Deconstructing the Four Pillars of Leftism
In my previous analysis, we covered the general features of modern leftism and asserted that it is a religion of four pillars — Racism, Feminism, Genderism, and Climate Alarmism. In this section, we explore each pillar in some detail and ask the crucial question: do these constituencies exist?
Race
Beginning with the first pillar, we see that the conception of race held by modern leftists is a uniquely American idea. There are ‘whites’, ‘blacks’, and ‘Hispanics’ — a set of categories tentatively suitable for the 20th Century USA but completely worthless for the European context. Do Italians count as ‘whites’ in this framework? If so, what makes them racially different from ‘Hispanics?’ What about Syrians? The modern leftist conception wishes to lump them in with one great pan-Arabic non-white race, despite the practical reality that many people from the region have pale skin.
The main dichotomy in modern leftism is between whites, who are deemed inherently evil, and everyone else — the ‘diverse’ people. What the Racists often mean when they talk about race is something closer to a dichotomy between English culture and everyone else. Indeed, English settlers were the driving force behind the creation of America’s institutions, and thus hold the blame for all of the nation’s chronic ills (which, lest we need reminding, are institutional and intangible).
Even so, the boundary between the English and everyone else is very vague. What if one has ancestors who were Irish, or French, or Spanish, or African? How many such ancestors does one need in order to qualify as white? Must one compare skin tone to a colour chart? There are no ready answers to this conundrum.
Even within groups that identify as ‘black’, the doctrinal disputes have moved on to non-issues such as ‘light skin privilege’, signalling that the purity tests never truly end. Races cannot be defined or identified reliably, let alone act as a politically coherent force in society. Yet, modern leftism wishes us to believe that racial distinctions and discriminations are paramount in shaping the evolution of our societies.
The fact is that modern leftism has an attitude to race that Jim Crow would’ve found appealing, aside from the small detail that its racism is anti-majority instead of anti-minority. Had the Nazis been African instead of German, on what basis could modern leftist theory disavow them? Thus we find ourselves confronted by racial segregation in schools, bombarded by anti-white rhetoric that verges on the genocidal, and bereft of anti-discrimination protections put in place during the Civil Rights Era.
Women
So much for race, but surely women exist as a group?
A common theme among modern leftists is that they cannot define the term ‘woman’. While an ordinary person might settle for the three simple words ‘adult human female’, this definition is at odds with another of the primary pillars of the intersectional belief system. If one cannot define ‘woman’, of course, then one cannot define any kind of group composed of women.
Nevertheless, in order to retain a shred of sanity in this discussion, suppose we define woman as ‘adult human female’. What we find is that in Western societies, women do not constitute a coherent political group. Attitudes on key issues, such as support for war, preferred political candidates, and even abortion policies, vary more among women than between women and men. In other words, the views of women are informed by their life experiences and beliefs, rather than their biological sex (or gender identity).
Still, the few examples of massed political action by women in history are regularly paraded around as proof of the coherence of women as a political force. The suffragettes are prominent in British primary school education, for example. Yet these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Even on the suffragette question, many women in the UK opposed the extension of the franchise to women, often on the grounds that it disrupted the traditional division of responsibilities within the household.
The amplification of the Suffragette narrative, which blithely skates over the other actors in the women’s suffrage movement, has a political impact. On the one hand, it supports the idea that women are a unified bloc and a monolithic political force — a valid constituency for Leftism. More concerningly, the suffragette narrative persuades schoolchildren that tangible political change is caused by extreme activism and violent ‘Direct Action’, and not by democratic participation in the political process.
In modern politics, a small cadre of shrill and influential activists claim to represent ‘women’ as a constituency and it is from this artificial platform that they impose demands upon society. Yet, the feminist cadre has lost much of its prominence in recent years. Other pillars of the intersectional left have reduced their once paramount influence, splitting the movement between gender-critical feminists (who are not intersectional) and trans activists.
Gender
The newest, most trendy, and most blatantly demented of these pillars is the modern leftist theory of Gender.
