Vaush: Addressing “Anti-Woke” Leftists

I needed a good laugh.

Let’s start with some basic definitions of terms:

Reactionary – In political science, a reactionary or reactionist is a person or entity holding political views that favor a return to a previous political state of society that they believe possessed positive characteristics that are absent in contemporary society. 

Populist – A person, especially a politician, who strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.

Nationalist – A person who strongly identifies with their own nation and vigorously supports its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations.

Progressive – A person advocating or implementing social reform or new, liberal ideas.

Liberal – A supporter of policies that are socially progressive and promote social welfare. A supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.

Modern liberalism – The dominant version of liberalism in the United States. It combines ideas of civil liberty and equality with support for social justice and a mixed economy.

Cultural liberalism – Cultural liberalism is a liberal view of society that stresses the freedom of individuals from cultural norms and in the words of Henry David Thoreau is often expressed as the right to “march to the beat of a different drummer”.

Kyle Kulinski is correct.

The overwhelming majority of working class people are unfamiliar with “intersectionality” and find it weird and alien. It is college educated people and progressive activists who are enamored with what James Carville has criticized as “faculty lounge” talk. Vaush goes on to defend the utility of “intersectional analysis” without addressing the point that working class people don’t understand it and that it is a political albatross. He implicitly concedes the point when he laments that the Right has successfully exploited it. It is something that alienates and repulses millions of working class voters.

Vaush goes on to argue that there is “no contradiction whatsoever” between advocating for “social minority rights” and “advocating for worker’s rights.” This flies in the face of a political realignment which has been going on for 50 years and is rapidly gaining momentum. In reality, the push by progressives for toxic and deeply polarizing cultural issues which continue to multiply has steadily alienated populists, repulsed millions of working class voters and has completely swapped out the bases of the two parties. He concedes this point too when he acknowledges that the woke scolds actually are repulsing working class voters. The whole phenomenon of lib owning on the Right is based on cultural antagonism toward these people. Conservatives and populists are united by shared animosity toward these people.

Vaush glides over the fact that populism and progressivism are different ideas with different histories which appeal to different people and which were only brought together as New Deal liberalism during the Great Depression. Populists tend to be working class people – historically speaking, farmers, workers, small businessmen – who have cultural or economic grievances against established elites. In contrast, progressives have historically been educated urban elites who are elitist do gooders. They are educated people with a technocratic bent who want to use social science to reform society. The New Deal coalition began to come unglued over integration during the Civil Rights Movement and dissolved completely over the Cultural Revolution in the 1980s. While populists and progressives might agree on the core value of economic fairness, they diverge on cultural issues. Populists reject social liberalism while progressives champion it which is the reason why the culture war ripped apart the New Deal coalition.

In the early 20th century, populists and progressives were opposing camps in rival political parties. Progressives like Theodore Roosevelt championed American imperialism. Populists like William Jennings Bryan opposed imperialism. Then as now, populism appeals to disgruntled, culturally conservative working class voters and progressivism appeals to wealthy, culturally liberal established educated elites. The progressives in the Democratic Party are the PMCs while the dwindling number of populists who remain there are working class voters. The Democratic Party is now defined by social liberalism. It is getting so bad that conservative-leaning, working class non-Whites are headed toward the exits.

The idea that populism is necessarily linked to progressivism flies in the face of American history. The Jacksonians were a populist-conservative coalition. The Democratic Party in the Bryan era was also a populist-conservative coalition. Donald Trump created a new populist-conservative coalition. Joe Biden’s Democratic Party has become the party of Corporate America, Wall Street, upper middle class professionals and utopian social reformers like its predecessors the Whig Party or the old Republican Party of the Eastern establishment facing off against a populist coalition based in the South and West.

The most intense cultural divide in the United States which is the primary political fault line is between traditionalist White working class voters and cosmopolitan White PMCs. It is interesting that Vaush would argue that there isn’t a meaningful class divide there and that the professional bourgeoisie is actually on the side of the working class when they are the people who give them orders. The old “populist stool” of cultural conservatism, economic fairness and foreign policy restraint is increasingly replacing the Reaganite “fusionist” stool in the GOP due to the sheer numbers of working class voters who have fled from the PMCs and their bizarre cultural beliefs who now dominate the Democratic Party.

