The Rise of Socialisn't
When I was but a mere whippersnapper, relatively speaking, I would have classed myself as a Socialist. A European/UK style socialist not quite ready to become the version of Socialist that would strip everyone of their property and ensure we all lived equal lives of misery and squalor.
The thing that drove this was a notion of people and society. Surely, I reasoned, good, hard-working people deserved a fair crack of the whip? Couldn’t we do better for them? Why did some have to struggle so, even though they they worked bloody hard, whilst others were served chilled margaritas at their luxury Mediterranean holiday villa?
I still feel (sort of) a bit the same way. I still feel that a honest day’s work deserves a remuneration that allows someone to live with some dignity, to raise a family, and so on. What I don’t have anymore is that kind of burning envy of those who do have plenty.
My ideas, back then, were driven by what I suppose would be called ‘compassion’ and ‘kindness’ these days. I’d like to think there’s some of those things left, but it’s more complicated now in that I recognize that practicality is probably more important.
“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
It’s a famous quote, somewhat well-worn, but it demonstrates the difference between two ‘compassionate’ paths. Which of these is truly compassionate?
In very (very) crude terms it illustrates the difference between ‘socialist’ and ‘conservative’ thinking.
The wealthy, the elite, will always look down on the ‘plebs’ - that’s kind of a given. Sure, they’ll give every appearance of caring when it is politically (or financially) expedient to do so, but make no mistake, when push comes to shove, if their bottom line is under threat they’ll be capable of laying waste to swathes of livelihoods at a stroke and without a second thought.
They’ll cut those people off because they’re no longer valuable to their business.
We’re seeing a kind of parallel these days - but it’s a different kind of ‘wealth’. Some people have amassed a great deal of what we might term Virtue Capital - or at least what they see as ‘virtue’. They are wealthy in things like goodness, kindness, empathy, compassion and love - or at least that’s how they portray themselves.
What seems to be happening more and more is that these oligarchs of virtue are ready to cut out vast swathes of humanity because they live in virtue poverty.
If your blood pressure is OK and you’re not in any danger of a coronary you might want to read this appalling and vile screed from a supposed ‘Pastor’. This guy has close to 100,000 subscribers and the article has over 1,500 likes.
A nod to the wonderful Jenny Holland for bringing this to my attention. She’s well worth a subscription if you haven’t already done so.
In the article the Pastor recommends ostracizing and marginalizing those who voted in the wrong way in the 2024 US election (can you guess which way he means? Hmmm - tough one that isn’t it?). No sitting down with the tax collectors, whores, and other sinners, for him! Oh no, that would just be so unlike Jesus now wouldn’t it?
I suppose he’s the Jesus that would drive the profiteers and rogues from his Temple of Perfect Virtue.
You can get a feel for how (some) people are thinking, and I suspect it’s not all that uncommon, from the top comment with nearly 150 likes (edited to highlight the relevant parts)
My neighbor is a 60-something single guy . . . Never married . . . We bought this house three years ago, a remodel place . . . So we've been wreaking havoc on our neighbors with projects. . . Single guy has been so helpful and complimentary on what we're doing, telling us that it brightens his day that he has "good neighbors," and he's saved our a--es a few times on weather-relates hindrances, repaired a broken irrigation system while we were traveling, and other kindnesses. . . Then the election came. Single Man hung out a Trump flag and an American flag. Suddenly I can't bring myself to even wave at him.
. . .
What I want to say is, "You have been kind to us and we have had peaceful relations, but unless you renounce Trump to me I don't want you to set a foot on my property, you stupid piece of $%&÷ and cretinous jerk.”
Wow. Just wow. So this guy who has been super-kind, friendly and extraordinarily helpful to her and hubby is, at a stroke, a stupid piece of $%&
If that’s ‘virtue’ I want none of it.
And look at the demand here . . . “unless you renounce Trump to me”
You what? What in the name of Biden’s dribble-ridden shirt collar gives you that right? Just how entitled are you? What a self-righteous and sanctimonious prick.
