Left Fault Lines

2,883 words

Die Politik ist die Lehre vom Möglichen said Otto von Bismarck, Politics is the art of the possible being the usual English translation, although it can also read as Politics is the training of the possible. Anyone wishing to act politically needs to master both the art of the possible and, in order to do so, learn what is indeed possible and finally, the successful political actor needs to be competent in recognizing and grasping possibilities.

The vehicle of political action in the Western world for about the last four centuries has been the political party. The political party in representative democracies is an association of political actors with political ideas and proposals and who are prepared to create a practical alliance of those who broadly see themselves as belonging to a broad family of political ideas and/or interests. The political party has been the pragmatic instrument of change, aware by definition that it was only a part, a faction and not the entirety, of a nation.

George Washington deplored political parties and in his farewell address, the first president of the United States famously warned against the creation of political parties in the young republic, stating that the political party “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.” However, neither George Washington nor any other eighteenth-century statesman was able to prevent European domestic politics from being increasingly dominated by faction and party. When not silenced by the terror of pervasive tyranny, people in society are naturally inclined to gather in interest groups, so different groups emerge with specific views of what their country could or should be, and more pragmatically, groups reflecting different economic interests and classes and different priorities. In a democracy, the public role is assumed by the political party. The political party serves as an association of convenience, of different parts and groups coming together in a pragmatic arrangement to assist one another in the attainment of administrative power (viz. government) necessary to promote their ideas and interests. Political parties tend to crystallize and acquire an identity and history with their founding fathers, their famous leaders, their myths, and in this manner they are sometimes not unlike a family or church.

The association of interests may extend over a wide span and endure for long periods of time. For example, the American Democratic Party up to the 1970s encompassed blue collar workers of the North and belligerently anti-socialist segregationists of the South voting for, and belonging to, one and the same party. Two factions holding extremely different views and perspectives, different religions and coming from different social backgrounds, adhered to one party and expected that party to represent their interests in government and opposition. But the South/North divide was a deep difference, what I call a fault line. The appeal of/rejection of Ronald Reagan finally widened the South/North fault line in the Democratic party to the point that it cracked, the Democrat South, confronted with the widening gap with an increasingly liberal and “minority” North Democrats, turned its back on the Democratic Party. The Democratic party has subsequently compensated for the loss of white voters in the South by drawing on an ever growing pool of black and Hispanic voters.

The successful political party represented the ascendancy of realism and compromise over ideological and religious purity. Party discipline holds together divergent interests with the message of practical necessity: “together we are strong.” The party, or political alliance, is a tacit acknowledgment of the need to create a solidarity of interests to obtain power. Nevertheless, parties are always by their nature at risk of splitting along fault lines and falling apart. Inherent divergences of interest, often to the point of incompatibility, may destroy a party, especially when victory seems far away or in the aftermath of defeat.

Today political parties in the West are in state of probably terminal decline. Party loyalty is losing its erstwhile hold on voters. Western politics is becoming more populist, more individual and focused on causes to fight for, and the appeal of the popular seller of good news and hope, less on history and party loyalty. Political parties which demand voting and membership loyalties handed down through generations, are giving way to a consumer-oriented politics of show, demonstration and impulse. The official media and party propaganda have both been substantially, probably fatally, weakened by the internet and cell phone and the modern forms of communications media which internet and cell phone/smart phone make possible. Fault lines which in the past could be concealed can be concealed no longer. They are more visible than they were just 20 years ago, and because they are more visible, they are more fragile.

In politics, the major movement agitating for the kind of politics which accelerate the decline of whites as a race is the left. While it is true that there are plenty of free market right wingers who favor immigration and while it is also true that the deeper impulse to destroy the race comes from somewhere other than the impulse to create socialist solidarity, it is nevertheless the fact that in practical politics, agitating for immigration and dismantling of “white privilege” is a “left” cause. What is today understood as left is a very extensive and successful political movement/alliance in Western society which extends beyond any one political party. To date it has nevertheless operated principally by means of only a few strong nationally based political parties. In part owing to the decline of the credibility of political parties and loyalty to them, the composite parts of what can be called left are more evident. In the simplest and broadest sense, the movement/alliance which can be called “the left” draws to it those who believe that certain entrenched social and legal structures prevent the majority, the deserving, as the left sees it, from enjoying material and social fruits to which they are entitled.

