Year End Thoughts 2023, Part 2

 

In recent years I’ve written frequently about the political attempt to divide the American populace into groups of victims and their oppressors. The value of this to the left is the fragmentation of the culture into aggrieved constituencies looking for redress or revenge for things done to them by the powerful, who can be opposed by various alliances of convenience. To this end, the victim groups have become more numerous and are proliferating. In addition to the traditionally resentful — women, blacks, Jews, and Native Americans — the Hispanics and Muslims have been added as ‘brown’ people also suffering from the abuses of the powerful. The most innovative extension of the victim class has been the visibly lengthening label of the group that was once Gay & Lesbian but has grown from there to become LGB, LGBTQ+, and now LGBTQ+++ with no end in sight.

The oppressors being opposed are conveniently identified by different, but usually overlapping, labels. Capitalists, Fascists, Heterosexuals (cis-normals), and more crudely, White Men, White Supremacists, and Christians. Predictably, this leads to other troubling overlaps. White Women become a culpable group, for instance, moving a notch down in legitimate grievance credentials on the feminist spectrum. Women are further becoming subject to exclusion as ‘pro-life,’ meaning they’re no longer women (whom nobody seems able to define anymore) but theocratic Christians. Jews are somehow not ‘brown’ like their Muslim genetic twins (Isaac and Ishmael, anybody?) but still White as can be, like White Women, White Men, and (ugh) White Supremacists, which facilitates the sleight of hand involved in tossing them into the population of ‘theocratic’ White Christians as a side dish.

Right now, of course, the label games being used to science-up the oppressor discussion are simply cover for the fact that there is one incredibly potent symbol of the evil oppressor every one of the victim groups can be persuaded or coerced to agree upon and target: Donald J. Trump.

While I am not convinced it is working in electoral terms, my thoughts as this year comes to an end are that this cynical assault on American identity is working at a different and troubling level. I can detect the effects in myself. If you’re honest, you can detect the effects on yourselves too. Differing in degree perhaps but effects nonetheless.

Just as old biases and stereotypes are being nourished in today’s progressive activists, they are being reawakened in those targeted as oppressors based on their race, ethnicity, sexual preference, political allegiance, and religious faith. I have found myself resorting for comfort to an old observation of mine that a cultural identity like race or sex is not a constant. Time and circumstance change the identity of the current population away from the global identity of the superset. In other words, women on the scene today, for example, are a distinct subset of the female sex, exhibiting some attributes but not others. It is possible to dislike a subset without hating the superset. I find myself disliking the current subset of women I observe and hear tell of in America. 

It’s not news that I have been accused many times of being a misogynist, but there is no one who is competent to judge me on this question. Over more decades than most of you have been alive, I have written glowingly about the female sex despite my criticisms, and I am eternally grateful for the female component of my own mind (yes, we’ve all got both inside us, except for the monsters of both sexes). There are two principal modes to the way my mind works: the Rifleman and the Receptor. I have always been wide open and welcoming to new ideas and interests, in which I am prepared to be uncritically voracious during the first burst of learning about them. That’s Receptor mode (which many men barely possess if at all unless hero worship is involved). Then comes the Rifleman, who probes the mass of new information for its proofs and potential pitfalls. If the process of learning the properties of the new material is interesting and adds to my mind space, I can become incredibly focused on pursuing it for years if necessary to find universal connections with other ideas and interests. How I work. I have spent an enormous amount of time on the subject of the opposite sex, as well as race and ethnicity, sexuality, and world religions. No one need agree with me about what I have arrived at in the way of mental models in these areas, but no one has any legitimacy whatsoever in dismissing me on any such subject with some slapped-on epithet.

