The left and the Elites
Commenter “huxley” asks an excellent question, and then answers it:
I understand it’s not a priority in conservative circles to wonder WTF happened to the Left. But, as an ex-leftist, I do.
Exactly how did the Left swivel away from the concerns of the (mostly) genuinely oppressed to this weird boutique world of mix’n’match identities, bizarrely ranked?”
I’ve concluded the Elites have beautifully coopted the Old-New-Left by way of the Social Justice Movement’s identity politics. …
Back in the 60s/70s the Left was perpetually on guard against being coopted by the Establishment to the point of paranoia.
Now the Left welcomes being coopted. It’s not a simple betrayal. Since the Left took over the academic high ground, the Elites have been indoctrinated into the Left and it became a class distinction. (Witness the BBC.)
And now the Elites have eaten the Left.
Kinda brilliant in its way .
I’ll take a stab at it as well. The question interests me, too, although I was never on the left, exactly. I was merely a garden-variety liberal Democrat, now a much scarcer commodity than it was back then.
Isn’t what’s being described in that quote the usual basic trajectory of the left when it comes to power, although the details might be somewhat different? That is, to start out being the champion of the working person when the left is on the outs and trying to worm its way into power, and then to change? That early left will speak idealistically about all sorts of things, but once in power it’s the nature of the beast to do whatever it takes to – well, I’ll let Milan Kundera explain, in a quote from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
… human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”
It is very very easy for ideological fanatics to segue into tyranny when they get power.
But what of the left’s unity with “elites”? They’ve long embraced and been embraced by academics on the left, of which there are many. The academics are the vanguard, the conduit to the minds of the young, and the academics are good at justifying almost anything as long as its done by the left and for providing theories to back and promote whatever the left might want to do.
What’s harder to understand – at least on the face of it – is the left’s embrace of financial elites. But it’s always the case that they need funds, and financial elites can help provide those funds with generous donations. Also, with the advent of the internet and its growing dominance, corporations such as Facebook and Twitter (until Musk bought the latter) were near-perfect ways for leftist governments to exert censorship power beyond their wildest dreams (the left is always pro free speech until it gets into power, after which it is gung-ho for censorship).
These days the financial elites are mostly those with degrees from colleges where leftists have been doing the teaching, and thus they have already been primed to agree with the left. Plus, if a rich person feels guilty about his or her wealth, what better way to obtain a “get out of conscience-jail free” card than to support the left? Identity politics makes it that much more attractive, because the financial elites can pat themselves on the back for being free of bigotry as bigotry is defined these days.
So what we have now is the marriage of much of corporate America with the left, and because the left is in power it can give perks to its financial supporters. It makes perfect sense, really. But – although I suppose this is just quibbling – I wouldn’t say with huxley that “the Elites have eaten the Left.” I’d say that it’s the other way around, although the Elites have willingly let themselves be eaten.
huxley finds that he wonders “Exactly how did the Left swivel away from the concerns of the (mostly) genuinely oppressed to this weird boutique world of mix’n’match identities, bizarrely ranked?”
(Far too) much of the left was always more interested in achieving its version of utopia than in supporting the “mostly genuinely oppressed”. The latter is a laudable self-conceit (which in far too many instances has morphed into a regrettable self-delusion).
The “mostly genuinely oppressed” will no longer be “genuinely oppressed” in utopia-land, so the left is going all out for the ultimate goal here. That’s my generous interpretation; you don’t wanna hear my less-than-generous interpretation(s).
And so, if the means to that utopian end takes them through “this weird boutique world of mix’n’match identities”, then they press on and do what they gotta do: whatever facilitates the path to utopia.
MJR was just ahead of me.
In a more simple minded vein, I would say that the Left has always followed the Utopian star. They also understand that to achieve Utopia, as they define it, they must have the power to impose their will on the recalcitrant. To borrow from an old saying, “you have to break a few eggs (or heads or whatever).” The quest for Utopia is a long road, and justifies all.
Mike Benz, former Trump-era Cybersecurity Deputy Assistant Secretary, on AI and the censorship regime. Long, but worth it. I mostly fast-forwarded through the host’s questions (good questions, but too rambling).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9Mm_AFpjPM
“Middle America” which seemed like a dominant force in the country in the days of Nixon and Reagan, is largely gone. Without that stumbling block, the McGovernite coalition of racial minorities, the young, and the affluent can get a majority of the vote.
The very rich may feel guilty about their fortunes, especially if they inherited their money. I don’t think the affluent and the ordinary rich do. They believe that they are meritocrats who got their money on their own by being more worthy and capable.
Higher-ups in finance and in corporate America are likely to share the attitudes of their peers in the legal profession, the media and academia — the other high fliers they went to college with. Once again, it’s not the Eighties anymore.
