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Radical leftism then and now: defiance versus compliance — 36 Comments

1. ” The old supposedly-held values of free speech, and the belief in objective truth, can now be jettisoned because the left is in control. Why even let their opponents on the right speak? They see no reason; no reason at all.”

   This is certainly a big part of it…when you get to your stop, you can get off the trolley, as the saying goes….but I also believe that a lot of liberals and progs actually were believers in free speech (and human progress) and have left the movement as it has changed. David Horowitz is a prominent example.

2. David Foster:

   True. But I think that some – the majority? – still identify as leftists. They may not defend everything the new leftist youth say and do, but most probably still vote Democrat.

3. It’s not much of a secret that these days being an out-and-proud Conservative is far more rebelious and dangerous than being a Liberal.

   Which side is the stronger advocate for the principal of free speech? Which side is more concerned about big business colluding with the government to suppress personal freedoms? Which side truly despises the brutal authoritarian crack downs of protests we’re currently seeing in China and Iran, and which side ignores or downplays such things? Which side is most concerned with the deluge of fentanyl flooding over our borders and devastating lower middle class communities all around the country?

4. Nonapod,

   All true, but what amazes me is that the liberal friends I know, and I wouldn’t call them leftists, are also quite ok with your list. They seem more concerned with being “good people”, and for them that amounts to supporting anything, no matter how outrageous, this administration supports.

   Once again that lockstep thinking, which doesn’t seem to happen nearly as much in conservative circles.

5. The key is the ability to totally demonize your opponents.
   Once you achieve that, there are no limits.
   You can persuade yourself that everything is possible, doable.
   Necessary.
   Because YOU are virtue personified.
   And THEY are worse than inhuman.

   See, you can consider yourself a radical and control ALL the levers of government, control the media, control info-tech. ALL THE CORRIDORS OF POWER.

   At the same time you will insist that you are STILL a contrarian, STILL an outsider, STILL an iconoclast fighting the good fight against those [fill in derogatory adjectives] RIGHT-WING DEMONS.

   Still a revolutionary…

   But it won’t be enough (for what good is power if you can’t wield it FOREVER! If you can’t totally and utterly destroy your enemy—the enemy you’ve so successfully demonized AND dehumanized because you have told yourself (and others) that a) you’re virtue personified; and b) that that’s precisely what your enemy would do to you. If it were possible.

   And once you’ve brainwashed yourself that this is the case…that this is the reality…then it becomes an intense, unyielding, manic, manicheaen fight to the finish.

   (Why should anyone compromise with the Devil? Why would anyone even contemplate such a thing?)

   And so…Good vs. Evil.
   Classic.
   With all opponents demonic enemies.
   (And the Left DOES need its enemies…)

6. I don’t know. When I first became aware of this, in my teens (60s), it was already obvious that they were conformists, and not real rebels. They didn’t think much of the Czechs, and Cuban refugees were Bad People. And the supposed tolerance was less widespread than one might think. One thing that made me realize this was my first girlfriend, who was very leftist herself, took a lot of grief from her friends for going out with me. Already, she was unusual in willingness to fraternize with the enemy.

   And even then, they were avowedly relativistic, most of them. It was then that I learnt the fun of pointing out what their beliefs entailed about reason, for instance. A few years later, in college, I had the pleasure of being lectured for being a “conformist” because I was the only person in the room wearing a coat and tie. (Something I started doing precisely because it bothered the free thinkers.)

7. “Democracy is like a tram ride: when you reach your stop, you get off” – Recep Tayyip Erdo?an

   That’s certainly been the attitude of the Left.

8. The most corrupt political party in American history crows earnestly about the absolute need to check a former president for purported (and hoped for) financial improprieties—even invoking the Magna Carta(!), but then hypocrites gotta hypocrite—as it hopes to finally, and completely to utterly defenestrate a political adversary after continuous unsuccessful starting even before that former president was inaugurated….

