the wokerati increasingly resemble the dog who chases cars – what would happen if he caught one? They are in the same situation; it is often rage for its own sake, and in the US at least, rage from a generation with less to be angry about than any in the country’s history. If the Bolsheviks or Medieval peoples are going to be invoked, then let’s be honest about it and mention the violence that followed.
See Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis. We don’t have to wonder
ml holton
3 years ago
What I’m not understanding is the sudden fascination with ‘class’ in pop culture, evidenced by the surge of Downton Abbey spin-offs, like The Great (a fantasy retelling of Catherine’s ascent to the throne in Russia) or, the latest mock-Regency rage, Bridgerton. After viewing the latter, it struck me how tediously ‘conventional’ it was, even with all its ‘diversity’ malapropisms.
It seems that there remains a deep seated yearning (and intuitive understanding) for clear markers within the hierarchical structures of any society.
Equality, per se, is the fantasy. There are (and have always been) ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. To the victor goes the spoils. etc, etc. As always.
And yet, somewhere within the fertile muck of contemporarism, a new ‘utopianism’ has taken hold where marginal & marginalized minorities are ascending through the vast ‘pc’ bureaucracies of media & government. These ‘ascenders’ are attempting to impose their ‘socialist’ views on the existing majority’s pragmatism. They are attempting to usurp the daily reality of the ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ with a delusional – yet increasingly seductive – naive romanticism. At best, their increasing ascension is premeditated, calculated and deliberate. At worst, it’s alarming and dangerous to the ‘status quo’. If these class-obsessed wannabes do secure the ‘wealth & power’ they so persistently desire, rest assured, purging conservative property-owners & free-thinking dissidents will be next …
Watch for the latest rewrite of the ever-exhilarating French Revolution, where ‘Off With His Head!’ will soon equal the trivializing Trumpism, ‘You’re Fired!’
Human beings are willful animals, and do not like subordination. They will put up with it if there seems to be a substantial payoff, or if they are terrorized, but they do not take well to being objects of it anyway. Hence the need for force and fraud to maintain a class structure, class being that conflict frozen in place for the moment. But even when things seem to be quiet, there is enormous tension under the surface between the willfulness of humans and whatever suppresses it, including the willfulness of other humans. In short, class is war. The particular gyrations you mention are the efforts of those who have power and wealth to evade and deflect the envy and hatred of those who have not, lest open conflict break out.
Peter Francis
3 years ago
This is one of the best, if not the best, articles that I have read in 2020. It made me remember the feeling I had, during a three year stint in the States, that middle class Americans, regardless of their political and religious allegiances, are more anxious about antinomian outbreaks than are their counterparts in the UK.
There is one problem with the article — it seems to be fact-free. Really — look around in it and see if you can reliably identify any particular entity, person, group, subject, movement, location, and so on. There are some sobriquets / slurs, like ‘woke’, but however gratifying to prejudice, these are neither informative nor entertaining.
Gray discussed the defund/abolish causes. They symbolize the larger social justice movements, which are about dismantling what exists, without building something new or better.
David Foot
3 years ago
The wokes are marxists and we need to do a Stalin purge of Marxists in the West before they purge, split and destroy us. They have floated a load of ideas which make no sense and fundamentally are against any form of merit. USA and many parts of the British Empire are places where people are prepared to die with their children to get in to and the alternative tyrannies of Marxism, Islam, African nationalism have only generated hell holes people are prepared to die in order to get out of.
Even though USA did something like this in the 1930s and 1940s to the British Empire and they were so stupid as to give China the blue prints of the West in order not to pay their own workers decent wages, it would be a terrible thing if USA split and fell like the real thing did after 1945 with a bit of USA help. USA is effectively the Renegade British Empire of the Americas and it is the last mayor Western power. It is better that USA survives strong. The Marxist Empires of Russia and China are intact in part thanks to the mistakes of USA. For the record the British Empire didn’t survive the Marxists of 1945 and the simultaneous USA attacks such as from Eisenhower and Roosevelt and Stalin, our “special” relation Roosevelt not only agreed with Stalin more than with Churchill but also wanted to stop Canada going in to WWII to help England and that was supposed to be our ally!
