While leftist revolutionaries around the world came to
embrace third-world peasants, Arab nationalists, and even Islamists as
manifestations of the People, Western revolutionaries had a problem as they
lacked these groups at home. The United States never had a peasant class. In
Europe, capitalism and the Industrial Revolution had eliminated the peasant
class in a mostly bloodless fashion and, until the end of the twentieth century,
Arab and Muslim migration were not significant issues. The solution was to turn
to racial and later sexual minorities.
Mid-twentieth-century American radicals “discovered” blacks,
a group that was honestly being oppressed. At a time when white workers were
embracing the New Deal and its protections for unions and even going so far as
to vote for Eisenhower, blacks stood out as a group whose problems could not easily
be solved by lobbying for some changes to current laws. Blacks were up against the
well-organized conspiracy of segregation that was passively facilitated by a
wider white society that, even subconsciously, looked down on blacks and did
not see their plight as a priority.
In the end, though, the mainline Civil Rights Movement proved
a failure for leftist revolutionaries. The Civil Rights Movement succeeded in
defeating formal segregation by pursuing a moderate path that was fundamentally unrevolutionary. It avoided violence
and framed itself as being within the American tradition. For Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr., blacks were Americans who, as Americans, were now coming to collect
on the American promise. He succeeded precisely because he managed to convince white America that he was not a revolutionary but an American asking for perfectly reasonable American things.
While the Civil Rights Movement itself proved distinctively
unrevolutionary and, even more subversively demonstrated that a reformist
movement really could bring about real change within a liberal democracy, it
still ended up proving useful to the left. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, while
well-intentioned and perhaps necessary under the circumstances, effectively
eliminated the constitutional balance between the federal and state governments.
Now the federal government can force any law upon a state simply by claiming
that it is a matter of civil rights, leaving us with a dangerously overpowered
federal government just waiting for leftists to take control and turn it to their own ends.
At the end of the day, the Civil Rights Movement did not
solve the economic problems facing the black community. This caused many civil
rights leaders, including Dr. King in the last years of his life, to drift toward
a more revolutionary mindset. This did nothing to help actual black people. This
should only be expected as the purpose of a leftist revolution is not to improve
the lives of actual individuals. A group is only useful, and therefore only counts as part of the People, when
their problems are not being solved. Thus, leftist revolutionaries have needed
to keep blacks poor and blame American racism for it. One can see this most
easily in urban policy and education, areas dominated by the left, that have
utterly failed the black community economically but have kept alive a sense of grievance.
The less plausible the charge of racism, in the conventional
sense, has become, as Americans have become less racist, the more racism has
needed to be redefined in ever more abstract frameworks. This has benefited
leftists as it makes the case for revolution. If you are black and your goal is
for white people to not hate you and conspire to keep you out of middle-class
jobs or even murder you, there is no need for a revolution. If your goal is to
not be an outsider in a culture created by white people for the benefit
of white people, then the only solution is for
there to be a revolution. This will tear down white American culture and place
blacks as the People at the center of the new culture. White people will be stripped of any positive identity and left only with the option of being allies of blacks if they wish to not be oppressors.
The most important leftist success of the 1960s was the sexual
revolution. This was indirectly connected to the Civil Rights Movement. As
Shelby Steele has argued, white American parents who were complicit in tolerating
segregation and felt guilty about it were not in a position to challenge their
children over whom they slept with and their kids knew it. Sexuality has long
been a tool of revolutionaries as communities require rigid sexual rules to
establish clear lines of kinship that place children within the group. Allow children
to be born outside of clear families and their community becomes the non-community
of the revolution. The Sexual Revolution has been particularly effective at
maintaining blacks as a revolutionary class. It has inhibited economic growth within
the black community. At the same time, anyone who points this out can be
charged as a racist. Thus, blacks are more likely to assume that the source of
their problems is racism, as manifested in bourgeois values like the nuclear family,
and the only solution is revolution.
The Sexual Revolution also created a new oppressed group
that could serve as manifestations of the People for leftist revolutionaries,
sexual minorities. It was leftist revolutionaries who decided that gay people
were actually a group as opposed to simply individuals who pursued an action
that should or should not be tolerated to various degrees. Furthermore, the fact that the sexual revolution made sexual repression a form of oppression rendered gays an oppressed group. Gays are an even
better class of revolutionaries than blacks as accommodating them within a
traditional society is even more difficult, hence gays are more likely to
assume that their only solution is the revolution and will not be bought off by
minor reforms such as the removal of anti-sodomy laws.
