Leftism: A Religion of Four Pillars

Modern Leftism is a religion. It inhabits the centre of our political universe. It has saints and sinners, rituals and liturgies, tithes and confessions, and festivals of atonement. There’s even a homebrew version of original sin: whiteness and privilege.

Like Islam, the religion stands on pillars — four pillars in this case, and not seven. I believe these four pillars to be Racism, Feminism, Genderism, and Climate Alarmism.

While an individual leftist may not be ‘woke’ on every topic, they will certainly have one or two under their belt. Accordingly, when leftists meet in groups, the whole ideology is present and presides over affairs from all four pillars.

Observe the close company which these topics keep within the nation’s bookshops. You will often find a small monument dedicated to the four pillars. Waterstones in Piccadilly, London, has one such monument in the shape of a four-sided shelf, festooned with eye-catching diatribes against civil society.

The Bookshop Shrines

The tomes are more pawed at than pored over, by Twitterati eager to preserve their precarious existence at the cutting edge of a tumultuous belief system. Slay In Your Lane and Everyday Sexism are perhaps less popular these days, though establishment regulars like Cathy Newman still get shelf space. Climate Alarmist books are stark and millenarian, and there is something of the pioneer slogan in their capitalised titles. There Is No Planet B, says one; Our Final Warning, proclaims another.

The Genderist section has a little more sass; The Queens’ English is an obvious play on words. But there are still slogans and demands: We Can Do Better Than This is a manifesto on “the future of LGBTQ+ rights,” while Queer Power and What’s Your Pronoun? are more obvious in their intent. Finally, displaying a remarkable degree of self-awareness, there is a table reserved for hardback copies of The Queer Bible.

Completing this shrine to offensive nonsense is the most egregious topic of the lot — Racism. Death is on the cards: Kill The Black One First is one title, and They Can’t Kill Us All another. Immigration also provides fertile ground for invective. Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats is written in aggressive capital letters, as is the provocative This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto. The multimillionaire property magnates of Black Lives Matter also enjoy the privilege of having their ‘memoir’ published to this shelf, the cover reading When They Call You A Terrorist — a name which surely speaks for itself.

The Marxian Invasion of Earth

The four pillars are a direct expression of Marx-inspired critiques of liberal, Western society:

These four pillars harmonise into one great ‘intersectional narrative’ which argues that you can’t address the theory of any one pillar without reciting the script of the other three. Built into each pillar is the mandate of praxis. In other words, to understand these ideas one cannot simply engage with them on a disinterested and intellectual level — but must conduct political activism in daily life based on the ideology’s ideas. One cannot understand modern leftism without preaching it.

These are bold claims. Established religious doctrines have their problems, but many of their contradictions have been worked on over centuries by the efforts of great minds (such as Saint Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, in Catholicism). Modern leftism has neither the centuries nor the great minds required to elevate a belief system from the level of a disorganised mess. It instead relies so heavily on power politics that any attempt to investigate the belief system in an original way must be brutally silenced. Modern leftism is 100 percent attack, 0 percent defence.

The Death Spiral

There is a glaring problem with this religion of four pillars: it is parasitic. Modern leftism generates no economic value, instead creating staggering bureaucratic inefficiencies in the institutions which it occupies. Where classical liberalism created meritocratic institutions and productive businesses, allowing the industry and ingenuity of whole populations to generate prosperity, modern leftism undermines this prosperity by hijacking organisations for its own selfish ideological aims.

In nature, parasites are biological specialists, occupying tiny niches in their ecosystem of choice. Modern leftism is equally specialised: its theories of inequity and modes of protest are well-adapted to target the classical liberal societies of its host. The ideology has thus been spectacularly ineffective outside of Western democracies. Despite vast sums of money being funnelled through universities, charities, and NGOs in order to subvert non-Western countries, modern leftism has been decisively rejected by the third world, the Islamic world, and East Asia. Even after 20 years as an American client state, intersectional social justice has failed to leave a discernible imprint on the Afghan psyche.

Once the propositions of modern leftism are accepted in the mainstream, thought leaders at the forefront of the ideology must generate more extreme and eye-catching ideas in order to stay relevant. These fictional problems multiply until believers are living in a make-believe world filled with terrible theoretical nightmares, and their erratic responses resemble the convulsions of a violent and dangerous lunatic. This mass delusion breaks the feedback loop connecting thinkers and policymakers with reality, and dooms the religion to a messy demise — a death spiral.

Having achieved undreamed-of success in co-opting Western institutions, modern leftism is now staggering into such a death spiral, its most precarious and dangerous stage. In Yuri Bezmenov’s exposition of subversion, the widespread chaos caused by this death spiral leads to ‘renormalisation’, or the invasion of Soviet tanks in order to restore order to a collapsed Western country. Ironically, their first order of business would be rounding up the useless, destructive leftists for liquidation. Yet there are no Soviets left to roll in a post-Soviet world. What happens next? We do not know, but it will not be pretty.

If we are serious about preserving some degree of liberty for the next generation, we must ensure that leftism does not take down all the institutions of our countries in its death throes. In light of the thorough subversion of these institutions that has taken place, however, it is difficult to see how they might be salvaged. Can the glimmer of goodness that motivated the foundation of these organisations be reclaimed from decades of bureaucratic bloat and misuse? A total rejection of the managerial state and the dissolution of corrupt institutions, in favour of founding anew, may be the proper way forward.

In the second half of this analysis, we will examine the constituencies that this novel religion claims to represent: racial minorities, women, and gender-nonconformists. Are these foundations flimsier than they seem?