I believe that we can identify four major components of the left. If we consider any left-wing agitation, cause or campaign and those involved, nearly all fall very easily and clearly into one of the four groups. Naturally, there are overlaps and special cases but the overwhelming majority of the left in the West can convincingly be categorized in the following four parts. Challenging and weakening the left will be better achieved by widening differences between the parts or breaking one part away from the others, than any “head on” assault of the left as a whole. I believe that only by breaking up this broad political formation will it be possible to make substantial political advances in the cause of a racially based politics.

These are the four groups which I have identified:

1. Socialists, consisting of public employees, union members, blue collar workers, mainly drawn from the indigenous white population. This is the left which has a strong class identity or whose history is one of class identity and party loyalty. The aim of this left is primarily the material advancement of the “working class,” the wage earner and the protection of jobs by the state.
2. “Progressives,” feminists, affluent majority Caucasian articulate high professional, liberal, articulate, successful: the entrepreneur, the opinion maker, the high flier, the artist, the journalist, most politicians. This group is well-to-do and tends to enjoy the high remuneration of the professional. The aim of this left is the advancement of progressive causes, such as feminism, the rights of refugees, environmental protection.
3. Immigrants, freeloaders, “minority activists,” “racial minorities,” long-term benefit recipients. Generally speaking, this is the least politically active left grouping, but a reliable and constitutes the largest and fast growing electoral base of the four groups. This group is principally interested in the protection and advancement of its material position and protection and support by the state in the form of subsidies and benefits.
4. Antifa, “black bloc,” nihilists, international anarchists. The aims of this group are best expressed in negatives: no barriers, no limits, no rules, the destruction of all differences and limits, rejection and subversion of authority and order in all its forms.

In the last couple of decades, group 3 has been penetrated by fundamentalist Islam, and the advancement of Mohammedanism to some extent, but not without obvious and potentially fatal contradiction, creates overlap between group 3 and 4. Groups 3 and 4 led and professionally assisted by group 2 created the main basis of support for the huge anti-war movement in Britain at the time of the attack on Iraq. Tensions between the liberalism of group 2 and the high Islamic representation in group 3 were openly acknowledged by the anti-war movement but never threatened to split it, its leaders successfully concentrating demonstrators’ ire on the pursuit of the war by Britain and the United States.

These groups very different in composition and social background of their adherents. Many of their aims of the groups are incompatible. Activists can only disregard incompatibilities by concentrating on external foes. However, each group needs the others to achieve political ends and economic, political and social change. Group 4 for example, is entirely dependent on financial support offered by members of groups 1 and 2. In any alliance, doubt that the alliance advances its needs creates a growing awareness of differences and political group fault lines widen. Over the last twenty years there has been increasing dissatisfaction among those in group 1 who feel that moderate socialists and progressives from well-to-do backgrounds, salaried professionals, (group 2) have lost contact with them, have even abandoned them and take their support at election time for granted. Donald Trump successfully exploited this sense of abandonment and created a wedge between group 1 and the rest of the left. His appeal to a color-blind nationalism also weakened group 3 solidarity on the left. His only wholly committed opponents were with very few exceptions from groups 2 and 4, and that was insufficient to stop him, either on the hustings or in the election. Groups 2 and 4 failed to stop Donald Trump because of a large scale desertion by group 1, many of whom actually voted for him, and a weakening of group 3 solidarity, so that fewer Black and Hispanic voted for Hilary Clinton than for Barack Obama in the previous two presidential elections. It should be noted, however, that Trump was elected president thanks to the peculiarities of the American electoral college voting system. Under most electoral systems, the French for example, where each citizen’s vote has equal value, Trump would have lost the election thanks to the masses of voters from group 3 in American cities. This growing ethnic base (group 3) makes the breaking up of the four parts of the left a matter of urgency, for demographics are yearly swelling the power and influence of group 3.

In the case of the Brexit vote, “Brexiters” were able to woo millions of voters of the left who belonged to group 1 (and a few from group 3, none whatsoever from group 2 and 4). It was disillusioned blue collar workers and unemployed working class voters who disregarded the advice of the Labour party for which they always vote, and voted to leave the European Union, which swung the vote to Leave. In France, while Marine Le Pen was successfully able to woo the same social class that had voted for Brexit, she offered nothing to France’s middle class. In France there is a strong middle class animosity towards taxes and state bureaucracy. It was easy for Macron to appeal to that middle class electorate by promising to cut red tape. Donald Trump made a similar pitch to the middle class (his “one-in, two-out” executive order is aimed at the very group in the U.S. which Marine Le Pen ignored in France).

