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I was thinking lately why I -- despite largely agreeing with the progressives on policy -- can never see myself as a progressive (or as a "leftist" or whatever you want to call it). I thought the answer was "wokeness", but it isn't. Not really. There's actually something deeper. None of things below should be read as endorsement of conservatism, which I also disagree with.
There's one thing the progressives keep doing which I wish they would stop. I don't think they can ever stop. Every once in a while, progressives annoint one group as basically saviors of humanity. All other groups, by implication get relegated to essentially NPCs at best or scum of earth at worst. The annointed group never lives to those high expectations, of course so progressives eventually discard them and annoint some other group. The discarded group is sometimes just ignored or sometimes declared scum of earth depending on circumstances and on whether kicking down such group would be considered racist or not.
Interestingly, this is not that disimilar to how a narcissist acts. A Narcissist tends to first lure the victim with love-bombing, and later devaluates and discards it.
Some 120 years ago the first group to wear the starry crown was undoubtably the working class. Progressives were marxist then and working class was the class. They were the one who will overthrow capitalism and establish the New Civilization. Not only was the working class better than other classes, they also deserved to act contrary to any common morality. To kill not only the fat cats but the kullaks too.
We all know how this ended. Although some good things did came from communism and the labour movement, like 40 hour work week, it was a disaster overall. The worker's paradise never materialized, but corpses did. Today, progressives are not overtly interested in the working class any more, and the white part of it is held in near total contempt as Trump base.
60 years ago, the mandate of heaven was on boomers. Or at least on part of boomer generation that weren't conservative. It is hard to remember now, but at the time many intellectuals had very high hope for boomers as a new, spiritual, highly aware generation that will clense the world of sins of the fathers. The flower children. And it is not hard to see that those outside of the "counterculture" were considered NPCs. See this 1963 song:
It starts with saying the houses were made out of ticky tacky and by the end it is the people that are made out of ticky tacky. Progressives were calling other people "NPCs" long before Alt-Right did. It is good that there are songs like this or I would no doubt be accused of enacting strawmen.
We all know how this all ended, too. Boomers are now seen as the narcissism generation. At least there were no mass killings this time.
The next group to be deified -- tho maybe not to quite the same extent -- was alienated male. This was actually happening in parallel with Boomers althought I think it only reached true prominence after the "flower children" promise faded a bit. The first work in praise of alienated male actually predates Boomers, it's On The Road by Jack Kerouac. But generally in the 70s and 80s you got lots of movies -- taxi driver being the most prominent -- starring alienated male. The reason for alienation varied but there was usually an implication that the society was at least somewhat to blame. There was also usually an implication that making society more friendly to alienated men was morally good, if not a moral imperative.
Now, this last example is a bit more complex because there are multiple types of male alienation, obviously, but one type that lasted longer than others was a nerd. For a while there was lots of material in praise of alienated nerd, the victim of NPC jocks. The nerd was the one with broader perspective than other crude people around him. He was the one who trully deserved the girl due to being such a nice guy. It is darkly funny in retrospect that back when the columbine school shooting happened, the progressives blamed everyone except the shooters. The bullies, the jocks, the popular crowd.
And then Mother Mercy looked away, as she always does. A nice guy became Nice Guy. School shooting were done not out of bullying but because of entitlement. Nerds are discusting sexists, who have exactly what they deserve, which is nothing.
In 2020 everyone got (rightfully) shocked by what Derek Chauvin did. But the answer was not to remove bad apples, it was to remove all the police. Because the newly deified minorities don't need any police, because they are better than you. So CHAZ was formed. Very shortly, it became more lethal per capita to young black men than the rest of the city ever was. Unlike with previous examples, minorities weren't villified, instead the whole episode just got forgotten. But I am not going to allow anyone to forget.
Another group that seems to be getting deified would be trans children. Now, I got nothing against trans people and think there are legit rights that should be protected here. But the surrounding rethorics still makes me unconfortable. There is very obvious implication that being trans is somehow a more profound experience than being cis. Trans peoples are the ones on a beautiful journey, unlike NPC me. And you got things like Trans Day of Revenge, whatever that is.
