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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Samizdata quote of the day

In answer to: Why can’t the Left let go of Trump?

It is the same reason a certain ilk of Remainers can’t let go of Brexit, and why the Left in media & academia can’t let go of GamerGate. These were each a cultural Stalingrad, defeats that indicated the world did not work the way High Status opinion demands that you think & say it does. Hoi Polloi keep throwing bricks through the Overton window & polite society really doesn’t like that.

So the people invested in these High Status opinions (shared by everyone they know) are obsessed by the fact they suffered defeats when they are suppose to own the future. They may have gotten rid of Trump now but the fact he was elected in the first place gives lie to their comfortable “inevitable march of history” narrative

– Perry de Havilland

39 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • pete

    The modern middle class left identify themselves and bond with each other by what they hate.

    They are angry people, full of bile.

    They can’t stand the rich and they despise the working class.

  • Well, speaking as a member of the modern upper middle class, rich but not plutocratically so (sadly), I think your description is a bit too broad-brush. But yes, that does indeed describe the bourgeoise left.

  • Philip Scott Thomas

    Hoi Poli keep throwing bricks through the Overton window…

    Nice one.

    Also, I agree completely.

  • John Lewis

    So she’s saying it’s the leftists who are “still so angry” despite winning their free and fair election?

    I had thought they would go full Akhenaten (“After his death, Akhenaten’s monuments were dismantled and hidden, his statues were destroyed, and his name excluded from lists of rulers compiled by later pharaohs”) but maybe the need to hate is too strong.

  • GregWA

    pete: not just the modern middle class left. Back in grad school, now 30+ years distant, a very conservative friend of mine routinely described liberals as “hate filled”. It neatly captured for him where they come from in addressing anything. It resonated with me then and since.

    Their hate has been with us a long time. Part of their origin story.

  • George Atkisson

    For far too many people, hate is what gets them out of bed in the morning. It keeps them going through their day, and keeps them warm at night. It gives purpose to otherwise empty lives without accomplishments, or relationships.

  • Paul Marks

    The Frankfurt School left, which dominates just about everything in the West now, are often compared to Puritanical Christians – but there are many important differences, and one of these is the idea of repentance and forgiveness.

    A Christian may fail in practice, but he or she is at least supposed to forgive a sinner who repents – a leftist has no such obligation.

    “Why do the the left not let go of Trump” – why should they? Why should they forgive anyone for anything?

    The left do not believe in forgiveness – they believe in persecution, for ever.

    The left will not rest till everyone, even themselves, is in torment – and for ever.

  • Paul Marks

    The lies will go as well.

    The “mainstream media” have had YEARS to report on the crimes of Joseph Biden – why should they suddenly start telling the truth now?

    The Economist magazine (typical of the mainstream media) has a picture of Joseph Biden, a life long criminal – one of the most corrupt people in the American culture, with a mop and bucket – ready to clear up the mess of Organge-man-bad.

    It was ever thus.

    For example, how many times did Reuters (with its fabled code) report in the 1960 campaign that Jack Kennedy was a drug abusing adulterer who had strong connections to organised crime? Did it even report that he was dying of Addison disease?

    Did any of the mainstream media report this in the 1960 campaign? They all knew – but they did NOT report any of it.

    The media were NOT Marxists back in 1960 – they were just no good.

    Has that changed?

    To judge by the fawning coverage by the shill media of the Biden Inauguration the answer to that question – “no, they are still no good”.

    Everyone really knows this – after all would you trust a mainstream media report on a matter in your own field of expertise?

    Of course you would not trust them to report on your own area of expertise – so why would do you trust the media when they report other areas of knowledge?

    Yes there is political bias – but there is also just being lazy.

    For example, how mainstream media reports have you read about Early Treatment for Covid 19? the vast majority of people who have died could have been saved, but they were NOT saved.

    Are the media really Satanists who enjoy the the idea of vast numbers of people dying horribly? I do NOT thinks so – the media are just LAZY, they just pass on the official line without checking it.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    Wokeness today is a status identifying thing. And it’s easier and cheaper to be woke then build a business, learn a trade or pursue a difficult career like being a surgeon or Air Force pilot. It’s a new way to show you’re part of the in-crowd.,

    I wonder if there’s going to be a non-woke version of such clusters of people, though, and also as a different kind of status identifier. Maybe it’s generational: will the next cohort of cool kids eschew woke thinking as stifling and boring?

  • Paul Marks

    “Wokeness” is a lot more than that J.P.