But, as I said, I find myself having to reference my own subset vs superset formulation more often on the subject of multiple groups I had developed my own complicated and often rewarding relationships with. What’s this formulation? A personal axiom which stipulates that the present population of any group (i.e., the current subset) is not synonymous with the superset, which consists of any group’s demonstrated strengths and weaknesses throughout recorded and deducible history. To use my own ancestral group as an example, the Scots alive today are not synonymous with the Scots who terrified the Romans into building a wall to keep them out of Britain, the Scots who fought glamorous wars in kilts against all odds to reconquer Britain for Christianity, the Scots who became drab Calvinists and led the Industrial Revolution into the 20th Century. The current subset of Scots is a rabble of lazy illiterates who have lost all their religious faith but retained their inherent propensities for violence, parsimony, and quarrelsome personal interactions. All attributes present in the superset, but destructively dominant to an unprecedented degree right now.

Recognize it or not, but everyone agrees with this formulation, in fact if not consciously. Their general acceptance of the urban plantation plight of American black people is proof of this. The liberal-minded of us on race, which is an overwhelming majority, declare, proclaim, even insist that all the races are equal, none different from any other except for skin color. If symptoms suggest otherwise, the causes are not their fault but ours. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, institutional exclusions from opportunities in education and the professions are responsible for what we witness as a constant in our lives, the clear inferiority in terms of every measure of human accomplishment by the current population of American black people. Their children, the urban ones in particular, tend to grow up in poverty, without fathers, raised by mothers who are overrepresented in the numbers of drug addicts, prostitutes, and consumers of abortion services. As a result, the children fail to finish high school, learn less in the years they do attend schools, join violent gangs that deal drugs and kill each other at a rate hundreds of times greater than the hated cops do, and are far more likely to wind up in prison than college, let alone the most lucrative professions. Generations of government efforts to restore the human equality we claim to believe in have all failed dismally. And yet as a nation, we continue to apply exactly the same measures to keep a horrible situation from getting worse. We all know they will fail, yet we, and they, elect leaders who do not do anything differently and consistently make things not only worse but calamitous. The only proposed answer is more handouts, more forgiveness of crime, more lenient standards for entry to the traditional paths out of dangerous, destructive black neighborhood life. 

If this is not an absolute acceptance that the current subset is not as good as the historical superset of the black race we claim to respect, then it’s just simple racism hiding behind empty platitudes about equality. Acceptance that the only possible equality to be achieved is through direct income redistribution, regardless of merit.

A corollary of my subset-superset formulation is that the American people, and westerners generally, are getting dumber every year, and the current subset shows almost none of the attributes that created the abundance and liberty of the United States of America. That goes for all the subsets.

I am coming to dislike the ones who are the most vocal about the astonishing range of privileges they are owed for just being alive. Over the years I have written abundantly in support of the supersets, but I have to be honest about how I’m feeling now. Which I think is what they want me to feel, because it makes me an easier villain to target. But the cynicism underlying the rhetoric makes it impossible for me not to object to what the loudest subsets are saying and doing.

I’m not liking blacks much these days. Or women, Sex & Gender Obsessives, Jews, Anglo-Saxons, Europeans, and atheists. (Muslims aren’t on the list because I’ve never believed the Islam superset was civilized.) I don’t hate any of these groups, and there are many individuals within even the contemporary subsets whom I respect, admire, and even love. But what I am confessing to very honestly is that I am feeling resentments based on these self-defined identity categories of victimhood that I don’t enjoy experiencing even if it has the collateral effect of making me more observant of relevant issues no one really wants to talk about. I especially resent the cynical and deliberate attempt to undermine civil discourse by turning the subsets into victim niches who attack one another and the invented mythologies about patriarchy and conventional morality, including Christianity in particular.

We are being exhorted, explicitly and subliminally, to return to long suppressed negative stereotypes that without their positive counterparts become excuses for hostility and, yes, resentment of the simmering variety. The emphasis ceases to be on commonalities and more on divisions, reparations for past grievances, and revenge. All childish outbursts that hurt everyone and are actually fatal to civil society. 

Every group has its stereotypes. Nothing new about the fact they exist in the record. These tend to represent both weaknesses and strengths, and we have villainized them not because they’re wrong or right but because they acknowledge that there really are recognizable differences between groups that go beyond skin color and locations of genetic origin. Women talk more than men. A lot more on average, but often charmingly. Black people are superior to white people in sports that rely the most on size, speed, and body coordination. They are also better extemporaneous dancers and jazz musicians for related reasons. Jews do better in school and make more money on average than most other groups. Asians are superior at math.

