The Pretensions of the Left, Then and Now

 

By Christopher Chantrill
AmericanThinker.com

Last week a bunch of celebrities were beclowning themselves over President Trump’s meeting with Russia’s President Putin. You see, they actually believe the cooked-up "Russia Collusion" narrative and so naturally assumed that a long meeting between Trump and Putin meant that the two of them were colluding on the end of civilization as we know it.

And Peter Beinart had to tell us that Trump’s stirring words about Western civilization and the nation state of Poland were dog whistles to the racist sexist omniphobic alt-right. Really, so now we deplorables are not allowed to celebrate the diversity of our glorious Western heritage? As in: shut up?

Okay, so your average celebrity lacks the fighter-pilot vision that can read the imperceptible nod and wink from the ones in the know, the “tell” that this is all just red meat for the base to keep them angried up.

But Beinart represents another problem: pretentious folks wearing coke-bottle glasses that think they have fighter-pilot vision, and nothing changes on that front. I’ve been reading the potted biography Karl Marx by Joel Carmichael this week. Marx and Engels had gussied up in the mid-1840s a sophomoric doctrine of the Armageddon of the Classes, the war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and called it science. So they read the Crash of 1847 as the end of capitalism as we know it, and the 1848 revolutions as the beginning of the new age. They were utterly floored when the bourgeoisie and the proletariat worked hand in hand to bring down the old feudal regimes. Then Engels took Marx to England and Marx was disappointed to find that the working-class Chartists respected law and order and believed that they could improve their situation by organizing in trade-unions and influencing legislation.

What? No #Resistance? Then the economy bounced back from the Crash of 1847 to new heights of prosperity in the 1850s. Meanwhile Ferdinand Lassalle traveled around Germany making brilliant speeches that divided the German working class off from the rest of the German nation.

After all, what is the use of a working class that just wants a bit of respect?

And what, if you are a “studies” graduate of 2016, steeped in everything from environmentalism to intersectionalism, is the point of a nation of deplorables that just wants jobs and a president to Make America Great Again? That is why SJWs have to go to activism school.  It’s because ordinary people have to be carefully taught to hate and to fear their country.

It took 50 years after 1848 to truly divide the working class from the bourgeoisie, and what good did it do the workers? The working class still died in the trenches of World War I right alongside the earnest educated young men of Testament of Youth. And it took 50 years after the new dawn of civil rights in the 1960s to truly divide white from black, men from women, and gay from straight.

And they call that “fundamental transformation.”

Nothing changes on the left. Back in 1848, Marx and Engels cobbled together a bunch of half-baked theories and called it “science”; they declared that the end was nigh and the world was about to be transformed by the mother of all social cataclysms. Today the lefty climate activists have built computer models that don’t predict the climate and call the result “settled science”, telling us that the world is about to end in a burning fiery furnace.

The reality is that, back in 1848, nobody had a clue what was going on in the economy. The science wasn’t settled; human understanding about the economy was barely out of its cradle, and it’s been playing catch-up ever since. It was ludicrous to make confident end-of-the-world predictions. And we now know that just about everything that Marx cooked up, from his class war to his labor theory of value to his concept of “surplus labor,” was rubbish.

In 2017 with climate Armageddon it is just the same, only different. We don’t have a clue what is going on with the climate. The science isn’t settled; human understanding about the complexities of the climate is barely out of the cradle. We don’t really know why the climate is warming; we don’t really know why we just had the pause. But we do know that the climate models are rubbish.

Then and now it’s all the bonfire of the lumpen-intellectuals, unexceptionable people that want to roast society in the furnace of their bottomless conceit.

And so, the activists run around brimful with plans to make us pay. What no educated lumpen-intellectual can admit is that nobody has a clue. Not the talking heads, not the celebrities, and certainly not CNN.

Donald Trump? Could it be that he is a science experiment designed to reduce the left to blithering idiocy?

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.