I loved Ruy Texeira’s challenge to progressives in his article on the Liberal Patriot Substack, “To Beat the Intersectional Left We Need More Class Traitors,”
Ask yourself who the social justice you prize so highly is really for. Is it really for the poor and working class who have the short end of the stick in our society or is it to make your feel righteous and onside with Team Progressive? Are your social justice commitments and priorities what the poor and working class actually want? Does the language you speak on these issues even make sense to them?
If not, you should consider that a politics that is appealing to you but not the working class is intrinsically limited and cannot achieve the objectives for a better society that you presumably harbor. You should, in short, consider becoming a class traitor.
I admired this because it strikes at the heart of what’s wrong with progressives, specifically educated woke metropolitan elite progressives. They are disingenuous status-seeking conformist cretans with chronically low self-esteem, whose shallow lives are a miserable non-stop act of keeping up with the Jones’s. If this sounds harsh or exaggerated, then because I went to school with them, and I know some of them personally, speaking from experience, I can assure this is actually not harsh enough.
They don’t read the newspaper. They get all their news online, which they use as a theater for performative virtue signaling where they put their pronouns on their social media profiles as they put Black Lives Matter signs outside their brownstone Manhattan apartments. White progressives and activist groups for “climate justice” or “racial justice” or “trans rights” depend on their in-group for validation. They are lonely career-focused people with an unstable sense of self, who always look to their social circle to decide how to think, and perversely exploit racial and sexual minorities to boost their self-worth. That is all “social justice” is for white progressives: it is social climbing in the digital age.
For our purposes, it is their dominance of the Democratic party that is destroying it and paving the way for an autocracy from the right. If Trump gets elected in 2024, it will be their fault to the extent that Biden is forced to pander to radicalized Gen Z voters on immigration, crime, and other issues, and it is the main reason he has utterly failed to unite the country and make good on his 2020 campaign promise.
As Edward Luce warned in the Financial Times, “Americans Won’t Be Terrified into Rejecting Trump,”
A lot of Americans think the Democrats are exaggerating the Trump threat, or using it as a cudgel to disrespect who they are. If you frequent the salons of Washington DC, or Upper East Side Manhattan, the Trump threat is surpassingly existential.
Aside from anxiety about crime, their concerns rarely intersect with those of the median voter. It is hard to persuade America’s cognitive elites that there may be valid reasons to take their worldview with a pinch of salt. The art of persuasion is forfeit if you brand your opponent as immoral before you begin.
It is also no way to win elections. The deeply uncomfortable reality for Democrats is that America’s working-class electorate is increasingly turned off from their brand. This stretches to non-white blue-collar Americans, including Hispanics of both genders and African-American males. Such trends offer both a warning to Biden’s Democrats, and a blueprint of how to defeat Trump.
The clue is to figure out what such ex-Democratic voters have in common. Clearly, being white supremacists is not one of them. Nor is being worried about the future of democracy. It does not help to tell people that the US economy is fine so they should stop complaining. It is safe to assume that median households are more familiar with their personal finances than people employed by foundations.
Indeed the Democratic party cannot count on abortion or “our democracy” to save Biden from defeat in 2024. Hispanics who don’t want to be viewed as “people of color” and black people who neither want to pay for climate policy nor defund the police—minorities get hit the hardest by crime—moreover who are struggling with high rent and gas prices—minorities also struggle the most with inflation—are leaving the Democratic party, and they’re becoming Republicans. And the price may be high enough in swing states to hand the election to Trump.
Though the unelectability of the Republican party under Trump is talked about more, Democratic dysfunction is even more significant. It may last longer, too, because Trump some day, though sometimes it feels like he was put on earth to torment us and he will never leave, will go away. But the Democrats’ ranks are filled with millions of doctrinaire white progressives, reeducated and radicalized in college and induced by social media to be hypercompetitive with each other socially, who comprise generations.
Having been forced by circumstances to deal with antiracists and such, myself, in and out of college, having just turned 26 and being an older member of Gen Z, I can say that politics doesn’t drive their social climbing. Rather to be sure, social climbing drives their politics.
And though I don’t expect people to be exactly like me who has no qualms about forgoing conformist instincts of all kinds because, as a man of knowledge, being right has the highest value for me in life; I’m lower in empathy than most people; I am certainly more intelligent; and not only does my character resist the herdlike passions of crowds, but I even derive antisocial joy from a decided hostility to the orthodoxy of the dominant group, whatever vulgar zeitgeists and phony intelligentsias— nonetheless I think a neoliberal individualist is entitled to demand much more independence from young people today than that with which they currently carry themselves. In these social times, though it’s heretical to say, you can be too social. And where your social climbing gets in the way of your ability to be objective and separate right from wrong against the tribal prejudice of one’s peers, it is one’s moral duty to check one’s slavish sociability for self-awareness’s sake. Our so-called crisis of belonging nowadays be damned. If you ask me, the problem is people want to “belong” way too much.
It is our duty to demand such a minimum of self-respect from vulnerable young people with Donald Trump 50 points over his rivals for the GOP nomination and polls indicating he could beat Biden in swing states, and antisemites marching in the streets, if any progressives have an ounce of courage to stand up to the collective delusions of their stupid friend-groups, then we must implore them to stand athwart history and yell STOP!
For the electoral viability of their own party’s sake.
— Jay