Although, to paraphrase the mass-murdering old b@stard: eliminate the Woke, eliminate the problem. Only in a manner of speaking, of course ;).
Imran Khan
3 years ago
Good article but don’t worry, property owners will always defend their property. In the 2011 riots I know for a fact that Asian areas were left alone as they had armed themselves and attacked the rioters. I was told by a Turkish friend that armed groups patrolled Green Lanes just north of Tottenham where it all started. It was the soft area like trading estates that were trashed. If you own property that you have worked for you will defend it.
Well, bless my soul! I never would have considered rioting and looting to be a kind of intellectual exercise ““ a fascinating topic of philosophical discussion among the well-educated, well-informed elite (no less).
Still, if the rioting doesn’t threaten your property (or wellbeing or life) you can afford to take a more lofty view.
Meanwhile, those vulgar rioters will be more interested in the appropriation of big-ticket consumer durables rather than thought. They just don’t get it do they?
Croydon Shops were burnt or looted in 2011, where I was shops were boarded up,like Washington DC….
Andrew Hall
3 years ago
The idea that wokeists are part of a miserabilist medieval tradition of flagellants is one I cherish and will try to use more often in conversation.
Peter KE
3 years ago
The woke are criminal thug anarchists wanting to destroy democratic society. Semi-educated in areas of no value. We need to cut off the supply starting at universities and then attack the social systems they rely on. This piece is an unnecessary over-analysis.
Funnily enough I happened to read Dostoevsky’s ‘Devils’ early in 2020. It served as an appropriate appetiser for the BLM/Antifa looting, burning and killing etc.
I agree, his anatomisation of the mentality of 5th form marxism is uncannily prescient.
rogerldale
3 years ago
They attack a the culture that abolished slavery and laud the cultures that tried to keep it. All cultures used slaves( including African) to some extent on an opportunistic basis prior to the modern era. The BLM in the UK is aiming at the most anti- slavery of nations. https://www.bbc.co.uk/world…
Not entirely. There is an exemption in the 13th amendment. One that “liberal” California has been the worst offenders of using. Penal slavery.
Ian Perkins
3 years ago
“The key scenes in the woke uprising … are … acts of iconoclasm in which public monuments have been destroyed or defaced. These are symbolic actions aiming to sever the present from the past, not policies designed to fashion a different future.” There just might be a hint of truth in this severing of the present from the past, were the US South dotted with as many prominent statues of Harriet Tubman or John Brown as Robert E Lee. But it isn’t.
“The foundational crimes of the American regime ” black slavery and the seizure of indigenous groups’ lands that followed the War of Independence ” are real enough.” But not real enough not to celebrate those behind these crimes against humanity, while black and indigenous people continue to reap the consequences.
Gary Greenbaum
3 years ago
” One of the most surreal moments during the insurrection occurred when Musk’s SpaceX, almost unnoticed, launched astronauts into space.”
Yeah, whatever. And China became the first nation in four and a half decades to return material from the Moon and the first to conduct a robotic rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit. That’s a little beyond sticking a sports car in solar orbit.
Perhaps you are unaware that the more difficult effort was launching a robot to collect a sample from an asteroid has happened with the robot on it’s way back now. The robot hovered to collect the sample but did so. Rather amazing US effort. I suppose intent is all that is now required.
Asinine comment. The astronauts were not in the sports car. They were on their way to the International Space Station. Musk’s Space X and Bezos’s Blue Yonder are significant engineering developments with huge future potential. That is not to deny Chinese or other developments in space technology but back in the fifties and early sixties it looked as though the USA would trail behind the USSR in the so-called Space Race. But that is not how it turned out.
Dennis Boylon
3 years ago
“Trump’s attempts to assert dictatorial power” ?
Kiran Grimm
3 years ago
This rather interesting line at the end of John Gray’s penultimate paragraph: “One of the most surreal moments during the insurrection occurred when Musk’s SpaceX, almost unnoticed, launched astronauts into space.”
