Why do our lefty friends talk about “black folks, queer folks, indigenous folks”? Answer: it all goes back to the Nazis and das Volk. The whole point of Nazism was to inspire das deutsche Volk to rise up against the punitive Treaty of Versailles after Germany’s defeat in World War I. In the end, it didn’t go very well, of course.
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But now we have the Global South, and instead of Nazis singing a song of völkisch oppression, we have lefties singing a song of postcolonial oppression to get the global Volk to rise up against the Western colonialist enemy. Call it “The Rise of the Völkisch Left,” writes Ashley Frawley.
Postcolonialism does not simply swap out the working class for some other group of the oppressed. Its object is a mystic unity of culture, collective memory, fraught relationships to race and place, and inherited victimhood. Blood and soil in these formulations are only slightly obscured by a thin rhetorical dust.
Concerning this worldview, we can say that Marxism did not arise out of rationalism and the Enlightenment but from just another mystic origin: the mystic emergence of the working class from the bottomless depths of exploitation.
Let’s universalize this. Every political movement is the story of the mystical origin of a people, and prophesies its heroic journey from the darkness of subjection into the glorious light of ascendance, the Promised Land of political dominance.
The story is the same, whether it’s the Israelites escaping from slavery in the land of Egypt, or overtaxed colonists escaping from the villainy of King George, or workers fighting the horror of capitalism, or Germans fighting the humiliation of Versailles, or students fighting to protest the Vietnam War, or MAGAs escaping their subjection to the Deep State into a Golden Age of America, or DSA girl students overwhelmed with student debt and useless degrees fighting against the billionaires that oppress them.
So what does it all mean?
To understand the old politics, go read Alexander the Great by Robin Lane Fox. Back then, the rulers were warrior lords, and when they weren’t invading Persia, they spent their time hunting and dueling: “horses and hunting, feasts and fighting.” And they liked to read Homer.
Today, of course, tech-bro warriors fly private and hunt for startups, feast on funding tranches and Occupy Mars.
But our educated-class rulers are not really like the warriors of the olden time. They like to ride taxpayers; they like to hunt racists; they feast on the tears of victims; they fight over words. Instead of looting Persia, they loot your bank account.
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In other words, our modern leaders leave the dirty work to police and bureaucrats.
Of course, back in the day, life was great for the warriors. For the rest of us, it was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
And when the rains failed, the people starved.
Some people adapted. In southern Arabia, according to Wilfred Thesiger in Arabian Sands, it was okay to go and raid the neighbor for a few sheep if yours died in a drought.
But what can our brave rulers do now that they are no longer needed to raid the neighbors for sheep? Perfectly simple. They fire off a barrage of words against the racist-sexist enemy. And plunder the billionaires for loot to help the helpless, to raise them out of the dark of mystic helplessness into the blinding light of Affordability.
And boy, oh boy, how the victim fashions change.
If the Jews are no longer the helpless victims of the Holocaust, but returned in glory to the land of Israel, then helpless Gazans are now the victims of “genocide,” and every educated and credentialed person is all-in to Free Palestine. Or at least to carry a Free Palestine sign at a mostly peaceful protest.
What should we do about our progressive friends? Should we invoke the Honeymooners gambit? “To the moon, DSAs!” Perhaps Elon could help with that.
But another approach is from Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of scouting. He recommends “patience and guile.” We need to be patient while the activist ruling class is replaced by the tech-bro ruling class.
It really wouldn’t hurt to employ a bit of guile to move the markers. How hard could it be? Our lefty friends really are not that smart, not Marx, not Engels, not Mamdani, not AOC.
Still, at least they aren’t Nazis. Not quite.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.