There’s a real sickness at the heart of US society if this kind of attitude is as common as I suspect it to be. And that sickness isn’t coming from Trump’s side of the table.
When did cutting off your family, your friends, people you’ve known (and respected) for years become the right thing to do? And all because they don’t think quite like you?
You can only do that if you’ve been persuaded to think of them as monsters, or in some way evil.
Not just misguided, but evil.
The thinking (if, indeed, we can elevate such sentiments to the lofty height of “thought”) is along the lines of :
Trump is a monster. Only evil people would vote for a monster. Therefore you are evil and monstrous.
What would be next, I wonder? Would these people have any ethical qualms whatsoever if Trump supporters were sent to some ghetto and made to wear a yellow star? I very much doubt it, because the language and rhetoric really isn’t all that far away from this in my view. Would their ‘compassion’ and ‘kindness’ and ‘tolerance’ all come flooding back if something like this actually happened? Again, I doubt it, because they have no such feelings for those who voted for Trump.
The Pastor wants them to be ostracized, marginalized and turned into pariahs. Why should such evil people be allowed to live amongst us, the virtuous, is very much the Pastor’s underlying message here. Only Aryans Democrats are worthy of a full and decent life.
We’ve gone from Socialism to Socialisn’t - and we have ‘woke’ in all its glory to thank for that.
Everything in this post, from the quotations you cite to your discussion of them, could be converted from Trump to covid without changing much other than replacing some key words.
In fact, back during covid, when the SARS-CoV-2 virus had temporarily tagged in for Trump as principal heel, there was an op-ed column in the NY Times that almost exactly paralleled the comment from the homeowner quoted above: as I recall, the writer was a woman living out in the country, probably relocated from the city Prince Prospero-like to escape the Red Death, who praised her neighbor for doing primitive, neighborly things like plowing the snow from her driveway, and she was just so torn as to whether to treat him like a human being since he was (or maybe she just assumed he was) not sufficiently enlightened about either the plague or Trump or some combination, I can’t remember.
When Trump is gone, this mentality will remain.
"Socialisn't" is a wonderfully succinct way of putting it. Having known real socialists, the kind that'd try to live together in a commune, I'm well familiar with the real thing, that only works small-scale and only as long as the wrong'uns are kept out, and the current thing which really isn't socialism in any way shape or form.
Nor is it conservatism or fascism or classical European (British/Scottish to be precise) liberalism. What is it then?
It's an ideology dreamed up in the 1930s (no, not that one, I already said it's not fascism) by Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises among others at a conference in Paris in 1938. They associated all types of "collectivism" as they put it (such as public transportation funded by taxes, or tax-funded schools for working class people, or public hospitals, drains, sewers, public anything really) as the first step to the kind of totalitarianism they had just fled from (Austria). To their minds, the only way forward was to make everything public and remove power from elected officials and move it where such could not get at it. For details, Hayek lays out neoliberalism in his "Road to Serfdom", a book that has since been used as a blueprint by post-WW2 progressives and liberals whether in office or in offices on how to reach serfdom for the masses.
(Because a text, especially an ideological or religious one, is like a sword - it has two edges and they both cut both ways.)
And since 1947 and the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberalism has more and more ruled the roost, as democracy became bureaucracy and power over legislation was moved away from democratically elected parliaments.
The problem is that neoliberalism yields two effects: the negative aspects of totalitarianism, and the negative aspects of capitalism. Cojoined, they form the current Western order. Trump is in no way upsetting this. What he is doing is rearranging the curtains and the furniture.
That what he is doing is enough to upset the average media consumer speaks more about the media and said consumer, than about Trump and his policies.
Neoliberalism will end. Either with a return to nationalistic democratic rule after a period of violent authoritarianism under one symbol or the other - or it will end due to demographic replacement and the end of Western Europe as it has largely looked since Hastings.
To use what a professor told me: "Following an ideology is like driving according to a map, that's placed on your windshield."