And look around. Concern for poorer Americans can be trumped by an (often pretend) concern for the poor of the world. Concern for the environment and the accompanying misanthropic attitude towards people outside of one’s own circle works just as well.
On the Left eating the Elites versus the Elites eating the Left question about causality…
Neo states “What’s harder to understand – at least on the face of it – is the left’s embrace of financial elites.” So, let’s explain that sea change.
Ever since the generational change in billionaire wealth, the harvesting of Silicon Valley in general, and Microsoft anti-trust actions in particular, by the Clintonistas in the late 1990s must be admitted.
That is, until after the Clinton’s, there was no vehicle to align and embiggen the younger Nouveau Rich voices with the existential interests of the Administrative State, transmuted into the Deep State, creating the Marriage Hell manifest after President Obama.
Zuckerburg’s $410 millions for drop boxes of mail-in ballots in 9 key states in 2020, for instance — who among the rich would do something so brazen before then? No one except Sorosl
I think it’s somewhat bass-ackward to be talking about ‘the left’. Instead, discuss the evolution of the worldview of the fancy professions and the managerial element and how they look at the rest of the population and the country’s history. In particular, look at what sort of discussion goes on (if that’s what can be called) within these segments of the population.
No offense to huxley; I’m a huxley hierophant, however:
I never saw any swivel or change. In my personal experience, leftists seem exactly the same as they always have been. They are generally self-centered, jealous and immature. And they can employ either political party as a skin to foster their goals of attention and self-importance, but the left is more common.
Their main concern is themselves and, because they are narcissists, they are incapable of blaming themselves when they don’t get their way, so they denounce, discredit and decry those who oppose them.
It’s similar to my comment on neo’s post about Ibram Kendi (née Rogers). Ibram is self-centered and immature and he’s jealous of others who have earned things he has not, so he looks for ways to manipulate people to work for his cause; Ibram Kendi. Some people are charismatic enough to conscript others to their cause, and those followers are typically “true believers,” but the person or people at the head are in it for personal aggrandizement and gain. The leader(s) often don’t even admit that to themselves, but whenever the facts on the ground change, they will always change tactics to what aggrandizes them.
“Concern for the genuinely oppressed.” This is just a tactic to make one feel self-important. When a narcissist sees someone better than himself; someone nicer, smarter, in better shape, achieving more… What’s easier? Working harder? Studying more? Going to the gym? Or, attacking that other person? The poor, the homeless, the sexually confused… Narcissists don’t care about those people any more than Ibram Kendi cares about the people he had to hire to make his self-aggrandizing “Center for Antiracist Research” appear legitimate. But when a narcissist sees someone in the community getting attention; a businessman, a father coaching a little league team, a scout leader, a minister… He uses the poor, homeless and sexually confused to diminish those who are successful.
Karl Marx is a textbook example of this type of person. He was either incapable or not industrious enough to create something that would employ and pay people, so he attacked how those who could do those things used the fruits of their labor.
A good man sees a great man and strives to do better.
An immature man sees a great man and strives to lower him.
Rufus T.: “A good man sees a great man and strives to do better.
An immature man sees a great man and strives to lower him.”
A maxim to be taught to all young people.
Another is: Discover your God-given talents and develop them to the best of your ability. Your mission on this Earth will succeed or fail based on how well you do that.
We come by envy and sloth pretty easily. How else do you explain the number of those who will steal, cheat, slander, and mistreat those they envy?
A meritocracy, which the left is against, is never perfect. Always, there will be greater and lesser soils than yourself. Always striving to do your best in all things will allow you to find your place on the totem pole of life.
It is the very nature of the totem pole that the left decries. But when they have forced people into their version of utopia, they want to be at the top of the totem pole and all the rest below them in perfect “equality.” Equality of misery is what it always turns out to be. It’s basically the medieval system – nobles and serfs. They think they’ve invented a great new governing system. In the end, it’s the same old tyranny that has always been with us.
Has the left swallowed the elites?
It has certainly hijacked them – for now. Both have the same goal – a perfect world of nobles and serfs.
I think I come down on the side of the Left swallowing the financial elites, rather than the other way around, but there have been plenty of feedback effects, so all the causal arrows don’t go the same way. Anyway, here’s what I think happened. (Aside from its wild oversimplifications, I think I’m just summarizing a commonly accepted story.)
Since 1980 or so, there’s been a dramatic change in the composition of both the labor force and the financial elite. After the 1930s, labor unions slowly drove up the cost of factory labor. Eventually, most of our factories migrated to China and Mexico. At roughly the same time as the industrial exit, the networked computer revolution took off. Businesses co-evolved with that change. These companies employed a completely different sort of people, who were nothing like non-union, badly paid factory workers, who’d been championed by older leftists. In other words, the Left lost its market.