   “Biden Administration Gives Trump Tax Returns To House Democrats—
   “President Joe Biden’s administration has handed over years of former President Donald Trump’s federal tax returns to the U.S. House of Representatives.”—
   https://www.zerohedge.com/political/biden-administration-gives-trump-tax-returns-house-democrats

9. Oops. Should be “…unsuccessful forays starting…”

10. I don’t see too many free speech old New Leftists around now. If they haven’t turned right or thrown in with the censorious young Left they’ve learned to just keep their heads down and live their lives. You’ve only got to say “Trump” or “White supremacy” or “Denier this, denier that” to silence them. It would be interesting to ask them if they still believed in the idea of “repressive tolerance,” but whether they do or not, they aren’t speaking up for freedom of speech.

11. Big Brother is evil. Democrats are Big Brother.

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/12/eye-on-john-kirby.php

    If you aren’t seriously concerned about the survival of America, you aren’t paying attention.

12. physicsguy
    All true, but what amazes me is that the liberal friends I know, and I wouldn’t call them leftists, are also quite ok with your list. They seem more concerned with being “good people”,

    “Good people,” a.k.a. group affiliation, a.k.a. virtue signalling. While I didn’t leave the Left until the 1980s, during the 1960s I became aware that political stances were not necessarily the result of thinking and/or reasoning, but often based on a desire to belong to a certain group of people. Such as the professor who signed a petition ad published in the NYT against the Vietnam War, who pointed out that a lot of the signers of that NYT petition were Ivy League professors. (That professor was at a public university that ranked far below the Ivy League. )

13. leftists have often cottoned to power, there are exception like emma goldman who was more of an anarchist, tells john reed what the cheka is doing, (this is the tale told in reds by maureen stapleton) there were some like dos passos who saw the light in the spanish civil war, james burnham one of the founders of national review was a former trotskyite, many liberals in cuba, turned against Castro, some element did the same in Nicaragua and Venezuela, horowitz radosh and co, in the 70s,

14. EEyore
    I don’t know. When I first became aware of this, in my teens (60s), it was already obvious that they were conformists, and not real rebels. They didn’t think much of the Czechs, and Cuban refugees were Bad People.

    I am reading Humberto Fontova’s book on Che Guevara.(Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him) He gives several examples of lefty tourists in Cuba who praised Che to some Cubans. The nonverbal response of the Cubans made it clear that they didn’t have a similar view of Che.

    (There is a hilarious anecdote of someone giving rock start Carlos Santana, a Che lover, some information on why Che wasn’t that great a guy. Carlos Santana’s response was essentially, “Don’t bother me with facts. Think of the ideal Che.” )

15. “Why even let their opponents on the right speak? They see no reason; no reason at all.” neo

    Shut down Redress of Grievance. Outlaw the right to speak against leftist orthodoxies and you ensure a violent revolution. Congress just passed a bill, sure to be signed into law by Biden that clears the path to legal prosecution of those whose religious faith forbids participation in secular ‘sacraments’. If the Supreme Court fails to overturn it, the 1st amendment is essentially rendered null and void.

    Matt Walsh makes a persuasive case: https://youtu.be/oxWXup-0Lx4

    “Coming soon to a living room near you…” https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/coming-soon-to-a-living-room-near-you/

16. Ah, the myth of Che…
    ________________________

    One morning in Bolivia
    The leader of the partisans and two of his companions
    Were forced to flee the mountains for their lives
    Through green and dusty villages they sped along the little roads
    The peasants smiled and shouted as they hurried by
    Jesus called out to every one “Don’t think that we are leaving,
    They only tried to frighten us with guns, we shall return, ”

    Continue with your work, continue with your talk
    You have it in your hand to own your life to own your land

    There is no one who can show you the road you should be on
    They only tell you they can show you and then tomorrow they are gone

    –Judy Collins, “Che”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JVAXmRyR70
    ________________________

    This is one of the best songs Judy Collins wrote and sang. Soaring. Glorious. Anthemic.

    And unfortunately, very, very wrong.

