A Righteous and Just Excoriation of “Woke Left” Anarchistic Nihilism

 

Bret Weinstein, the egregiously, horribly, railroaded former professor of biology at Evergreen State College, and a Bernie Sanders supporter, who spoke out against an action of de facto segregation promulgated by “woke” black student activists at Evergreen, has just spoken out on the British Unherd (https://unherd.com/2021/04/how-anarchists-captured-portland)  against the “woke” chaos now being perpetrated in his newly-adopted home city of Portland, Oregon, where he and his wife Heather, also ostracized from Evergreen, now reside—and criticizes the “woke” from a standpoint that can only be described as concerned, social-democratic left, not neoliberal right.

While he calls those promulgating violence, looting and harassment of ordinary citizens in Portland as “anarchists,” he’s not necessarily implying that they are political or philosophical anarchists; merely nihilists of the “woke left” who’ve latched onto the slogans promulgated by Black Lives Matter and concerns over the still-prevalent racism in US society to garner sympathy and support for what he calls only the ceding “by voices of reason on the Left to extremists who deliberately conflate a demand for racial justice with a desire to burn civilisation [British spelling, as Unherd is British—GF] to the ground” and ruefully, ironically, cries out, “Welcome to Portland; the progressive dream that has turned into a nightmare.” 

Weinstein is scathing throughout in his denunciation of these new nihilists:  he pointedly notes of this “movement’s” origins, “suddenly last summer, with the confluence of the George Floyd protests and the Presidential election, Portland came unmoored,” calls these activists, “a small but violent mob of misanthropes” perpetrating a “current wave of terror, and, due to the deliberate inaction against these mobs of “woke” by both Portland’s Mayor and police force, alleges directly, “anarchists have gained a strange kind of control over the city in their fight against Nazis and white supremacists they appear to have conjured in a quest to give their anger meaning.”  (However, Weinstein pointedly notes that, in progressive Portland, these supposedly everywhere hordes of Nazis and white supremacists are, in the famous words of Mark Twain commenting on his supposed death as published in a newspaper’s obituary, “greatly exaggerated.”)

But we of the “voices of reason on the Left” have dealt with this kind of pernicious nonsense before, famously in the case of Weatherman in the late 1960s, early 1970s, a group that, despite its florid adoption of Marxist-Leninist and Maoist rhetoric, were really, just as are the “woke” of Portland, “neo-anarchist terrorists” who only gave grist to the right-wing mill all too eager to silence those “voices of reason on the Left,” and who, under both Nixon and Reagan, succeeded masterfully, and shifted the country not to the left, but to the right (especially in Reagan’s case, to the far right, as this Great Communicator ran successfully for President twice on being against the New Left, and as a bulwark of safety against anarchy, terror, and Weatherman’s random bombings).  Thus, are there enemies of the Left clearly on the supposed left:  the “propaganda of the deed” denizens, the ultraleftists who have no idea of what is actually and actually not feasible, and the Blanquist small coteries of cadres who, by military-minded conspiracy, bring about “socialism by insurrectionary coup.”  [Blanquism is named after Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881), a French revolutionary socialist who called for socialism to be achieved by small, armed groups leading insurrections.  The similarities between the “woke” of today and Blanqui’s small cadres provoking revolutionary violence are obvious—GF] Much the same happened to the Weinsteins at Evergreen State; but it no more ushered in the Olympia, Washington Commune [Olympia is the home of Evergreen State—GF] than it has the Portland Commune.  All it has done is cause fear among small business owners whether their businesses will be trashed by looting, as has happened to so many other Portland businesses; and ushered in anger among ordinary working people, who are awakened from sleep by chanting mobs demanding, “Wake up, motherfuckers, wake up!”  Thus, do ill-conceived tactics, and a general sense of nihilism masquerading as activism directly undermine the cause of the left, not enhance it—and make meaningful and extensive social change that much more difficult to achieve and attain.  

Why this blog

I've been intimately involved with the organized left for over 40 years, ever since my college days started back in 1965. Now, however, my intimate partner, the left, has grown daft, paranoid and hostile, and so this blog is a wake-up call to the left to get its act together, and stop, utterly stop, its obeisance to Political Correctness.

