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Leftists Demanding to Be Accepted and Excluded at the Same Time
Things are really getting weird. A Super Bowl halftime show with rappers glorifying criminal gangs. Outrageously costumed drag queens reading to children at public libraries. Radical feminists demanding equal pay for women, while acknowledging that they don’t know what women are. It just seems so surreal. One wonders why this wild wave of weirdness is all happening at once. What’s going on?
I think part of it might be due to our culture’s power structure being based on the worship of victims. To gain power in our society, you don’t attempt to accomplish something great – you try to win the victimhood Olympics. That’s where the real power is. This creates an odd dynamic, with power-hungry leftists competing at being non-competitive. And as the game progresses, they eventually are stymied by the natural tolerance of the right wing.
Those on the right are naturally more tolerant. If I want the right to do as I please, then I obviously must extend that right to you, as well. Which is fine, unless your power base is built on victimhood. When Martin Luther King pointed out that The Bible and The Declaration of Independence clearly stated that all men are created equal, the right-wing agreed with him and accepted blacks into society. Which created a problem for the Black Lives Matter industry, so they pushed the envelope from a suit-wearing minister with a doctorate calmly quoting philosophers to a Super Bowl halftime show with rappers glorifying criminal gangs. “Oh, so you welcome blacks into society, huh? Well, how about black criminals who deal drugs and shoot cops? Huh? I didn’t think so! I knew you were racist!”
The same sort of thing happened with gay rights. In just a few decades we went from welcoming gays as equals (thus stealing their power as victims) to outrageous drag queens reading to children. For gays to remain victims, they have to become more aggressive and more outrageous. This really pisses off one of my gay friends who said something like this recently: “In the ’80s we just wanted to be left alone. And honestly, we were. And now I can go out to eat with my husband and hold hands in the grocery store and nobody cares. It’s great. But these drag queens in libraries and stuff are going to mess all that up.”
Incidentally, I tested his theory several years ago. We were going to a Tennessee game in Knoxville, and I held hands with him in line for the will-call tickets. He was right. Nobody cared. (Although my wife and friends loved the pictures…). But other than my wife, no one else cared. At an SEC football game. In the Bible belt. We’ve come a long way. We should rejoice over the progress we’ve made.
But the activists aren’t happy about that, because that destroys their source of power. So they wear ridiculous outfits and read to children – hoping to provoke a response that they can capitalize on.
Not all of this is part of some nefarious plot, of course. Much of it is just human nature. When my kids were small, they were constantly trying to stretch the envelope: “Hmmm… If I can get away with this, I wonder if I can get away with that?” It drove my wife crazy, but I viewed it as a healthy process of them learning how to control their environment as they grew.
But my point is that every parent intuitively understands “broken-window policing.” If they get away with something, they’ll try to get away with more. We all do it. It’s just human nature. So some of this weirdness in our society is probably just childish attention-seeking.
But I think much of it is evidence of the left’s discovery that victimhood is more useful for gaining power than it is for holding onto power.
Once you achieve victimhood against the establishment and gain power, then you suddenly are the establishment, and all of a sudden you’re no longer a victim. So the power you used to gain influence disappears overnight. It must be rather jarring to the Jesse Jackson types.
It’s jarring to the rest of us, too, as leftists go from protestors demanding free speech to becoming censors and fact-checkers who seek to limit free speech. It seems like an odd transition, but as they lose their status as outsider victims, what else can they do?
So as society becomes increasingly accepting of increasingly anti-social behavior, it becomes more and more difficult for radical wannabes to achieve shock value. Achieving exclusion from society becomes more difficult. Everybody from Dr. Ruth to Snoop Dogg to AOC have moved the needle of polite society so far left that it’s getting really hard to offend people. Which means that it’s getting harder for leftists to gain power via victimhood. If we accept them, they can’t capitalize on their outsider status.
So, power-hungry leftists are left with little option but to try harder. So things get weirder and weirder. Faster and faster.
I’m not sure where all this leads. But I know one thing:
You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
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Doc, you won’t be surprised that I disagree.
I do agree about the symptoms that you observe. I disagree about the diagnosis. This is a problem, because what I view as the underlying disease, you view as a good thing.
Speaking of ‘losing its shock value’…
All joking aside, I understand your point. I take a different view. But your point is valid, in my opinion.
The fact that they are made-up and dressed-up to look like hideous caricatures of women means to me that they are trying to denigrate women.
Maybe.
But I think it’s a power grab. Desperately seeking exclusion from society to gain the power of victimhood.
