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First it was farmers. Then coal miners and factory workers. And then minorities, first in this country and then abroad, who were the latest candidates for the oppressed of the year.
But beyond searching for victims to represent, the Left was really searching for authenticity.
The Left, for all its protestations about the travails of the working class, is a movement of radical intellectuals, effete upper-class dilettantes and professional activists who are detached from the ‘plight’ of the ‘proletariat’ whose rights they claim to be campaigning for. Its academic theories, from Marxism on down, are not grounded in anything except abstract sophistry marshaled on behalf of the perpetually oppressed who are to benefit from the totalitarian rule of the Left.
The inauthenticity of the Left, its power and privilege, its detachment from what it considers to be ordinary life, leaves it forever searching for authentic victims, whose lives follow the patterns of socialist theories, rather than being the ones who stand apart and make those theories.
The mimicry of working-class attire by leftists had been mocked as far back as Orwell. Radicals who didn’t work loved adopting the costumes and accents of the working class as if they were ideological method actors who could discover the authenticity they lacked by playing a part. (It is no coincidence that acting is a profession rife with leftist politics and that so many of those who play the embodiment of the ordinary man or woman on screen proved to be nothing of the sort. To paraphrase Shakespeare, all the Left’s a stage and its activists mere players.)
Leftists search for the missing authenticity by trying to embed themselves into the lives of the authentic ‘working class’. In the 19th century, they rallied for farmers and tried to become them. Wealthy urbane intellectuals engaged in doomed efforts to run farms, growing apples and raising hens in New England with invariably disastrous results that left them bankrupt and in debt, without having learned a single thing from the experience.
Except to denounce ‘mercantilism’ and later capitalism for their failures.
19th century leftist intellectuals, individually or as part of the growing trend of Fourierist communes, lacked the discipline for the backbreaking work and painstaking planning involved in farming. Rather than leading them to question whether they could run entire societies when they could not even manage a farm, they decided that the problem was with farming, not with them.
And that is what the Left always does. Rather than acknowledge that their failures stem from hubris and a lack of discipline, they instead blame them on the general state of society.
By the 20th century, they had turned away from farmers, who had proven that they were not fertile ground for their ideology, to factory workers and miners who were more willing to form unions. The new working-class ideal was no longer Fourier’s massive agriculture communes, but massive industrialization that appeared to be made for socialist central planning. Unlike agriculture which was subject to the vicissitudes of the weather, every element of the industrial process from mining to the finished product appeared controllable and subject to their theories.
The Soviet Union purged farmers and built-up industrialization, as Communist China would do in more recent times, leading to massive famines in both dictatorships. Russia and China reviled farmers as reactionaries and their mismanagement of agriculture collectively killed millions. The USSR became dependent on American agricultural imports and China may dump its junk on Americans on an incredible scale, but still imports agricultural products from America.
In America, the factory workers and miners eventually proved disappointingly conservative. Both the international Marxist movements and American leftists moved on to minorities who were seen as truly authentic revolutionary bases who would not be seduced by capitalism. Third world terrorism, especially in Latin America and the Muslim world, became the new ideal.
Western leftists began admiring and trying to imitate Che and Arafat. Then Hugo Chavez and Hamas. They gave up on the white working class entirely, then on men and everyone else. The vast majority of Americans, like the farmers, the workers and the miners, were no longer seen as ‘authentic’ and lost their ideological central place in the grand schemes of socialism.
The Left’s pursuit of authenticity was a response to its own unreality. The more unreal it became, the more it became obsessed with finding the authenticity in others that it lacked. As a movement trying to escape from itself, it could never achieve its real goal of embodying its shifting fashionable notions of the ‘salt of the earth’ who had the gift of making things work.
The ‘authenticity vampires’ who live on laptops but sound like they are struggling in salt mines always talk about ‘fighting for the people’, not because they love the people, but because they want to become them. They attach themselves to what they deem to be the working class to drain them of that authenticity, and then, like vampires, kill them off and replace them.
The crisis of the radical intellectuals is that they reject what they are, they reject the world as it is and they build their lives around fantasies that have no connection to their real selves or to reality. If they had the love for labor that they claim to, they would recognize their own decadence, but instead they aspire to be a supreme ruling class, the ‘first citizens’ of a class they do not even belong to.
