Good bye, good luck and I tried to warn you

We used to be on the same side. I used to sit next to you and thought we were all rowing in the same direction. I have to leave you now because I cannot ally myself with the Left any longer. For twenty years I tried to ignore the evidence of my own eyes and ears. I tried to tell myself that the things I read that seemed nonsensical did make sense but I didn't understand them. I was wrong.

I thought that the Left, more than the right, wanted to build a society where people would not be judged, as much as is humanly possible to do so, on the basis of their skin color. I thought that the Left wanted a society where a black woman and a white man were seen as having the same legal and political rights. I thought that the Left wanted a society where anyone who worked hard and play by ’The Rules’ would not be left behind unless things had gone wrong for everyone. I thought that the Left conceived of the problem as being a matter that a qualified woman could only rise so high in corporate America. Instead I found that they thought the problem was that people had jobs in corporate America at all.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came today when someone on a message board where we were discussing race posted the following from Russell Means:

At this point, perhaps I should be very clear about another matter, one which should already be clear as a result of what I've said. But confusion breeds easily these days, so I want to hammer home this point. When I use the term European, I'm not referring to a skin color or a particular genetic structure. What I'm referring to is a mind-set, a worldview that is a product of the development of European culture. People are not genetically encoded to hold this outlook; they are acculturated to hold it. The same is true for American Indians or for the members of any culture. 

It is possible for an American Indian to share European values, a European worldview. We have a term for these people; we call them "apples"--red on the outside (genetics) and white on the inside (their values). Other groups have similar terms: Blacks have their "oreos"; Hispanos have "Coconuts" and so on. And, as I said before, there are exceptions to the white norm: people who are white on the outside, but not white inside. I'm not sure what term should be applied to them other than "human beings."

This idea that the people who disagree with you, particularly if they share your skin color, are fair game for slurs like apple, Oreo or coconut was a bridge too far for me. Perhaps that is because I well remember the stings of being called that because I did well in school and read for pleasure The same argument was made ‘you’re black on the outside, but you think like a white person’. If we took those words and put them in the mouths of a white man, there isn’t a person anywhere on the North American continent who calls themselves Left, Socialist, Liberal, Progressive, or anti-globalist who would not, in heartbeat, condemn the speakers. But since the speaker was not a white man but an American Indian, no statement he could make would invite condemnation.

I can no longer call myself a woman of the Left because to do so puts me in bed with people who, while claiming to be against racism, cannot bring themselves to call it bad or wrong. This raises the question of whether or not we should care about racism if we aren’t ready to put a judgement on it and call it wrong. If it’s not bad, if it has no more moral or ethical weight than whether one likes science fiction or mystery novels then there’s no point in expending energy about it. Who cares? Racism should only concern us if it is bad behavior but on the Left we have decided that there are very few actual bad behaviors.

Being a conservative is bad behavior and being a Republican is just this side of homicide to the Left. But racism? No. Not bad. Something that white people do and should feel guilty about, yes but not bad. Capitalism? Yes, that’s bad. We don’t much like that on the Left.

This is disingenuous. Either racism is actually bad--in which case we should be prepared to stand up and say that it is unacceptable behavior or it isn’t. If it really is bad but we’re not going to say that it is so that people will ‘feel heard’ or ‘feel listened to’ when they make racist statements we are lying. We are pretending that our motives are noble and in this case we will do rather ethically dubious things in service of our agenda. There is very little concern about that behavior.

The list could go on and on. The Left likes to mock right-wing populists for their creationism and for their denial of climate-change but they are no more pro-science than those they oppose. The following, again from Russell Means:

"This is what has come to be termed "efficiency" in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the moment--that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one--is considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why "truth" changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stopgaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in favor of new stopgaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive. "

This was plucked out and posted to the thread by someone who claims to ‘love science’ but that is because he has mixed up actual science for New Age interpretations of quantum physics. Those interpretations have as much to do with actual science as Neo-Nazi historical revisionism has to do with actual historical study of Germany during the Nazi period. The language is the same but the methods could not be further from one another.

I used to see these right-wing populists on the message boards, screaming at people because they felt liberals were hypocrites. I still think they are out to lunch but I have a bit more sympathy for them. I don’t think they’re out to lunch because liberals aren’t hypocrites, I think they’re out to lunch because they’re solution was to buy into ideas that are no more grounded in reality than the Leftist idea that quantum mechanics means that we can wish ourselves rich or other such New Age nonsense.

The Left is going to go into 2012 with a profoundly confused mindset. They are not going to know what hit them. No small number of people on the Left will, ultimately, vote for a Green candidate or not vote and encourage others not to vote as a way of “teaching Obama a lesson”. Obama is going to lose next year and they will wake up January 2013 and will then try to ignore the fact that President Perry is being inaugurated. There will be a lot of gnashing of teeth and wailing. Then they will paint their signs and fire up the chants of “Hey hey! Ho ho! Capitalism has got to go!” If they have other designs for 2012, I wish them luck.

So, I’ve said good-bye and I’ve wished good luck. Now, the part where I say I tried to warn the people who I was formerly allied with.

I am a reasonably intelligent woman with an ability to turn a phrase from time to time. I have a very analytical mind and am a formidable debater. The Left does not want me on the other side. For a while now, I’ve hinted that I may turn my back and if I do, I will be disgusted and if I am, I will write about it.

For all those anti-racists who are actually okay with racism, as long as white people aren’t the one’s being racist, for those who think that we should not even try to have moral conversations about what is right and wrong or what is the best way to live, to those who are willing to stand up and applaud the most racist, sexist, homophobic statements provided that the speaker is non-white I tried to warn you. I tried to tell you that this path was troublesome and ill-conceived. But you loved your Foucault and Derrida too much to realize what they were actually on about. You enjoyed your anti-Western, anti-European posturing so much that you got into bed with any non-white person with an anti-imperialist cause even though, at the end of the day, they would happily take your queer ass to the gallows. If you are of the Left, if you believe that the West is the cause of the world’s problems, if you believe that it is nothing more than imperialism for American feminists to condemn the fact that Saudi women can neither vote nor drive, you have--through your own ideologies and defenses of them, sloppy and nonsensical as they were--created an adversary. Well done. I did try to warn you.