    Joseph Biden has ordered that the Federal Government employees, including the military, must be trained in the doctrines of the Frankfurt School of Marxism – which is what “Wokeness” really is.

    This training, which President Trump tried to stop, never really went away – but now it will be total and all consuming.

    Think about that J.P. – if means for your example of an “Air Force pilot” they will not be taught who their enemy is.

    Their enemy is “reactionaries”, people guilty of “whiteness” (not a skin tone – a system of ideas and customs) who are to be hunted down and destroyed.

    A “woke” military will still have firearms and other weapons – they will just be taught to point those weapons, and USE those weapons, on us.

    Not nice. Not good.

  • Paul Marks

    Before someone comes back – yes I know perfectly well that Joseph Biden does not understand any of this.

    But the people who control him understand it all very well indeed – he is the rubber stamp for their orders.

  • CaptDMO

    “Invested” in Gamer Gate…all the way through two rounds of Hugo (NOT Schwyzer-but included) awards!

  • George Atkisson

    Paul Marks –

    It was not laziness that drove the Media to ignore the HQC trio treatment. They actively attacked it, supported by the since withdrawn Lancet fiasco. They and their masters WANTED deaths to justify both the lockdowns to destroy the booming economy, and widespread mail in voting to make election fraud easier. Another 100,000 deaths among the old was no big deal to the Ruling Class.

  • Flubber

    Their hate has been with us a long time. Part of their origin story.

    When Stalin killed 60 million and Mao killed 100 million, they didn’t do it personally. Both had an army of millions of vengeful little bastards only too willing to grass up their neighbours or put a 9mm into someone’s head.

  • bobby b

    “Why can’t the Left let go of Trump?”

    Modern progressivism is essentially a race-based liberation theology.

    If they let loose of Trump, they might start wondering what they’re looking to be liberated from.

  • Shlomo Maistre

    Excellent quote in the OP and several excellent comments as well.

    Progressivism, in a certain deep sense, is today what it has been since the dawn of man: evil.

    That’s what it is. Evil.

    It sows disunity, discord, disorder, and dysfunction out of greed and/or ignorance and/or vanity and/or ego.

    Consider any progressive project from all of human history and you will find a combination of selfishness, ignorance, ego, and/or ignorance.

    Now, what I am considering in my mind to be progressivism is, I assure you, far more broad a definition than what all of you are considering progressivism to be. Why? Well, for many reasons I won’t get into here (I’ve done enough key mashing in other threads lately)…

    Anyway, there’s a little bit of an instinct for evil in all humans, all of us.

    Those of us opposed to progressivism have at least one big thing to a sufficient extent to squash that instinct enough to (at least) oppose progressivism: self-awareness. This is the prime wellspring of wisdom. Self awareness.

    I confess that I am painting with a broad brush, but the more I learn the more I realize just how correct King Solomon really was: the wise man’s heart does truly incline to the Right. In so many different ways and for so many different reasons.

    The Right is right and always has been.

  • Phil B

    There is this posting:

    https://mydailykona.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-left-is-ramping-up-their-stasi-20.html#comment-form

    I love their naivety in saying “Report these people to the Police and authorities” and at the same time claiming that the Police are those self same “domestic terrorists” they are denouncing … Not joined up thinking, eh? The right can make lists too and act on them, if necessary.

    Quite frankly, if people say that they want to kill you, you really, REALLY should believe them. The vitriol and “othering” is too close to the way that the Nazis demonised the Jews and the Communists, their “enemies of the revolution and counterrevolutionaries”. I can’t remember where I read it or heard it but someone said that the pessimistic German Jews spent WW2 sitting around swimming pools in Beverly Hills or Hollywood and the optimistic ones went up the chimney in the death camps. So … are you an optimist or a pessimist and where are you going to sit this one out? (Hint – you can’t).

  • Jacob

    “Why do the the left not let go of Trump”

    A strange question – the answer being glaringly obvious. It’s not that they are hateful (the are, but that’s not the point).

    They are out to consolidate their power.
    They are acting CORRECTLY (from their point of view) – when you have defeated your opponent – you need to destroy him completely so that he never raises again.
    The answer is not “hate” – it’s POWER.

  • Arkus

    They’ll keep hold of their hatred of Trump until the next Right of Centre leader rises – or perhaps the next slightly less left wing than their left wing fruitbat.
    In exactly the same fashion Bush derangement Syndrome was widespread until the rise of Trump and the same way the Regan bashing went on and on until GWB came along.
    Twas ever thus with the left.