17. he was a cold blooded butcher, he had entirely too tidy an ending, in the hills of bolivia, recently the local latin station, sought to defame felix rodriguez with an
    attack from a local ex mexican gangster, caro quintero

18. In her “The New Meaning of Treason”,. Rebecca West tries to figure out why upper class Brits, the most coddled class in history, needed to go all revolutionary. Apparently, the heroes of socialism prior to WW II were still heroes for what had been done since. Mostly a matter of social benefits, labor laws, so forth.
    So you had to upscale them to be anybody
    Hence cleaving to Moscow.

19. huxley
    Ah, the myth of Che…

    Judy Collins:

    Continue with your work, continue with your talk
    You have it in your hand to own your life to own your land

    Apparently Judy didn’t realize that Bolivia’s 1952 Revo gave land to the peasants.

    Regarding an Argentine saving the Bolivians, there is a Bolivian joke that indicates the absurdity of that. A Bolivian priest badmouths the Argentines in his sermons. The Bishops tells him to stop it- Argentines are children of God, like us. The priest shuts up until Easter, when he recounts the Last Supper. Jesus tells his disciples that one of the disciples will betray him. Simon: It is I, master. Jesus: no it is not you. This goes on until Judas talks. “Che maestro, soy ZHO.” (Master, it is I, in a very Argentine accent.)

    Some leftists, such as Margaret Randall, recognized the absurdity of an Argentine saving the Bolivians.

20. No she had a thumbnail sketch like coppola was fed in godfather 2

21. Yes, I’ve thought about this for many years. When i was in High School, in the 70s, it was quite fashionable to display “Question Authority” pins, bumper stickers, etc. Now that Leftists dominate our institutions, they say “Obey Authority”. I was a liberal then, am a conservative now, yet I feel like I’m the one who hasn’t changed: I still question authority.

22. Continue with your work, continue with your talk
    You have it in your hand to own your life to own your land

    That’s the bait – what the Bolsheviks told the mužiks tilling the land. And the mužiks bought in, and joined the revolution, and helped topple the government.

    Shortly after that, the mužiks began acting like they did own the land. In short order the Cheka made it clear they didn’t – they were to fulfill the quotas assigned by commissars even if it consumed their last seed grain.

    One wonders if Judy Collins understood that form of ownership.

23. Che’s adventure in Africa was even more ridiculous and incompetent than his failure in Bolivia.

    He visited Peron in Spain and shared his grand plans to bring communism to South America. Peron thought him an immature utopian but liked his socialist bent. After all, Peron loved national socialists and communist socialists both.

24. They comply with the current trendy leftism (annoying yet low risk activism) because they haven’t yet experienced any serious pushback. When the point of no return is finally reached, things are going to get very ugly for them, and Mama won’t be there to help them.

25. …fading Boomer old-school left…

    Neo, your “old-school left” is an anachronism. Tom Hayden (b. 1939) a member of Joe Biden’s generation (that’s a hint that he was born too early to be a Boomer) was one of the younger architects of the New Left. In America, the term “old-school left” refers to the Stalin-obedient Left of the 1930s and ’40s.

    When Tom Hayden concocted the Port Huron statement, the oldest Boomer was 14 years old. (17 if one considers the Baby Boom to have begun in 1945 rather than 1948.)

    Exit question: Why is it that the most vehement critics of us Boomers are the least informed people about whom we Boomers are?

26. In defense of free speech, for all sides.
    So that there can continue to BE sides.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/30/the-unconscionable-barbarism-of-cancel-culture/

    There are so many good things in Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Reith lecture on freedom of speech. She shatters the case for cancel culture. She lays waste to the patrician left’s claim that free speech serves the powerful but harms the powerless. She issues a stirring call for a new solidarity of liberty-lovers against the ‘unconscionable barbarism’ of punishing people for what they think and say. But the best thing, the thing that makes the breath catch in your throat as you listen, is just how unrepentant her love of freedom is. This is no meek, apologetic plea for a few more rights to say what we think. No, she’s passionate about this liberty, and it is rare indeed to hear that today. It is a truly infectious and inspiring call to arms.

