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Beware the Whig Left
Despite what you’ve been told, the American left is not composed of people who hate the country and want to see its institutions burned to the ground in an orgy of rage. Oh, sure, those people exist — but they’re not the whole left. Not even most of the left. Nor are they, on their own, all that dangerous, since burn-it-down-style radicalism inevitably runs up against the natural human desire for peace and order. (Even in Seattle, CHAZ could last only so long.) No, the great majority of Americans who identify with the left belong to a different faction: the whigs.
When I say “whig,” I’m not talking about powdered faux hair or the Democratic Party’s long-lost rival or British parliamentary politics. I’m talking about those Americans — and there are many of them — who take a whiggish view of the country’s history. Such people consider themselves patriotic. They hang red, white, and blue flags from their porches. They watch fireworks shows and march in July 4 parades. They swoon at the sight of military regalia. They flock to old battlefields and can rattle off facts about Benjamin Franklin and the Constitutional Convention. They also believe that Elizabeth Warren is the fullest expression of the Lincolnian spirit and that gas-powered cars must be abolished, lest life on Earth end.
If the whig left had a creed, it might be this: Social change is America’s genius. Resistance to social change is illegitimate and un-American. The Democratic Party, as the progressive party, is the natural steward for the best parts of American history — a history that consists of a series of virtuous struggles against oppression: the oppression of the British crown, the oppression of slavery, the oppression of the patriarchy, the oppression of unbridled capitalism, the oppression of the Jim Crow regime, the oppression of homophobia, the oppression of immigration restriction, and so on.
Our present-day struggles against systemic racism, climate change, Trump’s subversion of the democratic process, and Republican assaults on women’s right to choose and queer and transgender persons’ right to be included are merely today’s manifestations of the same old problem. After all, our great-great-grandmothers didn’t make the trek to Seneca Falls just so that we could be forced to stand barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen! We defeated the South (that backward hellhole!) once, and we can do it again!
Joe Biden’s misbegotten “Dark Brandon” speech is a prime example of whig leftism in action. Many in the commentariat misunderstood the lines about abortion and traditional marriage. When Biden tarred pro-life politics as fascism, he wasn’t just making a cynical calculation with an eye toward the November elections. No, he was expressing a widely held view among members of the American elite: that socially conservative beliefs have no place in the public square. They’re an aberration. Some ideas that were supposed to be dead and buried. The Democratic Party platform is America, and America is the Democratic Party platform.
And in a sense, they’re right. Because whig leftism is the American creed. It’s what all unelected leaders in major American institutions, private and public, believe. It’s what the head of the local chamber of commerce believes. It’s what the military officer class believes. It’s what every curator in every D.C. museum and every state historical society believes. It’s what every newspaper editor believes. It’s what every librarian believes. It’s what every professor believes. It’s what the school systems teach. It’s embedded in every part of civil society. It’s even encoded in the law itself. Only in some churches (not the Mainline Protestant ones), some weirdo classical schools, and, of course, the elected government itself will you find holdouts. But most who dissent belong to the disaffiliated, disorganized, and dysfunctional masses.
Perhaps it’s time for us conservatives to face reality: It’s not our country.
Published in Culture
No argument.
This perfectly explains why leftists simultaneously praise the Constitution and want to do everything to destroy it.
Then what?
The Constitution is there and it is the highest law of America so it is difficult not to acknowledge that fact. That Constitution, at the same time, because it is difficult to amend embodies resistance to change. So the description in the post that these Whigs, if they had a creed it might be: “Social change is America’s genius. Resistance to social change is illegitimate and un-American.” presents problems in the Whiggish pursuits.
They have been able to effect some Amendments (the 16th and 17th are examples) that have damaged the Constitution and they have had some success with interpretation of the words and phrases and imputing a different meaning from original intent. And as the culture changes much legislation is enacted into law that may be unconstitutional but is never challenged.
“The Democratic Party platform is America, and America is the Democratic Party platform.
And in a sense, they’re right. Because whig leftism is the American creed. It’s what all unelected leaders in major American institutions, private and public, believe.”
Now that is an interesting quote from the post in view of the fact that our political system is behaving in a way that makes it look as if we are about evenly divided, at least in terms of how we should go forth from this point in time.
I don’t think it is time to give up.
I’m not sure I agree. Everyone on the left that I know- and I live and work with them- may not hate the country but they don’t like it very much. They are pretty much ashamed of all things American, never fly flags or visit battlefields, and never miss an opportunity to diss America at the expense of pretty much any other culture or country which is always, always vastly superior to our own.
They don’t hate the country. They just hate us and want us destroyed, political, financially, pretty much any way.
My experience as well.
I’m not sure but I think this post was a wonderful bit of provocative sarcasm (in the best sense).
