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Nietzsche explains why black men are leaving Kamala Harris
It doesn’t matter how ridiculous you think my mustache is. I still predicted the modern world.
About half of comic book villains are Nietzschean. They disdain how superheroes support democracy and defend the weak. In their view they are the ubermensch, not Superman, and their respect for laws, rights and the welfare of people who struggle is misguided.
Among the more interesting Nietzschean villains is Bonsai. He was a samurai who put his soul in a bonsai tree so that he would cease to age after the death of Saigo Takamori, the last samurai (an actual historical figure who was quite interesting and had a Sabaton song made for him). He has spent over a hundred years obtaining enough political influence and underworld connections to control the Japanese prime minister and move Japan towards a more isolationist and traditional culture.
In his final fight with the Marvel Hero, Bonsai said, “He [Saigo Takamori] died fighting against the modernization of our country. A transition he knew would lead to mediocrity and cowardice.”
And he had a point. Democratic capitalism leads to a kind of peace and prosperity that does weaken people. When democratic societies degenerate, they even laud weakness as a virtue.
Now, Bonsai is a terrible person. He is a sexist, racist xenophobic samurai who thinks that his class should be able to execute peasants if they are sufficiently disrespectful. He wanted to make war with Korea when Korea was weak. He would marry off his daughter to some fat, old, corrupt politician in order to secure an alliance. He is like an exaggerated version of everything a liberal republican detests about monarchy.
But he is also brave and strong, and he loves beauty. Of course, his love of beauty is limited to Japanese (and, grudgingly, some Chinese) art. However, he deeply respects and appreciates that tradition. Perhaps because he limits himself to Japanese aesthetics, he can better appreciate the depths of that unique tradition.
In some ways, he is like a feudal Asian Solzhenitsyn. When the great Russian writer spoke at Harvard, he was much more critical of liberal democratic capitalism than many anti-communists were expecting. Solzhenitsyn hated Communism, but he admitted that Communism inspired bravery. He felt that the citizens in liberal Democratic capitalism just weren’t brave enough.*
Kamala Harris manifested modern weakness when she mentioned that she was middle class and worked part-time at McDonald’s. Kamala Harris comes from an upper-middle-class family that didn’t have to struggle to make ends meet. But weakness is so honored among the left that she had to pretend to be poorer than she was.
I must mention, she was likely selected as VP because she was a threefer. She is an Asian, a black, and a woman. Though Trump could have articulated it better, he was right to notice that everybody referred to her as Indian before she wanted to become President. Then she switched her identity to black.
For those of you who don’t know, Kamala Harris’s mother is fully Indian, while her father is a half-white, half-black Jamaican. She was raised almost entirely by her Indian mother in an upper-middle-class home that did not have to worry about how high their insurance bill or their mortgage was. She was what I consider the comfortable middle class.
Indians have a good record in the United States as being middle class or moving up to the middle class very quickly. Blacks, for reasons that we won’t get into in this essay, often have a record of staying poor. Because of this, blacks are seen as weak victims in the leftist imagination.
As per usual, Dr. Bastiat told a story that explained everything. He was speaking with a secular New York Jewish woman, and she said to him (I paraphrase slightly), “I don’t see why people judge blacks so harshly for their bad behavior. They have been through so much.” Dr. Bastiat responded that her parents went through the holocaust and became model American citizens.
Though a Jew, that particular lady captured what Nietzsche hated about the Christian elevation of the weak and downtrodden. The strong showing compassion to the weak was belittling. It could also be a way for the elite to secure their power as leaders of the weak.
Nietzsche understood that the people shown such ‘compassion’ would develop “ressentiment.” Ressentiment is similar to resentment, but it comes from a deeper part of human psychology and is more powerful than mere resentment. It is the idea that the weak will begin to resent the strong, even if they are nice to them, out of a sense of inferiority. In simpler terms, people hate it when others make them feel weak, and they develop deep negative emotions towards the people who make them feel that way.