“The Ehrenreichs’ innovation lay in linking the rise of this class to post-68 social movement leftism. Thus, from the start, it mixed sociological description with political diagnosis. “The PMC’s objective class interests,” they observed, “lie in the overthrow of the capitalist class, but not in the triumph of the working class; and their actual attitudes often mix hostility towards the capitalist class with elitism towards the working class”. The PMC origins of the New Left, the Ehrenreichs contended, “shaped its growth and ideology”. That said, their assessment, as of the seventies, was ambivalent rather than hostile: the PMC was by nature haughty towards the working-class majority, but also structurally antagonistic to capitalism. It was a potential ally, though not one to trust further than you could throw.

Post-68 radicalism ebbed away, leaving a cultural imprint on academic faculty, who, in a ponytailed, blue-jeaned, turtle-necked spirit of rebellion, passed hand-me-down ideas to their students. The resulting mixture of cultural radicalism, political quiescence and economic yuppiehood still dominates campuses today, and radiates out into graduate professions like fashion, journalism and the arts. …

Thus, when leftist protest re-emerged from the nineties deep freeze, it was increasingly inseparable from a great gloop of PMC mores. This formed a natural upper limit to the left’s hegemonic ambitions. Confronted with austerity, left populist parties initially tried to recapture a majoritarian spirit – “we are the 99%!” – but frequently found themselves prisoners of the predilections of their core supporters, those subcultures of downwardly mobile graduates.

The result, not just in Britain, is a leftism where class dare not speak its name. Stimulated by a postmodern curriculum, graduates encourage – indeed, mandate – wrenching self-examination of whiteness, heteronormativity and patriarchy. Privilege, as they call it. But, on class, they have built paranoid, insulated walls against critique. When the question is even asked, some retort (correctly) that the “working class has changed”, implying (incorrectly) that they are the vanguard of a new social majority that passes through top tier universities. Others bristle at the tag PMC, the mere mention of which invites charges of “class reductionism”, now regarded as the greatest academic sin one can commit. …”

What do you think?

Does this sound like Vaush with his ponytail pleading that there is “no contradiction whatsoever” between pursuing issues like “trans women” in women’s sports and building a political majority to advance the interests of working class voters who tend to be social conservatives?

One last thing …

If you are on the Left and you believe that life has objectively gotten worse for the working class under neoliberalism, you are already a reactionary. If you hate political correctness or wokeness and think our culture was better in the past when people were free to say whatever they wanted, you are also already a reactionary. If you think the status quo is shit and not worth preserving and you are nostalgic for the New Deal and think the Boomers ruined everything, you are a reactionary.

About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

27 Comments

  1. Where did these people come from. Why is a Shoe, which from what I can detect is an average to below average looking girl or this slob Vaush news worthy. They arent thought leaders nor are they some random Tomi Lahren hot bimbo who is at least tolerable with the sound turned off. How are these people even known to us or in the discourse. Valid question.

    • Gonna fight you on this one chief. Shoe is cute. Her shit is too mild and lame for me (and some of it wrong). But that doesn’t make her not a cutie. Not totally my type but definitely not average.

      How can you think Tomi Lahren is hot but Shoe is average? She looks like a hard pressed fake barbie doll from a toy store. Man men do us men vary in our taste.

      • Gonna fight you right back my brother. I just wasted thirty minutes reviewing videos and pics from her time with her fat boyfriend to her solo work. The girl looks like a rat dude and apparently is bald. Be better.

        As for content we have over two millennia of works and data to pour over, why would i, or anyone for that matter, waste an hour of my life which could be better invested on people with pithy names talking about subjects they arent well versed on. Oh well Shoe and Panera Bread says it is good so it must be…

        Come on

    • I follow the Populist Left, Breadtubers, socialists and anarchists. There are people like Jimmy Dore who despises Joe Biden, people like Shoe and Kyle Kulinski who are in the middle and people like Vaush who are pro-Biden and pro-SJW. We overlap on some issues like economics and foreign policy. We also know Shoe who is a huge fan of Huey Long.

    • ” How are these people even known to us or in the discourse. ”

      Hmmmm, I can’t imagine who would prop up and inflate such culturally destructive personalities, just can’t imagine ……

      Who runs google and youtube ?

      • I am quite aware of the who produces just the why and who watch. That applies to a broad array of things as a majority of the population watches the Kardashians and mainstream media.

  2. HW, are you a masochist,
    listening to vaush spew his verbal sewage ?

    He’s a bloated pig and so are his endless monologues of misdirection.

