NelsonRushton
Doctorate in mathematics from the University of Georgia, specializing in probability theory. Masters in AI from the University of Georgia. 15 years as a computer science professor at Texas Tech. Now I work as a logician for an AI startup. Married with one son. He's an awesome little dude.
I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit -- and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I think there is noise in the signal.
User ID: 2940
Species of Tyranny and their Hallmarks (Part I: The Theory)
(c) Feb 3, 2025, by J. Nelson Rushton
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.
[Matthew 7: 15-16, KJV]
Webster's dictionary defines "woke" as being aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice. Notice that this definition doesn't mention identity politics, or censorship, or cancel culture, or radical progressivism. Indeed, it does not mention anything that is associated with wokeness in the commonsense understanding of the word. That is because today, even the dictionary is woke.
To be woke in the Webster's sense is a noble thing indeed; it is to be a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden. This is the defining characteristic of a storybook hero -- like Superman, or Prince Charming, or the valiant huntsman who vanquishes the Big Bad Wolf and rescues Little Red Riding Hood and her sick, old, grandma. Not coincidentally, and probably because it is sine qua non of a storybook hero, "defending the oppressed" has also been the stated agenda of some of the most murderous demagogues in modern history. Practically every murderer is also a shameless liar; thus, not being constrained by the facts, they naturally toward the loftiest possible story about their motives.
A tyrant's rise to power is often paved with woke-sounding platitudes. For example,
- [Our] aim has been to grant equal rights to those social strata that hitherto were denied such rights.
- Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others.
- There must be a revolutionary party because the world contains enemies who oppress the people.
These are the words of Hiter, Stalin, and Mao Zedong-- who, between them, murdered tens of millions of their own people, and caused the deaths of tens of millions more through ideology-driven malfeasance, all in the name of "social justice". When you see a political leader rising to power on a fanatical message of standing up for the little guy, it's best to keep your rifle clean.
And how do such wolves rise to power? In many cases they are propelled by the will of the people. It is often believed that tyranny and democracy are opposites -- but the fact is that some of the most brutal dictators have risen to power on waves of broad popular support, in some cases through legal democratic processes, as was the case with Adolf Hitler. For this to happen, the tyrant must be shiny and slick enough to fool many people into complicity, and far more into complacency -- and they must keep their predatory intent in the realm of plausible deniability until it is too late for them to be stopped. It might be hard to believe this could happen, if it hadn't happened so many times.
So, how do we avoid being fooled, by leaders of our own party or those of another party? Are there signs that can be used to spot a rising tyranny in its formative stages, while it is still in its sheep's clothing? If so, those signs must be subtle -- or else it would not have been possible for so many intelligent, well-meaning people to be taken in by tyrannical movements through history.
Nonetheless, while they may be subtle, I believe there are certain hallmarks, or "tells", that tyrannical movements tend to exhibit even early in their stages --before they have gathered power, risen up, and bared their fangs. I hold that these hallmarks include, for example, the following:
- identity politics: as a caste system based on moral double-standards, often founded on a narrative of historical class exploitation
- authoritarianism: a sense of being entitled to control other people -- which engenders censorship, lawlessness, militancy, and arbitrary, intrusive governance
- extremism: policies and moral positions that flagrantly defy reason and common sense
So, my first claim will be that these characteristics are hallmarks of tyranny -- that is, identifying traits that can be used to known one when you see one.
However, not all forms of tyranny have the same character. There are fundamental differences between, for example, communism and Nazism, or between the rise and rule of Ayatollah Khomeini on the one hand, and Ivan the Terrible on the other. To borrow a phrase from author James Lindsay, there is more than one species of tyranny -- and each species, in addition to the general traits of tyranny, has its own characteristic markers that distinguish it from other species. This chapter will touch on two particular classes of tyrannical ideologies -- populist tyranny and its subclass of leftist tyranny -- and describe what I believe to be their identifying characteristics as well.
The subsequent chapter will illustrate how these hallmarks were evident in the early stages of the most murderous tyrannical movements of the 20th century -- Soviet communism, Chinese communism, and Nazism -- even before their true nature became obvious to their victims and to the world, and how they played out as these ideologies consolidated their power. I will also discuss how they are manifest in the woke movement today in the West.
Species of Tyranny
Tyranny can be defined as oppressive government rule. As I have discussed in a previously post, Plato wrote about the forms of tyranny that he and his forebears had observed in Classical Greece, but today we have more history to look back on. From our perspective, we can see that while many of Plato's observations are timeless, not all forms of oppressive government conform to the same model. It seems, author James Lindsay has put it, that there is more than one species of tyranny.
The tyrannical movement described by Plato is populist in nature. That is, in its rise to power, the tyrannical regime of The Republic derives its strength from broad public support. Generally speaking, this support need not come from an absolute majority of the population -- but it must come from a vocal and militant minority, that is large enough, and has enough allies, in the presence of enough passive bystanders, to seize power on the impulse of a "people's movement". Thus, Plato's tyrant is a demagogue: one who rises to power by stirring up and appealing to rash, angry sentiments that are festering among the population.
A demagogue can take office through a legal election or appointment (as with Hitler), through a revolution (as with Mao Zedong), or through a popular coup d'etat (as with Lenin). But not all tyrants are demagogues. A hereditary monarch, such as Mary I ("Bloody Mary") of England or Ivan IV ("Ivan the Terrible") of Russia, might indeed lead a cruel and oppressive regime, but their ascension to power does not rest chiefly on popular support, either of themselves or of their agenda. So, typically, a monarch's path to power does not resemble that of Plato's archetypal tyrant, even if they are, in fact, a tyrant.
