The prevailing conservative view of the Left is that the Progressives are in the ascendancy and they are hamstrung by an absolute fealty to their ideology. The Right believes that this leads them to make stupid decisions that undermine the general population's quality of life. The Republicans, in the US, further believe that the 'red wave' in the upcoming November mid-terms will sweep all that aside and will lead to the beginnings of a return to normality.
This is deeply flawed thinking, deliberately so. There is no other way of seeing it because, firstly, it is painfully obvious that the toxic Progressive brew has been leavened by the woke agenda. There are two movements, not one and Progressives and wokeists are not made from exactly the same cohorts of people, although there is considerable blurring of the lines now, after around 15 years of wokeism. Secondly, it is apparent that the state/Big Business joint enterprise is also on board with both movements, or they wouldn't be so fully invested in them.
What we have then is three different but coterminous interest groups working together to undermine Western society. First, the Progressives.
Nothing of what has happened would be possible without Progressivism; relativism and the abandonment of a moral framework. This is why they cannot commit themselves to a true vision of human rights. The amount of caveats renders the concept almost worthless. The moral vacuum in Progressivism isn't a recent thing. It's not even a cultural Marxism thing. It's a quality its adherents possess which makes them Marxists in the first place.
Progressivism is to political philosophy what Mormonism is to religion – a nonsensical, internally contradictory fantasy. An idea whose genesis is with the intellectual elite, not something ever sanctioned by the masses, which was then altered into a cultural version by those same elites. The idea that Marxism is an ideology that appeals to the genuinely downtrodden is a lie. That's why they never rose up; that's why the 'long march through the institutions' was necessary. It appeals to elites, who fancy themselves the leader and it appeals to the resentful and vindictive.
Fundamentally, Progressives are not like any other group of people. They don't inhabit the same moral universe as the rest of us; it's not even close. A large majority of Americans subscribe to a moral code that is explicitly or implicitly founded on Judeo-Christian values. They acknowledge the existence of right and wrong, of natural rights that are present at birth and which never leave us. They believe that the Constitution, imperfect though it may be, embodies principles that are immutable.
Progressives don't believe any of that; not one single part. They don't believe that there is anything permanent about morality. To them, history teaches that morals change with the times and are dependent on the will of the people. What is considered acceptable in one epoch may be beyond the pale in the next. There are no fixed points.
“Times change, and therefore man and his principles and institutions must change with the times. This has always been partly true, of course. But the older understanding knew that a permanent ground underlay the changing currents, and so men used prudence to apply their knowledge of the permanent to guide themselves through the ephemeral.
When you know what’s right and necessary, why wait? Why let yourself be held up by mere procedural hurdles, or worse, by the contentless objections of the ignorant?”(1)
It follows that, if the moral universe is fluid, our rights as humans may be, too. And, indeed, they are. To the Progressive, talk of natural rights is retrograde, a view that held sway in former times, but which has been superseded by a morality than heeded the lessons of history. Nowadays, it is the group, not the individual, which is the primary unit of social currency. If one pursues their logic further, we arrive at a place where anything that champions an opposing view, such as the Constitution, is irrelevant. It's only use is as a historical document, a record of what constituted received wisdom two and a half centuries ago.
This ideology, radical though it may seem, is permitted to coexist in a free society. Live and let live, after all. And if that was the end of it, this article wouldn't have been written. But, regrettably, Progressives don't believe in freedom either or, at least, not in the way that the rest of us do. In their world, they have 'science' and 'history' on their side and 'freedom' can only be achieved via the exercise of 'will' on behalf of the people.
Psychologically, its adherents tend to hail from the histrionic end of the behavioral spectrum – they are not shy but they are easily offended and pathologically altruistic. So, a Constitution that is diametrically opposed to their views cannot be left unmolested. It must be undermined and ignored. Tactically, it may not be wise to be too open about that (at least, not yet), but emphasizing its flaws and mischaracterising it solely as a legal document will do the job in the meantime.