It’s easy to be misled by analyzing the behavior of fools. I may be reading too much into this. Perhaps you are, too.
But it’s a widespread phenomenon, coincident with the left desperately trying to solidify its grip on power, which they appear to have gained without a groundswell of popular support.
So it looks intentional to me…
Absolutely correct. When I point out to people (especially leftists) that I am offended by drag “performances” because in essence they are mocking and denigrating women, they look at me in surprise. It clearly has never crossed their minds. Drag has been successfully marketed as benign and merely entertaining. It is neither.
THe LGBTQetal movement gets its power through bullying. But the interesting twist is that, while they actively work to destroy you, they claim that you are bullying them by not agreeing with them 100%.
Perhaps so, but we need to make sure we don’t view tolerance as a social truce.
Archbishop Chaput has the best explanation of this that I have come across:
The Leftist agenda follows a four-step program of what evil demands: Tolerance, Acceptance, Ratification, and Participation.
I think you are right that we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
Just as individuals can be diagnosed with psychological conditions, I believe psychology can be applicable to groups or tribes. After all, it is a kind of mind-at-large phenomenon anyway in our new connected world.
What you so well describe could be diagnosed as mass BPD.
To understand this disorder in thumbnail form is captured in the book entitled “I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me”. It’s a brilliant paradoxical encapsulation of the disorder.
In the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp defamation trial, an expert witnesses tested Heard and diagnosed BPD and Histrionic Personality Disorder ( which may also be applicable here, but I’ll stick with BPD for now).
How do I know anything about this? My second wife (of 25 years) who became a psychotherapist, informally diagnosed my first wife (of 10 years) of BPD and explained it to me years ago. It made perfect sense.
Whenever Johnny wanted to disengage from a given dispute, Amber would have none of it, trying to shame him into coming to a resolution, hectoring him and following him around the house, claiming he was a coward and was “running away” from their problems. From what I could gather from the trial – which was fascinating for anyone who studies human nature like me- she was unable to accept that he saw things differently and became incensed when he would not continue to participate in the argument.
Sound familiar?
They want to provoke bigotry and then claim virtue because of their ‘intolerant’ enemies.
In reality they feel shame, and the remedy for them is to flaunt their ‘weaknesses’ as they see it, and revel in the righteousness they feel when someone expresses negativity.
They want to be hated by the right people, this makes them automatically virtuous. It trumps any and every shameful indulgence. When I say “shameful” I am not using my standards, but theirs.
Brilliant quote. That Archbishop has given this done thought…
I like the little girl in the navy blue shirt. She’s like, “What in the hell…?”
One of the parts you left out, @drbastiat , is that these “victims” are not actually victimized. Being a victim sucks. I’m sure as a doctor you have multiple lifetimes worth of people dealing with loss and suffering. You see videos of people looking at the ruins of their home after a tornado or hurricane or fire – even when they are being strong, you can see the pain, and it is human to empathize – in fact it is the basis of morality.
That’s not what the Left is after. They want to pose as a victim to exploit the sympathy from being a victim. It reminds me a bit of S&M culture – people deriving pleasure from being in a position of being “victimized”. Slavery is a great and terrible evil, but these “slaves” are just doing this as a pose. They crave victim status without actually suffering – thus the insane over-reaction to microaggressions and wrong pronouns. The Left fetishizes victims in both sexual and mystical way – being a victim grants moral authority and the ability to wield power without being evil. In this twisted worldview, the best thing you can do for someone is make them a victim of society.
The Right get flustered by this as we generally think in terms of morals – stealing is bad, raising a family is good, even if sometimes things are more complicated (like stealing to survive and abusive parents). The idea of using victim status for power and moral authority does not make sense. If you survive a tragedy, you are not somehow superior to people who did not, and claiming victim status over something minor just seems silly. I mean, we do not go to a heart attack survivor for heart disease advise, or someone whose car broke down for car repairs.
I do like your view on the whole “wait now we are the establishment” problem.
Maybe I should develop a curriculum for kindergarteners. “Introduction to Heckling.”
So are there any lines we should draw? Seems like pedophilia is an obvious place because it involves someone who cannot consent. How about people walking around in public naked? There don’t seem to be many frontiers left.
Doc, readable prose (as usual) and a brilliant piece of analysis. Thanks for your contributions to Ricochet.
Indeed he has, Dr. Bastiat. This book, (Render Unto Caesar, IMO, should be required reading for every Christian and person of good will.
