Our lefty friends believe that the problem with the world is Injustice! If it weren’t for Injustice! humans could live in a peaceful egalitarian world, where work, food, sex, children would all resolve themselves into a good society.
Fight Injustice! share what you have, end inequality, and the world can finally hope for Justice!
Thus, the Allyship narrative, that the world is divided into the oppressed peoples and the white oppressors. and the Allies parachute into this world to fight as Allies of the oppressed peoples.
What our lefty friends leave out is that life ain’t that simple.
For instance, just staying alive takes a lot of skill and luck.
If you live in a hunter-gatherer band you need to know a lot about hunting and making weapons and the habits of the animals you hunt. What if you are a boy who’s a bit of a klutz, and doesn’t take kindly to advice from the experienced men in the band, and never develop the necessary hunting skills to help with the hunt? The women need to know a lot about childcare, and food, and where to find the food in each season of the year. What if you are a difficult woman that doesn’t fit into the community of women in your troop, and isn’t into gifting, and finds out that the other women won’t talk to you?
Life is not just fighting for Justice! Life is also dealing with all the difficulties and hardships and accidents of fate. And then there is the question of honor. For men, honor is about courage. Suppose you are not a very courageous man? For women, honor is chastity. Suppose you are a bit of slut?
Let us just say that if you believe in Justice! you have a rather narrow view of life. Most of life is not Justice! but getting along with other people and cooperating and figuring out how to help.
And above all, life means picking up the pieces after something went wrong and working out what to do now, after stuff unexpectedly went wrong.
As I gaze at our liberal friends I find that they are not very good at dealing with things that go wrong. Their focus is always on the next fight for Justice!
And when things go wrong, their instinct is the blame Injustice! and never admit that their glorious plan for Justice! didn’t really work.
I think that if you want to understand the present time you need to start with the idea that most of the noble liberal fights for Justice! have Made Things Worse, and that the usual liberal response when things go wrong is to double down and blame malevolent racist-sexist-homophobes for the mess.
If the white working class is dying of despair, it can’t be because of a century of pro-labor politics; if women are less happy than in the suburban Fifties, it can’t be because of feminism; if blacks murder at ten times the rate of whites it can’t be because liberal race politics has encouraged blacks to check out of the life of work, family, and children.
And don’t get me started on defunding the police.
Victor Davis Hanson has a piece today on the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror and the Thermidor reaction when France said enough already. He doesn’t go far enough. My view is that Reigns of Terror, Great Purges and Cultural Revolutions are all a result of the revolutions failing to produce Justice! and the revolutionaries accusing reactionaries and saboteurs and wreckers of destroying the revolution. The last thing a revolutionary will admit is that his revolution was a half-baked thing based on half-baked ideas that inspired half-baked activists to make a mess of things.
The only time is it possible to fix things without an ocean of blood is when sensible men sit down and work things out together in a spirit of cooperation and negotiation and good will. Activists need not apply.
Call it the good old American Way.