On the other hand, despotic hereditary monarchs are not the sort of tyrant we need to worry about much in the West these days. From this point forward I will focus on populist forms of tyranny: those in which the tyrants take office on the strength of their public support, whether by legal means, illegal means, or a combination of the two as in Plato's Republic.
Even after restricting focus to populist forms of tyranny, not all of these have the same character. On top of being populist in nature, the tyranny described in The Republic is marked by radical progressivism, defined as extreme disregard for traditional norms and values. But not all populist tyrannies are radically progressive, or even progressive at all. For example, the path from democracy to tyranny in The Republic begins with weakening household patriarchy, and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia took steps in the same direction -- but the Ayatollahs have not weakened the patriarchy in Iran (au contraire!). For another example, Plato’s tyrannical regime advocates open borders and a liberal immigration policy, much as the woke left has in recent times -- but such a program would not characterize the Nazis, to say the least.
On the other hand, while not all populist tyrannies are left-leaning in nature, it does seem that practically all, if not all, left-leaning tyrannies are populist in nature. This is empirically observable as well as naturally logical: if a tyrant, as such, has the power to impose his will upon the people without their consent, one doctrine he is not likely to impose is that of egalitarianism. He is more likely to impose a pitiless, top-down pecking order, with himself at the apex.
In light of all this, I submit the following:
- Tyranny is defined as oppressive government rule.
- Populist tyranny -- or what might be called "grass roots" tyranny -- is a form of tyranny that draws its power from broad-based popular support, at least in its formative stages.
- Leftist tyranny, of roughly the character described in Plato's Republic, is one form of populist tyranny -- though there are other forms of populist tyranny that are not leftist in character.
In summary, populist tyranny is a species of tyranny, and leftist tyranny is a sub-species of populist tyranny. What follows from that?
Populist Tyranny
The first consequence of the claim that populist tyranny is a species of tyranny is something that is obvious to any student of history, but evidently not obvious to many people: that populist tyranny is a thing in the first place. It seems to be widely believed that democracy and tyranny are opposites, and that tyranny can only take hold by being ruthlessly imposed from the top down. In fact, Webster's (now woke) dictionary lists democracy and tyranny as antonyms. But on the view I propose here, de facto democracy is not the opposite of tyranny at all. On the contrary, it is an essential prerequisite for the very kinds of tyranny we need fear most, viz., tyranny of a populist variety.
At a minimum, there is nothing logically contradictory about democracy and tyranny. The will of the people as a whole, at least in principle, could be to welcome over them a cruel and oppressive dictator -- so long as he is cruel and oppressive chiefly to a well-defined minority. So a democratic tyranny is possible in theory; the question is whether it could happen in real life. Philosopher Jean Jaques Rousseau -- a key figure of the Enlightenment -- seemed to think not. Rousseau wrote that democracy is practically infallible, so long as it truly reflects the will of the people:
*As long as several men assembled together consider themselves as a single body, they have only one will which is directed towards their common preservation and general well-being. Then, all the animating forces of the state are vigorous and simple, and its principles are clear and luminous; it has no incompatible or conflicting interests; the common good makes itself so manifestly evident that only common sense is needed to discern it.
However, when the social tie begins to slacken and the state to weaken, when particular interests begin to make themselves felt and sectional societies begin to exert an influence over the greater society, the common interest then becomes corrupted and meets opposition, voting is no longer unanimous; the general will is no longer the will of all; contradictions and disputes arise.*
[Rousseau: Of the Social Contract, Book IV]
I wonder what Socrates would have to say about that.
The plain fact of history is that the population as a whole often supports leaders who cruelly oppress certain individuals or demographic groups -- and, in many cases, supports those leaders because they promise to oppress those people or groups. It might be difficult to know what the majority silently felt about, say, Lenin, or Hitler, or Ayatollah Khomeini -- but what the majority silently feels is not worth spit. In the real world, it is what a majority of active and vocal citizens feel that makes the will of the people -- in proportion to how active and vocal they are, and regardless of whether they assert their will by counting heads or by cracking heads. Formal democracy can soften the effect of this law of realpolitik, but democracy just-on-paper cannot soften anything much when the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity [cf. Yeats: "The Second Coming"]. Germany was a formal democracy as Hitler was rising to power, as was Russia during the rise of Lenin. Yet, in the practical sense of rule by the people, Germany welcomed Hitler over them, as Russia welcomed Lenin -- in substantially the same way that Iran welcomed in the Ayatollahs, even though Iran was not a formal democracy at the time. Each of these leaders rose to power by winning a contest for popular support, one way or another, Rousseau's pipe dream bedamned.
Hallmarks of Tyranny
So, how do we recognize rising tyrannical movements before they reach full bloom?
To draw an analogy in zoological terms, consider, for example, how usually know a mammal when we see one. A mammal is defined as an animal that nurses its young with milk. But when you see a mammal in the wild, even of a species you have never seen before, you usually don't have to wait until you see it reproduce and feed its young to recognize it as a mammal. This is because mammals have a certain cluster of diagnostic traits -- that is, features that co-occur together in most mammals, and co-occur for the most part only in mammals. The diagnostic traits of mammals include having hair rather than scales or feathers, and being warm blooded -- as well as certain hidden anatomical features such as having three middle ear bones, a diaphragm for breathing, and a neocortex brain structure.
Each category of tyranny -- if we have chosen our categories in a way that reflects nature (or in this case human nature) -- should also have certain collections of diagnostic traits. I will refer to the diagnostic traits of each species of tyranny as its hallmarks. Below I will list what I believe are some hallmarks of tyranny, followed by additional hallmarks of populist tyranny, and the further hallmarks left-leaning populist tyranny. For readers familiar with the history of Communism and Nazism in the 20th century, these hallmarks may strike a chord of familiarity.