    This year’s BBC Reith lectures are titled ‘The Four Freedoms’. The first, Adichie’s, is on the freedom to speak. Her diagnosis of the crisis of free expression is peerless. She says the problem we face in the West right now is not the jackboot of government tyranny pressed on the throat of free debate. It’s social conformism. It’s the overbearing pressure to adhere to ‘the collectively sanctioned attitudes and behaviours of this era’. ‘The biggest threat to speech today is not legal or political, but social’, she says. She recognises this is ‘not a new idea’: ‘When John Stuart Mill warned against “the tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling”, it reads as though he foresaw the threat that orthodoxy poses today.’ But the ‘present manifestation’ of this ‘social censure’ is, she says, especially severe. It desires nothing less than the permanent banishment from society – that is, the cancellation – of anyone caught deviating from sanctioned thought.

    Adichie describes brilliantly the horrors of cancel culture. Against those who apologise for this new species of social tyranny, who say it’s just about holding people to account for what they say, Adichie brings a stirring clarity. ‘There is a difference between valid criticism, which should be part of free expression, and this kind of backlash – ugly personal insults, putting addresses of homes and children’s schools online, trying to make people lose their jobs. To anyone who thinks, “Well, some people who have said terrible things deserve it”, no – nobody deserves it. It is unconscionable barbarism. It is a virtual vigilante action whose aim is not just to silence the person who has spoken, but to create a vengeful atmosphere that deters others from speaking.’

    This is one of the finest elucidations on cancel culture I have heard. Adichie recognises what so many others fail to: that cancel culture’s grimmest achievement is not to claim the scalps of a handful of controversial individuals, but rather to send a message to everyone else that they had better shut their mouths if they don’t want to suffer the same fate. The result? An ‘epidemic of self-censorship’, she says.
    …
    Adichie’s belief in free expression extends even to defending the right of people to say untrue and malicious things. She says she wouldn’t even agree to the censorship of such foul ideas as Holocaust denial or hatred for homosexuals. ‘[The] solution is not to hide the lie’, she says, ‘but to expose it and scrub from it its false glow’. When we censor the ‘purveyors of bad ideas, we risk making them martyrs’, she says, ‘and the battle with a martyr can never be won’. As to the fashionable notion that free speech is of more benefit to powerful people than marginalised people, Adichie says ‘free speech is indeed a tool of the powerful, but it is also, crucially, the language of the powerless’. She cites the current Iranian revolt, the Arab Spring and other uprisings – ‘all wielded speech’. Then her killer line, one I hope will ring in the ears of all of those so saturated in media-studies thinking that they have lost sight of the tight bond that has always existed between free speech and the fight for equality: ‘Dissent is impossible without the freedom of speech.’
    …

    And stifling dissent from the Leftist Orthodoxy of the Day is, of course, the goal.

27. About that echo chamber thing on the Left …

    https://notthebee.com/article/check-out-this-new-software-tool-the-government-is-sponsoring-to-use-friends-and-family-members-to-correct-social-media-posts

    Have you ever been on social media and had a weird moment of déjà vu? You post something, and then fifty people come back at you with identical talking points.
    Maybe they’re all brainwashed mainstream media consumers, or maybe it’s just bots.

    But thanks to a government-sponsored Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust app being developed by the Hacks/Hackers team and the University of Washington, soon we’ll get the best of both worlds where everyone will be able to respond to social media posts just like a brainwashed bot.

    The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a grant to the group to develop the app to fight “misinformation.”

    The app will allow you to enter the social media post of a suspected conservative or free-speech advocate, and then the app will tell you why they’re wrong and how to appropriately respond.

    I guess the NSF is looking to replace Twitter as the government’s propaganda outlet.
    But it’s adding insult to injury to use our own tax dollars to pay people to tell us how “wrong” we are.

    On another thread, I observed (as many others have) that conservatives are generally reluctant to argue with family and friends who vote for Democrats and support Leftist policies, because we value their relationship with us more than we value winning ideological arguments.

