The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Church of Fear: Desperate Democrats Have Become the Prophets of Doom

Posted on | August 31, 2018 | Comments Off on The Church of Fear: Desperate Democrats Have Become the Prophets of Doom

 

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
H. L. Mencken

After a hectic few days here at Chez McCain — our Army son and his wife are in town, among other things — I fell asleep Thursday night re-reading The Russian Revolution by Alan Moorehead (1958) and, after waking up to get my first cup of coffee, began checking in online to discover what I’ve missed lately. One depressing tidbit, pointed out by libertarian writer Cathy Young, was that anti-Semites have begun claiming that the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web,” maligned by the Left as a crypto-fascist “alt-right” scheme, is actually run by (of course) the JOOOOZZZ!

The persistence of such paranoid obsessions is discouraging, but should be expected, so my eye-rolling dismay at the “IDW JQ” is probably unnecessary — the fringe is gonna fringe, the kooks are gonna kook, and you just have to learn to shrug this off. And I suppose by now I should also not be surprised to read dangerous nonsense on the op-ed pages of the New York Times. Take it away, Pankaj Mishra:

Hate crimes continue to rise across the United States, Britain and Canada. More ominously, demographic, economic and political decline, and the loss of intellectual hegemony, have plunged many long-term winners of history into a vengeful despair.
A century ago, the mere suspicion of being thrust aside by black and yellow peoples sparked apocalyptic visions of “race suicide.” Today, the “preponderance of China” that [19th-century Australian author Charles Henry] Pearson predicted is becoming a reality, and the religion of whiteness increasingly resembles a suicide cult. Mr. Trump’s trade wars, sanctions, border walls, deportations, denaturalizations and other 11th-hour battles seem to push us all closer to the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once outlined: that the rulers of the “higher races,” “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.”

You can read the whole thing, which has been re-tweeted by every liberal with a wifi connection, perhaps because it’s a brown man telling white liberals what they want to believe, i.e., that Trump’s presidency represents nothing but the last dying gasp of “white supremacy.”

This is simply a rationalization of defeat for Democrats and their leftist sympathizers around the world who had believed that Barack Obama’s presidency represented a permanent revolution in American politics, the final defeat of everything the Left has always hated about America. The Democrats shoved all their chips onto the table betting on Hillary Clinton to win what the Left imagined would be in essence Obama’s third term and, when she lost in November 2016, this provoked an existential crisis on the Left, not only in the United States but worldwide. If Trump could defeat Hillary, after all, what was to prevent a right-populist uprising against left/center hegemony anywhere else? The answer to that question proved to be “not much,” and suddenly every country in Europe seemed to sprout its own Trump-style populist movement.

The #Brexit vote in England, along with the triumph of Viktor Orban in Hungary and Matteo Salvini in Italy, further exposed the weakness of the left/center establishment that had supported mass immigration of Muslim “refugees” into Europe. Almost overnight, it seemed, the establishment was on the defensive everywhere, challenged by right-populist voices who were tired of being passive spectators to the enactment of a policy agenda imposed on them by political elites who claimed that they were merely following an inevitable trend of “progress.” It was not a latter-day fascism, but mere common sense, that inspired citizens to wonder whether the changes to their society were really “progress” at all. Once they became skeptical about that, people with common sense realized that there was nothing inevitable about these changes, because they could vote out the elitist politicians who were implementing these changes and elect leaders who would stop this agenda of so-called “progress.” Thus, Trumpism has become a worldwide phenomenon, and the Left is frightened and desperate.

