How the Left Rebranded as Non-Ideological
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Every time Obama issues another public ultimatum to
Congress (before doing what he wants to do anyway)
he phrases it in terms like "common sense" or
"pragmatic". It's "non-ideological" he insists. The
left's ideological agenda just happens to be the
common sense pragmatic non-ideological solution.
Obama
may be the most radical political figure to occupy
the White House, but he is careful to avoid
political labels. His leftist allies calculatingly
compare him to Reagan or Roosevelt. He's not an
ideologue. Just another one of those "Great American
Leaders" bent on helping ordinary people.
A big part of the left's latest successes can be
attributed to this non-ideological rebranding.
The old left (both old and new) was a political
movement that wanted to be understood in terms of
its ideology. The post-leftist left wants to be seen
as progressive. It emphasizes policies linked to
people instead of ideology. The ideology is still
there and choking entire university departments to
death, but its public face emphasizes an apolitical
technocracy of pragmatists and caring social
workers.
It's not a new idea. Communists heavily leaned on
non-ideological front groups. Its activists were
writers or grandmothers even when they were
parroting Soviet talking points. They weren't
anything political. They were just ordinary common
sense folks looking for pragmatic solutions.
But American leftists used to be more like Bernie
Sanders and less like Barack Obama. Today Sanders is
a strange romantic anachronism which is why he
attracts so much of the left. The modern leftist
politician follows a left-wing line, but without a
lot of the ideological trappings. He does his best
to sound like a reformer. He's a political extremist
who tries to sound like a moderate.
Bernie Sanders appeals to the left for the same
reasons that post-left lefties like Hillary and
Obama don't. Hillary and Obama pursue their goals,
but Sanders talks their talk. He doesn't pretend to
be the voice of a new generation looking to find
common ground. He doesn't pretend to be anything
except a political extremist convinced of his
rightness and unapologetic about it.
But Sanders' only real function is to serve as a
stalking horse for Biden, weakening Hillary to
enable a third proxy term for Obama. Bernie Sanders
is what the left used to be. It's now a collection
of political shapeshifters like Obama and Hillary
who bury their radicalism beneath a paper thin
veneer of moderation and caring. His kind of leftist
never sold well and doesn't sell in this type of
market.
Americans are suspicious of political agendas. They
like their leaders to be common sense apolitical
pragmatists who put people ahead of ideology. So
that's what the left pretends to be.
The public face of the left has become
non-ideological. No longer even liberal, but
progressive. There's no Marxism here, folks. Just
science and humanitarian impulses.
The left doesn't talk ideology. It just claims to
care about people. It wants illegal alien amnesty,
not because it believes in open borders, but because
it cares about illegal aliens. It champions gay
marriage, not because that's a part of its ideology,
but because it cares about gay couples. It wants
universal health care, not because it's Socialist,
but because it cares about the uninsured.
Its MO is to put a human face on an issue. Then ram
through the policy as an "act of love" to
pragamtically "solve" a problem. The ideology
remains hidden out of sight behind the curtain.
This post-leftist left requires a steady supply of
victims as human faces of their latest totalitarian
measure. Children are always useful because they're
adorable and can be told to say anything. But it
also requires a complete embrace of identity
politics. And identity politics brings back ideology
in the most toxic of ways.
The Social Justice Warrior has revived political
correctness and taken it to new lows. While these
activists have been key to the left's agenda, they
are making it increasingly obvious that there is an
agenda and that it's built out of Marxist
gobbledygook.
The left wanted its activists to be thought of as
people who volunteer to build homes in the Third
World. Not the same old angry Marxists clutching
pamphlets and screaming slogans filled with
terminology no one understands. The SJWs are
slightly more diverse than the old Marxists, but
they are if anything even more obnoxious and their
"problematic" vocabulary is very revealing.
Liberal outlets have been churning out pieces
critical of the SJWs (without using that name)
because, like the Cultural Revolution, these
activists excel at internecine violence and because
they risk destroying the left's new brand as a bunch
of non-ideological problem solvers.
SJWs operate publicly within the shadow of popular
culture. This has given them a certain amount of
plausible deniability as they parasite and prey on
creative fields, playing critics, commentators and
writers, rather than ideologues, but the civil wars
within some creative fields are bringing that time
of quiet infiltration to an end.