The phrase “…almost unnoticed” stands out. Yes, it was reported in the MSM but with little of the fanfare that accompanied previous developments. Space exploration just isn’t sexy anymore. The public are content with the space opera fantasies of Star Wars and Star Trek which have the same relationship to the development of space travel that pornography has to actual sex.
Technological progress IS the future of humanity though absurd movements such as Extinction Rebellion are doing their best to denounce it as greedy and immoral while the intersectional crowd will only grudgingly give credit to developments that are too male and too white.
Dodgy Geezer
3 years ago
Local warlords and prophets ” some of them no doubt armed ” will become arbiters of public safety. When they overreach themselves and fail to protect even minimal levels of security, vigilantes and organised crime will fill the void. Where this proves costly or unstable, federal government may step in and impose order. In other cases, cities may be abandoned to become zones of anarchy….
Er… not at all. We know what will happen – history is FULL of such examples. When the revolution starts drowning in its own blood, a ‘strong man’ arises and takes over as a dictator. Like Napoleon. Happens all the time….
And old Boney did say- or is alleged to have said – “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”. Let us hope the Woke are making such a mistake.
robert scheetz
3 years ago
John Gray’s etiology is surprisingly reductive. After all the critical thinking of the last 2 and one half centuries: Marx, Nietzsche, Frankfurt, …Foucault & Derrida, Western nihilism is honestly come by; and, he sees only Norodniki and Lenin. For sure its actuality is horrible, but these types are only realizing a programme long hard-wired into future history, correcting, e.g., for the vicious lie of the justification narrative of the “god-given right” of the oppressor class since John Brown’s body lies a moldering in the grave.
Frances An
2 years ago
This really deserves to be a best of 2020 article. It traces the radical progressive-left’s descent into madness and pointless rebellion so well. Professor Gray please come back and write something else when you can!
zac chang
2 years ago
What we might think of as the "war on wokeness" appears to be simply one more iteration of the same entrenched intolerance that has characterized our history reflexively defending itself. It makes me think immediately of a quote by Neil Gaiman:
"I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’. That’s just treating other people with respect.”Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile. You should try it. It’s peculiarly enlightening. I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”
and also of a different quote by John Cleese:
"Snowflakes is a word used by sociopaths in an attempt to discredit the notion of empathy."
The simple fact is that in a widely intolerant rape culture institutional racism world, displaying basic human decency is a threat to that status quo. That's why this term, or any term, which indicates willingness to care about the feelings and dignity of others will suffer denigration. In precisely the same hypocritical way that the sort of people who burned Harry Potter books clutch their pearls in outrage at the prospect of the Dr Seuss foundation discontinuing a handful of largely unread titles with racist content, bigoty will always claim that anti-bigotry is "the real bigotry" in a classic exampe of what Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels meant when he reportedly said:
"You must always accuse your opponents of doing the thing that you yourself are doing."
As one term for encouraging human kindness is steadily disempowered by alt right bros displaying contempt for it over and over again until their acolytes reliably parrot that malice every time it comes up, new terminology for the same thing will inevitably arise, and this endless cycle will begin anew. It's repellent, but at least it's understandable, and no matter how hard the most awful individuals around us try to normalize sociopathy, human empathy also isn't going away, at least not yet.
Alex Tickell
3 years ago
So true! Contrasting twentieth century communism which for all it’s dreadful faults did bring many millions out of poverty, with the modern equivalent which seeks simply to destroy the present, substituting anarchy and suppression of free thought. We of a certain age are the last bulwark, if in doubt try conversing with the average educated youth.
Communism transformed the Russian poor from serfs of the Tsar into serfs of the Communist Party. You can argue that was progress, but be honest about the facts, including the millions of “poor”who died in the process.
20thC Communism killed millions and plunged people into poverty and starvation. It has done nothing for anyone.
