patrick.net

Concerned mainly with the lives of working people, the Old Left, despite its unrealistic expectations, was still fairly grounded in reality. The New Left, by contrast, is characterized by delusional beliefs, the gospel of the identity-politics zealots. New Left intellectuals therefore seem to live in a different world from the rest of us. How does this happen? In part because these persons tend to come from wealth and remain at a certain comfortable remove from the destructive consequences of their ignorance. It is, indeed, the function of wealth to obscure what would otherwise be clear. Wealth not only corrupts the soul; it also makes one stupid, allowing for ideas that appear plausible only because they are never put to the test of practical experience, wherein something more than the approval of fellow frauds and cowards is at stake. ...

Unlike the ordinary academic “political theorist,” a white person living in a London slum can see for himself that, for women, Islam is de facto sex slavery. Observing Muslims live, he also notices no distinction between what we Westerners call church and state. For Islam, religion is the state. So this poor white person has no sentimental illusions about Islam’s compatibility with the West, because experience has shown him the impossibility of that project. And since his more honest and manly way of life does not require paying lip service to genteel cant—that is, what the vulgar success-crowd class calls morality—you won’t hear any intellectual herd chatter about diversity and inclusion and the like from this hearty and straightforward character.

It is not so with the diversity fundamentalists. Driven by needless guilt, petty envy, and, much less often, compassion, they have an anxious desire to believe that peoples and human nature itself are as conveniently shapable and interchangeable as the nifty gadgets affluent Westerners rely on to live lives of unprecedented ease, and correspondingly, unprecedented corruption.