And yet the left created the SJW problem by its
apolitical reinvention. It needed a lot of identity
groups to take the place of a formal ideology in
public. The identity groups were meant to interlink
with the technocracy of the left, the consultants,
experts and academics who would claim that their
demands were pragmatic and scientific. But the SJWs
are spinning out of control.
Americans hated political correctness the first time
around. Even liberals hated it. And the SJWs with
their safe rooms and trigger words, their contention
that they should have the right to violently berate
and cyberlynch anyone they please without criticism
(that's tone policing and punching down) are worse
than any 80s sensitivity training course.
Political correctness doomed the public image of
liberalism to a bunch of Bernie Sanders',
pinch-faced scolds with no sense of humor who were
always furiously angry over everything. The brand
became so toxic that it had to be abandoned. The new
leftist was non-ideological. Like Obama, he was
supposed to be a natural comedian. He might show
empathy, but he wouldn't be a scold.
But the idea that the left could sustain a
non-ideological image while ramming through a
radical ideological agenda was always tenuous. Not
because Republicans would expose it. That might have
happened in the era of Reagan and Goldwater, but we
tend to forget that they were already frustrated
responses to the failure of Republicans to check the
radical agendas of FDR and JFK. An immediate
successful Republican campaign against Obama was
probably always too much to hope for.
Conservative movements are notorious for their slow
burns as they react to a left that has learned to
get around public distaste for its agenda with
shameless lies and fake patriotism. FDR and JFK both
knew that they had to make their agenda seem like
Americanism, inspirational, exceptional and
patriotic. Republicans never figured out how to
counter them, relying first on legalism, and then
searching desperately for compromises. Obama had
managed to successfully repeat the same trick.
It wasn't the right that would bring down the left.
Historically it's the left that brings down the
left.
The Obama era was a brilliant public relations ploy
that was made possible by the entire media and the
cultural industries turning themselves into a
non-stop commercial for it. But its ability to fool
enough of the people to stay in power wouldn't last.
Obama's own aggressive ObamaCare bid precipitated
the original conservative reaction. His growing
aggressiveness after his last midterm election
defeat was mimicked by a left drunk on power and
echoing his arrogance and contempt.
Sanders is a stalking horse for the Obama agenda,
but he's also a symptom of a left that distrusts
non-ideological rhetoric and is convinced that the
public would embrace its agenda and allow it to
accelerate its program of Socialism, mass seizure
and abolition of property and rights, if only it was
allowed to make the case. Before Sanders, Elizabeth
Warren became the darling of the left for her, "You
didn't build that" message. It was Socialism, though
still cloaked in the non-ideological common sense
brand, but the left could taste how close she came
to saying it all.
The left has become too successful to sustain its
non-ideological brand. What the right hasn't managed
to do, the left is doing to itself.
As Lincoln knew, no lie can sustain itself
indefinitely. Even when it isn't exposed from the
outside, success creates its own internal tensions
that will tear it apart. The left needs a right to
fight because otherwise it will fight itself. The
left is obsessed with purging its own ranks and the
SJWs are the mechanism of that purge.
The return of political correctness, of censorship
and the culture war, is not only creating new
enemies, but exposes the fraud that there is no
left, only a non-ideological progressive movement
that eschews dogma and just tries to solve problems
because it cares about people. The SJW, an angry
freak who identifies with as many identities as
he/she/it can, is a wailing hub of dogma, a physical
embodiment of an ideological power
structure-in-waiting that is built on repression and
political terror.
Also he/she/it ruins everything.
The SJW reminds everyone that there is a left and
that there's nothing progressive about it. That
despite its culture heroes, it's a humorless
movement whose aim is cultural censorship, and whose
claims of caring about people are undermined by its
angry hysterical tantrums.
Meanwhile Obama's plan to replace himself with his
own LBJ just means that if the Republicans still
can't get it together, Biden will be a sitting duck
as the non-ideological common sense pragmatic
Socialist program really begins coming apart. It was
LBJ's failures that really buried the JFK era. Biden
will bury the Obama era just as thoroughly when the
chickens of a disastrous foreign and domestic policy
have really come home to roost.