David Eppel
3 years ago
I think there may be a few thousand ‘Antifa’ a movement grossly exaggerated by MSM. The US has a huge problem with low IQ, uneducated Trump enablers who ignore truth facts and reason, in the same way religionists do.(Scammed be evangelists who are about as Xtian as Genghis Kahn). The abuse of economic power by Republicans is just appalling. Their hatred of low earners and minorities has no place in this world. The ‘K’ shaped recovery is simply a transfer of wealth (government debt) from the poor to the rich. And people are angry about this? Surely not.
is it Trump people who engaged in rioting, looting, and murder for months in numerous US cities? Is it Trump people who brand all white people as unreconstructed racists? Is it Trump people who attack others for saying such radical things as “men do no get pregnant”?
Their hatred of low earners and minorities has no place in this world. Where is any evidence of either? Before the pandemic, unemployment rates among minorities were at historic lows. That’s a poor result from people who allegedly hate minorities. Wall St, Hollywood, Big Tech, and Big Media are subsidiaries of the left. They’re not Repubs; they would eliminate Repubs if they could.
David, The US is the third most populous country on earth, and your summarization of it is not only skewed, but betrays a bias that sounds like typical European drivel. It may interest you to know that out of nearly 350 million people, about four times that of the UK, we are all basically immigrants, and the number of more recent immigrants who come here unable to read or write in their own native language is high. It is a problem, to be sure, but it is one that liberals neglect to tackle. If you think liberals, democrats, or progressives are somehow under the thumb of the Republicans who rule with an iron fist, maybe you should learn about the hawkish policies of Obama. And Bill Clinton. Two presidents who did very little good in their 8 years in office. The left ignores facts and reason as much as any fundamentalist conservative. Two sides of the same coin. The difference is that the media isn’t fanning the flames of crazy religious hatred at the moment, as the handlers have them busy promoting anti-science woke hysteria. The “hatred of minorities” you mention is 1) not much different than any other place, except we are wayyyyy bigger and have wayyyy more mixed cultures, which often don’t get along because those cultures don’t want to conform to the very much British colonial value system. Those fundamentalists conveniently get left out of the conversation by the likes of you. People here overwhelming actually do not hate minorities. Do they respect the working class? No less than Britain. The percentage of fringe assholes who do hideous things publically is probably on par with the UK. But four times the people, and most of them armed with guns. The abuse of economic power is something that has existed under both parties. Stop getting your news from facebook. As for a transfer of wealth, I don’t know what you think is happening, but it isn’t that. And those lefties you think are doing so much good? Most of them from privileged families with way more money than my working class self.
Garbage. Trump scores 32% of his vote came from Black districts, he has done more for ‘Blue Collar’ Workers than Any democrat since lyndon johnson ”The Great society”.
the wokerati increasingly resemble the dog who chases cars – what would happen if he caught one? They are in the same situation; it is often rage for its own sake, and in the US at least, rage from a generation with less to be angry about than any in the country’s history. If the Bolsheviks or Medieval peoples are going to be invoked, then let’s be honest about it and mention the violence that followed.
I agree Alex totalitarianism will always end badly, but I think the author was making a different point regarding motivation?
See Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis. We don’t have to wonder
What I’m not understanding is the sudden fascination with ‘class’ in pop culture, evidenced by the surge of Downton Abbey spin-offs, like The Great (a fantasy retelling of Catherine’s ascent to the throne in Russia) or, the latest mock-Regency rage, Bridgerton. After viewing the latter, it struck me how tediously ‘conventional’ it was, even with all its ‘diversity’ malapropisms.
It seems that there remains a deep seated yearning (and intuitive understanding) for clear markers within the hierarchical structures of any society.
Equality, per se, is the fantasy. There are (and have always been) ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. To the victor goes the spoils. etc, etc. As always.
And yet, somewhere within the fertile muck of contemporarism, a new ‘utopianism’ has taken hold where marginal & marginalized minorities are ascending through the vast ‘pc’ bureaucracies of media & government. These ‘ascenders’ are attempting to impose their ‘socialist’ views on the existing majority’s pragmatism. They are attempting to usurp the daily reality of the ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ with a delusional – yet increasingly seductive – naive romanticism. At best, their increasing ascension is premeditated, calculated and deliberate. At worst, it’s alarming and dangerous to the ‘status quo’. If these class-obsessed wannabes do secure the ‘wealth & power’ they so persistently desire, rest assured, purging conservative property-owners & free-thinking dissidents will be next …
Watch for the latest rewrite of the ever-exhilarating French Revolution, where ‘Off With His Head!’ will soon equal the trivializing Trumpism, ‘You’re Fired!’