The hallmarks of tyrannical government of all sorts include identity politics, authoritarianism, and extremism, defined as follows:
- Identity politics is the stance of advocating moral double-standards, in which people are viewed as having different moral status, eventually leading to differing rights or obligations, based on demographic characteristics such as race, class, sex, religion, and ethnicity.
- Authoritarianism is a sense of being entitled to control other people. It manifests as highly centralized government authority, lawlessness, suppression of dissenting voices, and arbitrary, intrusive governance -- particularly including widespread and vicious use of government authority against political rivals.
- Extremism is the embrace of policies and principles that flagrantly defy reason and common sense. In particular, it tends to include utopian "final solutions" to problems that are endemic to the human condition.
Populist tyrannical ideologies -- from that of Plato's Republic, to Soviet and Chinese communism, to Nazism -- exhibit the hallmarks of tyranny in general, with two modifications. First, the identity politics of populist forms of tyranny tend to be based on a narrative of historical class exploitation (e.g., by the Jews, the "bourgeoisie", or straight white males). Second, in populist tyrannical movements, the characteristics of authoritarianism, identity politics, and extremism emerge in a decentralized form, imposed by partisans of the ideology in any spaces, institutions, and jurisdictions where they hold sway. This process begins long before the movement consolidates central power, as we have seen happen with the woke movement in recent years.
Leftist tyrannical movements -- including all of the above except Nazism -- share all of the hallmarks as populist tyranny, with the stipulation that their extremism takes the form of radical progressivism, defined as extreme disregard for traditional norms and longstanding laws. Elements of radical progressivism (common to the Communist movements in the Soviet Union and China, to Plato's archetypal tyrant, and to the woke movement) include things such as negating gender differences, rejection of traditional religion, aggressive wealth redistribution, disarming private citizens, gutting the pre-existing legal system (e.g. legacy police departments), negating meritocracy, and denigrating traditional culture and cultural icons.
My next few posts will illustrate how these hallmarks were visible in the early stages of the three most murderous regimes of the twentieth century -- Russian and Chinese Communism, and German Nazism -- and how they played out as those movements consolidated and then abused their power. At the same time, I will discuss how these hallmarks of tyranny are visible in the woke movement in the West today, in case you haven't noticed. In fact, I believe the hallmarks of tyranny are exactly what differentiates the woke "social justice warriors" from good-faith progressives. What is alike between the two is a message of compassion -- that is, a call for each of us to do what we can to aid the visible, present suffering of our fellow men and women in need. What is different is that, with wokeness, this call for compassion is warped into a pretext for identity politics, authoritarianism, and extremism. Tyranny to a tee.
Note:
This post is an installment of a book I am writing, under the working title They See not, which I am serializing as a series of posts on The Motte. The book is planned to be about the nature and common characteristics of populist tyrannical movements, especially focusing on the woke ideology, and how to combat them. The first two chapters were:
- Introduction: Past peak Woke? Don't count on it.
- Say then, my friend... Plato on Democracy and Tyranny
The third chapter is titled Victim Identity Politics and Wokeness.
Preface to Chapter 3
The radical progressive movement in the West today, aka wokeness, bears a striking resemblance to the populist tyrannical regime described by Plato in The Republic. Given that, one would expect wokeness to have more recent historical counterparts as well, and I will argue that it does. This chapter will examine parallels between today's woke movement and the early emergence of three major tyrannical regimes of the 20th century: Soviet communism, Chinese communism, and Nazism.
It is not surprising that wokeness looks and feels a good deal like communism -- since it is a common view that wokeness inhabits the far left, and communism is often thought of as the really far left. However, even in light of that, I will attempt to show that the historical parallels between wokeness on the one hand, and the early rise of Chinese and Soviet Communism on the other, run deeper than one might expect. It is perhaps even more surprising, as I will also argue, that many of these parallels also extend to the rise of Nazism -- which is commonly viewed as the opposite of communism, and as an ideology of the "far right". This following chapters will examine historical parallels in the emergence of all four of these ideologies (Soviet communism, Chinese communism, Nazism, and wokeness) along three lines: victim identity politics, authoritarianism, and extremism, defined as follows:
- victim identity politics is a caste system in which different moral standards are applied to people of different demographic groups, based on a narrative of historical class exploitation.
- authoritarianism is a sense of being entitled to control other people. This sense of entitlement engenders censorship, militance, lawlessness, and arbitrary, intrusive governance -- in particular, the use of government power to harass and silence political opponents.
- extremism is the embrace of policies and values that flagrantly defy reason and common sense.
Victim Identity Politics and Wokeness
(c) Feb 6, 2025, By J. Nelson Rushton
Divers weights, and divers measures, both of them are alike abomination to the Lord.
[Proverbs 20:10, KJV]
Diver's weights? Actually here, divers is an archaic spelling of diverse, meaning various and sundry. Of course different things have different weights and measures, but I think what is supposed to count as an abomination is different weights or measures for the same thing.
This phenomenon of diverse weights and diverse measures was brought home to me when -- somewhat to my chagrin, but also as the source of a few valuable life lessons -- I wound up rooming with a pot dealer for a few months when I was in graduate school. To be fair to him, my classified ad didn't specify "no drug dealers please" -- but, to be fair to me, he might have presumed on general principles that could be on my list of concerns, and given me a heads-up to see if it was a deal breaker. In any case, he didn't disclose his profession, and I didn't disclose a preference about that profession, and he moved in.
