The Democratic Party once championed masculine brutality. Now it runs on feminine cruelty. Another civil war coming up? By Helen Dale.
The Democrats were the Party of the slave-owning plantation elite, and then of Southern Jim Crow segregation. It was never just the Party of those things, but they were large parts of its history. …
Slavery is classic masculine brutality. Slavery is built on the twin humiliations of physical brutality and sexual exploitation. [No further explanation required.] …
Today, the left has migrated to female-typical aggression and cruelty:
That a lot of modern left-progressivism is strongly female — even apart from the gender gap in voting — is something many folk have observed. …
The soaring increase in prejudice terms (racism, sexism, transphobia, etc.) in scholarly abstracts corresponds quite directly with the sharply declining public standing of higher education in the US. The similar surging use of those terms in mainstream media coincides with the collapse of US mainstream media audiences.
These prejudice terms do not correspond to trends in wider society. On the contrary, what they represent is an increase in the use of terms of moral abuse to elevate one’s own status and de-legitimise dissent and disagreement. Hence we get the burgeoning phenomenon of the hate crime hoax, as demand for bigotry greatly exceeds the supply.
It’s also led to a situation where almost two-thirds of Americans report they have political views they are afraid to share. This naturally leads to a lot of preference falsification — a problem for pollsters, among others. It also leads to a lot of resentment, which a media-savvy politician can tap.
First came the feminists:
When we look at mobbing and shunning, and the dynamics of cancel culture, we can see patterns — now enabled and facilitated by social media — that first manifested in their modern form in the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The organised, networked form of targeting folk for what they say — attempting to destroy reputations, careers, livelihoods — was then pioneered by activists claiming to operate on behalf of Jewish communities. (The hostility this activism generated in countries without the First Amendment has quite a lot to do with why Jews find themselves increasingly friendless now they have lost cultural power.)
What women and Jews have in common is a vision of themselves as peaceful people. It is self-delusion: there is nothing peaceful about attempting to systematically hound people, to deny them a voice, to seek to destroy their careers, reputations, livelihoods — particularly not for things they merely said.
While humans in general have considerable capacity for self-deception, a key feature of both female aggression and female cruelty is that it typically cannot see itself. This flows directly from women being the physically weaker sex with — if they were to have any genetic legacy — bubs in tow. Aggression (and cruelty) had to be hidden to avoid provoking retaliation to which they were very vulnerable.
Moreover, only a fraction of our cognition is conscious. To lie consciously requires a lot of cognitive effort. The right sort of self-deception enables much more cognitively-coherent sincerity in one’s actions. The way to engage in aggression and cruelty without it seeming to be such — even to oneself — is to dress it up as moral concern, as social concern. Intensifying the aggression — and the cruelty — requires wielding the weapon of stigma.
Wielding moral/social concern as a form of aggression in such ways means that it is much more likely to be effective. It is also much easier for it to spill over into cruelty. This self-deception is much of the basis of the claim that cancel culture does not exist: it is just moral concern, just social concern. …
Prestige and propriety:
Prestige is status and admiration: it comes from doing things which are clever, skilled, or risky. It mobilises status as social currency to reward — and so encourage — folk to engage in activities which generate positive externalities: actions that benefit third parties, such as strengthening social connections and capacities.
Propriety is status and admiration: it comes here from adhering to wider social norms. It is hard to gain propriety. It’s much easier to lose it. The reverse of propriety is stigma: the loss of status from failure to adhere to proper behaviour. It mobilises negative status to discourage folk from engaging in activities with negative externalities: actions that harm third parties, such as weakening social connections and capacities.
Prestige has tended to be male: those who can’t get pregnant and don’t have bubs in tow can far more readily engage in the sort of obsessive risk-taking that generates prestige.
Propriety — and particularly stigmatising — tends to be more female. This is so whether from seeking social safety, as a safer weapon than overt aggression, or as a better cover for cruelty. (Women are every bit as likely as men to be violent or abusive to those weaker than themselves.)
Prestige and propriety are incredibly useful social mechanisms for a species with such biologically expensive children requiring cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies. These strategies transfer risks away from, and resources to, childrearing. …
Religion plays an important role in wielding power:
A sense of the divine generated a shared framework of ultimate authority. Religious sensibility also generates a sense of the sacred: the realm against, or at least outside of which, trade-offs are not accepted. …
One of the many ways in which left-progressivism can act as a political or secular religion is in generating zealots. Zealots are notorious as both products of—and drivers for—religion becoming cruel and intolerant. …
The left, past and present, runs on a caste system:
One of the most obvious similarities between the masculine brutality of past Democratic Party and the feminine cruelty of present Democratic Party is both of them operate a moral caste system. In the past, it was a racial moral caste system, according to a black-white binary, which nevertheless had implicit gradings within both races.
The current moral caste system of intersectionality is more complex. Indeed, it is positively Brahmin in its complexity.
Like all moral caste systems, it is a structure of presumptive deferral. The intersectionality moral caste system operates according to oppressed/oppressor, marginalised/dominant pairs. Doctrinal adherence gives you extra credit, while doctrinal heresy or blasphemy casts you out. This is how Larry Elder famously became the “black face of white supremacy”. Meanwhile, Peter Thiel was not gay because he supported Donald Trump.