The new workers were mostly college-educated. Many were new immigrants from India and China. Many were women. The Civil Rights movement, the gay rights movement, feminism, exploding immigration, legal abortion, and the birth control pill all contributed to the changing make-up of the work force. The Left may have lost their old market, but now they had a new one. All they needed was a new ideology. Enter American Marxism — aka the Woke.
The cornerstones of the new American Marxism are currently critical race theory, radical gender theory, and climate catastrophism. But the Left’s ideology can change when the market demands it. The vivid conflict between brutal factory owners and oppressed factory workers is gone. Instead, corporate leaders and business owners — the financial elite — are allies of the Leftist nomenklatura. Their common enemies are the unwoke troglodytes, especially the white working class.
What, Precisely, is the Issue with ‘Elites’?
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/21332.html
The new workers were mostly college-educated.
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About 45% of each cohort cadges a baccalaureate degree nowadays. Many of these degrees are job-market signals and not applicable occupational training.
Embrace the possibility that they haven’t changed, they’ve just decided that they are in a position now to treat the rest of us like the Help, and themselves like the worst sort of plantation-owning Robber Barons.
“Exactly how did the Left swivel away from the concerns of the (mostly) genuinely oppressed to this weird boutique world of mix’n’match identities, bizarrely ranked?”
Wherein his puzzlement lies, is in the presumption that the Left ever genuinely cared about the oppressed.
The Left has only ever been concerned with the acquisition of power and control. Liberals have only ever been seen by the Left as their useful idiots. As cannon fodder in the war they wage.
Those who seek to rule, whether on the left or the right have no real concern for those they seek to rule over.
Thomas Jefferson wrote of it, Mass. Senator Daniel Webster spoke of it and libertarian / Sci-Fi Grandmaster Robert Anson Heinlein wrote of it as well.
As for the moneyed elites, their fate was pronounced long ago by Vladimir Lenin; “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”.
from the jacobins to so called antifa, they have never been concerned with such things, well the leadership, the membership can be easily fooled, re the memoirs of admiral wrangel, re the pre revolutionary era, that tucker referenced in a recent post,
It’s strange that all of the enemies of the left 50 years ago — the military, the CIA, the military-industrial complex, Big Oil, and the Big Three automakers — are on the same side as the Biden administration and the Democrats (along with the more recent foes, Big Pharma and the Big Banks), and hardly anybody on that side of the aisle seems to have noticed. There’s a knee-jerk opposition to Trump and very little recognition that Trump is the enemy of their own traditional enemies. Maybe the hard left is critical of Biden and the Democrats, but they also haven’t seen that Trump may not be all bad.
Class war brings one into contact with people one would rather avoid, so academics leaned heavily on race/gender/sexuality. There were a lot of interesting research topics there that trade unionism didn’t provide, and the new emphasis meant that most academics wouldn’t have to come into contact with what they’d left behind. Big business saw what universities had become, and what politics had become, and took its cue from that. Younger execs had already absorbed much political correctness in college, and globalization left even older execs unmoored from traditional values. Ultimately, DIE is destructive, but it has to be easier than figuring out how to make more and better and cheaper widgets. New green subsidies are also welcome.
Coincidentally, yesterday Freddie deBoer published an essay entitled “How Elites ate the Social Justice Movement” (https://tinyurl.com/54vwrauf).
deBoer is an academic Marxist, and I certainly don’t endorse his point of view, but I think it’s interesting to see how leftists look at the issue.
I should probably mention that huxley and Neo limited their comments to the financial elite, but deBoer casts a wider net.
J.J.
I forget the exact quote, but Peter Robinson asked Thomas Sowell what advice he would give to young black people. Sowell’s response, which I’ll paraphrase, is the only employment advice any American needs:
“Become proficient in a skill that people will pay for.”
I strongly recommend Carl Trueman’s book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. It doesn’t directly address the phenomenon Huxley and Neo are talking about, but it describes the change in culture over the past couple of centuries which among other things underlie the phenomenon. A quote:
“To follow Rousseau is to make identity psychological. to follow Freud is to make psychology, and thus identity, sexual. To mesh this combination with Marx is to make identity–and therefore sex–political…. To transform society politically, then, one must transform society sexually and psychologically….”
Once leftism became transformed in this way, it was no longer the enemy of big business. The two were allies because they both tend to see the individual as mainly a pleasure-seeking organism. Vigorous and unlimited sexuality was a cause they could both support. Total liberation and expression of the narcissistic self takes money. Working-class culturally conservative people were obstacles to the main program and the left lost interest in their welfare.
I’ve pretty much made my case on this many times before.