So one day my drug-dealing roomie has a client over and I am watching the deal happen in the living room. The dealer weighs out however many grams or ounces of pot was asked for, and then the customer pulls out his own scale, weighs the same lot again, and completes the transaction. Why the second weighing? The dealer isn't likely to have a broken scale; he buys and sells for a living. Aha!, I thought: Divers(e) weights and divers(e) measures! Evidently, it is a thing for particularly unscrupulous drug dealers to keep two scales in their pocket: one for buying and another one for selling -- and to pull out whichever one benefits him the most on each given occasion. That is the literal reading of the abomination in question -- though I suspect my pot-slinging roommate could plead ignorance on that score, not having not been much of a Bible reader at that stage of his life. Incidentally as it turns out, he is now, but that's another story.
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I define victim identity politics as a caste system in which different moral standards are applied to people of different demographic groups, based on a narrative of historical class exploitation. The justification for woke victim politics was famously encapsulated by Ibram X. Kendi:
The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
-- Ibram X. Kendi: How to Be an Antiracist
Here, Kendi is saying that (1) black people have been wrongfully oppressed by white people, in particular in America, throughout much of history, and that (2) the just and effective remedy for this offense is institutionalized discrimination in favor of blacks over whites, presumably until the books are balanced. One of those things is true. Kendi's argument seems to be based on a general principle that when one class of people has been systematically wronged by another class, each member of the offending group then owes each member of the offended group preferential treatment and reparations. But in the light of day, this view breaks down for two reasons: first, the woke don't really believe it, and, second, the principle itself is ridiculous.
The more you study it, the more you see that woke identity politics is not about keeping a ledger of historical injustices between groups and trying to balance the books; it is about keeping a ledger of historical injustices committed by groups that oppose the woke agenda, against groups that support the woke agenda, while conveniently ignoring all other patterns of predation and exploitation in the country and around the world. For example, the woke say that America owes blacks reparations for slavery. Maybe She does; around 450,000 blacks were brought to the United States and its original colonies in the Transatlantic slave trade, and their descendants held in bondage until the end of the Civil War in 1866 -- the total evil and suffering of which practice over time defy imagination or calculation. But on the other hand, over 1,000,000 whites were brought to the Mediterranean region in slavery by the Barbary pirates, and their descendants held in bondage until decades after the practice had been abolished in the United States, under circumstances no less brutal and probably worse. We hear indignant outcries by the woke for America to pay reparations to blacks -- but where are the cries for Morocco, Libya, or Turkey to pay reparations to whites and their families for their past enslavement and its deleterious and lasting effects? Of course there aren't any, because (1) the peoples of the Barbary Coast are not political opponents of the woke agenda, (2) group justice for ancient wrongs is a ridiculous idea in the first place, and (3) even if whites asked for reparations for their centuries of brutal oppression under North African slavery, as Thomas Sowell wrote, nobody is going to be fool enough to give it to them.
The woke would argue that, unlike the centuries-long slavery of whites in the Mediterranean, institutionalized discrimination against blacks in the United states is our problem, that it extends into living memory through the end of the Jim Crow era, and that its lasting effects are still felt by blacks today. And every word of that is true -- but if that is an outrage when it happens to some groups, shouldn't it be just as much of an outrage when it happens to others?
The raids of the Barbary pirates happened far away and long ago. But when it comes to alleged injustices by whites against non-whites, the woke certainly don't restrict attention to problems in our own back yard, or to problems that are currently going on. They fill the streets to protest the Israeli occupation of Palestine, wail angrily about the historical colonization of Africa by European powers like Belgium and Holland, and point their fingers over the long-ago British rule of India and the Spanish conquest of Central and South America -- all as if to say, look at all the terrible things white people have done. And they are right: white people have a lot of terrible things -- but so have other people, here in America and all around the world. Do the woke stigmatize the Japanese for their inhuman mistreatment of the people of Nanking and Korea during their subjugation under Hirohito? Do they lambast ethnic Hawaiians for the imperialism, slave driving, and brutality of King Kamehameha -- more recently than the American founding, and right in our own backyard? Are they calling for reparations to the Ute Indians for their epochs of enslavement and exploitation at the hands of the Navajo? And is anyone -- woke, Ute, or otherwise -- wagging their finger at modern day Navajos for those brutal crimes? Not at all. Not a peep. Why not?
Woke activists insist the United States should return the Black Hills region, in which Mount Rushmore is located, to the Sioux Indians -- from whom the United States seized it during the Black Hills War. And maybe we should: the Supreme Court ruled in 1960 that the United States owed the Sioux $106 million in return for the wrongful seizure of the Black Hills. But on the other hand, nobody -- neither the woke, nor the Supreme Court, nor anyone else -- is suggesting that the Sioux should pay reparations of any kind to the Cheyanne, who occupied the Black Hills for years before being driven out at the points of Sioux spears. Even the Cheyanne don't push that agenda; if they did, it would loose from Pandora's box the principle that people other than whites can be held individually and collectively responsible for the ancient wrongdoings of others of their race -- and nobody wants that.
To apply the principle of collective guilt to any group other than those targeted by the woke -- whites, and men, and especially white men -- sounds crazy. And it is crazy, but it is not less crazy for one group than it is for another. The fact that it has been normalized in our public conversation to do this selectively to certain groups shows how far down the woke rabbit hole our whole culture has fallen, and how far we have to go to drag ourselves out of it.
The "social justice" crowd claims that (1) blacks are negatively affected by the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow even today, and that (2) "systemic" racism continues to subtly permeate the fabric of our institutions, resulting in currents of racial prejudice that blacks must swim against -- and, therefore (3) policies and principles that discriminate against whites are necessary to "level the playing field". Claim #1 is certainly true, and I believe there is a good deal of truth to #2 -- but, again, does the social justice crowd go from #1 and #2 to #3 by the same logic for every group -- or are they pulling out diverse weights and diverse measures as it suits their political purposes?