If a group is sacred, their claims cannot be traded-off. Others must give way. Trans are sacred, so women must defer to them.
Women are marginalised compared to men, so men must defer to them. It is fine to celebrate appointing a woman to whatever, not so to celebrate appointing a man. It is fine for some social good to be disproportionately female, it is a moral blot if some social good is disproportionately male. Thus, the publishing industry being overwhelmingly female is fine, STEM being predominantly male is not.
Leftist cruelty — do as we say, or lose your reputation and livelihood:
The most obvious cruelty in the intersectional moral caste system is in its relentless use of stigma. To mob someone, to attempt to destroy their reputation, livelihood, career — because they said something that you disagree with — is moralised cruelty. To shame, shun, belittle, someone because they have a different perspective, different concerns, to you, and then to do so at scale, is cruel. To seek to cut people off from their most valued connections, is cruel. (The act of official cruelty during Covid that folk most often cite is people dying alone, isolated from friends and family who were banned from being with them.)
The shaming and shunning, the belittling, the in-your-face nagging and scolding: this is classic feminine cruelty. It has elements of infantilising — dissenters are moral, cognitive and psychological inferiors to be talked down to. It has elements of overblown empathy and emotionalism — you have bad emotions, you are not deferring correctly. It has elements of misidentified predator — you are being a hateful bigot, motivated by maleficent intentions, your speech is violent, it makes me unsafe.
The oppressed/oppressor, the marginalised/dominant template provides the moralising structure for such cruelty. The invocation of that held to be sacred is no stop to the cruelty. …
One of the astonishing features of the first operation of the original, Marxist, version of the oppressed/oppressor template in the Soviet Union was the incredible cruelty the operatives of the regime felt entitled to engage in, which extended to vicious and murderous physical cruelty.
The contemporary version of the updated template stops at the emotional, social-connection, social-standing level. It is still moralised cruelty.
So entitled:
“We feel entitled to police all parts of your language, even in your private communications. We feel entitled to say what concerns are, and are not, legitimate. We feel entitled to police your information sources. We feel entitled to police your expression of views. We feel entitled to tell you what is, or is not, a legitimate way to vote. We feel entitled to invoke new sins, and to overturn long-established categories—;while excusing actual crimes.”
What makes all this both disorienting and infuriating is how it’s all parsed in the language of ostentatious compassion. This is made worse because those involved are not able to see themselves. Which is — when it comes to cruelty and aggression — particularly (but not only) feminine. …
Mass migration:
The notion of humans as socially-interchangeable widgets generated the notion—what the UN was pleased to call replacement migration—of importing people to replace the children who were not being born.
It turns out — especially if migrants are from highly clannish cultures that have been marrying their cousins for 1400 years, and are generally low skill — they can be a net drain on the fisc. Making the fiscal situation of one’s welfare state worse via migration policies seems an act of remarkable fiscal incompetence on the part of Western European states. But academic economists treating people as interchangeable social widgets provided cover for such incompetence. …
False claims about migrants and migration, along with failures to grapple with the flaws of bureaucracy, and ludicrous over-investment in higher education — which, among other effects, has led cultural conflicts to overwhelm attention to economic policy — have led to grotesque failure. …
All this has led to working-class voters to shift towards populist parties that are willing to elevate citizenship — and the security of common heritage — over the corrosive effects of migration.
Destructively divisive:
The notion that the Republicans are the Party of the middle class and the Democrats are the Party of everyone else does not describe contemporary US politics.
Under Trump, the Republicans are reverting to what they were in the 1850s: a protectionist party resting on working-class votes mobilising against an exploitive and contemptuous elite. In a case of history rhyming but not repeating, the original Republican Party was against an elite of masculine brutality; it is now against one of feminine cruelty.
Like the pre-Civil War election of 1860:
Isn’t this a spiralled-up new version of US politics as it was in the lead-up to the American Civil War? Not a repeating, but a powerful rhyming? Yes, it absolutely is. This in a situation where, just as mass migration in the lead-up to 1860 fractured the American Republic along its fault-line of slavery, mass migration is nowadays fracturing the American Republic along its metro/provincial and college educated/non college-educated fault-lines.
The politics of cruelty are the politics of entitlement: both over and against the choices of others. When the election of Abraham Lincoln as US President threatened to create and empower the coalition seen as an existential threat — between the slaves and the “masterless men”, the “poor white trash” — the then practitioners of the politics of masculine cruelty felt entitled to reject the act of democratic choice that was the 1860 Presidential election.
A similar wave of rage and entitlement is being played out against the act of democratic choice of the 2024 US Presidential Election. Like the politics of brutality, the politics of cruelty is showing itself to the politics of entitlement both over and against the choices of others. This goes beyond the embracing of the politics of censorship — of “words are violence”, of “silence is violence”, of the censoring in the name of blocking “dis- mis- and mal-” information. It extends to rage and contempt at those who “chose wrongly”, who “chose vilely”. …
Their ultimately narcissistic rage is intense. Their politics previously burnt US cities down in the cause of the lie of murderous police racism.
A big picture with a lot to unpack. More at the link.