For example, blacks venerate Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali and the Tuskegee Airmen because they are strong. Native Americans honor their chiefs because they are brave. Even peacemakers like Martin Luther King and the Paiute medicine man Wovoka had masculine traits: integrity under social pressure and speaking honestly, even when inconvenient. Perhaps more importantly, MLK and Father Wovoka asked their respective groups to be strong, even if they didn’t ask them to be violent.**
In the books and TV I consume, there is a pattern of poor blacks and poor Native Americans making fun of lefty wine-drinking, affluent suburban white women — with a sharpness that surprised me. Even lefty black and native writers wrote about these ladies with bitterness in their language. Now, poor folks making fun of rich folks is a tale as old as time. It is the same with diverse populations noticing the differences they have with other populations and finding their differences humorous. I don’t mind jokes about Chinese eating weird things and white women loving pumpkin spice as long as it is done in a well-meaning way. But, even if those affluent lefty white women were a bit silly and drank stupidly expensive wine, they were basically compassionate people who wanted the betterment of the poorest sections of society. So why the resentment (or ressentiment) against them?
While it may not be moral, I empathize with the ressentiment felt by poor groups towards such white ladies. I felt it myself quite acutely at one point in my life. At a friend’s house, I cut my hand while preparing food. It bled a worrisome amount and I had to compress my bleeding hand above my heart for what seemed an interminably amount of time before it stopped. My friend’s wife was the personification of female compassion and wanted to drive me to the hospital immediately. I responded to her in an unfairly harsh voice that I was perfectly fine. Of course I should have been nicer to her, and I make no excuse for myself, but like most men, I hate feeling weak. Also, to my friend’s wife’s credit, she was decently and sensibly compassionate without being condescending unlike a good many affluent lefty ladies.
What is Kamala Harris’s message to poor blacks? “You are poor and can’t help yourselves, so vote for me. I am weak like you, and my family struggled like yours does.” This is condescending pity that is also inauthentic because Kamala Harris doesn’t have the experience of being a poor black person. She can’t even fake it like Obama can. Obama’s message to blacks in 2008 was, “Vote for me and I’ll prove that blacks aren’t inferior because a black man will be President.” It was a vote of optimism as well as a vote for “hope and change.”
As my fellow Ricochet member put it:
The last company at which I was employed made much ado about the “diversity” in the law department because we had several black female lawyers. The two highest-ranking of those black female lawyers were the daughter of a professor at an Ivy League university, and the daughter of a medical doctor. They both grew up in “middle-class” Connecticut suburbs. One of the outside lawyers I often hired for contract work for the company was a white man who grew up in poverty in the hills of Appalachia. I (a white man) was the child of a consulting engineer who became a professor and grew up in the “middle-class” suburbs of California and Florida. So my own background experience had more in common with those black female lawyers than I did with the white man who grew up in poverty-stricken Appalachia.
The idea that being a quarter black raised by an Indian Mom automatically lets you relate to poor blacks is so absurd that I would like to think that it needs no refuting. Sadly, we do not live in sensible times.
Trump’s message to poor blacks is the masculine opposite of Kamala’s: “I want you to get a job and make money. Like the poor whites in the Rust Belt, you have been screwed over by a corrupt globalist elite. But I will fight them so you can be strong and prosperous.”
Additionally, Trump constantly emphasizes strength. He wants the military to be strong. He wants American manufacturing to be strong. He wants our borders to be strong — and so on. While Trump is not exactly Lincolnian in his speech, I believe that he is sincere in his message. Moreover, he owns up to being rich, privileged and really good at making money. He is authentic, even if not authentically polite.
Trump wants black Americans to be like the 716 blank tank battalion who drove back the Nazis; or like Jesse Owens, who could not stop winning. Kamala wants blacks to feel like poor, weak victims so they will always vote for their government benefactors. Think of how the left quite literally made George Floyd into a religious figure. It is no accident that they promoted a weak man who died largely because of his self-destructive tendencies.
Kamala herself is an embodiment of weakness. She rose up through the Democratic ranks by appealing to her weakness as a woman, as a middle-class person, and, most importantly, as a black victim of American racism. Why is it anyone’s surprise that people who make weakness into a virtue are having trouble attracting men?
*And then Captain America punched him in his stupid savage-steppe jaw. In a dream I had. On the morning of the Fourth of July. With Eagles outside my bedroom window…
** Yes I am aware that in MLK’s later years, he foolishly flirted with more militant black nationalism. I am referring to his earlier years when he emphasized the endurance necessary for nonviolence.
Published in General
Interesting stuff, Henry.
(Check out your paragraph that starts with ‘Nietzsche’. You misspelled at least one of the occurrences of ‘ressentiment’, in a way that is quite confusing.)