Human beings are willful animals, and do not like subordination. They will put up with it if there seems to be a substantial payoff, or if they are terrorized, but they do not take well to being objects of it anyway. Hence the need for force and fraud to maintain a class structure, class being that conflict frozen in place for the moment. But even when things seem to be quiet, there is enormous tension under the surface between the willfulness of humans and whatever suppresses it, including the willfulness of other humans. In short, class is war. The particular gyrations you mention are the efforts of those who have power and wealth to evade and deflect the envy and hatred of those who have not, lest open conflict break out.
This is one of the best, if not the best, articles that I have read in 2020. It made me remember the feeling I had, during a three year stint in the States, that middle class Americans, regardless of their political and religious allegiances, are more anxious about antinomian outbreaks than are their counterparts in the UK.
There is one problem with the article — it seems to be fact-free. Really — look around in it and see if you can reliably identify any particular entity, person, group, subject, movement, location, and so on. There are some sobriquets / slurs, like ‘woke’, but however gratifying to prejudice, these are neither informative nor entertaining.
Gray discussed the defund/abolish movement, which crystallizes his concerns about the social justice movements.
Gray discussed the defund/abolish causes. They symbolize the larger social justice movements, which are about dismantling what exists, without building something new or better.
The wokes are marxists and we need to do a Stalin purge of Marxists in the West before they purge, split and destroy us. They have floated a load of ideas which make no sense and fundamentally are against any form of merit.
USA and many parts of the British Empire are places where people are prepared to die with their children to get in to and the alternative tyrannies of Marxism, Islam, African nationalism have only generated hell holes people are prepared to die in order to get out of.
Even though USA did something like this in the 1930s and 1940s to the British Empire and they were so stupid as to give China the blue prints of the West in order not to pay their own workers decent wages, it would be a terrible thing if USA split and fell like the real thing did after 1945 with a bit of USA help.
USA is effectively the Renegade British Empire of the Americas and it is the last mayor Western power. It is better that USA survives strong.
The Marxist Empires of Russia and China are intact in part thanks to the mistakes of USA.
For the record the British Empire didn’t survive the Marxists of 1945 and the simultaneous USA attacks such as from Eisenhower and Roosevelt and Stalin, our “special” relation Roosevelt not only agreed with Stalin more than with Churchill but also wanted to stop Canada going in to WWII to help England and that was supposed to be our ally!
Once you get to recommending Stalin’s methods, it’s time for a little reflection.
Although, to paraphrase the mass-murdering old b@stard: eliminate the Woke, eliminate the problem. Only in a manner of speaking, of course ;).
Good article but don’t worry, property owners will always defend their property. In the 2011 riots I know for a fact that Asian areas were left alone as they had armed themselves and attacked the rioters. I was told by a Turkish friend that armed groups patrolled Green Lanes just north of Tottenham where it all started. It was the soft area like trading estates that were trashed. If you own property that you have worked for you will defend it.
“I was told by a Turkish friend that armed groups patrolled Green Lanes just north of Tottenham where it all started.”
This is true. I remember seeing it on tv at the time.
It’s not really about the theft of property, rather the appropriation of thought.
Well, bless my soul!
I never would have considered rioting and looting to be a kind of intellectual exercise ““ a fascinating topic of philosophical discussion among the well-educated, well-informed elite (no less).
Still, if the rioting doesn’t threaten your property (or wellbeing or life) you can afford to take a more lofty view.
Meanwhile, those vulgar rioters will be more interested in the appropriation of big-ticket consumer durables rather than thought. They just don’t get it do they?
Well, of course, the big ticket TVs they half-inched they needed for their Open University social ‘science’ courses.
Croydon Shops were burnt or looted in 2011, where I was shops were boarded up,like Washington DC….