  • Paul Marks

    George Atkinson – as you know it is not just HQC, it is combination of medications including HQC. But your point is TRUE.

    At least 80% of the vast number of people who have died of Covid 19 could have been saved – but the media covered up and (yes) SMEARED Early Treatment.

    Would someone please explain why the media did that?

    And why the media are still pushing lockdowns and other totally useless polices – policies that are have done terrible harm? Policies that have and will cause many deaths.

    Sorry but “we are just reporting what the establishment say. – it is not our fault” will not work anymore, not after a year.

    The media has much blood upon their hands. Negligence – failure to research and report.

    The same with the crimes of Joseph Biden and the rest of them.

    At best this is negligence by the media “Group Think” – failure to independently research and report.

    But, yes, it could be a lot worse than negligence and “Group Think”.

  • Snorri Godhi

    Paul Marks wrote:

    “Wokeness” is a lot more than that J.P.

    I agree. “Wokeness” is primarily a justification for suppressing dissent.

    That does not mean, please note, that the “woke” are concerned specifically with defending and increasing the power of the Establishment. No, they might be motivated by hate for “the oppressors” or by compassion for “the oppressed”, or both; and yes, they want to suppress “the oppressors”; but it never occurs to them that they are tools of the Establishment. (Except perhaps for members of the Establishment, but i suspect that most of them believe their own propaganda.)

    On the whole, i have more respect for members of BLM/antifa who keep rioting, than for members who have stopped.

  • GregWA

    Schlomo, another wise man, maybe not as wise as Solomon, said: If you’re conservative before you’re 30, you’re heartless and if you’re liberal after 30, you’re brainless. I ascribe this to Wm F Buckley Jr, but am not at all sure about that.

    I interpret this quote as balancing the virtues of youth (passion driven by the knowledge that we are immortal and bulletproof 🙂 ) against the virtues of maturity (knowledge of what works and doesn’t, of the world and people). There is value in both Left and Right…but I certainly want a large majority in my Legislatures to be from the Right and I want Executives and Courts in the US to have no power compared to what they now have.

    Oh, and I want the US Constitution restored in its entirety (best balance of Left and Right, majority and minority, etc.)…sorry for going off topic.

  • Martin

    They can’t stand the rich and they despise the working class.

    While I agree that they hate the working class, I’m not so sure about the rich. A lot of the rich seem to be allied with woke ideology and share a lot of responsibility for disseminating, often enthusiastically. Multinational corporations are just as bad in this regard of the public sector and NGOs. Whether the superwealthy genuinely believe in woke ideology or are cynically using to make more money/retain social status I’m not sure. But BLM/Antifa sure aren’t targeting Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates!

  • There is one important difference. The remoaners are, from their PoV, rational in moaning: all their efforts to defeat Brexit revealed much about them that they would rather have kept less obvious, yet in the end did not stop it. Indeed, they overreached themselves, and contributed to their own defeat, as some say and likely more realise.

    By contrast, the PC in the US should feel like victors. I don’t believe in the honesty of their victory, and would gladly believe this overreach will in time contribute to their defeat, but clearly that time is not yet, and meanwhile I doubt that either idea clearly exists in their thoughts or their feelings (save that they may at some level feel that, without the virus, they would not have won).

    They are out to consolidate their power. (Jacob, January 23, 2021 at 10:01 am)

    That’s one view: having taken power, they naturally do what they’ve always wanted to do – replace free speech with woke-permitted speech.

    Did Churchill have a different view, or merely a different way of stating the same view, when he said:

    in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable! – fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse – a little tiny mouse! – of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.

    Of course, it’s early days yet. We know they kept up the ‘literally Hitler’ stuff for the whole four years he was president, but while the BBC this weekend guards against my forgetting that by spending the license fee on “The Trump Show: Downfall”, I do not yet know for how long they will keep up that kind of thing.

  • RNB

    Let go of Donald Trump? Hell, they haven’t let go of Alger Hiss!

  • staghounds

    Same reason the pigs couldn’t let go of Jones.

    “Surely you don’t want Trump back.”

  • phwest

    It’s a convenient distraction. And if enough Republican senators are dumb enough to fall for it could send the party into a civil war that will hamstring it for a decade. Win-win.

    The US electorate is in the middle of one of its periodic realignments (every 40 years or so), when the various factions in American politics that have to come together in no more Than two groups due to the electoral system, shift between those parties. Sometimes one of the parties fractures, dies and then is replaced by a new party (Whigs to Republicans in the 1850s), sometimes the parities continue in new forms (see the 1960s realignment that ultimately shifted over half the electorate between parties). These tend to take a while, because individual voters will hold on to the party they belong to even as the coalitions shift, indeed some never leave because it’s just too much a part of their identity. This muddies things, but you can see the movements in the long term.