This is Classical Liberalism vs. PostModern Liberalism. The former is about the classical elements associate with the Left — freedom, liberty, honor, decency, compassion, and respect for the individual.
The later is about hate and power, pure and simple.
Many decades ago, I read a wonderful piece from American Heritage, still available online, at:
What We Lost In The Great War
by John Steele Gordon July/August 1992
https://www.americanheritage.com/what-we-lost-great-war
It’s a moderately long but interesting piece, and it put me on track for thinking about the development of “PostModern Liberalism”, as opposed to “Classical Liberalism”
Classical Liberals, in the run-up to WWI, were very proud of themselves, arrogant, even, in their belief that humanity could be perfected, that it/they had taken major steps in that direction.
THEN they saw, during WWI, what human stupidity could do with their efforts, and a certain percentage of them turned on it — on Western Civilization itself — “as a woman scorned”. The result was PostModernism, and the political arm, PostModern Liberalism.
A casual examination of PostModernism is clear — it is aimed at nothing less than the total destruction of the foundational underpinnings of Western Civilization — it takes particular aim at the twin foundations of the Judeo-Christian Ethos, as well as the Inheritance of Greek Thought and Ideal. Seriously — take a close look at the tools of PostModernism — moral relativism, deconstruction, pure egalitarianism, Marxism…. all of them attack central tenets of Western Civ, with the goal of invalidating them and repudiating them.
Sara Hoyt says, “Europe felt full of self-loathing. Most countries, each despised itself.”
This is as-designed. PostModernism is all about hating Western Civ, and thus all of Europe, the main source for Western Civ, is under attack. The USA even more so, as we are truly the bastion of the effort — we fail utterly, time and again, to live up to what we stand for — but we try.
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PML is a huge hate-fest filled with self-loathing and blaming Euros (and America!) for doing nothing more than things humans have been doing to each other for millennia, and just being BETTER at it than anyone else… except they also, during the process of developing Western Civ, particularly as a result of that Judeo-Christian Ethos, also developed the notion of the worth of the individual, and the notion of simple human decency due All Men (and Women).
The earlier people of Western Civ failed at many places and times to BE PERFECT? How DARE they!! Everyone since bears absolute guilt for their every sin!! It all needs to be destroyed — after all, how can anything that wasn’t begun from perfection possibly strive to be better and better over time?!!??
And this is where the hatred for America derives from, because America, for all its many faults and failures, has striven — more than any OTHER nation — to try and exemplify those best qualities of Western Civ. We did not start the notion of race-based slavery, but, having had it made a central tenet of our early economy, we had a hard time throwing the yoke off — but we did do it, we fought one of the most bloody Civil Wars in human history to get rid of the primary vestiges of it.
Then we spent another 75-odd years trying to clean up the mess THAT left behind… And, by the 1980s, came pretty close to having fully done so, and achieved much of MLK’s dream, of a land where people would be judged by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. But the quacks and the charlatans saw their opportunities for personal power and wealth threatened, and invented “institutional” racism and falsely conflated inequality of results with racism. And the cultural Marxists, having lost the whole War Against Capitalism, appropriated racism into a new form of Marxism that sells itself as “fairness” and “equity”… because “equality” is work. Equality is engendered by the SELF. And it’s a lot easier to blame others for one’s failures than to work on self-improvement.
“[Harry S] Truman was particularly irked by the ‘professional liberal’, whom he distinguished from ‘real liberals’ like himself. Professional liberals lived by slogans and saw American politics as an ideological war, which Truman considered alien to the genius of the Democratic party. In his lifetime the party was a sort of political melting pot in which conservative Southerners and moderate border-state men like Truman found common ground with Eastern liberals. ‘Professional liberals are too arrogant to compromise,’ Truman said. ‘In my experience they were also very unpleasant people on a personal level. Behind their slogans about saving the world and sharing the wealth with the common man lurked a nasty hunger for power. They’d double-cross their own mothers to get it or keep it’.”
PostModern Liberalism — about 95% or more of all modern self-defined “liberals”, nowadays — are exactly those ‘professional liberals’ Truman railed against — nothing but people out for a power-grab with zero legitimacy and zero ethical responsibility.
So, to Huxley’s question: When did it all happen?” — slowly but surely, starting after WWI, PML developed, and insinuated into every aspect of Western Civ. It took over Europe, and, more slowly, America, first via Acadamia and Art, then, Education. Teaching generation after generation to hate itself and what The West has done Wrong, while ignoring, utterly and completely, all the things it had done right.
If you were “on the Left” prior to that, well:
a — You were almost certainly a “Classical Liberal”, and not a PML. YOU actually wanted to make things better, not gain power and destroy what existed. YOU were not driven by hate**.
b — You got excommunicated, if you did not leave on your own accord, as you were no longer in obedient lockstep with the goosestepping fascists of the PMLs.