I’ve often wondered about the psychological effects on Blacks of having been freed from slavery by Whites. Every culture has its stories of overcoming aggression and oppression. Those struggles, and knowledge of them, instill a sense of pride and self-worth in a people. Slavery stripped Blacks of their culture and history, and the stories and legends that typically ennoble a culture went with them. The only narrative American Blacks have to look back on is being enslaved, which is shaming, humiliating, and demoralizing, and then being set free, not by their own hands, but by their oppressors themselves, which is even more shaming, humiliating and demoralizing. I suspect that some of what drives the escalating demonization of Whites by Blacks is a psychological need to overwrite the specter of having been saved by another culture with a story of self-redemption. “We shall overcome” is far more ennobling than “Someone had to save us because we couldn’t save ourselves.”
The right, Christian way of helping the weak and downtrodden is the way of true compassion. It excludes envy, resentment and dependency.
Interesting point. I feel like young black men (and women) today may not appreciate what people of all races and cultures went through to remove their chains (ending slavery) and lift them truly up to have an equal opportunity (killing Jim Crow). It’s a crying shame that there are blacks who want to bring back racial separation . . .
Resentment can be caused by the fact that the privileged can afford to be kind. They are not scrapping competitors for survival on the same plane of existence. You can quite naturally show concern for sufferers in your own family, clan or tribe. But to stoop to save a socially lesser stranger while retaining status and material superiority can be problematic. Putting conditions on aid has more dignity in the end.
Republicans are putative Nazis because they reject the notion that disparity creates a presumption of unjust gains versus morally superior victimhood. White liberals add the addictive proviso that because they have the deepest grasp of that dynamic of presumptions that they are entitled to special status, economic tenure and an exemption from any radical redistribution that would otherwise adversely apply to the privileged. (“Some are more equal than others.”)
The deformative alliance of savior-narcissism and feeders at the public trough defines our politics.
Yeah, there’s a huge psychological difference between suffering an injury that you did to yourself and one that wasn’t your fault. I have also had that “shut up and leave me alone” feeling, even if no one else was there to witness my clumsiness.
As to the larger point, I agree that we have gone overboard with sympathy and compassion when people are striving to be recognized as victims because they think it confers upon them some positive status. And we’ve been doing that for the last few decades.
I still think Buddhist compassion and Christian agape is good. I don’t think Nietzsche fully appreciates the strengths that Christianity provides but he is correct that feminine sentimentality can be incredibly destructive. Not enough people focus on that.
David Starkey does but I do think he is overly dismissive of Christianity preservation of Greek logic.
“Additionally, Trump constantly emphasizes strength. He wants the military to be strong. He wants American manufacturing to be strong. He wants our borders to be strong and so on. While Trump is not exactly Lincolnian in his speech, I believe that he is sincere in his message. Moreover, he owns up to being rich, privileged and really good at making money. He is authentic even if not authentically polite.”
You’ve articulated my assessment of Trump better than I could have. I will use that to try a persuade my older brother, once a staunch conservative, into voting for Trump. The last time we spoke was days before January 6th 2021, when he proudly proclaimed that he voted for Biden as I listened in stunned disbelief. He and his wife have always been reclusive, but they went into hermit mode during COVID and his knowledge of the outside world is fed by legacy media and cable news.
They were mostly enslaved by their own people too, originally. I wonder how that factors into all of it.
Probably not at all. Most Russian slaves were enslaved by powerful Russians and most Chinese were enslaved by powerful Chinese a thousand years before Marx. Heck, that was happening a thousand years before Christ walked the Earth.
It’s a normal thing to be enslaved by your own people. Always was.
Exactly. And yet they were blaming outsiders from the start.
You do know that normal black people are pretty alright Americans right? You sound like my Uncle who became slightly racist by watching the local news. On the local news, white lefties find a black guy who hates America and wants more welfare.
I live in Idaho where there are very few black people so it is easier to for lefty news people to depict black people in a lefty way.
I am aware that some black Americans are dumb racist Marxists like that Tah-na Coates guy and so forth but that is a minority of black-Americans.
So I live in Idaho but when I went to New Orleans and drank with black people. Most of them were pretty alright.
Not the point. If black people blame white people pretty much exclusively for slavery, that totally ignores that black people were sold INTO slavery, in Africa, by other black people.
And that doesn’t even get into that slavery is still a thing in much of the world, including Africa, and some figure that there are more slaves today than at any point in the past in the US.
Or that free black people in the US also owned slaves.
Indeed. We westerners suck at communicating how the rest of the world is racist and had a history of slavery often as bad or worse than America.
Western civilizations, as James Lilleks has noted, have had all the same sins that all civilizations have had but they think they are unique in sins.
One of your best, @henrycastaigne