I’m very impressed with Ben Burgis.
If you have any experience in radical politics on the Left or the Right, you know exactly where he is coming from in this podcast. Why do people on “our side” feel the need to do all the stupid, unnecessary and counterproductive shit that they do? Why are they more interested in expressing their own sense of identity than in building political coalitions to change objective material conditions?
These people aren’t engaging in politics at all which is about articulating an agenda, identifying common ground, crafting a message and building coalitions. They are engaged in an aesthetic and moral performance. They are virtue signaling to others in the same milieu. The biggest example of this on the contemporary Left, which has clearly dawned on Burgis, is that his fellow leftists are much more interested in the transformation of consciousness (internal reality) than in changing objective material conditions (external reality) for the working class. They are obsessed with policing thought and controlling words and inventing new -isms and -phobias and scolding people and having them jump through hoops on the basis of these -isms and -phobias to pump themselves up and showcase their moral purity. They are obsessed with psychology. They want to be your priest and control your inner world. This is why they go so hard after heretics and become busybodies and surveil even people on their own side and form social media mobs to destroy the lives of ordinary people for saying the wrong words. When you respond to these people and insist the Left should be focused on practical politics and changing external material reality and moving the country toward social democracy, they will accuse you of “class reductionism.”
Bro, have you even read Freud? Have you read Nietzsche, Adorno, Marcuse or Foucault? We need to get the whole country on the psychoanalytic couch in order to identify their psychological repressions which are their -isms and -phobias where they can be confessed and removed by therapy.
Note: In order to escape from the clutches of these people, millions of working class voters have been alienated and flocked to the Republicans.
“How Could The American Left Allow The Republicans To Become The Party of the Working Class?”
By making it’s main goal the cultural genocide of Native American Whites.
At least to some degree GOP was a White working class party under Reagan until his successor squandered it all away.
@More of The Same…
Yes, absolutely, but, President Reagan was neither a New Englander, nor an aristocrat dandy, both of which were those Republican chief executives who followed him before President Trump.
Depends on how you define Working Class. I define as people who work full time, are not white collar professionals and are reliant on wages from tangible work for existence. However, some blue collar workers are business owners and/or make middle class wages. These folks liked Reagan and Trump. They are usually white, often rural. Often skilled trades. Many are in unions even. The vast majority of working class today though are caretakers, service workers, lower paid teachers and drivers. These workers tend to be, with the exception of large truck drivers, female, urban and ethnically diverse. They are core democrats. The working class vote, since 1980, has generally bifurcated politically, between the urban service economy working class, who wants more government support, and the generally wealthier, more libertarian traditional blue collar working class, who has trended GOP
The Left is taking more militant positions involving minorities (gays, non-whites, etc). Minorities are the sacred. Minorities are to be elevated. The oppressed are that which must be protected at all cost. The majority is evil and must be policed as they’re a danger to minorities. The majority needs to be dismantled (including demographics as well as social and cultural mores it forces on minorities, etc).
It doesn’t matter how vile, stupid, or abusive minorities are. Minorities can do no wrong in the eyes of the Left. And even when they do wrong it’s the fault of the majority. Minorities are not problematic.
This is where all of this stems from on the Left.
The Right, especially Republicans, cannot really articulate this. The Right doesn’t take anti-minority pro-majority positions. It just blindly backlashes when shit becomes too intolerable (with the policing of the majority in the name of minorities to make everything minority-centric, etc). Things then resume as usual. This cycle repeats itself.
“They are obsessed with psychology. They want to be your priest and control your inner world.”
They do this because they believe intrinsic bias and prejudices leads to marginalization of minorities. It is important to understand their arguments to both understand, counter them, and figure out the truth of it all and make the best path forward.
Some leftists, recognizing there is a [building] backlash on the horizon [which Trump is just the beginning of continual backlash], is trying to convince society that the “true left” is just about class (because they don’t want to be associated with the more militant anti-majority pro-minority left). They have an entire worldview where race/culture is a way for the elite to divide the working class and prevent revolution. They get accused by the other leftists as class reductionist and undervaluing minorities’ oppression (which is part of their white privilege). And so a quasi-internet civil war ensues between these two camps.
The Republicans represent themselves and their lobbies and special interests just as the dems represent theirs.