And so, not that long ago, first trans school shooting has happened. People who say that school shootings happen because of white male entitlement are silent so far.
Okay, so what all of this means, you might ask?
I want to say right away that it is entirely possible to fight to people's rights without putting those people on a pedestial. Both civil rights in the sixties and gay marriage happened without pedestializing black people or gay people respectively. But all too often, progressives prefer pedestializing.
Progressives -- to the extent that they are aware of this dynamics -- often conclude that the problem is that they have picked the wrong groups. Those damn white male nerds were always too privileged, after all.
In my opinion, the problem isn't that progressives single out wrong groups for annoitment. It is that any group you annoint is all but guaranteed to become worse. Everyone sees that if you tell to an individual person that he is the center of the universe, that he is going to reedem the world, that all his problems are the world's fault, you are then likely to induce narcissism. Not always, because some people's egos aren't inflatable, others are (smartly) wary of praise, but in most cases you are going to end up with a worse person. Why is it so hard to see that it is exactly the same with groups?
Telling to alienated nerds that they are better than the morons around them, that they deserve more than this rotten world is giving to them, is going to turn a few of them into school shooters. If the other people are ants, why not step on them? But the same dynamics can be induced in e.g. trans people too, as we now see.
My current ideology is that the future either belongs to everyone, or it is a shit future. I am with everyone who thinks so and against everyone who doesn't.
The progressive today is not the progressive of yesteryear, just as the cause to be championed changes from year to year. Yet the patterns repeat because the lessons are never learned, for This Time It Is Different.
The pattern OP rightly observes is that a disenfranchised group is championed by a vanguardist element (the vanguardist is typically a member of an elite class unable to function within elite society due to scarcity or more likely incompetence) as a morally righteous party whose interests must be advanced no matter the cost to current society, with the vanguardists administering said advancement and adjudication of costs/benefits. The whole point, now as in the past, is to allow the vanguardists a permanent hand on the lever of power, and the championed must be incapable of replacing the vanguardists hands with their own.
This is where the break point normally lies. It is easy to champion a group when said group is incapable of exercising their own agency and simply act as a formless mass to be grafted onto the vanguardist agenda, a silent blob that is asspuppeted for the vanguardist utopian dream. It is much less useful for the vanguardist when the blob finds its voice and says they actually like old system except with them on top, or that they like a new system but with the vanguardist removed.
@anti_dan below (above?) is right. The hated group is the animating force vanguardist progressives are trying to act against, not acting on behalf of a new downtrodden to be raised up. If progressives truly gave a shit about downtrodden marginalized oppressed you'd see much more support for copts, middle eastern jews, dayaks in East Malaysia, hindus in Bali, dalits in India... the list goes on. The progressives only seem to champion disenfranchised criminal minorities in their local sphere who need the guiding hand of the progressive, and this serves only to expand the list of groups who are the Hated Group. JK Rowling was the crazy woman who kept inserting weird racial minorities in Harry Potter long after she got her bag, now she's UltraTERF because she refuses to let men exploit womens only groups.
Progressives now, as in the past, fail to consider that the groups championed have their own agency, and can bite the hand on the leash as easily as choosing a new leash to be attached to based on their own preferences. The ANC suppressed necklacings primacy as a weapon only briefly under Nelson Mandela, with the EFF now looking longingly to restarting the practice. The SDS allied with the Black Panthers and were already suffering from internal splits thanks to Black Panthers eschewing socialist theory in favor of afrocentricism. The Iranian and Egyptian socialists joined hands with the Islamists only to be brutally suppressed by the Imams. The progressives of Europe opened the floodgates to refugees only to (continue failing to) discover that muslims love welfare, love raping nonmuslims, hate working and hate nonmuslims.
Whether progressives are aware that their ideas are not actually that popular or that their pets can and will rise up to advance their own interests is irrelevant. So long as an unsatisfied elite feels that they can exploit a wedge to upend the current hierarchy to put themselves on top, they will use that tool to the hilt. Right now the meta of Disparate Impact is still effective as a tool to be exploited to the hilt for DEI managers to continue creaming off the fat. Lets see if this state of affairs can continue.
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