If historical class maltreatment justifies present class favoritism, as Kendi claims to believe, then no group in modern history has earned it more than the Jews of Europe. If the Jews of Europe are not lagging economically, and are not overrepresented in Europe's prisons and poorhouses, should we conclude it is because, they have entirely escaped the effects of the brutal victimization that was historically aimed at them for thousands of years, to the point of attempted genocide almost within living memory? Or that all remnants of antisemitism have been completely extinguished from our institutional DNA and collective consciousness? Both claims are preposterous. If the Jews of Europe are doing better than the blacks of America, despite millennia of atrocious oppression and widespread lingering animus, it is only because the Jews of Europe do not act like fools as often as the Blacks of America. If blacks deserve officially sanctioned favoritism to level the playing field, on the argument that past discrimination requires it, then the Jews deserve such favoritism as much or mor. Of course that would only put the Jews farther ahead than they already are -- but, after all, a level playing field is a level playing field. Wouldn't the Jews be doing even better on a level playing field -- where they had never been persecuted and marginalized? So if the woke want to level the playing field, and if the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination, where are the strident demands for reparations and affirmative action for Jews?
It seems that a level playing field is not what the woke really want after all. They are often accused instead of chasing the dream of equity, or equal outcomes, defined as equal average levels of success and failure, in all major measures of quality-of-life (educationally, economically, in criminal justice, etc.), for every demographic group. That would explain why they don't support affirmative action for Jews -- and why the remedy for past discrimination against them isn't current discrimination at all. Some of the more extreme SJWs, such as Kamala Harris, even admit to wanting equal outcomes for all groups. But do they really want that? Do they apply the principle of equal outcomes evenhandedly to different demographic groups, for each basic measure of success and quality of life? Or is this another case of diverse weights and measures?
One key demographic group that is woefully lagging in quality of life in America, and falling behind farther with every year, is the largest minority group in the country comprising 49.5% of the population: men. For example, a man in America is around four times more likely than a woman to be sent to prison for a violent felony. (Should we automatically conclude there could be no other reason for this than sexism in the criminal justice system?) Roughly four fifths of all suicides in America are by men, and the rate of suicide among men increased 28% between the years of 2000 and 2021. American men die of drug overdoses at two to three times the rate of women, and almost 70% of homeless people in America are men. Even among those American men who escape catastrophic events like a felony conviction or a fatal overdose, educational and economic attainment among men is in worrisome decline. Only 44% of the students now enrolled in four-year colleges in the United States are men -- 12% less than the figure for women -- and men are falling rapidly further behind in this key measure of achievement and future success. Among adult men in the US, the percentage who are not working and not looking for work increased 3-fold (from 4% to 12%) between 1960 and 2010 and continues to grow. A tiny handful of the growing cohort of non-working men are independently wealthy -- but the vast majority are either sponging off of their wife or girlfriend, living on handouts from of the state, panhandling and hustling to get by as homeless addicts, or making their living through some form of organized crime. Twelve percent of all adult men in America now fit that description -- roughly the same proportion of men that earn graduate degrees, while two thirds of graduate degrees now go to women. To put that a different way, a man in America today is only half as likely as a woman to get a graduate degree, and is as likely to be an indigent or dependent as he is to get that graduate degree. In summary, men have disproportionately bad outcomes in several major areas of life, and they are falling farther behind in these areas by the year.
If you have been paying attention to the political discourse of the times, you may have heard statistics like these about the plight of men in America. But even if you have heard of these gloomy trends and disparities, you will have rarely if ever heard calls for pro-male affirmative action to remedy them, or seen women blamed for them wholesale as a class -- especially by woke SJW's. If the woke want what they say they want and think what they say they think, reverse discrimination and narratives of class exploitation should be right up their ally. But in the case of men, what happened to equal outcomes? and what happened to class exploitation as the explanation for group differences in outcomes? And if not equal outcomes and class oppression, what the Hell happened to leveling the playing field?
So let's summarize. The woke agenda is to balance the books of historical class oppression -- but only to examine the entries in the entries in those books where white men did something wrong. And they want to level the playing field -- except that they are fine to leave it tilted against groups that are succeeding on their own merit. And they want the same outcomes for every group -- and to impose quotas, regulations, and subsidies to bring about equal outcomes for all groups -- except for a striking lack of interest in any program or policy that would help men catch up to women in major areas of quality-of-life such as education, housing, and mental health. Make sense?
Cui bono?
The woke ideology's ideology does make sense if you watch what they do instead of listening to what they say. What is going on is that the aim of leveling the playing field, and the narrative of class exploitation as the automatic explanation for why some groups outperform others, and even the quest for equal outcomes by group, were all lies in the first place. The pattern of which groups are demonized by the radical left and targeted for group guilt, and which group disparities and trends the woke crusade to fix with affirmative action and reparations, are as clear as the pattern of which crooked scale a drug dealer chooses to weigh out his pot, depending on whether he is buying or selling: it is a matter of cui bono.
The table below shows the political leanings of several major demographic groups in the United States, according to Pew Research polls conducted in 2024 [source1, source2]. The number in the right-hand column is the percentage who described themselves as leaning Democrat, minus the percentage who described themselves as leaning Republican -- so the higher the number, the greater the number of self-described Democrats in the group. The groups appear in the table from top to bottom, ranked by their affinity toward the Democratic party.
