The American Left's Silly Victim Complex
Before I comment on this article, let me tell you that for the time being, I affiliate myself with neither Republicans or Democrats--I'm still trying to figure it all out. I just found this article to be interesting enough to post about.
For a while there I'd forgotten that the Democrats were the ones who catered to the working class, those who were down to earth and realistic, those who really made an effort to see eye-to-eye with the average American. According to Bernie Sanders,
“Unfortunately, today, when you talk about the ‘American left,'...you’re not really referring to millions of workers who have lost their jobs because of disastrous trade agreements,” he says. “You’re not talking about waitresses who are working for four bucks an hour.” As often as not, he says, you’re talking about “sophisticated people who have money.”
“It’s also a cultural thing,” Sanders says. “A lot of these folks really don’t have a lot of contact with working-class people. They’re not comfortable with working-class people. They’re more comfortable with environmentalists, with well-educated people. And it’s their issues that matter to them.”
This is another dirty little secret of the left – the fact that, at least when it comes to per-capita income, those interminable right-wing criticisms about liberals being “elitists” are actually true. According to a 2004 Pew report, Americans who self-identify as liberals have an average annual income of $71,000 – the highest-grossing political category in America. They’re also the best-educated class, with over one in four being post-graduates.
Ouch. In terms of financial stability...well. The gap between the rich and the poor seems to be growing at almost an exponential rate. The rich are getting richer, the poor becoming poorer. And it seems that as this gap widens, the poor are being neglected in the political sphere. Politically, people seem to be coming together, even if they don't necessarily identify with the same political party.
American is increasingly becoming a nation driven by its wealth, not by its people. Surprise, surprise--this nation is supposed to be one of people, not of money.
But having rich college grads acting as the political representatives of the working class isn’t just bad politics. It’s also silly. And there’s probably no political movement in history that’s been sillier than the modern American left.
What makes the American left silly? Things that in a vacuum should be logical impossibilities are frighteningly common in lefty political scenes. The word “oppression” escaping, for any reason, the mouths of kids whose parents are paying 20 grand for them to go to private colleges. Academics in Priuses using the word “Amerika.” Ebonics, Fanetiks, and other such insane institutional manifestations of white guilt. Combat berets. Combat berets in conjunction with designer coffees. Combat berets in conjunction with designer coffees consumed at leisure in between conversational comparisons of America to Nazi Germany.
We all know where this stuff comes from. Anyone who’s ever been to a lefty political meeting knows the deal – the problem is the “spirit of inclusiveness” stretched to the limits of absurdity. The post-sixties dogma that everyone’s viewpoint is legitimate, everyone‘s choice about anything (lifestyle, gender, ethnicity, even class) is valid, that’s now so totally ingrained that at every single meeting, every time some yutz gets up and starts rambling about anything, no matter how ridiculous, no one ever tells him to shut the fuck up. Next thing you know, you’ve got guys on stilts wearing mime makeup and Cat-in-the-Hat striped top-hats leading a half-million people at an anti-war rally. Why is that guy there? Because no one told him that war is a matter of life and death and that he should leave his fucking stilts at home.
I'd always wondered, in passing, why it is that college students just don't seem to care anymore. I wondered why nobody takes to the streets like they did back in the 60s, why everyone seems to be so darn apathetic. I guess it's because, as addressed in this article, we don't have any new fights to fight. The issues that drove students to the streets and to be active are now things of the past, things we really don't have any reason to fight for as actively as they did in previous years. Times have changed; things are vastly different from what they were in the 1960s. Times have changed; why haven't we? It seems to me that I need to rethink what it means to be politically active, what it means to make a difference in this nation. Maybe I don't have to march around with a megaphone, crying out against the war; maybe that's not as effective as it was nearly 50 years ago.
I'll end it with this:
That, in sum, is why I don’t call myself a liberal. To me the word “liberalism” describes an era whose time is past, a time when a liberal was defined more by who he was fighting against – the Man – than what he was fighting for. A liberal wielding power is always going to seem a bit strange because a liberal always imagines himself in an intrepid fight against power, not holding it. I therefore prefer the word “progressive,” which describes in a neutral way a set of political values without having these class or aesthetic connotations. To me a progressive is not fighting Mom and Dad, Nixon, Bush or really any people at all, but things – political corruption, commercialism, pollution, etc. It doesn’t have that same Marxian us-versus-them connotation that liberalism still has, sometimes ridiculously. It’s about goals, not people.
It's about goals, not people. Well said.