The idea that wokeists are part of a miserabilist medieval tradition of flagellants is one I cherish and will try to use more often in conversation.
The woke are criminal thug anarchists wanting to destroy democratic society. Semi-educated in areas of no value. We need to cut off the supply starting at universities and then attack the social systems they rely on. This piece is an unnecessary over-analysis.
Wrong. Remember: know your enemy.
Funnily enough I happened to read Dostoevsky’s ‘Devils’ early in 2020. It served as an appropriate appetiser for the BLM/Antifa looting, burning and killing etc.
I agree, his anatomisation of the mentality of 5th form marxism is uncannily prescient.
They attack a the culture that abolished slavery and laud the cultures that tried to keep it. All cultures used slaves( including African) to some extent on an opportunistic basis prior to the modern era. The BLM in the UK is aiming at the most anti- slavery of nations.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/world…
Not entirely. There is an exemption in the 13th amendment. One that “liberal” California has been the worst offenders of using. Penal slavery.
“The key scenes in the woke uprising … are … acts of iconoclasm in which public monuments have been destroyed or defaced. These are symbolic actions aiming to sever the present from the past, not policies designed to fashion a different future.”
There just might be a hint of truth in this severing of the present from the past, were the US South dotted with as many prominent statues of Harriet Tubman or John Brown as Robert E Lee. But it isn’t.
“The foundational crimes of the American regime ” black slavery and the seizure of indigenous groups’ lands that followed the War of Independence ” are real enough.”
But not real enough not to celebrate those behind these crimes against humanity, while black and indigenous people continue to reap the consequences.
” One of the most surreal moments during the insurrection occurred when Musk’s SpaceX, almost unnoticed, launched astronauts into space.”
Yeah, whatever. And China became the first nation in four and a half decades to return material from the Moon and the first to conduct a robotic rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit. That’s a little beyond sticking a sports car in solar orbit.
Perhaps you are unaware that the more difficult effort was launching a robot to collect a sample from an asteroid has happened with the robot on it’s way back now. The robot hovered to collect the sample but did so. Rather amazing US effort. I suppose intent is all that is now required.
Asinine comment. The astronauts were not in the sports car. They were on their way to the International Space Station. Musk’s Space X and Bezos’s Blue Yonder are significant engineering developments with huge future potential. That is not to deny Chinese or other developments in space technology but back in the fifties and early sixties it looked as though the USA would trail behind the USSR in the so-called Space Race. But that is not how it turned out.
“Trump’s attempts to assert dictatorial power” ?
This rather interesting line at the end of John Gray’s penultimate paragraph:
“One of the most surreal moments during the insurrection occurred when Musk’s SpaceX, almost unnoticed, launched astronauts into space.”
The phrase “…almost unnoticed” stands out. Yes, it was reported in the MSM but with little of the fanfare that accompanied previous developments. Space exploration just isn’t sexy anymore. The public are content with the space opera fantasies of Star Wars and Star Trek which have the same relationship to the development of space travel that pornography has to actual sex.
Technological progress IS the future of humanity though absurd movements such as Extinction Rebellion are doing their best to denounce it as greedy and immoral while the intersectional crowd will only grudgingly give credit to developments that are too male and too white.
Local warlords and prophets ” some of them no doubt armed ” will become arbiters of public safety. When they overreach themselves and fail to protect even minimal levels of security, vigilantes and organised crime will fill the void. Where this proves costly or unstable, federal government may step in and impose order. In other cases, cities may be abandoned to become zones of anarchy….
Er… not at all. We know what will happen – history is FULL of such examples. When the revolution starts drowning in its own blood, a ‘strong man’ arises and takes over as a dictator. Like Napoleon. Happens all the time….
And old Boney did say- or is alleged to have said – “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”. Let us hope the Woke are making such a mistake.