But let’s remember Vox Day’s Three Laws of SWJs:

1. SJWs Always Lie.
2. SJWs Always Double Down.
3. SJWs Always Project.

Pankaj Mishra’s op-ed represents the psychological projection aspect of this. Because the Left’s anti-white agenda of flooding Europe and America with Third World refugees is finally being met with organized political resistance, Mishra claims this is an expression of irrational fear, rather than a change justified by legitimate concerns about the consequences of the center-left establishment’s open-borders policies. Instead of admitting the reality of what has happened (i.e., people finally waking up to where the elite’s policy agenda is leading us), instead Mishra has to reach back in time to the late 19th-century to craft a clever narrative of how Trumpism represents a revival of discredited racial theories of the past. The New York Times publishes this, and every liberal on Twitter re-tweets it, because this explanation flatters the sensibilities of the elite, who are always eager to believe that they are “on the right side of history,” and that their critics are reactionary troglodytes in thrall to obsolete “myths” and ignorantly opposed to “progress.”

To the ruling elite, “progress” is always synonymous with their own success and influence, without regard for the welfare of the societies over which they feel themselves entitled to rule. During the 1930s, the elite in England favored appeasement of Hitler, and they smeared Winston Churchill as a warmonger, an enemy of “progress.” Even after the catastrophic course of events proved Churchill had been right all along, the appeasers never really accepted responsibility for their errors, and the lessons of Munich were largely forgotten. To this day, the peace-at-any-price mentality of the Chamberlainites continues to prevail among the elite, whose characteristic prejudices seem impervious to facts.

In this way, liberals are much like anti-Semites, whose Argus-eyed vigilance enables them to find Jewish influence everywhere. There has never been a time in the past 80 years when anyone who opposed the Left could avoid the accusation of “fascism.” Harry Truman was a fascist, according the Left, and so was Churchill. In 1951, when Bill Buckley published God and Man at Yale, one reviewer denounced him thus:

“The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face.”

Yes, the Yale-educated intellectual Buckley was likened to a Klansman, and the same reviewer (who was, not coincidentally, a Yale trustee) also accused Buckley of employing “the technique of Dr. Goebbels.”

In my own lifetime, I have watched the Left smear their enemies in many different ways. During the 1990s, Richard Mellon Scaife was one of their demonized scapegoats, in the same way the libertarian Koch brothers have more recently been demonized. Not so long ago, we were assured by liberals that the Religious Right was seeking to impose “theocracy” on America, but a few years later, the same people insisted that the real danger was war-mongering “neoconservatives.” The latest hobgoblin in this parade of right-wing monsters (a continual pageant of fear produced by Democrats and their media allies) is the “white nationalist” threat blamed for Trump’s election. Liberals expect us to believe that we are living amid an epidemic of “hate crimes” for which Trump and his supporters are to blame, although evidence for this alleged epidemic is hard to verify. (See, for example, Chad Felix Greene, “The Reported Spike In Anti-LGBT Homicides Is Fake News,” Jan. 31.) This sort of political clairvoyance, claiming a magical ability to detect a “climate of hate” whenever Republicans win an election, is an evasive tactic, a way for Democrats to distract attention from their own failures.

If Hillary had won, they’d be telling us we’re living through a new Golden Age of Progress and Equality, no matter what the facts actually were. Because she lost, however, liberals want us to believe we’re living through a neo-fascist nightmare. This enables Democrats to continue promoting the same left-wing policy agenda that voters rejected in 2016, without pausing to consider the possibility that those voters were right. In other words, the claim that Republicans won because of a secret dog-whistle “racist” message is a way for Democrats to avoid admitting that they deserved to lose the election. Not once in my lifetime have I seen Democrats admit, after losing an election, that maybe the Republicans just had better ideas. Even after the pathetic 1988 Dukakis debacle — the third consecutive landslide defeat for Democrats in the 1980s — there was a resistance to accepting that, for example, releasing rapists from prison on furlough might be a bad policy. No, it was those dastardly Republicans and their racism that were to blame, liberals told themselves, and they’re still making the same excuse now.

Trump is president, the economy has never been better, and yet Democrats are still inviting Americans to worship in the Church of Fear — vote Democrat to exorcise those racist white demons — because this doom-and-gloom pessimism is the only message they’ve got.

We are less than 10 weeks away from the midterms, and if Democrats are defeated again, it will be because menacing the public with imaginary racist hobgoblins is no substitute for a coherent policy agenda.



 

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