    They don’t have the same scruples, do they?
    https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/12/01/victor-davis-hanson-9/#comment-2655763

28. Another voice opposing the stifling of dissent.
    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1597581049491607558.html
    John Hayward Follow @Doc_0 Nov 29

    Totalitarian ideologies are wholly incompatible with democracy, no matter how they might pretend otherwise to win a few elections.
    …
    The deadly danger of totalitarianism, the politicization of everything, is that politics is inherently coercive. Politics without coercion is merely a discussion. There must be carrots and sticks, and sticks are the only way to get the carrots needed.
    …
    Totalitarianism is incompatible with free speech, democracy, and sovereign individual liberties because it assumes arguments will be “settled” and the “correct” conclusions will be imposed by force. Politicizing everything means introducing coercion into everything.
    Coercion doesn’t work if the targets can resist or escape, does it?

    Totalitarians inevitably conclude that no one should be allowed to vote against, or even speak against, their policies and beliefs. Resistance and debate dilute the power needed to impose “correct” conclusions.

    Totalitarian ideologies will never permit people to vote against “correct” ideas, once they gain enough power. The list of things people are not allowed to question, to vote against, to disobey grows longer. The corners of life that are not politicized grow ever smaller.

    If you want healthy democracy and representative government, you should cultivate the opposite of the totalitarian mindset. Cherish and defend the parts of life that are not politicized – where people are not just technically free to choose, but their choices are respected. /end

29. Micha Elyi:

    At this point, Hayden’s “New Left” is pretty darn old.

30. I saw this happening a generation ago…during the 60s the Baby Boomer rallying cry was “Question Authority!”. In the 90s, when they had seized the political high ground (most obviously by Clinton’s defeat of GH Bush), it suddenly changed to “Do Not Question [our] Authority!”

31. Micha Elyi: “Exit question: Why is it that the most vehement critics of us Boomers are the least informed people about whom we Boomers are?”

    Hmmm….I’m a Boomer and I think “My Generation” is one of the worst to ever come about. In terms of musical ability, it is one of the finest. In terms of everything else…ugh! It’s the Boomer leftists who paved the way to take over education and I saw with my own eyes what havoc that has brought about not only to education, but the ripple effects downstream in the culture.

32. “Why even let their opponents on the right speak? They see no reason; no reason at all.”

    I’d go further and say that not only do they not see a reason for others to speak, they believe it is wrong to let others speak. They have to shut down “disinformation” as well a “hate” speech or anything else they feel is “wrong.”

    Being leftists they believe in the superiority of themselves and believe that others cannot think for themselves and that only those on the left can understand or see the truth. Everyone else is too stupid/gullible and might be confused with any opinions or ideas that are different from what they, on the left, know to be the truth. Therefore un-Leftist ideas/opinions MUST be shut down. It is their duty to do so.

33. charles,

    and this is why they are evil. They believe they have the moral right and privilege to play God with the lives of the rest of us.

34. This story is making the rounds – I posted it recently in another thread from a different source.

    The Democrats having lost Twitter, the NSF is stepping into the breach.

    https://www.bizpacreview.com/2022/12/01/feds-fund-group-to-develop-software-to-turn-average-americans-into-misinformation-taskforce-1313717/

    The liberals’ war on so-called “misinformation” is as relentless as it is Orwellian, and just when you think it can’t get any worse, the federal government has handed a group of so-called “journalists” $5 million to design software aimed at getting average Americans to confront their friends’ “harmful” social media posts and correct them with text the developers suggest.

    In other words, they are creating a legion of Karens, supplying them with Easy Buttons, and setting them loose on the internet.

    The five mil went from the National Science Foundation (NSF) — whose mission is to “protect and improve human health” — to a group led by Hacks/Hackers, which, according to its website is an “international grassroots community of people who seek to inspire and inform each other to build the future of media.”

    From that, the Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust (ARTT), “a suite of expert-informed resources that are intended to provide guidance and encouragement to individuals and communities as they address contentious or difficult topics online,” was born, according to Hacks/Hackers.