Sorry to veer off track from your post – I thought you, and others, might like this book.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
— Mark Twain
Where have you been, Kent. We’ve missed Bob.
I’ve missed Kent, too…
But we didn’t make that progress because of people like your friend (who, I’m going to guess, ‘passes’ for straight when he wants to). We made it, like it or not, because of Drag Queens – gay people who were undeniably different. The issue is still about accepting difference.
I get your point about victimhood politics – and how that motivates people to establish their victim cred (on [the] Right as well, I think, when it comes to things like Jan 6) – but I would point out that it’s a stretch from that to saying that gay people were never victimised by social conservatives.
I lived in America in the 80s and 90s, and my recollection of that time is different from your friend’s. Though your paraphrase prompted a memory of one of my friends at that time saying “…they keep talking about tolerance and acceptance, but forget that – gay people aren’t demanding acceptance, gay people are [CoC] ecstatic when straight people leave us the [CoC] alone…”. Which at that time they really didn’t.
I agree with everything you’ve said. One interesting thing is that the truly powerful neither conduct themselves like victims, not lose their power. If anything their power is stable: they gain power by encouraging others to claim victim status, to humble themselves and cry in order to get the privilege of reaching for the ring; they look down and watch the victims struggling with gaining and losing power, shouting out and tearing up like Taylor Lorenz and Patrisse Cullors and Adam Kinzinger, without themselves, standing above, ever being affected.
I’m speaking of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the entrenched agents of the FBI, the CIA, the Department of State. Maybe including the politicians of the WEF and the Davos set. That’s true power.
It’s almost as if victimization is a con, and the victims are being conned, and the powerful are doing the conning.
What evidence do you have for this?
I honestly don’t think drag is widely accepted – it’s certainly not something you would wear at work, and wearing it around kids is causing a firestorm.
I’ve always thought it was the presence of upstanding individuals who are likable enough to reduce difference, while being unapologetic about who they are. Take a Jackie Robinson, for instance – he was successful in opening up baseball because he was unquestionably a good player who deserved to be there. Someone who liked baseball but did not like black people was forced into a dilemma. It’s the opposite of affirmative action.
What you want is a character or person who is gay or trans or what have you, but it is neither hidden nor their primary characteristic. I mean, James Bond clearly gets the ladies and is unashamedly heterosexual, but he’s also a gentleman spy and action hero. I can think of two of the musicians with the most bad@$$ and masculine lyrics who definitely play(ed) for the other team. I remember some fellow geeks being a bit weirded out when finding out that Sir Ian is gay, before just dealing with it because he is a great actor.
Basically you want a gay or trans person who doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable.
What if I asked you to be straight in a way that didn’t make me feel uncomfortable?
What if your equality depended on how I felt?
I strongly disagree.
Everybody I know happens to know at least one gay person like Doc’s friend. Knowledge of their existence and how they don’t throw it in everyone’s face is what convinced the majority of us normies to tolerate homosexuality.
The “not throwing it in everyone’s face” is what makes it non-hazardous to the rest of society. Drag-queen story hour and the like are attacks on children and the family.
How us normies feel is simply a reflection of the moral framework that society depends on to sustain itself. (The next generation needs to show up and also sustain itself.) You have posed a strawman by conflating the two. (“Personalized” it, actually, like a good radical following the rules.)
If a straight person brought up their sex life all the time, that would make me uncomfortable as well. Bedroom stuff is best left in the bedroom.
What you do in the privacy of your own home is not my concern.
Everything you say is probably true, but there is more. Some folks just like chaos and disorder, they get to take stuff and find it exciting. Most folks come to believe what they’re told but some folks gain power. The latter includes the top federal bureaucrats, the top of digital companies, and the Chinese. Of course some just want chaos and destruction because they know how to enrich themselves and exercise power with it (how else does one explain Soros?) Chaos doesn’t work and freedom requires some basic foundations. When the totalitarians succeed we don’t know how they will work matters out with the Chinese, the latter won’t care because the US will be weak and no longer a threat. The western countries will gradually decline without the US to lead and compete with. The top in all of these top down places will shrink, that’s what they have always done. The global economy will shrink rather rapidly. The Chinese will as well, but it won’t matter to them as the’ll have more influence on the world and it’ll take a generation or two to flatten out so much it starts all over.
Agreed. But also, imho, tapping into the average person’s good-will and empathy.
I don’t want to associate with anyone who makes me feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t matter if we are talking gay, straight, or any other variation (if they even exist). I have many friends who are not, well, like me and who are good company. Uncomfortable is not good company.