    This current cycle has seen the formation of a credential class (those educated in elite institutions as well as those with advanced degrees) that aligned itself with the Democratic party. This class has control of key sectors in the US, particularly Corporate management and mass media (journalism used to be a trade open to anyone with primary school education who could write, now it’s a credentialed profession with graduate degrees, ditto the rise of the MBA at the expense of learning a business from the ground up) It’s a good fit with two other factions – the government worker class and its clients, and the financial elite that finance the party in exchange for favorable policies. They are not a good fit for some other parts of the old-Democratic party, particularly private (non-government) labor, which has be shifting Republican during this period, in large part because the credential class favors policies that directly attack workers interests, Green issues particularly. The Dems can live with this, but only if they can limit the losses to whites. If they lose ethnic workers in the broader economy as well they’re in trouble. The Democrats are using racial politics to keep the working class vote split, just as the old Democratic party did in the opposite direction in the South.

    This is why the Democrats have been relentlessly smearing Trump as racist (not that they didn’t do the same in minority communities to Bush, McCain and Romney, but it wasn’t necessary to saturate the national media with this message before). Even with all that Trump gained voter share in minority areas, particularly in heavy Hispanic districts populated by 2nd/3rd generations. Non-government working class voters will be hurt too much by policies desired by the rest of the party for it to be papered over with cash concessions or job-retraining programs. It’s meant a permanent loss of status already for some, and it will only get worse with the actions that Biden is taking. The Democrats need a distraction badly.

  • Shlomo Maistre

    GregWA,

    Schlomo, another wise man, maybe not as wise as Solomon, said: If you’re conservative before you’re 30, you’re heartless and if you’re liberal after 30, you’re brainless. […] There is value in both Left and Right

    You think so? Please enlighten me, what’s the value in the Left?

  • phwest

    As an aside – in additional to class there are also strong factional alignments stemming from regional differences in culture (that often overlap with class somewhat). This is becoming harder to see because modern internal mobility has emulsified the geographic distribution – a State like Texas still retains a lot of its historic culture, but also contains pockets like Austin that are quite alien. The old Puritan strain still runs strong, just like the Scots-Irish “country music” culture does, but both exist all over the country. The US is full of factional divisions, even within individuals, to a degree that I don’t sense in Europe (even when those states have more parties that the American system, those parties are still fewer than the factions fighting within just one of the two American parties). Feel free to enlighten me if you disagree.

  • phwest

    The right, if left to itself leads to stagnation and decay. Sooner or later change is always necessary.

    Of course, too much change leads to chaos and disorder.

    Ironically enough, in many ways the Democrats are actually the more conservative party, in that they are trying to preserve a model of governance that largely dates from the 1930s, and has become calcified and incapable, even as they chase the latest popular obsession. Conquest’s First Law holds even here (as the party of government, Democrats are quite conservative about how government should be run).

  • Shlomo Maistre

    The right, if left to itself leads to stagnation and decay. Sooner or later change is always necessary.

    The only constant in this world, phwest, is change. Change isn’t necessary, but it is inevitable – regardless, of course, of whether or not “the right is left to itself”.

  • APL

    George Atkisson: “They and their masters WANTED deaths to justify both the lockdowns to destroy the booming economy ,, “

    Of course they did! Exemplified by a sometime commentator here who insisted that HCQ, zink etc, treatments that are commonplace and were probably available with out prescription across the counter in many jurisdictions, must have double blind randomized trials to prove their efficacy for the treatment of COVID-19.

    Then cited trials where overdosed patients in the terminal stages of COVID-19 died, to corroborate why HCQ it wasn’t safe.

    We still don’t have any information about what makes COVID-19 so much more lethal than any other Coronavirus strain, and indeed, looking at the ONS figures, It’s more likely we have returned to an historically normal death rate in 2020, than the UK population was ravaged by some here-to-for unknown virus.

    A question worth asking. What was it about the preceding sixteen years that contributed to the historically and unusually low (UK) mortality rate?

  • […] The best bit of the day before yesterday’s somewhat longer Samizdata quote of the day: […]

  • Exasperated

    I don’t remember where I read this comment but keep it in mind.

    Many of Skeezy’s and Sleazy’s voters convinced themselves that they were voting for moderation.