It is in this general region that Progressives find common cause with the wokesters. Progressives have been with us for 150 years and, while they have been inflicting their ideology on others for that entire duration – with increasing success – the woke explosion is the phenomenon that has turbocharged the Leftists in the past decade or so. It would seem that all wokeists are Progressive, but not all Progressives began life as wokeists and may not be fully signed up to the movement even now, although the vast majority of them take pains to avoid broadcasting that opinion.
If Progressives are unpleasant characters, wokeists are a pathological subset exhibiting extreme manifestations of the ideology. Their excesses are easily identifiable, but getting a handle on the reasons for their belief system and the nexus with their less neurotic bedfellows has proven to be beyond 'conservative' commentators. Functionally, Progressives and wokeists feed off each other in a closed loop. Ideas such as Critical Race Theory, whilst articulated by academia and an article of faith among the Progs, are easily adopted as part of the oppression agenda by the wokeists. The issue of transgenderism, together with the wide reaching re-ordering of societal values that it insists on, is a cause that has traveled in the opposite direction and been adopted by Progressives.
There are some serious anomalies in play, which should be expected whenever neuroticism is ramped up to 11. Feminism is still nominally a cause championed by the Left but, in reality, it has been subsumed because other people on the oppression hierarchy are deemed more deserving. How can it other when biological men now share changing rooms with women and compete in the same events? That dynamic cannot possibly be good for women. The Left still acknowledges the patriarchy, but white privileged women can be targets as well as victims now, especially when men are absent.
This is just one more nail in the coffin of feminism; ever since Muslims joined the victim roster, women's claims to equal rights have been compromised. Women generally don't feature high enough in the empathy pecking order.
The extreme version of wokeness that is currently in vogue is a recent thing. There is evidence to suggest that Tumblr circa 2009-16 was the cradle for the views now being encoded in the laws of Western countries. Tumblr was a hermetically sealed little world, where language, custom and hierarchy – the same traits that characterize normal societies – came to be created out of whole cloth. The app was favored by teenage girls, mostly white and middle to upper class and it was they who took the Progressive oppression hierarchy and gave it wings, particularly in the field of gender; not a particular preoccupation of Leftists at that time, who were more practiced in the macro issues of race and male privilege.
It was the Tumblr crowd who arranged social justice concerns in an order that they believed reflected the severity of each oppression. The privileged have no right to an opinion on anything and are expected to grovel permanently and, as affluent white girls are nobody's first choice as victims (but grovelling ad infinitum is still an unattractive option), there was a need to invent oppressions where none truly existed; hence, the explosion of claims of gender fluidity and transgenderism (nobody understands, you see), mostly by teenage girls. Squadrons of them.
Real oppressions, the physical and financial, were of no import. The Freudian Left cares only for the psychologically vulnerable, nothing else. However, whilst feeling the pain of thousands of the oppressed is all well and good, practical empathy has to be rationed if it is to be effective. The general consensus is that the approximate number of recipients of a person's empathy is 150, which means that the familiar takes precedence. Friends and, importantly, famous people who are also familiar. It doesn't take much foresight to realize that it's a race to the bottom; the fewer people you have to take permanent punishment from, the better.
It is probable that there is some genuine gender dysphoria which is now more prevalent due to the resources expended on gender studies, but when entire groups of friends all identify as gender fluid, we can be sure that there is more at play. In any event, dysphoria needs to be treated so that its damaging effects are mitigated. Instead of that, the wokeists intend to remake the world so that it fits around the condition.
The woke are also hypersensitive; this is their defining characteristic. The sensitive are, therefore, the oppressed and the cruel (a subjectively chosen category that includes the merely resilient) are the oppressors. This doesn't mean that the Left isn't extremely cruel to those it despises; it has that in common with mainstream Progressive thought, which is all in on the ends justifying the means. The wokeists have only a limited supply of empathy to ration and that is going to go to those who are the least threat to them and their world. There is none left for people who don't agree with them, the enemy.