By the same token, there are also negative stereotypes of these groups. Every coin has two sides, heads and tails. Women are sexual exhibitionists. Blacks are extravagantly emotional. Jews are argumentative. Asians are inherently secretive. It’s possible to dispute such generalizations by citing anecdotal exceptions, but that’s just specious denial. There’s something called the Pareto Principle (or 80-20 Rule), which is usually being invoked when people default to the adjective ‘all’ in conversation, this being the casual equivalent of the more formally framed stereotype. 

It bears repeating that stereotypes exist for all groups. (Cite me the exceptions in your rebuttal.) They have their value. Scots are tight with money. The English are pompous and insulting. The French are obsessed with sex and food. Italians are loud and violent and musical. Scandinavians are beautiful and promiscuous. The Irish are drunk, violent, and lyrical. Russians are drunk, tragic, and enduring. The Germans are smart, dangerously ambitious geniuses and monsters of viciousness. Catholics are obsessed with guilt and the Virgin Mary. Evangelicals have carved Jesus out of Christianity as a personal totem who spends more time with them than with other people. Mormons are friendly but boring. Conservatives are tightasses who don’t’ care about the welfare of the less fortunate. Liberals are bleeding hearts who are better at talking the altruism game than playing it for real.

Unfair? Yes but no. There is value in even the most negative stereotypes. One of my oldest statements to myself throughout my life has been: people have the weaknesses of their strengths and the strengths of their weaknesses. The greatest strength can in many instances be linked to the greatest corresponding weakness of the same trait. Yes, Jews are argumentative, which can lead to ruthlessly effective lawyering and brilliantly insightful comedy, both products of the questing mind that challenges every assertion. Yes, black people excel as athletes, improvisational musicians and dancers, actors, and inspirational pastors, all of which talents arise directly from their capacity for spontaneous creativity in the moment; however, the corresponding weakness is vulnerability to emotional overreaction, also in the moment, that can lead to violence, infidelities of various kinds, and lack of the kind of perseverant ambition that builds steady, disciplined careers. Yes, women are nurturing by nature, inclined toward the lovely avocational word “homemaker,” but the inward-looking perspective that focuses on the nest rather than the surrounding forest can also lead to a preference for physical safety and security over the liberties of those others who might impede her authority in the home. She’d rather be a safe hen in a padlocked henhouse than a Rhode Island Red taking unguarded potluck in a big old barnyard. 

The reason we’ve become so unconstitutionally censorious of stereotyping is that we don’t want to see how much our most cynical leaders have manipulated these same stereotypical generalizations for their own purposes of control and personal advancement. We have encouraged groups who see themselves as discriminated against into becoming the opposite of their strengths in the name of defeating the enemy by becoming him, or more accurately, their erroneous perception of him. We’ve made women into imitation men, every bit as foul-mouthed, promiscuous, and conquest-oriented as the worst of men. Both strengths and weaknesses are abundantly on display as the need to put a female face on ersatz maleness results in brand new extremes of illogic and thoughtless self-destructiveness. Motherhood is actually villainized as a construct of the patriarchy, turning the female sex’s most valuable claim on respect into a symbol of actual disgust. The physical realities of female fertility, including menstruation, globular pregnancy weight, stretch marks, varicose veins, and sagging breasts, as well as the female-specific experience of constipation and urinary incontinence, are paraded in advertising, entertainment vehicles, and political protests. The latter have ironically succeeded in turning female nudity from an effective political protest tool into an appalling, unsightly reminder that it was the male sex which first invented the delightful ideal of romantic love and attraction, including makeup, fashion, and sexually tantalizing modesty about what used to be private women’s business. In all the professions and trades they’ve demanded their fair share of, they are hoist by their own stereotypical petard, continuing to be too obedient, risk-averse, and myopically nest-oriented to achieve the kinds of performance breakthroughs men achieve by busting through the conventions of a patriarchy that has always been just as intent on controlling them as it does more successfully with women. All this after, mind you, a full century of universal women’s suffrage. How can it be that today’s women would rather have a License to Kill than protect their living children from school libraries repelete with raw pornography and pedophile groomers twerking in K-12 classrooms.