“… so: if you want a symbolic gesture, don’t BURN the flag, WASH it!”
– Norman Thomas –
They taught to burn the flag, because they have always wanted to destroy it all. Not reform it. Not fix its problems and reduce its failures. They are about destruction, and always have been about that.
And of course, a lot of it is about power, because some are charlatans, not quacks. But even the quacks want power more than anything else. Because PMLs are also uniformly fascists at heart. They want to tell everyone ELSE What to Do and How to Think.
}}} Back in the 60s/70s the Left was perpetually on guard against being coopted by the Establishment to the point of paranoia.
The whole movement started in the 20s and 30s, so it had actually already been co-opted. Its path was already set in stone and the future planned out for it. The noise about being “co-opted” was window dressing. The fix was already in.
US$0.02 <— Mine, and worth every penny. 😉
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** Realize, “hate” vs. “anger”. One could, particularly as a youth, feel angry about what the government and others did, given Vietnam and many other things (though there were, of course, many many lies taught, and the demand should have always been about functional, effective reform, not throwing money towards supposed solutions. Give people chances to make themselves better, don’t just Give Them Free Shit).
But Anger and Hate are VERY different emotions, even though many conflate the two.
Anger has a CAUSE. Take away the cause, and the Anger fades for lack of “fuel”…
Hate has a TARGET. If you remove the target, the Hate continues, it will simply transfer to something else. The fuel of Hate is… your soul, your well-being, your heart. To stop hating, one must make a serious effort to recognize it for what it is, a self-destructive force, and to reject it. And keep doing so, because, if you have allowed it to overtake you, you’re kind of an addict, in a sense, and must always be on guard against failing your recovery.
“Become proficient in a skill that people will pay for.” – Rufus T.
So simple, so direct, and so true.
The brilliance of Sowell in a nutshell.
We are suffering from a mass delusion in this country. I blame it on the capture of academia by the left, and mass communications proliferation – particularly social media.
Social media uncensored would be a raucous free-for-all of ideas and opinions. Social media as it is now – censored and tailored to a narrative (except for X) – has allowed the left/elites to capture the narrative. That narrative is that this country is on stolen land, built with slave labor, has a constitution that enables racism, is patently unethical in its capitalistic ways, is a climate change enabler, and in bad need of reform.
Such propaganda repeated often enough becomes truth to many otherwise rational humans. Hence, the mass delusion. Thinking about and studying the issues is too difficult for many. They throw their hands up and don’t want to think about it. I know far too many people like that. They still want to believe in a country that will muddle through, and that the government is still of, by, and for the citizen’s.
You’re asking how the pigs took control of the farm & turned out worse than the farmers… Well… there’s your answer.
I don’t think I’m overthinking this: it’s a harsh example which just happened to happen to me recently and may bear on the subject.
There is a family; mom retired and not doing well lives in a trailer, son on disability missing his legs from the knee down but active–on disability, daughter in law on disability but I didn’t find out why.
After many years, the married couple were going to move in with mom. By an unlikely series of coincidences, they were connected to one Aubrey whom they asked to help them move.
So I, with some help, unloaded a 26-foot UHaul. My cardiologist will be happy to know I suffered no distress in five hours of humping heavy loads in the hot sun. Not bad for a seventy-eight year old who prefers the sofa.
The point is not that I’m a hero. Got to pass the time some way. The point is the coincidences. Without those, they’d have been screwed. They had no other resource.
The poor and the otherwise chronically unlucky have no fallback positions.
I had a special needs nephew who passed at the age of thirty-four. My sister, necessarily, was part of and familiar with the community of special-needs families. So few had a parachute. One thing goes wrong….
But see Myron Magnet–The Dream and The Nightmare. The wealthy have parachutes. They can afford to indulge themselves. They have money, lawyers, influence, plenty of resources for a do-over.
Part of Magnet’s thesis is that when these habits–advertised in social and celebrity media– are taken up by those without a reserve chute, the latter are screwed. The habits, the world views, the expenditures, all depend on nothing going wrong. Those who are old enough may recall when there was a certain reluctance among the middle class to buy Cadillacs. Those were only for the snooty rich or the poor blacks. In the latter case, a couple of missed paychecks and the downward spiral started.
And the wealthy can afford to indulge in leftism because they can–maybe they’re correct–abandon it when it’s no longer any fun. They’ll be fine. Which, to a great extent, is true. Or they can withdraw and just keep their heads down–politically–and maintain their lifestyle while indulging their personal wonderfulness in some other way.
The left have managed to make leftism seem morally virtuous and it can be indulged in by the wealthy with no effective downside. So why not? And the elevated moral position gives them more elevation from which to look down on the rest of us.