John Gray’s etiology is surprisingly reductive. After all the critical thinking of the last 2 and one half centuries: Marx, Nietzsche, Frankfurt, …Foucault & Derrida, Western nihilism is honestly come by; and, he sees only Norodniki and Lenin. For sure its actuality is horrible, but these types are only realizing a programme long hard-wired into future history, correcting, e.g., for the vicious lie of the justification narrative of the “god-given right” of the oppressor class since John Brown’s body lies a moldering in the grave.
This really deserves to be a best of 2020 article. It traces the radical progressive-left’s descent into madness and pointless rebellion so well. Professor Gray please come back and write something else when you can!
So true! Contrasting twentieth century communism which for all it’s dreadful faults did bring many millions out of poverty, with the modern equivalent which seeks simply to destroy the present, substituting anarchy and suppression of free thought. We of a certain age are the last bulwark, if in doubt try conversing with the average educated youth.
“communism which for all it’s dreadful faults did bring many millions out of poverty,”
It didn’t.
Alex Tickell, I have seldom seen a comment more factually incorrect than your claim about poverty.
You have no idea about poverty in communist countries.
Communism transformed the Russian poor from serfs of the Tsar into serfs of the Communist Party. You can argue that was progress, but be honest about the facts, including the millions of “poor”who died in the process.
20thC Communism killed millions and plunged people into poverty and starvation. It has done nothing for anyone.
I think there may be a few thousand ‘Antifa’ a movement grossly exaggerated by MSM. The US has a huge problem with low IQ, uneducated Trump enablers who ignore truth facts and reason, in the same way religionists do.(Scammed be evangelists who are about as Xtian as Genghis Kahn). The abuse of economic power by Republicans is just appalling. Their hatred of low earners and minorities has no place in this world. The ‘K’ shaped recovery is simply a transfer of wealth (government debt) from the poor to the rich. And people are angry about this? Surely not.
is it Trump people who engaged in rioting, looting, and murder for months in numerous US cities? Is it Trump people who brand all white people as unreconstructed racists? Is it Trump people who attack others for saying such radical things as “men do no get pregnant”?
Their hatred of low earners and minorities has no place in this world.
Where is any evidence of either? Before the pandemic, unemployment rates among minorities were at historic lows. That’s a poor result from people who allegedly hate minorities. Wall St, Hollywood, Big Tech, and Big Media are subsidiaries of the left. They’re not Repubs; they would eliminate Repubs if they could.
David, The US is the third most populous country on earth, and your summarization of it is not only skewed, but betrays a bias that sounds like typical European drivel.
It may interest you to know that out of nearly 350 million people, about four times that of the UK, we are all basically immigrants, and the number of more recent immigrants who come here unable to read or write in their own native language is high. It is a problem, to be sure, but it is one that liberals neglect to tackle.
If you think liberals, democrats, or progressives are somehow under the thumb of the Republicans who rule with an iron fist, maybe you should learn about the hawkish policies of Obama. And Bill Clinton. Two presidents who did very little good in their 8 years in office.
The left ignores facts and reason as much as any fundamentalist conservative. Two sides of the same coin. The difference is that the media isn’t fanning the flames of crazy religious hatred at the moment, as the handlers have them busy promoting anti-science woke hysteria.
The “hatred of minorities” you mention is 1) not much different than any other place, except we are wayyyyy bigger and have wayyyy more mixed cultures, which often don’t get along because those cultures don’t want to conform to the very much British colonial value system. Those fundamentalists conveniently get left out of the conversation by the likes of you.
People here overwhelming actually do not hate minorities. Do they respect the working class? No less than Britain. The percentage of fringe assholes who do hideous things publically is probably on par with the UK. But four times the people, and most of them armed with guns.
The abuse of economic power is something that has existed under both parties. Stop getting your news from facebook.
As for a transfer of wealth, I don’t know what you think is happening, but it isn’t that. And those lefties you think are doing so much good? Most of them from privileged families with way more money than my working class self.
Garbage. Trump scores 32% of his vote came from Black districts, he has done more for ‘Blue Collar’ Workers than Any democrat since lyndon johnson ”The Great society”.
If Trump got 100% of the Black vote it would only amount to 13%. But he got maybe 12% of 13% about 2%.
Makes about as much sense as speaking in tongues.