A true society of workers would have no place for the sorts of people who theorize about it. A society of workers would understand why the various theories of those who pretend to speak for the working class are actually unworkable. The Left is not a society of workers, but of theorizers, whose theories never work, but who collude to perpetrate a massive fantasy on the public.
The world’s greatest con job.
Leftists began by fooling themselves and then fooling everyone else. Like all liars, they are desperately hungry for some truths to hang over their vast infrastructure of deceits. That is the authenticity they seek. Some truth to make the lies that they tell to themselves and to us seem plausible. Leftists put on working-class outfits, shabby, ripped and worn clothes, use lower class accents, embrace their music and what they think is their culture to find the truth.
But eventually this fake authenticity wears thin and they have to exchange it for another one. And they tell themselves that time this it will work and radical Pinnochio will become a real boy.
The Left loves losers more than they love winners and they love death more than they love life.
Well said.
That nihilistic pricks love to imagine an “oppressed” class . . . always formed of infantile, entitled, violent low-lifes.
Wasn’t it Golda Meir who said “When the arabs love their children more than they hate us, there will be peace”?
Won’t happen. They’re too enamored with murdering their “oppressors”.
I guess that is why you are an objectivist. You seem to love being a loser. You have pinned everything on a failed philosopher and a loser ideology. You care for no one, hate success, and constantly whine and moan about happy people.
Great life you have carved out for yourself.
Lenin was hereditary nobility and his life in exile in Switzerland was financed by remittances sent to him by his mother from the income of the family estate.
Radical leftists have been drawn from the power hungry but disaffected upper middle classes and lower echelons of the upper class since before the French Revolution.
The Chicago 7 followed the same script. Children of wealth who role played as brawny oppressed revolutionaries.
How long would Abby Hoffman survived in Stalins Russia, that he imagined as a paradise?
At the bottom all this, it is not about economics but about the Oedipus complex. Every one of these Spartagus impersonators hated their own fathers.
I love watching the old clips of Woodstock, when Pete Townshend smashed Abbie’s head with his guitar…… now that moment was delicious!
John Ratzenberger, who portrayed Cliff Claven on “Cheers”, worked on building the Woodstock stands when he was a teenager.
He witnessed the festival degrading into a Lord of the Flies on the last day.
The idiot attendees hadn’t thought ahead, and failed to bring essential food, water, etc . . . but plenty of drugs.
So when Hillary suggested a statue to commemorate Woodstock, Ratzenberger suggested it be that of a “National Guardsmen feeding a sandwich to a crying hippie!”
Ratzenberger said that while campaigning for Sen. Scott Brown. (He’s a rare conservative in Hollywood.)
He now runs an organization called “Nuts, Bolts, and Whatchamacallits” to teach inventive skills & work ethics to the next generation.
Down Easter -Out of all the sixties radicals, Abby Hoffman’s suicide with antidepressants was the most fitting. If only he could see things now considering Trump’s recent victory.
I’ve always wondered: if the left hates America that much then why don’t they leave and go find someplace better? Or are they cowards and know that only Americans will put up with their bullsh*t?
What does that say about America and Americans? That says to me that in the name of tolerance and liberty & freedom, we are passively accepting our own destruction. It seems to me that we the American people have no right to throw those ungrateful nihilistic bastards out of our country. Until we do, the end of America is nigh.
FINLAND has just imposed a 5oo% tariff on the United States until Rosie moves back.
I don’t even think CUBA would want any of our Communists if they were to leave, even while wearing their Che T-shirts.
Finland or Ireland?
Equally frigid…
Can’t say that I blame them. Perhaps Rosie O’Dumbell should move to Afghanistan or Yemen. They know how to deal with loudmouth fat butch-cut Feminazis like her.
I thought Rosie went to Ireland? If so, Ireland would impose the tariffs… But tariffs, indeed!
The left and especially the M.S. Media Bottom Feeders always Supports the most violent mobs around
Yep. Brilliant as usual Daniel.
But.
Actually quite a bit more brilliant.
Nobody penetrates the pathologies of Leftism as well as the great Greenfield.
Speaking of penetrating insights, leftie women have been faking their orgasms for years.
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Not all. Maybe you need to ramp up your “skill set.”
Anyone who supports backward “palestine” is already a fake progressive. Not just Hamas that it seeks a Caliphate. But “moderate” Arab ‘Palestinian Authority’ is preaching, ondoctrinating and paying for bloody jihad.
