A common rhetorical tactic of the Left is to accuse their opponents of sounding angry–as if all the folks in flyover country whom the coastal bubble dwellers bitterly hate are a legion of hotheaded Skywalkers charged with a violation of the Jedi Code.
An even worse sin than general anger is “partisan anger”, i.e. getting mad at the people who’ve been working nonstop to ruin your life for decades because they hate you. Canny rhetoricians will note that the “you sound angry” card is an admission of guilt on the part of the Lefty who’s playing it.
The Left isn’t entirely wrong, though. There is a rising tide of partisan anger in America at present. They’re just wrong about where it’s directed.
I was privy to a discussion in which a down-on-his-luck tech industry veteran was denied a job by a small business owner and ideological fellow traveler. Why? Because of the latter’s hard and fast policy against hiring anyone who’s been out o a job for more than three months.
You already know these gentlemen’s political persuasion. Leftists never let trivialities like job history, relevant experience, personality, or even basic competence get in the way of packing their offices with fellow cult members. The Equifax debacle proves that.
This is why the SJW swarm and disemploy tactic remains effective. Not only are conservative employers quick to offer their workers’ scalps to SJW hate mobs; they participate in the social justice blacklist by taking the manufactured charges seriously and treating disemployed targets like lepers.
Conservatives pride themselves on being entrepreneurs. If they stopped caving to the point and shriek routine, it would lose its effectiveness overnight.
Imagine if conservative business owners refused to fire employees at the SJWs’ whim. Let’s go a step further. What if conservatives made a point of hiring victims of SJW mobs? (Rank heresy to “best candidate for the job regardless of political persuasion” free marketeers, I know.) Going way out on a limb, think of what would happen if conservative managers proactively fired all confirmed SJWs working at their companies.
“A whole slew of wrongful termination lawsuits is what would happen!” I can hear a gaggle of conservatives whine. I’m not advocating that anyone break the law. Just look to the Left, though, and you’ll see they’ve found creative ways to terminate wrongthinkers while keeping their noses clean. Exhibit A: former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich being pressured to resign for perfectly legal behavior that was also in line with reason and natural law–two concepts that conservatives claim to hold in high regard.
Which major conservative tech firm picked Eich up? Answer: nobody–possibly because there are no major conservative tech firms, which speaks volumes.
The grim workplace reality that anyone to the right of Chairman Mao has to deal with is that you’re on your own. No one is going to stick his neck out for you when the SJWs call for your head, and no one will care. After all, they’ve got theirs, and they’d hate to lose it.
It’s not just tech, either. Hard as it is to believe, almost every cultural and business institution in America was once what we’d now call conservative. Walt Disney once fired every communist from his studio. Science fiction stories used to take Western, Christian morals for granted. Harvard and Yale started out as seminaries.
How did we lose all of these institutions? There were concerted efforts to converge these organizations, to be sure. But these attempts wouldn’t have succeeded if not for a fact that has become painfully clear: conservatives are cowards. They talk a good game about standing on principle, but the inescapable conclusion is that they don’t really believe what they’re saying. People who truly believe in and are informed by principles act on them.
Was your job shipped overseas or sacrificed to the SocJus death cult? Your conservative friends will tell you to hit the books and learn chemical engineering. Or move to North Dakota and work the oil fields. Or slum it as a janitor to avoid the dreaded job history gap on your resume.
Never mind that the STEM jobs are going to H1Bs, and the unskilled blue-collar jobs are going to illegal aliens. Never mind that real wages have been stagnant since the 70s. And never mind that our ruggedly independent, principled conservatives won’t try any such desperate measures themselves.
After all, they’ve got theirs. And they forge their principles in the tradition of Cain, the original agribusiness pioneer. Screw you for playing the victim!
Yes, there’s a great deal of partisan anger. And unless Hindu cow conservatives bestir themselves to support those who are suffering for their principles, they’ll find themselves the most principled guys on the cinder.
Brian
so how do we disrupt their OODS loop? One strategy is to investigate who funds them and cut off the oxygen supply. Then how to counter their anti reality ideology?
Kinda heard to reason with creeps
xavier
This comment has been removed by the author.
I give a response.
Rawle
thanks that's quite helpful but is the practicality an Anglosphere phenomenon? The European right (I mean the centrists) appear to quite aware of the importance of culture but simply can't any traction…until now. And even
then
xavier
Nice, Rawle! You ran my pass in for a touchdown 🙂
Thanks, Brian.
You're welcome.
This article might be germane:
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/08/utilitarian-economics-corruption-conservatism/
Utilitarianism is a huge part of the zeitgeist. It's less blatant on the right than the left, but it's there.
Utilitarianism informs liberals' and conservatives' worldviews because both liberalism and conservatism are Modernist ideologies (actually shades of the same Classical Liberal ideology). Conservatives are just less up front about it.
I loathe Utilitaranism and that animus was reinforced when I studied political philosophy at the university.
It's also a bane of Anglosphere conservatism. I wonder how we can acquaint its sympathizers with the contential esthetics (I'm pointedly thinking of St Tomas Aquinas and the Salamanca school)
Your post brings us back to Jeffro or Jasyn's post at Castalia House as to what is Beauty?
Those of us who are preservationalists need to very seriously grapple with that question and present some very cogent arguments for beauty that blows Gramscian and other neo Marxist esthetic theories out of the water
xavier
Holy hell, this has given me quite a bit to think about.
I imagine a way to re-establish a kind of balance is to keep supporting creative endeavors that bring actual divergence of thought to the table then.
Fiannawolf.
"Holy hell, this has given me quite a bit to think about."
At yer service.
The "principled" were given their own reservation that they rule over and can do whatever they want as long as they don't rock the boat.
That's why they don't.
They want things to be the way they are and don't want anything to change. After all, they get called heroes and warriors for doing absolutely nothing at all.
Bingo.