But they’re not serious. You’re not serious when you know you have one foot out the door, just in case.
OBloodyHell,
That’s a great rundown and there is a lot of truth in it but Marx and Voltaire wrote and wreaked havoc prior to the Great War. I think what you write about the 20th century is basically accurate, but it’s a certain type of person who becomes leaders in these movements.
I think Karl Marx and Bill Ayers and Jussie Smollett are all the same person. Narcissists. And yet the world doesn’t see their brilliance so it must be the world that is wrong, it can’t be them.
deBoer’s an honest man, but in 16 years of seeing occasional commentary by him online, I’ve never seen him advocate anything worthwhile.
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Marxism, like psychoanalysis, is a diversion for people who like to play with ideas. It’s not an apt framework for assessing social relations or human behavior.
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I think our actual problem is that an escalating share of the professional-managerial stratum in this country despises the rest of us (bar their designated pets). Their business is using what tools they have at their command to injure and humiliate us and to destroy crucial features of the common life in the country founded by our ancestors.
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A related problem is the increasing Bourbon quality of the most influential segment of this class. The Biden family presents a grotesque and lurid example of this, the Obamas a more tempered example. Neither man practiced law for more than about four years and neither built their own firm or won a partnership in someone else’s. Yet, there’s Obama sitting on three homes worth about $28 million. Eleanor Roosevelt, who came from money, had two homes she lived in from 1945-62. You can purchase a condominium in her old building for about $1.4 million. A house roughly comparable to her old country home in Dutchess County (which is now a museum property) will set you back about $1.8 million.
You have not mentioned the great wealth of some women. It is not that they are “left”. It is that they truly believe they “will do a better job of running the world” (Melinda Gates, et al)
Microsoft was born and grew in the middle of a very small population of the world’s already wealthiest. Those new owners had to make nice with the union bosses. The link between Boeing unions and Microsoft leadership is very tight and the feminists have had a strong voice in that relationship from the beginning. The unions in Seattle are old and very well established: shipping, aircraft manufacture, banking, timber, Microsoft, and now Amazon et.al. These are the people who have decided how far “left” .
Microsoft was born and grew in the middle of a very small population of the world’s already wealthiest. Those new owners had to make nice with the union bosses. The link between Boeing unions and Microsoft leadership is very tight and the feminists have had a strong voice in that relationship from the beginning. The unions in Seattle are old and very well established: shipping, aircraft manufacture, banking, timber, Microsoft, and now Amazon et.al. These are the people who have decided how far “left” .
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Microsoft was founded in New Mexico in 1977, then relocated to Seattle. Only quite recently has any part of its workforce unionized. (https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/03/microsoft-zenimax-union/). Microsoft was founded not by feminists but by a pair of tech-bros, one of whom had famously bad manners and bad hygiene.
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Paul Allen grew up in a lower middle class family. Bill Gates’ grew up in an up-and-coming haut bourgeois family that grew more prosperous as his father’s legal career advanced. Gates’ father came from an ordinary family. His mother came from a well-to-do if not wealthy family, but even her family’s money was crisp.
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By all accounts, Bill Gates, rude prick that he was, had an oddly affectionate relationship with his mother. He lost her to cancer before he turned 40. Mrs. Gates was a recognizable type among non-ethnic society wives – fundraising for this and that and on the board of this and that. It’s the late Mrs. Gates, not some sort of feminist power drive, which is the inspiration of the philanthropic activity in which the Gates’ have been engaged.
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And note, Microsoft tried to steer clear of political involvements until the Clinton Administration opened up a lawfare campaign against them. The Democratic Party is a skeevy protection racket.
Art Deco: I appreciate your comments and would like to add to them.
Bill Gates and his school friends were hunkered down in NM for a very short time. That is where the “technical idea” for Microsoft was born–not the company. The kid had to come home to Seattle to get the company off the ground in a big way.
It is incorrect to say that the Gates family was “up and coming”. Their ancestors were very successful for some generations if under a different surname.
It is necessary to see Seattle for its geography as well as its families. Those early families who started the early banks, the timber company, shipping, airplane manufacture, etc. started out in the tight quarters of downtown Seattle and later moved family homes over to the other side of the lake and to some degree to Mercer Island.
Generations have gone to the same private schools K-12. HOWEVER, there were always daughters and wives! Through the generations and especially since the end of WW1 these women began speaking loudly to their most powerful husbands, brothers, and fathers. Pacifists and phony intellectuals they embraced socialism without calling it by name. It was the way to assuage the guilt of the incredible profits that were amassed by their own families and tight little community. Not to mention the horrific loss of life that they could not help but feel some guilt about.