The term originates from the infamous New Zealand sexologist John Money, who appropriated the word ‘gender’ from linguistics to propose an aspect of self-identity that relates to sexuality-based performative social behaviour. Critically, gender is a subjective social aspect, distinct from objective biological sex — I will argue elsewhere that this separation is fundamentally impossible.
John Money is notorious for paedophilia masquerading as research when he forced two vulnerable young children to simulate sex acts on each other — which he photographed — and forced the involuntary sex reassignment of one of them from 1966 onwards (David Reimer). Both children committed suicide as adults. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when this criminal behaviour became known in the late 1990s, Money defended himself by claiming that his detractors were “biased right-wingers” and “antifeminists.”
Money’s fraudulently deceptive research is the origin point of a doctrine that has led to thousands of gender reassignment surgeries. Often motivated by mental illnesses in addition to gender dysphoria, many of these surgical transitions are later regretted. Alas, the pseudoscientist never faced prosecution for his crimes, and his endeavours have been quietly shelved by the modern left.
Modern genderists have expanded on Money’s illustrious work to assert that there are many different genders beyond ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Ridiculous definitions saturate their deranged lexicon: from ‘non-binary’ and ‘genderqueer’ to ‘aporagender’ and ‘maverique’. What do these genders have in common, apart from biographies fit for a supplementary manual of Dungeons & Dragons? They share an avowed commitment to modern leftist theory.
Genderists have thus addressed the central problem faced by Racists and Feminists, namely: the essential characteristics upon which their political coalitions were based did not translate into a cohesive political bloc. They have created a smorgasbord of new gender identities whose very existence is conditional on belief in modern leftist theories. This enables the critical theory imperative of representing minorities against the majority, while ensuring there are no detractors from within the actual minority who can hold back the ideological campaign.
Alas, this is a solution which creates many more problems than it solves. What underwrites the performativity of gender? If not biological sex, what essential characteristic is gender performance based on? If there is no essential basis to gender, why must it be affirmed by mandatory social respect? Genderists have no good answer to these questions — you are simply a bigot for asking.
Climate
Climate Alarmism is the most interesting pillar of the four, since anthropogenic climate change has some real scientific merit beyond the institutional and intangible ravings of critical theorists. As a result, it has proven to be the most persuasive means of effecting radical social and economic change through the power of national and international institutions. ‘The Great Reset’, for instance, proposes a socialistic future whose mandate is substantially derived from climate change.
A cynical observer might suggest that since the economic claims of socialists and communists were obliterated in the 1980s by Thatcher and Reagan’s engagement with Austrian economics, the only way of convincing modern populations to adopt socialist economics is to place a gun to their head. Rather than literally send in the troops, the amplification of climate change as an existential threat serves to disarm any criticisms of central planning.
As a result, it is imperative that the claims of climate alarmists be rigorously examined on their scientific merits, and solutions found which properly address what problems remain — as opposed to flimsy excuses for providing carte blanche to central planners whose research interests are animated by a powerful ulterior motive.
The Covid-19 pandemic is also presented as an existential threat, and has proved to be an unexpected windfall for central planners. With the emergence of lockdowns and vaccination mandates, the ‘Climate’ part of modern leftism may morph into a number of possible evolutions.
One possibility is mere Alarmism: the general tendency to promote existential threats in order to control populations through fear. Another option is Scientism: the elevation of experts and scientific institutions to a status of unquestionable infallibility, provided their utterances coincide with establishment ideology. Alternatively, worship of the state may manifest via canonisation of the UK National Health Service, or of public health officials in the US such as Anthony Fauci. Yet none of these bubbling psychological mythoi are broad enough to justify total economic shutdown, and so Climate will remain an integral part of the religion for many decades to come.
The Wild Ride Continues
I hope you enjoyed this breakdown of the four constituent pillars of modern leftism. If this treatment seems abridged, it is because the magnitude of factual and conceptual error in the genesis of modern leftism is so great that it defies concise discussion. As I outlined in my first article on this subject, such a misbegotten philosophy can only be the product of extreme power politics: one that is 100 percent attack, zero percent defence.
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