Furthermore, the fact that even considering gays as a group
is an invention of leftist revolutionaries has meant that the gay community is
intrinsically tied to the leftist revolutionary cause and cannot easily exist
without it. It makes perfect sense for a black conservative to still want there
to be a black community such as their presumably black families. It is hardly
obvious why an Andrew Sullivan style conservative gay community would want to
operate as a gay community as opposed to being a tolerated minority within their
presumably heterosexual families and the wider community. Keep in mind that
gays, unlike blacks, are usually not raised with their identity. This is
something they consciously embrace as teenagers or later in life.
Much as with blacks, the gay rights movement involves an act
of motte and bailey duplicity. Now that the sexual revolution has happened, it
makes sense to not stigmatize people for sexual acts between consenting adults.
We might even take the next step and say that government should recognize same-sex
marriage. None of this, in itself, would be particularly revolutionary. On
the contrary, accommodating homosexuals in such a fashion lessens their ability
to serve as revolutionaries and risks their status as a manifestation of the
People.
The revolutionary doctrine would be to say that the sexual acts
of homosexuals give them authenticity as a manifestation of the People that
heterosexuals lack, particularly if they submit themselves to traditional
morality. Heterosexuality does make one part of the People but their oppressor.
As such, heterosexuals need homosexuals to redeem and make them part of the
People. This is done by allowing heterosexuals to become allies and share in
the task of tearing down society and rebuilding it around homosexuals.
Homosexuality requires someone to do, or at least desire to do, something that most people would find repulsive. This limits the number of people who can be gay. The solution is for sex education that will encourage more people to overcome any predispositions against engaging in gay sex so there can be more gay people. Alternatively, there are the bi-sexual and queer identities that anyone can embrace. Thus, the LBTQ+ identity has the ability to become a larger group than African Americans and thus a better claim to being the American People. And since LGBTQ+ identity really means nothing more than rejecting traditional sexual norms, this manifestation of the People can be relied upon to truly embrace the revolution as their very identity is meaningless otherwise.
More recently, as homosexuality has gained mainstream acceptance
and lost its revolutionary edge, we have seen the rise of a transgender identity, which furthers the revolutionary logic of homosexuality. Unlike
homosexuality, which requires no great metaphysical leap to accept that a
person really is attracted to people of the same sex, accepting that someone is
trans requires buying into a larger metaphysical system that the person really
is a different “gender” from how they were identified at birth. The reason for
accepting this new metaphysics is that leftist revolutionaries have placed transgender people as an authentic manifestation of the People and to reject this claim makes you
an oppressor and not part of the People. This means that transgender people are dependent
on leftist revolutionaries not only to have a transgender community but even to be
trans in the first place.
Transgenderism,
building off queer identity, is something so nebulous that anyone can claim to
be trans and, thus become a manifestation of the People. That being said, “authentic” transgenderhood requires hormone injections and surgery. Going through this means that not only
are you the male or female that you claim to be but you are more authentically that gender than those “assigned” their identities by their doctor at birth, thus you
are an authentic manifestation of the People. Cisgender people can only become part of the People by being allies of transgenders and acknowledging their greater authenticity.
In the present discourse, it has become common to see rhetoric like “Gaza to Ferguson” or “Queers for Palestine.” If one thinks in terms of helping members of particular groups improve their physical lots in life and overcome oppression, this sounds strange. We are talking about different groups in different parts of the planet, with different needs that might even clash. For example, Hamas believes in murdering gay people.
These claims begin to make sense once you realize that we are not talking about actual blacks, homosexuals, or Palestinians. Instead, these are simply names for manifestations of the People, united in being rhetorically useful for leftist revolutionaries. The point is not to improve the lot of members of any of these groups. On the contrary, doing so would lessen their usefulness to the revolution and render them no longer manifestations of the People. Thus, we are not interested in helping gay Palestinians. Such a Palestinian undermines Palestinian peoplehood and, thus, it is a revolutionary act of the People to kill them. By contrast, a gay person in the United States does represent the People so not wishing them mazal tov on their wedding is a counter-revolutionary act that makes you an oppressor.
The real
purpose is for there to be the revolution. This will place the truest
manifestation of the People, leftist revolutionaries, in power. In the end, not only will whites, Christians, and Jews not be part of the People but even the "oppressed" groups, which were supposed to be favored to make up for their lack of privilege will eventually also lose their place as they stop being needed and can be replaced with a more plausibly revolutionary manifestation of the People.
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