These are the women whose daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters have formed a very powerful network. THE network that funded the most recent wave of feminism. THE network that created the first female archbishop of the Episcopal Church. The network that chose Obama and then assured his election. THE group of women who demanded the Episcopal church, and thus all other Protestant churches, embrace homosexuality.
Here is an interesting link. Just one little opener to the story of Seattle and the women’s movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Gates_%26_Ellis
In writing this comment I thought about the influence–the horrific influence in size and scope–that both world wars have had on the wealth of this particular community. I know of only one other American city with a similar history, but on a much smaller scale–Pittsburgh, because of its coal and steel. Similar, but not nearly the same in scale or scope as the influence of war on Seattle. Pittsburgh never had airplanes, nor the shipping. While New Yorkers had to do battle with each other for European influence. Seattle is one of only two major ports to the great Pacific Ocean, giving these families unimaginable connections to China, Japan, etc. To a lesser degree, we should also include Alaska in this geographical part of the discussion. Gold, oil, and the value of the location are also primarily managed by the families of Seattle.
Orwell is ALWAYS germane to the discussion…
“This Will Make Your Blood Boil” – Biden Admin Goes Full Orwell Denying Vaxx Mandates Ever Happened”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/will-make-your-blood-boil-biden-admin-goes-full-orwell-denying-vaxx-mandates-ever
Compare with:
“Biden to Announce $9 Billion More in Student Debt Relief”—
https://www.newsmax.com/us/joe-biden-student-debt/2023/10/04/id/1136900/
Anne,
Your account matches what I know of Bill Gates, his parents and their ancestors. Great synopsis.
Wasn’t it Bill’s mom whose position on a board got he and Paul a meeting with the CEO of IBM that ink’ed their initial DOS/IBM PC deal that made them very rich, very fast?
Wherein [huxley’s] puzzlement lies, is in the presumption that the Left ever genuinely cared about the oppressed.\
Geoffrey Britain:
I’d say the presumption is yours.
I was a leftist, sometimes activist, from the 70s to 9-11. I went to marches and demonstrations. I stood on street corners with a clipboard. I was in affinity groups. I volunteered for leftist organizations. I lived in communes. I voted Democrat or Green. All my friends were leftist or progressive or liberal. I read a ton of leftist books.
The left isn’t theoretical with me. Everyone I knew believed we were trying to help the oppressed, as well as steer the world away from war.
You don’t have to believe it.
Wasn’t it Bill’s mom whose position on a board got he and Paul a meeting with the CEO of IBM that ink’ed their initial DOS/IBM PC deal that made them very rich, very fast?
Rufus T. Firefly:
True. The IBM CEO then was John Opel.
Gates wasn’t just a bright guy coming in from the outside like Steve Jobs. He was a Harvard kid from a rich family with tons of connections.
huxley; Geoffrey Britain:
Not only that, but many of the people on the left (that is, current liberal Democrats) I know still genuinely care about the oppressed. They simply have bought the idea that Democrats care more than nasty Republicans do.
I believe, however, that today’s Democrat leaders (and some of yesterday’s, as well) don’t care about the oppressed, but use the rhetoric of caring as a tool to acquire power, preying on the ignorance and good intentions of some of the rank and file Democrats.
I agree with Anne.
My previous comments about Mercer Island….
“That fall I started a very lonely senior year at Mercer Island High School. A snooty place. I discovered the ‘Seattle Freeze,’ not inclusive. It took about a month for me to come to despise the place. I decided that I wanted out.”
I believe, however, that today’s Democrat leaders (and some of yesterday’s, as well) don’t care about the oppressed, but use the rhetoric of caring as a tool to acquire power, preying on the ignorance and good intentions of some of the rank and file Democrats.
–neo
This is the key distinction. The leaders of the left are not the same as the rank and file of the left.
I’m paraphrasing a poem by James Thurber.
Maybe he wrote it in the 1920s:
The Liberal runs up to someone, and says,
“Come here, brother, and I’ll TELL you HOW to LIVE!”
“HALT!”, says the Conservative.
TR:
Was that, perhaps, the inspiration for:
____________________________
A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.
–William F. Buckley
____________________________
WFB was such a good writer.
Anyway. My original point was that the Woke Left ain’t the Old Left or even the 60s New Left. Those leftists cared (or pretended to care, if you prefer) for the poor and the working-class.
The Woke Left don’t care about the poor or the working class. Thus Michelle Obama’s oppression is far more significant than any trailer park white kid from Appalachia.
But the poor and the working class were once the bread-and-butter for the left.
Hmm…
I say that’s an interesting development, especially if one is interested in taking advantage of the current weaknesses of leftist opponents.
For instance — maybe the Right can make inroads on black and hispanic working-class voters.