    The group, which will now be doing its level best to squash free speech in America, is based in Dublin, Ireland, according to crunchbase.com.

    The Daily Wire reports, “Users are encouraged to paste in their friends’ Twitter and Facebook posts, and the tool will tell them how ‘harmful’ they are. Then it ‘suggests relevant responses through tailored response examples or templates’ that the user should copy and paste as a reply, according to a video demonstrating the software.”

35. At RedState, streiff has a post on point, talking about how the Hunter Biden laptop suppression conspiracy is only one example of how the leftist orthodoxy is enforced.

    https://redstate.com/streiff/2022/12/01/twitters-former-truth-and-safety-poohbah-demonstrates-why-we-are-ruled-by-idiots-n667436

    …yesterday, Twitter’s defenestrated head of “trust and safety” (lololol) Yoel Roth admitted, over two years after participating in the most significant election fraud since JFK’s father bought the White House for him that he was wrong,
    …
    Roth’s hand-waving and excuse-making can be boiled down to one statement.

    “We didn’t know what to believe, we didn’t know what was true, there was smoke — and ultimately for me, it didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter,” Roth said. “But it set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack and leak campaign alarm bells.”

    Even though Roth has a Ph.D. in communications and is the author of such hard-hitting journal articles as No fats, no femmes, no privacy?, Zero feet away: The digital geography of gay social media, ‘No overly suggestive photos of any kind’: Content management and the policing of self in gay digital communities, and Locating the “Scruff Guy”: Theorizing Body and Space in Gay Geosocial Media, the first thought that should have occurred to him was it was not his job to decide what was true.

    Maybe the thought that he should show a tiny bit of humility and defer to a major newspaper that exhaustively reported on a critical story and not play Galactic Commander should have whizzed through his mind.

    He could have told the various alphabet agency enforcers that Twitter was a social media platform. If they disagreed with the New York Post, they needed to avail themselves of the media to make their case to the public.

    The very last thing he should have done was acquiesce and participate in a scam to deprive the American people of the information they needed to make an informed choice.

    What really shows the falsity and self-serving nature of Roth’s apologia is when you look at how Twitter was ground zero of misinformation about COVID. I’m not talking about random people trying to tweet about ivermectin. I’m talking about the blatant and bald-faced lies spun by the US Department of Health and Human Services and its subordinate agencies, particularly the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. I’m talking about how Twitter, under Roth’s leadership, ruthlessly banned tens of thousands of users because they dared to state what is accepted as the truth today. People were banned for, literally, posting links to articles in scientific journals questioning any of the stupidity that Anthony Fauci was slinging about.

    In those cases, Roth didn’t know what was true or false either, and, just like with the Hunter Biden laptop story, he sided with elite opinion and against free speech and open debate. It had to be awesome to be a film studies major and have federal officials begging for your help to save our democracy.

    He seems to think that having a Ph.D. in a pseudo-discipline gives him the knowledge to determine truth from falsity and the right to impose his not-very-reliable judgment on millions of Twitter users.

    Back in February 2021, I was a guest on Susie Moore’s podcast Moore to the Point. On that program, I said that the underlying cause of most of our problems is that we are governed, officially and unofficially, by idiots; …

    Roth is a prime example of a credentialed idiot. Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, he decided that he was smart enough to determine what you and I were allowed to read and see. He made a career out of being spectacularly wrong, and only the once-in-a-generation nature of this f***-up has caused him to admit that someone else made a mistake.

    He’s not alone.

    This will not stop, and our republican form of government will continue to be at grave risk unless we take steps to deprive government bureaucrats and their social media counterparts of the ability to determine what we can read, watch, write, and say.

36. I didn’t even know you could get a PhD in “Communications.” I always thought that major was for kids who did not want take even the smallest chance that Math would be required in a class.

    My parents were Depression Democrats and were horrified when they learned I voted for Nixon in 1960. The “Boomer” thing was more about culture than age. Some may have been the fault of parents who were determined that their kids would never have hardship like the parents had had. Now, of course, it is much worse with “Safetyism” as the reigning parental rule.

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