We’ve made urban black communities into slaves of their own spontaneity, subsidized and incentivized by scheming politicians into mere wantonness in every aspect of their lives, all in the name of defying the stultifying conventions of The Man, however that mythical ogre is perceived. Even the kinds of behavior that can lead to prosperity and opportunity without crippling spontaneity are not only discarded but reviled. Everything conventionally “white” is to be renounced. Marriage gives way to a culture of baby-daddies and epidemic abortions evocative of eugenics, the best way — increasingly the only way — to succeed is the seemingly easy choice of disdaining wage labor in favor of of drug dealing, thievery, and violent reaction to every perceived slight or rival. Political activism is not about unspontaneous organized messaging but riots, looting, and gunfire. Guns being the great Equalizer, which is actually The Man’s weapon of choice for ensuring that black neighborhoods are a perpetual hell on earth, more inescapable than slave quarters on a southern plantation, as blacks kill blacks on front porches and in dirty abortion clinics, and the politicians take credit for giving them the pittance that funds the next Saturday night special.

The same kind of cynicism has led Jews to trade their cultural heritage for politics, which means they abandoned Judaism as a religion in favor of Marxism when immigration to America offered an opportunity to achieve public office and authority Europe had never permitted them. Now they are victims of broken backs they have inflicted on themselves because that trade turned out to be a stupid one. Being argumentative can also be a warning sign that you aren’t as smart as you think you are. Are Jews smart as a group? Yes. But are they really an order-of-magnitude smarter than everyone else, or are they, as seems possible, as much a result of overachievers backed by ambitious parents who thought they could outsmart all the obstacles caused by surrendering to illogical nonsense they assumed they could make sensible by winning all the arguments? The latter seems likely to me. What I see when I behold Alan Dershowitz dangling on a cross of his own perpendicular values sets — equal fealty to a fundamentally Talmudic icon of law and to a godless mess of utopian political absurdities that always end in slavery, death, and genocide. He just wasn’t as smart in the end as he always thought he was. Overachiever auguring in after a long lucky life of fatal contradictions.

As I said, I’m not fond of these subsets of race, sex, and religion. Not fond of White Men either at this time. We let all this happen, in many cases enabled it. We never took the possible consequences seriously enough, because the weakness of our strength is overconfidence. We are, have been, the fixers. The car that won’t start, the toilet that won’t flush, the child that won’t obey his mother, the field that won’t grow, the product there’s not enough of, the government that’s just not working, the enemy that won’t get out of our country’s face, the commandments no one has yet brought down from the mountain. We always thought we could just go fix it, whatever was wrong, when things got bad enough to turn off the football game and go see a man about a horse. 

But it’s too late now. The mountain is coming down, leaving us no place to bring the old commandments down from now that we need them again. It’s easy to think Trump can do it if he can survive the beating he’s taking long enough to rescue us. It’s wrong to think that. He can’t do it alone. It takes a lot of people’s strengths to accomplish miracles against the odds. One man isn’t enough. And all the ones who should be helping him are doing so close to nothing as to be almost invisible. And that’s not including all the ones on the other side, the ones who are determined to kill him and us.

I don’t like feeling this way. I don’t like finding not much to like in fellow citizens. It probably means I should stop trying to make even the small difference I’ve been striving for. 

There will probably be a Part 3 of this series. Look for it before New Year’s Day.

Also working on several candidate swan song book manuscripts, including one that could finally make me a martyr in the free speech fight. It would be called Unprinting Myself and would be a collection of my most outrageous and politically incorrect musings from my darkest moods about all kinds of topics and groups. Haven’t decided on the byline yet. Content still fluid but guaranteed to have something to offend absolutely everyone.