The tragedy is that instead of granting life to the inherently divisive doctrines of Cultural Marxism, these problems could easily have been solved with the milder tradition of Classical Liberalism. Indeed, in 1950s Britain, it was classical liberal politicians of the Wolfenden Committee who began the process of decriminalizing homosexuality. Marxists played little if any role in it. By the end of the 1960s, when the New Left were still on the fringe, their milder allies in the social liberal movement were already well on their way to winning America’s most important cultural battles: Jim Crow was dismantled, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were passed.
For better or worse (it was definitely for worse), the New Left became the defining youth movement of the 60s and 70s, and although initially perceived as radical, its ideas would eventually come to dominate modern culture. The counter-culture of the 1960s became the prevailing culture of the 1980s. By the 1990s, a decade in which, despite the LA riots and the OJ trial, we could all watch The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air without agonizing over white supremacist tropes in the Banks household, the New Left had become the establishment. It was now difficult to argue that any social group in the West lacked equality under the law. Indeed, thanks to the persistence of government redistribution plans and the early growth of affirmative action, some groups were already getting favored treatment—a sign of things to come. But the New Left still achieved complete control of media, academia and the arts, just at the point when they were no longer needed.
Metropolitan elites of today’s leftist political class follow the intellectual legacy of Gramsci and his contempt for working-class, traditionalist culture. The knee-jerk endorsements of feminism, Black Lives Matter, and gay identity politics are in no small part related to this Marxist tendency to back the “revolutionary class” against the “oppressors,” regardless of facts. Another by-product of 1960s leftism is the unabashed hatred of white males, who are (correctly) identified as the architects of western culture.
For the New Left, white men are the cultural counterpart to the economic bourgeoisie class in classical Marxist theory—a class of oppressors that must be overthrown by the oppressed. The influence of the New Left is seen most clearly in universities, where efforts to “deconstruct” the pillars of western civilization, from classical liberal humanism to the mythical “patriarchy,” proceed just as Gramsci would have wanted.
By the early 2000s, in firm control of the baby boomer’s cultural consciousness, the New Left was on course to become the new cultural hegemony. Conservatives, preoccupied with defeating the Soviet Union and reviving the free market, failed to grasp the gravity of the Left’s cultural revolution. On the Right, culture wars were only fought by social conservatives, spearheaded by evangelical Christians, who obsessed over unwinnable fights like gay marriage, and alienated young people with hare-brained censorship campaigns against rock music, comic books and video games.
When social conservatives started going after Harry Potter for “promoting witchcraft,” it became embarrassingly clear which side had won the culture wars. And it’s culture that matters. “Politics is downstream from culture,” as Andrew Breitbart used to say. Politics is just a symptom, which is one of the reasons I spend more time on college campuses than I do in Washington, DC.
If you’re reading this and you’re in college, or you recently graduated, you can lay the blame squarely at your parent’s generation for handing culture to the regressive lunatics and SJWs. The previous generation of conservatives failed completely in their attempts to save academia, the media and the arts. In many cases, they didn’t bother to fight at all, preferring to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on think-tanks and magazines complaining about the problem while doing absolutely nothing to fix it, as brilliantly set out in a well-known 2016 essay in The Claremont Review of Books.16 FOX’s Tucker Carlson is refreshingly harsh on this point, describing the conservative establishment as “overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders.”17 Liberals, meanwhile, were setting up university departments, organizing activist groups and installing themselves in Hollywood and New York City.
By 2010, the argument that racism, sexism, and homophobia still ran rampant in western society started to look absurd. I suspect the reason gay marriage became such a cause célèbre for the Left during this period is because it was, for them, the last clear-cut legislative battle that could be easily fought and won.
Like carnival magicians, the Left kept voters distracted, so they didn’t notice they were being taxed oppressively, regulated minutely and manipulated in countless other ways.
Seriously, you have to hand it to them. These guys put the work in. I do admire leftist’s energy levels. If I had to spend all day screaming and crying, stewing in my anger, blaming made-up concepts like the “patriarchy” for my failure and defending Barack Obama, I’d be exhausted.
Modern American liberals took Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” from 1984 and turned it into 24 hours. The “Two Minutes Hate” is a daily ritual in which every citizen must watch a video depicting the Party’s enemies and direct hatred toward them. For two minutes. CNN has published several articles comparing Trump’s presidency to Orwell’s dystopian fantasy, sanctimoniously oblivious to their own offenses.
How do they keep those hatred levels up? Maybe I’ve stumbled onto the real reason they love Starbucks so much.
WHY THE LEFT HATES YOU
Because of their intellectual pedigree in the angry, victim-centric doctrine of Cultural Marxism, the Left is committed to defending a worldview which arranges women, minorities, and gays in a league table of oppression, with straight white men as the eternal oppressors at the top of the list, followed by gay white men, followed by straight white women, all the way down to paraplegic black immigrant Muslim transsexuals at the very bottom. Straight white men are the new “bourgeoisie,” the group oppressing everyone else.
The academic phrase for this is “intersectionality.” Intersectionalists are the ones responsible for dreaming up new, ever more bizarre categories of oppression. These fun people believe there are “intersecting” categories of oppression: it’s not enough to just talk about the oppression associated with being a woman, one must also talk about the oppression associated with being a black woman, a black disabled woman, a fat black disabled woman, a fat black disabled Muslim woman, and so on.
In plainer English, different people’s lives suck for a bunch of different reasons. The progressive Left has constructed entire university departments just to parse that sentence.