On Thursday afternoon in Reno, Nevada, Hillary Clinton warned the nation of a grave threat to our way of life. It wasn’t ISIS or Russia that she warned us about, although Putin got a mention. Instead it was white men saying very bad things on the internet.
The mortal danger to American life that has Hillary jumping in her pantsuit is the alt right. For Hillary, white men being as proud of their race and identity as black men or white women is profoundly disturbing. This is because in the ideological worldview of the left today, best identified I think as Cultural Marxism, white men are the perpetrators of injustice. We are the privileged, the powerful, the bigots and the oppressors. In the mind of the leftist, unrepentant white maleness is the mark of Cain.
We have reached this point gradually as Cultural Marxist thinking has taken over our institutions and centres of power. Ideologies take hold of societies through a feedback loop of virtue signalling — if you want to make it in the society, you need to maintain ideological correctness and propagate politically correct views. This then strengthens the hold of the ideology on the society overall.
If you are an academic, you need to find some unexplored avenue of white male oppression and make a career out of ‘researching’ it. If you are an investigative journalist, you need to create stories which further expose how white men are benefiting from all that patriarchal privilege. If you are a politician, you need to give speeches about rednecks who cling to religion and guns or how oppressive it is living in a White House built by black slaves. This is how careers are made in societies in the grip of ideological conformity. This pattern has prevailed in Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany and in Kim’s North Korea today. If you go against the ideological orthodoxy, watch out.
Hillary Clinton’s speech in Reno against the alt right then is the latest example of a politician using ideology to divide and rule society. The familiar totalitarian dynamic of increasing ideological extremism over time has also played out in the Cultural Marxist West. Ideologues have to compete with each other to demonstrate that they are more ideologically pure than their rivals, and thus the ideology becomes more extreme and dogmatic over time. This is why rhetoric against white males has been increasing each year, even as most white men have capitulated and agreed that they are indeed the worst people to have ever drawn breath in all of history.
Hillary is a pro at this; she’s been doing it for fifty years. Schooled in extreme leftist ideology during her college years and having refined her rhetorical barbs inside the deeply corrupt Democratic machine, she’s expert at pushing the ideological buttons which leftists have been programmed to respond to. The problem that Hillary and other leftists are encountering now is that young, white men have had enough, and are starting to push back against the dogma en masse. They can also use the internet.
Leftist extremism in education, the arts, the media, politics and the entertainment industry has reached its current fever pitch right when we have a generation of young men for whom Jim Crow may as well have happened during the Middle Ages. They have never seen a woman mistreated because of her gender, and they’ve been raised color-blind since kindergarten. When they are heckled and shamed by leftist teachers for the real and imagined sins of the white patriarchy, their response is baffled incomprehension.
What they do see are the devastating consequences of leftist identity politics upon society and individuals. They may well have been raised by a single mother. They’ve seen girls favored in the classroom then thrive academically while the boys in the class have languished and become antisocial. They see older generations congratulate their own generosity when mass immigration changes the face of Western cities, when those older leftists won’t ever have to live with the consequences.
They have reached adulthood in a post-Global Financial Crisis economy in which the assets owned by the old and the wealthy have skyrocketed in value while today the job prospects of even college graduates are grim. Saddled with crushing student debts, many young, white men struggle to find even unpaid entry-level positions. This is affecting family formation and leads many young men to feel alienated from their own societies. All the while, they are reminded over and over again how shameful their heritage of imperialism, sexism, racism, bigotry and exploitation is. Many have retreated into online communities or built an armor of muscle to try to gain back the sense of self-worth which has been denied them by a culture that denigrates them.
Young, white men are tired of having to atone for the historical sins of their forefathers. They are tired of bearing the original sin of patriarchy. A class consciousness has emerged. A rebellion against leftist orthodoxy which began, as Hillary says, on the fringes of society has now gone mainstream. Now the alt right genie is out of the bottle, it will not be put back in.
The alt right is not a single, concerted movement in the way Hillary portrays. There are many divisions. What unifies the movement, however, is a passionate hatred of leftism. The destruction of leftism, of identity politics and the prohibition of speech, is what unites the alt right.
This is what has leftists worried. Leftists haven’t had any real intellectual opposition for a very long time, and they now have a formidable foe indeed. White men, after all, built the modern world. Many are rediscovering the heritage of accomplishment that was hidden from them, and reclaiming the pride and dignity which is the right of all peoples. No matter how many speeches Hillary makes against it, the alt right is not going to disappear. It only makes it stronger.
Moses Apostaticus is a PhD student with a background in classics, history and literature. His years in education have made him a lifelong enemy of leftism. He blogs at http://follyofreason.org.