- black women: +74
- gay women: +71
- black men: +66
- gay men: +66
- Hispanic women: +28
- Hispanic men: +22
- white women: +10
- white men: -21
Whaddayaknow? If you only looked at the left hand column, you might think this was a chart of the woke victim status hierarchy from top to bottom. There are two salient explanations of what could be going on here. The woke explanation would be that America is institutionally rigged to favor the groups at the bottom, and the Democrats are the ones who are trying to level the playing field -- so of course the groups at the bottom, who don't want the playing field leveled, tend more to vote Republican. If it were remotely true that Democrats wanted to level the playing field, that might be plausible -- but I believe there is a simpler explanation that fits more of the facts. Like Plato's drones buzzing around the bema, the radical left wants to silence and marginalize its political opponents, whose identities fit the pattern in the table above, and part of the plan is to demonize them as historical class oppressors.
As an experiment to test this, you could ask what would happen if Latino men began voting Republican in larger numbers. My theory suggests that, since selectively enforced class-guilt narratives are a propaganda tool of the woke, we would see a sudden wellspring of woke narratives about Latinos as class oppressors. But that experiment has already been run. Over the course of the last several years, Latinos began moving to the right politically source, to the point that almost half voted for Trump in 2024. Now Google "racism against Latinos" on the one hand, and "Latino white supremacist" on the other, and check the dates and sources on the top twenty articles for both searches. It seems that Latinos were once portrayed copiously in woke outlets as historical class victims -- until around 2023 when stories began to emerge of a nefarious white supremacy movement in the Latino community. So, either Latinos began flocking to the Republican party because they shifted toward white supremacy, around the same time left-leaning pundits came to their senses and realized Latinos had never been class victims in the first place, or the woke propaganda machine began to pump out articles about Latino white supremacy to marginalize that group as soon as they began voting more like white men. You make the call.
It is often said that the woke ideology is unforgiving. That is said with good reason: people have been cancelled by the woke left, for example, for years-old drunken social media posts, that were objectively inoffensive in the light of reason, and that were inside the window of acceptability at the time they were made. People have even been cancelled for liking such posts -- and in England some have been arrested. And that is pretty unforgiving. But, on the other hand, senator Roberd Byrd was literally an officer of the Ku Klux Klan in his youth (an Exalted Cyclops, no less!), and he was never cancelled for that. At the time of Byrd's death, he was a powerbroker in the national politics of the Democratic party and a dependable supporter of the Democratic agenda (the latter of which was no change; the Klan has always been dominated by Democrats). At his funeral, Byrd was lovingly eulogized by Democrats including President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Governor Joe Manchin, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Representative Nick Rahall, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, and former president Bill Clinton. So they aren't that unforgiving after all -- as long as you are squarely on their team. Diverse weights and diverse measures.
There is a second, less subtle reason whites would naturally appear at the bottom of the woke caste hierarchy. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to form a political movement -- not for the purpose of achieving any real aim of social justice, but just to plunder the wealth of an opportunistically selected class of people through the apparatus of the state. Who would be the most natural targets of such a scheme? the same as the natural targets for any other sort of robbery: the ones with the most money. This pattern dates back to the time of Plato, as he noted:
Then there is another class which is always being severed from the mass. They are the orderly class, which in a nation of traders sure to be the richest. They are the most squeezable persons and yield the largest amount of honey to the drones.
-- Plato: The Republic, Book VIII
The pattern has repeated itself with the targeting of industrialists, aristocrats, and land-owning farmers (the "bourgeoisie") in the communist revolutions of Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Yugoslavia, to name a few -- and with the targeting of Jews in Germany, Tutsis in Rwanda, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Igbos in Nigeria, and Christians in Lebanon to name a few more. In every case named here, and many others not named, a disproportionately successful demographic group was demonized as a historical exploiter class and targeted for persecution and plunder, ending in tyranny, and in several cases genocide. Some of these groups, without a doubt, had histories of predatory exploitation of their countrymen -- and some of them, without a doubt, did not. But in no case did the persecution and plunder solve the problems of the alleged victim classes that perpetrated them. In each case, on the contrary, it affected a catastrophe for everyone involved. It turns out that the alleged historical exploiter class, even when it actually is exploitative, is almost never the problem at the root of lagging outcomes for less fortunate groups.
The final reason why whites would find their place at the bottom of the woke caste system is the simplest of all. Whether the targets are whites, or Jews, or aristocrats, or industrialists, or Tutsis, or Tamils, or Igbos, or somebody else, when people are hurting and hungry, it is easy to get them to hate others who have more than them, to churn this hatred into an ideology, and then to mill that ideology into a political regime. That is the nature of the game of modern-day tyranny -- from Mugabe to Khomeini, from Lenin to Hitler, and in scores of other cases. Many of the class-exploitation narratives leveraged by tyrannical regimes of the 20th century had truth to them; some had smaller threads of truth, and some were utter fabrications. But no good came of the victim identity politics in any case; it is a murderous plague, plain and simple. There is a crucial difference between, on the one hand, remembering who did what to whom with an eye toward preventing it from happening again, and, on the other hand, saying, "...so let's do it back to them." Doing it back to them is the message Xendi expressed with such force and poetry, and his expression of that message -- the toxic, two-faced message of modern tyranny -- is the reason he has been elevated as a spokesman for the woke movement.
Conclusion
It is a natural question why, if wokeness functions largely a pretext for class warfare to demonize white people and redistribute their wealth, so many college-educated whites have nonetheless become infected with the woke mind virus. I will return to this question in detail in a later chapter, but the basic answer is that, in a tragedy of commons orchestrated by the woke censorship-indoctrination complex, it behooves them as individuals to be part of the problem in the large -- something like it behooved Uncle Tom. Doesn't it behoove you, at the very least to play along and keep your mouth shut? Playing along and keeping your mouth shut under tyranny is what Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, in his book The Captive Mind, called ketman. Ketman is a dangerous game: you can only pretend to be something for so long, before you start to become what you pretend to be. Even if you continue to secretly and silently resist being changed by one-sided propaganda pouring out of our major institutions, the young people around you, who only hear one side of the argument voiced by authority figures in public, will presume that side is just and right, and that it is an offense to their community to question or deviate from it. Our cowering in silence, even in silent resistance, explains why our children are getting away from us.
