Anger Privilege

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

 

If you want to know who has privilege in a society and who doesn’t, follow the anger. There are people in this country who can safely express their anger. And those who can’t. If you were angry that Trump won, your anger was socially acceptable. If you were angry that Biden took over, it wasn’t.

Not all anger is created equal. Some anger is privileged rage.

Good anger gets you a gig as a CNN commentator. Bad anger gets you hounded out of your job. Good anger isn’t described as anger at all. Instead it’s whitewashed as “passionate” or “courageous”. Bad anger however is “worrying” or “dangerous”. Angry left-wing protesters “call out”, angry right-wing protesters “threaten”. Good anger is left-wing. Bad anger is right-wing.

Socially acceptable displays of anger, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter riots to the anti-Trump marches to the furious campus protests, are invariably left-wing.

Not all anger is created equal. Anger, like everything else, is ideologically coded. Left-wing anger is good because its ideological foundations are good. Right-wing anger is bad because its ideology is bad.

It’s not the level of anger, its intensity or its threatening nature that makes it good or bad.

And that is why the left so easily slips into violence. All its ideological ends are good. Therefore its means, from mass starvation to gulags to riots and tyranny, must be good. If I slash your tires because of your Biden bumper sticker”, I’m a monster. But if you key my car because of my Trump bumper sticker, you’re fighting racism and fascism. Your tactics might be in error, but your viewpoint isn’t.

There are no universal standards of behavior. Civility, like everything else, is ideologically limited.

The left prides itself on an unearned moral superiority reinforced by its own echo chamber even as it has become incapable of controlling its angry outbursts.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is a symptom of a problem with the left that existed before he was born. The left is an angry movement. It is animated by an outraged self-righteousness whose moral superiority doubles as dehumanization. And its machinery of culture glamorizes its anger.

But monopolies on anger only work in totalitarian states. In a free society, both sides are expected to control their anger and find terms on which to debate and settle issues. The left rejects civility and refuses to control its anger. The only settlement it will accept is absolute power. If an election doesn’t go its way, it will overturn the results. If someone offends it, he must be punished. Or there will be anger.

The angry left demands that everyone recognize the absolute righteousness of its anger as the basis for its power. This anger privilege, like tone policing, is often cast in terms of oppressed groups. But its anger isn’t in defiance of oppression, but in pursuit of oppression.

Anger privilege is used to silence opposition, to enforce illegal policies and to seize power. But the left’s monopolies on anger are cultural, not political. The entertainment industry and the media can enforce anger privilege norms through public shaming, but their smears can’t stop the consequences of the collapse of civility in public life. There are no monopolies on emotion.

When anger becomes the basis for political power, then it won’t stop .

The left likes to think that its anger is good anger because it’s angry over the plight of illegal aliens, Muslim terrorists, transgender bathrooms, the lack of abortion in South Carolina, the minimum wage at Taco Bell, budget cuts, tax cuts, police arrests, drone strikes and all the other ways in which reality differs from its utopia. But all that anger isn’t the road to a better world, but to hate and violence.

Millions of leftists are told every day that Republicans are responsible for everything wrong with their lives, the country and the planet. Despite everything they do, all the petitions they sign, the marches they attend, the donations, the angry letters, the social media rants, Republicans continue to exist and even be elected to public office. Where does that anger go?

Either we have a political system based on existing laws and norms of civility. Or we have one based on mob violence and terror. And there are already a whole bunch of those south of the border.

Leftist anger is a privileged bubble of entitlement that bursts every other election. Its choice is to try to understand the rest of the country or to intimidate, censor, oppress and eventually kill them. 

Daniel Greenfield is a columnist, an investigative journalist and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Marx and the Rioters

June 17, 2020 By Wen Wryte
 
You can see revolutionary Marxism made real in the violence and destructiveness of these “protests”, and you can see the narcissism and nihilism being expressed in the self-justificatory rhetoric of the participants and the demonizing of anyone the mob decides ought to be hated and destroyed.

If the cultural cancer of 21st century progressivism is ever to be successfully eradicated it will first be necessary for it to be seen for what it really is: a form of neo-Marxism that aims to destroy capitalism, and with it, Western civilization. The roots of the current wave of pathological irrationality, intellectual deformity, and moral underdevelopment reach far back into the early 19th century in Europe, with the German idealist philosopher GWF Hegel’s idea of historical determinism.

Marx seized on Hegel's dialectical system (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) and his philosophy of history and combined these with his own theory of class conflict as the determinants of social, economic, and political progress. Marx claimed that history led deterministically to the one defining moment of the age and that it was left to a unique historically determined genius -- Marx himself -- to educate the world about this...................Marx’s stroke of evil genius was his collectivist ideology of oppression based on economic class..........To Read More.....

Stop Sucking Your Thumbs, Liberals, and Get a Clue

By Christopher Chantrill

It must be the holidays, because a lot of liberal media types are publishing end-of-year thumbsuckers on democracy. In the Atlantic, Peter Beinart writes that Americans are becoming more liberal; in the New Republic, David Dayen says no, they are not. And over at Vox, Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk show with the World Values Survey that democracy is in trouble as Americans, and people all over the world, are losing faith in it.

What’s a conservative to think? Are liberals throwing in the towel, and ready to hand the keys of the kingdom over to conservatives? Hardly. The tone is more about how ungrateful the plebs are, after all liberals have done for them.

Peter Beinart is all excited by the activism of Black Lives Matter and Occupy as markers of a leftward move, as if these regime supporters represented anything other than regime-sponsored activism theater. But Dayen points to the Big Problem: we’ll need more taxes just to deliver on the entitlement promises. And Foa and Mounk report that more and more people across the world are leaning towards the idea of “have the army rule.” So what is really going on?......Get a clue, liberals. We are in the current mess because of you. Let me count the ways.......To Read More...

Why Most Rich 1 Percenters Would Give Anything To Be Among The 99%

Louis Woodhill

If the Democrats are not (electorally) washed away by a tsunami of voter outrage over Obamacare, they will no doubt seek to make “growing inequality” the principal issue in the 2014 elections. So, let’s apply a little unconventional logic to the subject of inequality.

The “Occupy Wall Street” crowd that took over New York City’s Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011 was protesting inequality. They seemed infuriated that “the one percent” was so much better off than “the 99 percent.” But is this really true?........The Occupy Guy is better off. .....And why is that? Because the Occupy Guy is 24 and the FFHFC is 70.   Almost any 70-year-old male would gladly trade all of his worldly goods for a healthy 24-year-old body, even if it came complete with $20,000 in student loans. And, very few 24-year-olds would take the other end of that deal—not even for $41.1 billion.....To Read More....

My Take - There are some points here that should be obvious to the most casual 0bserver, but I’m going to outline them anyway.  First, the “evil” 1% usually worked all their life to accumulate their wealth.  Those OWS representing the “good” 99% only want what the 1% has and worked for without any effort on their part and without waiting.  They want what others have worked for and they want it now.  The old and ‘evil’ wealthy would be more than willing to give it to them if they would give them their youth because they know they with their drive, intelligence, ambition and work ethic [now enhanced by 70 years experience in life] they would have it all back in five years.  The OWS losers would be broke in five years, demanding the rich give them back their youth and their money.