Hmm…
huxley,
I’ve made it a point to state and restate that movements, including leftist movements, attract true believers. But the leaders almost always seem to be disgruntled narcissists and egoists. Look at the founder of Earth Day, Kwanzaa, Karl Marx, Voltaire, Bill Ayers, Betty Friedan, Jim Jones, Saul Alinsky, Cloward and Piven, Paul Ehrlich, Timothy Leary, Shoko Asahara, Angela Davis… I think they are all cut from the same cloth. They know they are geniuses and want to be front and center, but society, as it is organized, does not recognize their greatness. So they lash out at that society. They formulate narratives that will appeal to others; often using altruism, but that’s not their motivation. Self aggrandizement is their motivation.
huxley,
Steve Jobs was not a bright guy coming from the outside. The luckiest day of his life was the day he met Steve Wozniak. Jobs couldn’t wire a light switch, but he was greedy and willing to exploit others to enrich himself and he was very fortunate Wozniak is so good natured.
The second luckiest day of his life was when his failing NeXT computer company purchased an image computing hardware company, Pixar, that also failed as a hardware manufacturer. But, unknown to Jobs at the time, Pixar would turn into an extremely lucrative side business making animated features.
Rufus T. Firefly:’
See previous remarks distinguishing between leftist leaders and rank-and-file leftists.
Does anyone on the right these days not notice that conservative leaders may not embody the values of rank-and-file conservatives?
The Michael Stivic character on “All in the Family” is a perfect example of the type of egoist I write of. He’s unable to support his wife and subsequent children, but he’s convinced he is superior in every way to his father-in-law he feeds, shelters and clothes him and Michael’s wife and children. I think Michael’s wife, Gloria, also worked to support him. Not only is Michael convinced he is superior, he never hesitates to explain to Archie Bunker how wrong and base Archie is.
huxley,
I agree. Jerry Fallwell, Jimmy Swaggert, Larry Craig, Joe McCarthy… the list goes on and on…
That’s why I don’t view it as a Left-Right phenomenon. There are just as many greedy hucksters willing to wave the stars and stripes to fill their pockets as there are Colin Kapernicks and Megan Rapinoe’s willing to walk on the stars and stripes to fill theirs.
Steve Jobs was not a bright guy coming from the outside.
Rufus T. Firefly:
As far as I’m concerned, you way underestimate Steve Jobs.
I kinda hate Jobs and I am not unaware of his weak spots. Nonetheless, the guy was a natch and a phenom and a damn hard worker.
Sure, Jobs made mistakes and some bad gambles. But those were cutthroat treacherous times. There were plenty of also-rans from that era.
Steve Jobs wasn’t one and Apple now has a higher capitalization than Microsoft.
My comment at 10:11 should read, “his father-in-law WHO feeds, not, his father-in-law he feeds.”
huxley,
Your impression of Steve Jobs does not coincide with reality. Read about how he cheated and lied to Wozniak. Read about how he went to court to withhold money from his daughter and her mother, even after drawing attention to himself by naming a computer after her. (Especially ironic, since Jobs himself was adapted and raised by two generous, loving parents.) Read about how he verbally abused and denigrated brilliant engineers, often firing them or denying them profits after they worked like dogs to try to make Jobs’ designs work.
I think, towards the end of his life he may have truly become a good and kind man. I hope he did. But there is a hagiography about the first 4 or so decades of his life that do not correlate with who he was and what he did and did not do. There is a reason the Apple board got rid of him.
Hi huxley,
Thanks for the quote.
Who knows? Maybe Mr. Thurber inspired Mr. Buckley.
I’d really like it if he did.
Cheers. 😀
Nothing wrong with making mistakes and losing some business gambles. It’s how you treat those around you that matters and Jobs was an absolute jerk to many, many people, even people who did wonderful things for him. And he took credit for everything.
If Wozniak hadn’t met Jobs, Wozniak would have been a successful computer entrepreneur worth billions. If Jobs hadn’t met Wozniak, Jobs would be asking people if they want fries with their order.
Read this reddit thread and research the history people reference about Jobs, Wozniak, Lisa… https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/b4pppe/til_that_steve_jobs_lied_to_steve_wozniak_when/
Steve Jobs must have had a fantastic publicist. So many people believe he did things he never did. I especially get a kick out of the people who praise him for being a computer whiz.
“When the truth become legend print the legend.”
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Anne on October 4, 2023 at 12:40 pm said:
“Seattle is one of only two major ports to the great Pacific Ocean…”
Only if Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Oakland are considered one port.
Never mind Portland, Oregon. It moves less than half the cargo that Port Hueneme,* California does.
* good luck pronouncing that name correctly
Sarah Hoyt linked to this post at Instapundit and added this (I agree. She nails it.):