The left has seemingly been irrelevant to lived life now since at least the early 1970s, much to the diminishment of political and social life since then. While certain left ideas are more relevant than ever, especially in economics and economic policy, other leftist ideas which have gained fasionable currency are not only irrelevant but actually harmful, and the left that is organized into various groups here in the U.S. is simply a disaster. We, the left, are now our own worst enemy.

This undermining of the left by the left itself comes from both the Right and the "Left" wings of the left, from the very leftists themselves. On the Right is the slavish tailing after whatever Obama offers, and craven submission to the Democratic Party. On the "Left," however, is ultraleftist disaster: Politically Correct adherence on cultural and social issues with no dissent or raising of caveats allowed, whether it be on feminism, racism, what constitutes left and "advanced' culture, what is retrograde and what is not, what is "working class" and what is not; with the result being the stifling of any honest discussion on the left of all kinds of issues, baiting of those leftists who do try to dissent as "retrograde" and still slaves to "'male' or 'white-skin' privilege," of being "elitist" or "offensive," and myriad other charges. This results, needless to say, with a left absorbed today not in the advancingof its ideas and in recruiting, reaching out, but in censorship and the imposition of self-censorship in the name of Political Correctness.

In concrete terms, this means the denial that, e.g., blacks and women are individuals with varying mixtures of virtues and faults, but instead the left insistence that their structural oppression does not deform them to various degrees, but rather, only makes them into Ideal Types who can never do or say anything wrong. It means romanticizing them, and painting a Manichean picture of them as forever struggling against another Ideal Type, the Forever-Evil white, educated male. Talk about regression to Rousseau's Noble Savage!

But an obvious political conundrum arises: if women and blacks (not to mention gays, Hispanics, "conscious" workers, and others) are so Ideal as a result of their structural oppression (a structural oppression which I readily admit), then why is capitalism, which socially created these Ideal Types, something to oppose? After all, its oppression is only creating--paragon Ideal Types full to the brim with virtue! That would only make capitalism a moral good, and its sturctural oppression merely a challenge to face and overcome through Politically Correct deference to the Ideal Types--especially if one is a white, educated male such as myself. (However, I would like to point out that my college education came from Michigan State and Indiana Universities, not the schools of the Ivy League or the elite state universities of, e.g., Ann Arbor and Berkeley, where many of my fellow leftists were educated.)

Most especially this white, educated male, despite 40+ years of devotion to the left, but now found to be hopelessly Politically Incorect by his fellow leftists because he asks too many Politically Incorrect questions and raises too many Politically Incorect objections. Never mind the substantive, logical and reasonable basis of these questions and objections. Even substance, logic and reason come under attack by today's left as being somehow subordination to capitalism, to the minions of the right. After all, according to our modern leftists (especially those infatuated with Postmodernism, or just going along with it because it's the trend), science itself is but a pernicious ideological construct of capitalism and repressive institutional structures! There is no Logic and Reason, because everything is really nothing but competing Ideology.

So I'm thrown back on believing with the most Politically Incorrect Liu Shaoqi: "Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao have all made mistakes." Yes, and so have Fidel and Raul Castro, Trotsky, Bukharin, Rosa Luxemburg, Cesar Chavez, Gloria Steinem, Al Sharpton and Michael Harrington. So has George Fish, the writer of this blog. But the ideal of leftism was expressed precisely in the third verse of the Internationale: "We need no condescending saviors." No, comrades and fellow friends of discussion and debate, we do not need to close off full and unfettered inquiry by canonizing infallible Popes of Revolution and demanding strict adherence to Political Correctness. If anything, what we need most of all is what was advanced (but never sriously implemented) bu the Chinese Communist Party in 1957: "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a thousand schools of thought contend." Open up the floor for full discussion and debate! Nothing is too sacred, or too Politically Incorrect, to be denied the floor! Let all say what they will, and let them all be judged by merit and truth, but never by adherence to Political Correctness. No censorship, but only responsibility for one's ideas and actions. And that's why this blog, "Politically Incorrect Leftist." Because my home is still on the left, despite the too-frequently obtuse and willfully ignorant characters I must now share my quarters.