    (He attended Humbolt State, in Arcata CA, which is san francisco on steroids.)

  3. Notice this, about the jewish type (vaush), they use a flood of words to introduce ambiguity and confusion to persuade the listener.

    • @Arrian…

      He may well be Jewish, but, his name, and his appearance, seems more like a Baltick Republick-blooded Viking man to me.

        • @Arrian…

          Yes, it’s true.

          I am half Hungarian Jewish, half Anglo-White Southern – those parts exclusively, and I look neither, but, Hungarian Gentile.

  4. Once you take all the “wokeness” away from modern leftism/progressivism … all that is left is the Zionism.

    I oppose finance capitalism, but these progressives can’t even balance a checkbook or run anything more complicated than an anarchist bookstore. American white men know how to run efficient businesses. The problem isn’t in the execution of the businesses, the problem is the ownership of finance capital.

    What happens if we start to “redistribute” finance capital? What happens when Vaush and his friends start to look into the actual largest finance capital companies in America?

    Immediately they become “anti-semites” trying to “steal Jewish money” – exactly as former Anti-Defamation League Abe Foxman already said.

    I wrote last month about why there can never be a “Red-Brown alliance” because the Reds are literally – not figuratively – literally paid by Jewish capitalists to attack the working class. That is their job, and the smart ones know it.

    We saw it all happen at Occupy Wall Street. The conservatives started screaming “Anti-Semite” and the liberals started screaming “Racist” and the entire OWS started talking about “white supremacy” by which they meant people they racialize as “white but not Jewish.”

    It’s really, really simple. Walk into any of these “progressive” groups and start naming the names of actual, really existing Capitalists and they will throw you out.

    100% of “progressivism” is fake, unserious bullshit. Mostly it’s exhibitionism by 20 something rich kids on various SSRI drugs who like to post selfies of their “activism” for “likes” on Facebook – that’s it.

    • “the problem is the ownership of finance capital.”

      Is that ever true !

      Ya know, when the great banks of England were owned and run by Quakers, they were world famous for their impeccable ethics.

      Now, neither is true.

    • “Walk into any of these “progressive” groups and start naming the names of actual, really existing Capitalists and they will throw you out.”

      Yep, I’ve been on that ride.

  5. The Left (a steroidal form of Federalism) has dreamed of overturning this country, culture, and people since such thinking began to be popular in New England 200 years ago.

    At first they worked around the edges, then, once they got a holt of The Oval Office (1861) they resorted to force to further and maintain the process.

    When that, by the mid 1870s, did not quite work out as they had hopet, they returned to working around the edges, and, eventually, by the rise of Teddy Roosevelt, they began to gain traction.

    A few decades later saw the new steroidal Federalism in the academick system, and, nowadays, The Academick System in this country is not really such, but, rather Jesuitical Indoctrination System in this kind of thinking.

    Given that all things grow until they are struck down, one must assume that The Steroidal Federalist Left, now in control of The Academick System, The Mainstream Media, Athletics, Monuments, Corporations, and The United States’ Government, will attempt the last lap – total control over Smalltown and Rural America.

    This is the last bastion for them, though, because Smalltown Americans are extremely well-armed, and are evermore so mentally and spiritually, I am left to expect some cataclysmick events over the next decade or two.

    With governors ordering lockdowns and mandatory masks, we are at the threshold of that period in Russian history when the NKVD drove around the countryside with lists of people to execute, and the general order to confiscate all firearms and Ikons.

    Given the logical progress of things, that has to be the next step here, for, even at this late date, I still see nothing forming in the political structures to effectively oppose it.

  6. *I’m Counter Revolutionary. Not reactionary. which these terms get used interchangeably. But they’re not.

  7. Hi Hunter,

    Long time no speak.

    I’d like to do an OD blog (haven’t done one in years) about the rancher vs grey wolf protecters in Idaho and Montana.

    My log and passwords don’t work.

    Can you call or e- mail me?

    I’ll try to call, but I never get through.

    I hope you and yours are good.

  8. You really find these autistic bugmen interesting, HW? The only intellectual YouTube personality I like is Keith Woods, who won me over with his commentary on The Paris Review and the art of Jackson Pollock.

  9. Why does a guy named Ian Kochinski use the online identifier Irish Laddie? Kinda makes you wonder what is Sean Hannitys’ real name, Sol Rabinowitz?

Comments are closed.