    Of course, Day One’s EOs reveal the opposite. What do you expect, their agenda was derailed for four years. You gotta kill that American Dream and replace it with a very diminished and shriveled version for the new Americans being enticed across the border. The very existence of Trumpism is an existential thorn in their sides.

  • Paul Marks

    The international establishment have got away with destroying most small business enterprises, reducing nations to serfdom with massive Credit Bubble Debt, and killing vast numbers of human beings – by denying (just flatly denying) that there is any Early Treatment for Covid 19.

    If this is not the “inevitable march of history” it is something very close to it.

    Why should the international establishment not impose their totalitarian “Sustainable Development” and “Stakeholder Capitalism” (Corporate State Fascism)?

    Just look at what they have already done in the United Kingdom, the United States and many other lands. Who is going to stop the international establishment just carrying on with their plans?

    There is no internal reason they should stop – they have crushed any moral conscience they may have had (if anyone doubts that – visit the graves of the people who have died from Covid 19 and remember that at least 80% of them could have been saved), and who has the external power to stop the international establishment?

    If there is no internal (moral) check on them, and no external check on them (no one with the power to MAKE them stop), why should they not just carry on?

  • John Lewis

    APL.Thank your for the link. Those are really thought-provoking statistics.

    One thing that strikes me is the low ASMR (Age Standardised Mortality Rate) for 2019, which looks like a distinct outlier. This may largely be due to a significantly lower than usual level of deaths from winter flu and similar seasonal effects which in turn resulted in the higher than expected vulnerable population carried forward in to 2020. It’s obviously not the whole picture but could still be the cause of a substantial proportion of the “excess deaths” total for 2020.

    The trend in Crude Mortality Rates also suggest that 2019 was an outlier although not to the same extent.

    If reliable data was available for the average age of those immigrants moving to the UK and the age of those permanently emigrating it may shed some light on whether this was a contributing factor towards the decline in both measures of crude mortality for most of the current millennium. Chances are it was a combination of population replacement, medical advances and consistent increases in health care spending.

  • Exasperated

    I listened to a podcast with Robert Barnes, civil rights attorney. He speculated a source of the pearl clutching over the Jan 6th demonstrations, was the disrespect shown to the captured institutions and, by extension, the shills who dominate them. There seems to be no awareness that the government class invited the contempt over the past decade and that it paved the way for the emergence of a Populist. Being oblivious dullards, it’s another fabricated reason to hate Trump.

  • Paul Marks

    The election was blatantly rigged – there was no effort to even make it look straight, observe (for example) the number of people who are supposed to have voted in Pennsylvania in 2020 compared to 2016.

    As for January 6th – the left (yes the left) had people in the crowds, and they manipulated events. But that is not the point – the point is how LITTLE anger there has been, no one was armed, no one really tried to do anything, most people (including me) have just been filled with despair.

    The establishment elite reasoned that they could rig an election in full view of the public and get away with it – and THEY HAVE.

    Now they know that there is nothing, nothing at all, that they can not do.

    The full Davos, and general establishment, agenda will follow.

    Frankfurt School “Cultural” Marxism -, Critical Race Theory, mass abortion, sex changes for eight year old children, you name it (whatever the forces of Hell can think up) joined with economic FASCISM – the Corporate State, totalitarian “Sustainable Development” (Agenda 21 – in the works since at least 1992) and “Stakeholder Capitalism” which, again, is just another term for FASCISM, but with a “Woke” twist.

    Will any remnant of Western Civilisation survive?

    I do not know, I would like to think so (perhaps Poland?), but I just do not know.

    Remember if you oppose Davos you hate the poor and support the ultra rich – even though the forces of Davos ARE the ultra rich.

    The international television stations were full of people today saying, with a straight face, that the forces of Davos wanted to help the poor and were against massive inequality.

    That the areas dominated by such things as Credit Bubble Banking (i.e. banking that is not from Real Savings) have the MOST inequality (not the least) is something the media carefully ignore.

  • Caligari

    @Paul Marks:
    Forget about the continent. Its all lost.

    The European Union will rule the whole super-state “united states of Europe”. Just google “New European Bauhaus” and “NexGenEU” or “NextGenerationEU”.

    Bauhaus was a artical movement in the 1920er years from Germany. Lots of ideas of modern designt comes from Bauhaus. “Bau” means “to build” AND “building” (but “Bau” is slang for the jail, too) and “Haus” means “House”.
    Even Wikipedia know it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus
    https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/recovery-plan-europe_en

    I like especialy that one: “biodiversity protection and gender equality”