I’m talking about people like my middle-school history teacher, a self-proclaimed American history nerd who spent half his time whining about straight white males. Or Keziah Sproat, the Chillicothe, Ohio poet and woman about town who hung a portrait of Lincoln and a BLM sign from her Greek Revival house’s porch. Or Andrew Feicht, who writes a very polished blog on Ohio history and also heaps bile on the people who actually live in the area he chronicles. Or Tom Eblen, the Kentucky journalist whose commitment to localism earned him an award from the governor, and whose Facebook page is oozing with every conceivable form of leftist condescension. These people are a dime a dozen in America and dominate what remains of its civil society. If you “get involved” in the intellectual life of your community, chances are, you’ll meet people who think this way (and only people who think this way).
One way of putting it might be this: These people believe that selective hatred of America is the only acceptable form of patriotism. A true patriot believes whatever cause du jour the Democratic Party has latched onto this week.
The “whig left” has been routed by the woke left everywhere.
The old American debate was a whiggish view (“the American Experiment has won throughout its history and will continue to do so”) versus a conservative view that (“yes, it has gone well but need not do so always and some of what you call “victories” could well be pernicious”).
Such a debate could be conducted politely with lots of common ground.
But former “leftist whigs” now weirdly conscious of guilt they never had before and alarmed by the caricature of the right (“Ultra-MAGAs hate our democracy!”) are sock puppets for the bad new left. The threat of being called racist, transphobic of whatever is enough to keep them in lockstep.
I truly like how you have described this here.
What do you think the distribution is among these three groups, the quiet conservatives, the intimidated whigs, and the brazen wokes?
Dunno. Even the brazen wokes include a lot of shallow wannabes who could change sides with surprisingly little effort. It is not so much the numbers as the fact that those who comprised the old spectrum are in shock at the ferocity and moral presumption of the woke assault and entirely disarmed rhetorically. How many Gestapo and armed guards do you need to control a town of disarmed, demoralized people?
I trafficked in such ghost-dancerism before. I may do so again.
I am well-armed and have a couple of bug-out plans. That’s my bullet-proof shirt.
They are not whigs. They are communists. And they fully intend to undo our system of government.
Payute or Lakota ghost dance?
Do folks believe that the vast, infinitely complex US economy can be run from Washington? Let me put that another way, if it is centralized what happens to those who run it? Or differently, what has happened to every centralized country in history?
Let me guess. Collapse or civil war.
Gustave Le Bon on centralization:
It would be necessary to take one by one the laws and institutions of each people to show to what extent they are the expression of the needs of each race and are incapable, for that reason, of being violently transformed. It is possible, for, instance, to indulge in philosophical dissertations on the advantages and disadvantages of centralisation; but when we see a people composed of very different races devote a thousand years of efforts to attaining to this centralisation; when we observe that a great revolution, having for object the destruction of all the institutions of the past, has been forced to respect this centralisation, and has even strengthened it; under these circumstances we should admit that it is the outcome of imperious needs, that it is a condition of the existence of the nation in question, and we should pity the poor mental range of politicians who talk of destroying it. Could they by chance succeed in this attempt, their success would at once be the signal for a frightful civil war,[10] which, moreover, would immediately bring back a new system of centralisation much more oppressive than the old.
I have to agree with G-Cat.
I don’t interact with a lot of people but from what I gather from various sources many Americans who lean Left have an issue with the American culture about self-reliance and responsibility and, when necessary, help from family and local community. They want all this at the national, or better yet International, level.
Yes, me too. I don’t think I’ve commented on the main topic yet, because I don’t know how this fits with my current schematizing, but even before that, I don’t think the description is accurate: that the majority of the Left thinks that the US is more or less fine and getting better and better. I think it’s their philosophy that they think is fine and with their help will make the culture better and better. And the US is a simple bastion of archaic barbarity and just needs to be helped forward by whatever means necessary.
In other words, the so-called whiggish thinkers think that the world and culture can be micromanaged by force of will and force of law. But this is not how cultures change.
They think they are the real Americans. If you disagree, you’re just an evil Confederate reincarnated.
You know, I’ve spent so much time trying to figure out what’s wrong with the Left that I haven’t spent much time trying to figure out what’s right with the Left. Let me think about it.
One element of a well-written plot is that the antagonist thinks he is the protagonist, with fleshed-out motivations, goals, and obstacles.
Doesn’t make him the good guy.
The Confederates rejected the founding idea that all men are created as Harry Jaffa has noted. They thought that they could progress away from his ideas.
Not all of them. A lot of them believed that the federal government was growing too powerful at the expense of the states, and Lincoln’s reinforcement of Fort Sumter only confirmed it. Remember that almost half the confederate states were willing to give up slaves and stay with the Union until then.
Every centralized economy has failed. But the guys doing this time are better, smarter, kinder than any in the past and they feel they deserve to run thing and more importantly get the wealth and power from doing so for as long as they can.
Real centralized planning has never been tried before.
At least by them. They will do it differently, calling it something else, so it will be differently this time.