This enemy is not really perceived as truly human, because it doesn't possess the same value system as the sensitive, empathetic person from a group high on the oppression hierarchy. Apparently, this makes the enemy a sadist (remember the hyper-sensitivity) and such people can have no room for complaint when people are sadistic towards them. Here we have a firm nexus with the Progressive ideology – they are right, everyone else is wrong and if you're not with them, you are automatically against them. To talk with you, to compromise, to break bread with the opposition is a betrayal to the cause and weakens the woke world.
“With the end of politics and religion, the use of practical reason, or prudence, would become not merely superfluous as a political virtue but perceived as a reactionary defense of the irrationality of the past. If will established the ground of legitimacy, or political right, it would be immoral not to carry it out.”(2)
The famous people that are inside the wokeists' big tent are people who are popular because they conform; they are not the infamous, counter narrative types. They are people who protect and promote the world of the Left. What we really end up with is a demand to conform to the collective, not the individual. Of course, the conformists have become so by virtue of their willingness to embrace the societal norms imposed by Progressives and seconded by media organisations owned by the elites.
It isn't as though the screechy minorities haven't existed before. Ecological extremists have been a factor for decades. The difference is that they are now being put to use by the interests that they nominally oppose. The French sank the Rainbow Warrior. The Brits cleared Greenham Common. Examples of protesters being harshly treated by the state are, historically, ten a penny. Now, police kneel with BLM supporters and allow Extinction Rebellion to superglue themselves to any available structure and close down central London. Why would police behave in that fashion? Presumably because they actively want to, or because they feel pressured into doing so by the social mores of the current day. If it's the latter, it's because fringe movements and concerns have become mainstream and that couldn't have happened without state and moneyed elites' collusion, as they (between them) control the public square and the Loony Left wouldn't get the airtime otherwise.
The next question is why has this happened? Clearly, it must benefit those in control of the narrative and it's not very difficult to see what they are up to. The globalists make it easy for us, writing books with titles like Covid 19: The Great Reset, holding yearly knees ups with their global emissaries who are now embedded in banks, supranational organisations and governments worldwide. They pass climate accords and UN Agenda 21/30, that explicitly set out the way ahead in minute detail. A neat summation of the overall strategy can be found in the WEFs infamous slogan “You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.” The logical extension of this statement has not attracted attention, but it's clear that the idea is that some people will own everything and they will be considerably happier.
What's more, the majority of the biggest winners – people like Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, Soros and Fink – will all be members of the oppressive white male patriarchy that the Progressives (the wokeists foremost among them) profess to despise.
“When the rights of individuals are not understood as rooted in nature, it is merely the arbitrary will of the most powerful group, ideologically or politically, that determines the rights or moral worth of groups in society. And, by extension, the rights of individuals are only as secure as the status of the group to which they belong.”(3)
This needs to be understood. There are some of these people, cultists, that can probably never be talked to sensibly. This is difficult to take, especially when co-operation and bi-partisanship are usually to be applauded. But if people engage in debate with the sole intention of being able to talk the other party round to their position, they are nor approaching matters in an open minded manner. Let's face it, most people argue in this fashion – from an entrenched position. Certainly, extremists do and the wokesters are the very definition of extreme. There is a vast cohort in the middle of the spectrum who are worthy of effort first.
Examining the origins and makeup of the enemy is useful if it assists in forecasting their next move or reveals a psychological weakness that can be exploited, but it is much more important to understand what they can do, rather than second guessing what they will do.
Between the three groups, they have near total power. They can introduce guidelines and legislation that entrench woke obsessions, they can wage war, they can sabotage our food and fuel supply. They can introduce programmable digital currencies. I'm pretty sure all of those will happen; some of them already are. Who's going to stop them? There isn't anyone with that motivation, other than the people themselves and it is highly likely (in my estimation) that they won't wake up until it's too late.
The group with the ultimate power, of course, is the global elites. When the other two groups' usefulness is at an end, they will be sidelined, at least partially. After all, they are only front and centre because they are allowed to be. And when the globalists can control how we spend our money, we will be royally screwed.
Citations
(1) Anton, Michael. Draining The Swamp
(2) Marini, John. Unmasking the Administrative State (pp. 229-230). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.
(3) Marini, John. Unmasking the Administrative State (p. 298). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.
Nice job unraveling this