Ironically, it was her establishment-sponsored opponent who who represented a new style simplistic positive movement, while Marine Le Pen was the candidate of an old French political party, one incidentally intensely disliked over decades by millions of voters and considered negative and embittered. It was in this case the radical candidate who was hampered by the history of political parties and party antipathies and it was the pseudo outsider Macron, who by responding to the style and presentation of the time, seemed to represent a new political initiative, although his politics in essence are a continuation of Fifth Republic cronyism and a pursuit of the very multi-ethnic supranational politics of the discredited parties he has replaced.

Group 4 on the left has played a key role in keeping radical nationalists and racial separatists in a ghetto, by labeling them as “fascist,” “racist” and “nazi” and employing terror to frighten off all but the most ideologically committed, or those with nothing to lose from joining a racial nationalist cause. This anti-fascist guard dog role suits both big business, which has thereby been able to maintain a steady flow of cheap labor pouring into the West without sustained criticism, and does “the dirty work” for group 2 as well. Group 2 figures proclaim slogans of love and benevolence such as “refugees welcome” and “build bridges not walls” and “no one is illegal” but wink at the politics of hatred at the core of group 4’s activities.

Support or at least tolerance for group 4, was forthcoming also from group 1 so long as the cause for which group 4 was fighting was that of historical anti-fascism. However, radical Islam and its terrorism and implicit hostility to liberal values cannot but undermine solidarity within group 3 and between group 3 and the rest of the left in the long term, while the violence committed by group 4, increasingly against the police, has alienated it from group 1, probably to a point that the two groups are now wholly irreconcilable. The destructiveness and principled hostility to all representatives of state authority, especially the police, on the part of the ultra-left, has made large swathes of group 1 (to which group the majority of police officers after all themselves belong!) hostile to group 4. Group 4 depends on funding from a left-wing establishment made up of predominantly group 2 professionals who hold a protective hand over it. With a withdrawal of financial backing from group 2, group 4 would shrink dramatically. Anti-fascist violence has nurtured the disenchantment of group 1 with traditional left-wing groups and parties. Group 4 cannot count many friends among group 3 either. Hard working low wage earners want “anything for a quiet life” and no upsets which could lead to an examination of their social status. Anti fascism is now wholly dependent on wealthy patronage. If group 2 withdraws its protection of the ultra left, it is finished. That would have momentous consequences in political life across the west for at that point the more timid elements of the middle class would become more open about their doubts on race and immigration.

It can be seen from these brief observations that the current left alliance is a vulnerable construct. First there has been the rift between group one and the rest, now it is group 4 which seems to be working hard to isolate itself. After the recent riots in Hamburg where the militant ultra left wildly attacked police and burned shops, dismaying not only conservatives but moderate establishment socialists as well, and undoubtedly making no friends among immigrant shopkeepers, the very liberal German-language Suddeutsche Zeitung printed a cartoon depicting a conservative election office and a calendar showing “our election campaigner of the month” with the image of a masked anti-fascist. After the Hamburg riots for the first time to this writer’s knowledge, the German language media have begun to talk and write about “left-wing extremists.” Before the riots, the only acknowledged political extremists in the German-speaking world were right-wing ones. The symbolic change of lexis can be taken as a warning note that group 2 protection and funding is not necessarily a given. Group 4, by its provocative openly anti-police militancy, has created a rift between traditional socialists and militant anti-fascists.

There is another crack in the left front likely to widen in years to come: the advance of fundamentalist Mohammedanism in Europe furthered by open door policies has created tensions between groups 2 and 3. Recently the Bravalla pop festival in Sweden, an annual event held in the summer, where fans are almost exclusively from group 2 and in the majority young women, was cancelled for all time because of sexual assaults caused, there can be no doubt, although the press will not confirm it, by immigrants. In Britain, a Manchester pop concert given by a progressive representative group 2 musician was bombed by a Mohammedan suicide bomber. Long gone are the days in Britain where white upper class feminists could march with Islamists in protests against Blair’s war in Iraq, crying “shame on you!” Today they march in separate groups. Tomorrow? We may see them marching in opposing groups.

Nothing is certain in politics except that nothing is certain. It is quite possible that the large scale support of well-to-do and well-meaning liberals slips noiselessly away from any association with the militants of group 4, while the bonds between groups 2 and 3 may weaken in coming years as well. The cards may be reshuffled and dealt. Another movement, sufficiently organized and willing to exploit and where possible to widen existing rifts among these left groups, highlight and encourage doubts, could welcome disillusioned idealists from groups 1 and 3 to a quite new political home. Politics is the practice of the possible.