people figure out that is your unironic political position ? One tweet ? 10% of your tweets ? 50% ? Because as of 2021, it’s nearing 100% of your tweets.

How often do you need to act on it ?

IV

I will not bore you with ragebait articles. You’ve probably already seen the videos and articles of students being asked to say they’re sorry for being white or for being male. You’ve probably read the studies of young girls identifying as non-binary en masse. You’ve probably read about « transracial » people who hate their white skin so much they’ve decided to become African-American. You’ve run across thousands of people who support communism even though it’s genocided millions of Uyghurs, Chinese, Jews, and Ukrainians among others. You’ve probably not seen leftoids marching in Vienna and engaging in Holocaust denial to « own the Zionists » but it probably doesn’t surprise you.

These things aren’t twitter memes anymore. They are actions. They are actions that the left — exclusively the left supports. There aren’t any republicans white-washing communist genocide or changing races. When rightoids are racist, everyone flips out about it. When the left is, nothing is said, and nothing is done. Why, when — rarely — the left does address that these things actually happen and aren’t a Cracked.com article, they reframe them as something good and proper.

Your political opponents aren’t blind. They can see what you are doing, and they do not like it. Some even voice their disagreements, and here lies another catch : they are walking on eggshells when they do so. Because besides all of the above, there is also cancel culture and massive, systemic and systematic censorship on the internet. Not all leftoids support those things, but of the people who support those things, everyone is a leftoid.

I used to hang around evangelicals who were openly arguing for online censorship of things they disliked. Things have flipped 180° and now the same people support more liberty online, while leftoids are openly in favour of tech billionaires deciding who gets to be a person, without any judicial oversight or transparency.

In the midst of corona, in the midst of poverty, these are the things your journalists and your influencers are talking about. How gender and sex mean nothing. How you should burn down your neighbourhood. How you should suck Zuck’s cock. How stabbing a little girl is normal. How you should be sorry you’re white, male, heterosexual, cis, fit, mentally stable and monogamous.

V

When you notice something curious, always follow the paycheck. Isn’t it curious how nobody talks about poverty ? Well, how much money did they make last year ? Who do they hang around ? If all your friends are ultra-rich coastal elites, you are also an ultra-rich coastal elite.

People are tribal, which can be a good and a bad instinct : tribalism is why you have your dearest friends, and it’s also how you justify racism. Leftoids can scream about racism all they want, but they are still tribal — hell, they are aggressively and proudly tribal — and this backfires often. « Leftist infighting » is tribalism in action.

The real reason why so much of media leans left, from journobloggers to films and comic books, is because media is a clique, and media people have admitted to hiring preferentially within their clique. All of a sudden, when a leftoid holds a position of power, everything they learned about institutional prejudice is thrown out of the window, and they get to be as prejudiced as they want. They rail against meritocracy for this reason : not to reduce bias, but to feel free in being extremely biased.

As such, their opinions, their words, and actions, are no longer about their politics, but about climbing socially within the clique. Advancement is about who has the « courage » to adopt the most … permissibly « radical » opinion, be that discarding your gender, your race, your sexuality, your language, your family, whatever. Of course, there are opinions outside that, and that form of radicalism isn’t accepted. So « radicalism » is about how firmly you believe in the party ideology — an ideology that is unstated, yet everyone knows what it entails.

High positions in the media are revered in the left. So revered are they, they even have their own crown : the blue checkmark. These people may not be the best, and they may not even be the richest, but they are the most influential, and they hold prestige by virtue of their position. In other words, they are nobility.

The twitter user that can’t stop tweeting about identity isn’t thinking about the working class : most working class people don’t support their positions. Most black people are in favour of the police. Most transgendered people have a binary gender. Most fat people feel miserable in their bodies. These things have nothing to do with helping the poor. They’re statements of ideological conformity, ways to earn kudos and advance in the clique, manifestation of the leftoid’s true aspiration, their true self-image : not Che Guevara, but Romanov in hiding. The temporarily embarrassed noble.

VI

There is a dystopia on the horizon, not too faint now : that one day the practically-minded person won’t be able to vote left anymore, because the left’s positions will be as disgusting as climate denial and creationism are in the right. For some people, that is already the reality. For some places, that is already fact.

Leftoids underestimate the extent to which non-whites are conservative. Non-whites don’t have the same experiences with modernity as whites have had : they live in premodernity, and modernity is what’s radical for them. The left’s divorce from enlightenment-era movements like capitalism or even orthodox Marxism leaves the field open for the right, which will happily swallow premodernists and modernists alike.

In fact, leftoids underestimate the extent to which educated people are modernists. While, yes, educated people mostly lean left, there is a difference between the positivist tradition and the postmodernist tradition. When these crystallise into party affiliations, there will only be a place for them in the metamodern left or the metamodern right ; realistically, it’ll never be both. Being the party of the college-educated is one thing. Being the party of the college-educated Human Resources washouts is another ; you will have lost all your engineers, all your mathematicians, and all your historians to the right. But at least the software engineers will remain … so long as they’re white.

Maybe that can be good ; a metamodern right will be an improvement over the naïveté and bigotry of the current right. It’s more likely to be bad, because white identitarianism does not go out so easily, and when it’s identitarian versus identitarian, who loses is the worker and the poor.

VII

Biden was right that there is a battle for the soul of the nation, except replace « nation » with « the western world. » Postmodernism is dead, and we truly live in metamodernity now. As the west has replaced its foundational myths with the mere desire to improve welfare, it has discovered people need more than better food and better medicine to survive : they need nourishment for their souls, too. In a way, leftoid identitarianism serves this purpose : a new religion for the intellectual class. As the right sheds its evangelical Christianity, what will replace it ? Will it be Alex Jones, or will it be Jordan Peterson ?

The left has profound questions to answer. Its egalitarian roots contradict its current theories : feminism rejects sexism, but also it rejects womanhood, for it is man’s creation. Critical race theory rejects white supremacy, yet it defines black people, and often exclusively American black people as victims. Gender theory rejects rigid gender, yet it declares any deviation from gendered caricatures to be evidence of transgenderism. Psychology tries to reduce neuroticism, yet openly psychotic people make identities out of their delusions. Biology rejects eugenics, yet autistic people are disproportionately sterilised after being convinced to reassign sexually. Both cannot be true as is. Somehow, they must be reconciled, and if the left doesn’t do it, other people will do it for them.

There is a growing underbelly in the west that feels alienated by leftoids, that for all the tweets and all the marches, all it’s amounted to is coastal elites telling rural people that they should hate their skin, gender, and sexuality. This self-flagellation can only persist so long as the populace feels privileged ; when the people suffer, giving free shit to migrants isn’t a sacrifice. It is hatred. It is violence. It is tyranny.

And no matter what your professor said, no matter what you tweeted, happiness is measurable, and so is pain. If electrons exist, then suffering exists, then ethics exist. Injustice is real ; people feel it in their guts. Be wary of how nobles end, lest the next time the guillotines drop, yours is the head the blade of modernity chops. I, for one, will cheer on ; you should know by now how many journalists I want dead.