The following chapters will discuss victim identity politics under Lenin, Hitler, and Mao Zedong.
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
Respectively,
- Nothing is being molded by anyone. Petition for redress of grievances is business as usual.
- If it is illegal then it is newsworthy, but what law is being broken and by what conduct?
- BLM is not the other side from the pro Hamas protests; it is the same side. Both are illegal and both should have been dispersed by police immediately. If it was MAGA protesters they would have been.
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
*Other than why the fuck are Canadian doctors so keen to help their fellow citizens maim or destroy their bodies??!!
Whatever it is, I think it is the same thing that motivated Dr. Frankenstein.
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
The big media outlets don't seem to be interested in this story. Maybe that is because they are controlled by a Jewish syndicate, or maybe it is because it isn't a big deal. I go with "isn't a big deal". If they were conspiring to break the law that would be a big deal; if they were conspiring to change the law it would be at least interesting -- but what is happening here is that they are "conspiring" to enforce the law -- which they would already be enforcing, with prejudice, if a group on the other side were doing the same thing. So, so what?
This is a reply jointly to several comments so I will put it as a new semi-top level post. Several of the responses, including such as (what I consider) the most thoughtful ones of @sqeecoo and @Gillitrut, point in the direction that the mission of science is not to discover natural laws that are literally true, but to produce useful fictions -- stories about the world that we are better off believing and acting on. That position, if you really believe it, is immune from my argument. But if you take that position, and at the same time embrace the study of science, then you cannot, at the same time, argue against theism on the grounds that it is literally false.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
If you did it in a bar to a private citizen, probably. But I think there are severe sentencing enhancements for assaulting public officials in the line of their duty, and especially cops, and especially with a weapon (per se or improvised) of any sort. And I reckon there should be. I'm kind of shocked by this on behalf of the cops.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
Tit for that is the provable optimal strategy in an iterated game of prisoner's dilemma.
I do not believe this. I don't even think it makes sense to say, game theoretically. Source?
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
Lost all credibility for me when he said that of there was a Palestinian state that the fighting would stop. "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free" means the entire area of what is now israel will be "free" of Jews. And where are these Jews supposed to go? It says in hamas's 1988 charter where they are supposed to go (to their graves) and they have never changed their tune. When Fatah renounced terrorism, Hamas became the most popular party among the people of Gaza, and they won the 2006 Palestinian elections on a platform of terror and hatred. As Douglas Murray said, it there was a Palestinian state it would be a Nazi state.
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
By "inflammatory" do you mean (a) inflammatory in the eyes of a reasonable person, or (b) something that will, if widely seen, get a lot of people riled up, reasonably or unreasonably?
Is this like a hypocrisy claim? That since science isn't literally true it would be hypocritical to criticize theism for not being literally true?
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
If there is some causally inert god or gods out there, who do not interact with our reality in an empirically testable way, I am not that concerned with their existence.
God's pronouns are He/Him. (For the sarcasm-impaired, that's a joke)
Incidentally, I think this is the deepest and most informed comment in the thread so far.
Sure, the things we call the "laws of nature" may not be the true causal description of the universe at some level. What matters is that the universe acts as if they were universally true, as best we can tell.
This may be the view of many scientists who think about the epistemology of science if you pin them down (their motte!), but I think if you talk to people walking down the street, they think we are in the business of discovering natural laws that are actually true. I suspect that when we are not pinned down, scientists like to think that we are searching for truth ourselves (our bailey!), and it seems like the phrase "May not be the true causal description... at some level [emphasis added]" hedges against giving up that bailey. As I recall, the word for not-true is "false", unqualified by levels.
If you would affirm that science has no hope of attaining even tentative knowledge of natural laws that are literally true -- but instead that its mission is purely to discover useful (but presumptively fictitious) models of the physical world -- then that position is consistent with my argument, with or without miracles. From the post, I am perhaps a little more than halfway confident you would affirm that, but I am not sure, and I'd like to know.
NelsonRushton
4mo ago
You can't understand Nazism without getting to grips with the special place that anti-semitism has in Nazi ideology.
I think I understand that tolerably. The question remains what is the rationale for this antisemitism? My only assumption is that it rests on the alleged threat the Jews pose to Germany. Am I missing something? If it doesn't rest on that, what does it rest on?
NelsonRushton
4mo ago
The argument doesn't depend on Hitler wanting to exterminate the French. The Jews had no plans to exterminate the Germans; they were just a threat of some sort. Hitler's axiom is that threats to your national safety can be preempted by genocide. Germany was a threat of far greater magnitude to the Allies in 1919 than the Jews ever were to Germany, so by Nazi logic the allies were entitled to exterminate the Germans in 1919.
The Allies planned initially to treat the German nation harshly post-war in the Morgenthau plan but then moderated their stance in peacetime when they concluded it would be unhelpful.
It would only be unhelpful if it didn't go far enough.
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
From reading Nixonland, he documents a bunch of right wing protestors doing the same thing left wing protestors did in the 1960's. We never really hear about it though. We only hear about left wing protestors vs police or the National Guard.
How many is a bunch, and what counts as the same thing? I'm curious to see a list of these and I challenge you to a game: you name a documented act of Republican act of mob violence (where most of the protesters presumably self-identified as republicans and at least one person was injured), and I will name two Democrat acts of mob violence, etc., back and forth for as long as you can come up with them. "A dollar a ball until the loser says quit" [The Hustler].
