Back in the day, many years ago, in his Temper of Our Time longshoreman writer Eric Hoffer wrote:
Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.
But, whatever the mass movement, it is first imagined, created, led by intellectuals, who, according to Hoffer, have come to dominate modern society. Intellectuals, he says “want power, lordship, and opportunities for imposing action.”
As we know, the political formula for power, lordship, and opportunities for imposition action of, by, and for intellectuals is encoded in the notion of Allyship, in which intellectuals experience themselves as
Allies of the Oppressed Peoples fighting against the White Oppressors.
Actually, I think that is my own reading of Allyship. If you read accounts of Allyship on Google Search they are all a more complicated word salad about
a lifelong process of building and nurturing supportive relationships with underrepresented, marginalized, or discriminated individuals or groups with the aim of advancing inclusion…
But the thing that impresses me is that, with the rise of transgenderism, we really are living out the truth of Eric Hoffer’s apothegm.
Transgenders are not helpless lower-class victims. Transgenderism is a racket. All the fashionable gender notions that oppress us today are upper-class narratives practiced by educated people wanting to get creative. But they are smart enough to understand that the only way you get traction is by playing the victim game. It’s not enough to be transgender; you need society to acknowledge transgenderism as a Thing. And they way that the kiddies are taught to become a Thing is by posing as a helpless victim oppressed since the dawn of time by white oppressor patriarchs.
Actually, in my view, the original educated-class narrative about helpless workers and the satanic mills was a lie as well. In the several hundred years before the industrial revolution rural people were starving and being driven off the land. Why? Because landowners were practicing “improvement” such as the mechanical threshing machines that inspired the Captain Swing riots in England of 1830.
Yes, the working class had it rough. But factory work was way better than starving on the farm.
But then we had the feminist revolution of the late 19th century. Not a movement of girls working as domestic servants, but the kind of upper-class women you read about in Trollope novels that wanted to “do something” with their lives like the men they knew. Jane Austen deals with this in her Emma, where her heroine “adopts” a lower middle-class girl Harriet Smith and teaches her to want to marry an upper-class man.
Yes, as domestic work became mechanized and child-birth less dangerous women experienced a new world opening up before them. But the fundamental problem of human society remains: how to keep the men usefully employed and out of trouble.
And then we had the civil-rights revolution in the mid 20th century.
Yes, Negroes had been treated badly. But we can now see that Frederick Douglass, escaped slave, was right when he told the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society: “Do nothing with us!”
Now we have the gender warriors and the anti-fascists warriors of AntiFa. It really needs no comment beyond the treatment of 2020 George Floyd rioters versus January 6, 2021 rioters. And now we experience the AntiFa riots in Atlanta and find out that some of them are related by blood to Democratic elected politicians. Like the rioter in Boston.
No, you gender warriors and AntiFa thugs were never oppressed.
Which leads me to quote the words of a working-class intellectual, Eric Hoffer:
When you talk to an American intellectual about common Americans it is as if you were talking about mysterious people living on a mysterious continent.
And that was written nearly 60 years ago, before Critical Race Theory and “wokeness.”