___
BTW, the recent horrific case of “Belal_donq” on TikTok agitating to shoot at ICE agent…
‘Belal’ is an Arab migrant, a Sharia enthusiast, speaks Arabic, English (with an accent) and Spanish. He chose “Donq” a to envoke Don Quichote – a Mexican legend, as he chases Latinas…
AOC refuses to drop the “Cortez” from her name, as if she doesn’t know that Cortez was the Latin Hitler.
The only thing authentic about supporters of “Free Palestine” is the hatred of Jews. That includes people like Bernie and Soros, as well as that ugly, baleful Swedish brat Greta Thunberg.
What great allusions to history in this essay! It brings to mind the story of how socialism failed miserably with the Pilgrims, and how the change to private private property helped the Pilgrims prosper.
I will assign this essay to students in an Econ special topics course next semester. Excellent stuff! Thank you, Daniel.
The same change had already been made at Jamestown. Private plots replaced communal resulting in individual labor directly connected to the reward of acquiring food from individual labor.
Excellent analysis. What is so sad is that after trying to make everyone gay and succeeding to a certain degree but not enough, they turned on children and the trans contagion started. This created a class of real people who were medically altered and harmed. Also the idolization of criminals, and the importation of illegal aliens is another example of creating a victim class. The left is desperate and cruel and creates real victims in its search for ideological victims. They do not care about women, children, minorities,, gays, about human trafficking or anything but power.
But, they have their dupes and hangers on. We can see those “protesting” with whatever the latest slogans on college campuses and streets.
I know a Trans Am which is trying to transition back into being a 442. So far, it is stuck at being a Firebird.
Thanks OK, as long as you IDENTIFY as a Trans Am.
That transition can no longer be completed with an unleaded mind.
Rebels without a pause. Protest globalization, then support it when it wants cash for global warming/climate change:grift. Denounce big business again with Occupy Wall Street.. Then back to global warming and the green new ripoff. Then BLM gets into the act and gets the usual suspects to burn downtown and demand DEI and CRT. Taking the extortion money and buy mansions.
Then back to global warming and Trump hatred with pussy hats, windmills and Teslas. Now it’s burning Teslas in the name of…what exactly? Protesting saving taxpayers money? The firing of government employees? I think they’ve run out of causes. They now just look dangerous and silly’.
It is just a matter of never letting a weapon go to waste.
Brilliant insights. Looking back, I think I noticed something like that, without realizing it at the time, when reading Trotsky on Lenin and his followers.
In other words, Trotsky was trying to praise Lenin and his followers, but let slip that even Lenin’s close associates didn’t understand what Lenin was talking about.
“But beyond searching for victims to represent, the Left was really searching for authenticity.”
The Left will only find authenticity when they put aside these role-playing theatrics and get down to the real business of caring for their fellow human beings.
They will never match President Donald J. Trump in this effort as Trump had been doing and caring for other people all of his life.
Other than violence what do they offer?
NOTHING
This one needs to be flagged to be put into the Daniel Greenfield Reader. (But I would consider changing the last line to read “this time”.)
The operation of the left is transactional. It cannot be as goal oriented as its philosophical rationale pretends because it is not workable. The Eden promised at the end to match the false history of the beginning with primitive communism can never be achieved. The absence of success always requires the method of rule to be scapegoating and human sacrifice resulting from the failure of production and distribution being blamed on external and internal enemies. The left has to falsely identify reality, including itself.
Could the search for authenticity be the reason why they hate both the God of Israel and His people? After all, if a Being is self-existent, there just aren’t any onion skins to peel off before you get to the real thing. He is what He says He is. And if the thought of a Person like that sends you spinning into atheistic denial, you certainly won’t like anyone whose life testifies to His existence. You might even try to destroy their testimony by perverting the truth in an attempt to prove them to be “pigs and apes” as Mohammed put it, or to be the secret manipulators of the entire world.
Daniel, you are so good at forming a caricature of these left-wing nuts. Your descriptions are completely accurate. I so enjoy reading your articles.
Dose Islam allow for idiots who paint up their faces like the that one in the Picture?
The left is brimming with greedy sociopaths who just want to send their kids to Philips Exeter Academy while making slaves of black Americans.