NelsonRushton
4mo ago
Well, darn. I tried to piece the contents of that book together from snippets without reading it, because I don't want to buy it on principle and I couldn't find the full text online. Now I have to spend Saturday at the book store reading it in an easy chair.
Thanks for the info. I will make appropriate edits when I have time.
This sounds contradictory - were the pagans and Hebrews meant to be the other way around in the latter?
Yes that was a typo. Thanks for pointing it out.
More generally, if I read this as a book, I think certain parts of it would strike me as failure to maintain the professional detachment
I think it's funny that you expect books to have a tone of "professional detachment". Plato didn't.
Oh, dang, I missed the Plato discussion.
Never too late.
This is a shame because I think you’re misreading a crucial part of it. Specifically here; the last time I made this argument (to @MaiqTheTrue) is here. In short, I think aging philosophers have been complaining about libertine, shiftless youth for literal millennia, but the predictions rarely come true. Athens was perfectly able to go to war, elect new leaders, corral its livestock, etc. up until they got subjugated by an outside tyrant. Though if you’ve made a case for the decline of virtue in Classical Athens, I’d be interested in seeing it.
Plato was clearly not saying that this (libertine-ness) was happening at the time he wrote The Republic. He was saying that it happens from time to time in various places, and that where it happens it is a symptom of coming tyranny. He had already lived through one such cycle in his 20's, and another one happened in Athens about 75 years after he wrote the Republic. It seemed to happen about every 100 years. Also, I do not accept the argument that the regime of the Thirty Tyrants had nothing to do with the moral fabric of Athens (see below). To elaborate on the words of Col. Jeff Cooper, armed men with moral courage cannot be easily tyrannized, and men with moral courage in the first place cannot easily be disarmed.
Athens was perfectly able to go to war, elect new leaders, corral its livestock, etc. up until they got subjugated by an outside tyrant.
Sometimes it was. Sometimes it wasn't. I'm not sure why you think Classical Athens was such a first world open society. Plato's Apology suggests that most people cooperated with the regime of the thirty tyrants as informers, as if the people of Athens, like Soviet Russia, was open to that sort of government by virtue of its failing values. The trial of Socrates happened in 399; that almost certainly a historical event, retold fairly accurately by Plato (since it is not contradicted by other sources, many of whom mention Socrates and were familiar with Plato's work). The trial related in The Apology not exactly a signal of a functioning democracy; it is a story of literally fatal cancel culture.
More importantly, the argument proves way too much. I could go down your tyrant checklist and fish for ways to make the prophecy fit Donald Trump, a textbook oligarch waving the flag of populism. Would that really be useful?
You could of course fish for that, or for an extended analogy between pinto beans and cardboard (they do kind of taste like cardboard, don't they?), or anything else you want to fish for. The trick is to actually do it -- and compare the two side by side. If you have the time I would be happy to see the results of your analogy with Trump.
This isn’t even your first time playing the lazy DRRR game.
Sorry. No idea what this means.
That makes it kind of pointless to draw your enemies as the soyjak.
Depends on how accurate the drawing is, and what other attempts to draw the same comparison you hold it next to. The details matter, and the control groups matter.
I wanted to discuss Plato because I think that post was a lot more interesting than this one.
Be my guest. I will respond to your replies to it (though they may not have a big audience)
You are not the first person to write an essay about how your opponents are Literally Hitler.
I didn't say anyone was literally Hitler. Please be smarter than this.
The Democrat agenda had thoroughly shifted by the Reagan years, and pretending otherwise is a cheap rhetorical trick.
This is beside the point. My point was that Byrd was forgiven for egregious racism in his distant past.
Also, I think you missed the salient point of the article on Plato. Plato obviously has a low opinion of the "democratic men" of his time, and was probably on the other side from them of the political aisle. Maybe they were right and he was wrong; that's perfectly possible and (note carefully that) I never made a claim about it. The main point is the resemblance between their agenda and that of modern progressives, which I find evidently uncanny.
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
Let's start with number three, because that is the one that surprises me. (1) The city government of NYC is woke AF, (2) so is the administration of Columbia U, and (3) one element of the woke agenda is a strong leaning toward both Palestine and BLM to the point of permitting illegal protests for both. Do you affirm or deny (1), (2), and (3)?
Since you yourself admit that this argument is restrained to humanist rule utilitarianism, shouldn't you edit the title to include the full phrase?
I don't actually admit that. It starts off with the humanistic version, but the later paragraphs address broader forms of the view. Do you have a particular variation in mind?
I clicked this post expecting a serious attack on the compromise between deontology and consequentialism that rule utilitarian offers,... to hell with clickbait and false advertising.
I don't think the title suggests this topic exclusively. Even if I am mistaken, and it did, "clickbaiting" is a deliberate deception, and I plead innocent to that charge.
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
Science is stories about the world that we are better off acting on. This phrasing seems better to me. In this way, can't I argue against theism (whatever you mean by that) by saying "acting on theism doesn't make us better off"?
Yes, feel free. But not (under the premises I described) on the grounds that there is no objective evidence that God actually exists (since that is also true of universal gravitation).
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
Sources?
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
modern Ashkenazi Jews are descended from intermarried Jews and Romans.
Many modern people are descended from the interbreeding of masters and slaves. What I mean is, if only they had incorporated conquered people into their society having the rights of citizens.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
Great post.
Thanks!
you have gotten one person to read the book!
...An angel got their wings today.
You might be on the wrong side of history if... your excuse for the wrongdoing on your side is, "the other side does it too", or "the other side does it more".
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