The New Tribalism

In-between countersuing Michael Mann for $20 million,  Mark Steyn writes:

Julie Burchill, my old boss at The Modern Review many years ago, has a bracing column in this week’s Speccie on the difference between the left she grew up with and the left today:

While working-class left-wing political activism was always about fighting the powerful, treating people how you would wish to be treated and believing that we’re all basically the same, modern, non-working-class left-wing politics is about… other stuff. Class guilt, sexual kinks, personal prejudice and repressed lust for power.

That’s why, as Kathy Shaidle observes here, the concept of free speech is no longer widely accepted. If you believe in “treating people how you would wish to be treated”, then it’s natural to accord them the same rights of freedom of expression that you yourself wish to exercise. But, if you believe (as I discussed with Steve Madely on the radio yesterday) that what matters is what identity group you belong to (the New Tribalism), then it’s natural to demand that members of non-approved groups should not be permitted to make their case.

Consider, for example, Brad Johnson – “Climate Brad”, who’s something to do with that group that wanted you to send Valentine cards* and “carbon-offset roses” to Michael Mann. Yesterday, Climate Brad Tweeted:

Today, 110,000 citizens told @washingtonpost to stop publishing climate lies like today’s @krauthammer oped pic.twitter.com/iM2ZO9cRVZ

I’m so bored by people whose only reaction to a difference of opinion is to demand you be banned. Do please click over to Brad Johnson’s accompanying photograph. It shows the fetching young pajama boy clutching what appears to be a giant eco-condom made for First Grade Show-&-Tell using only eight cereal boxes, some Scotch tape and a bright red marker. Look, it’s even got a hashtag! Even though it’s not a Tweet but a prop he made to stand outside his office and be photographed with!

Washington Post: #Don’tPublishLies

Because everyone knows The Washington Post is just another right-wing Koch-funded denialist operation.

Wouldn’t it be easier just to sit down and demolish Krauthammer’s “lies”? An ideology that can only scream “Shut up!” sounds a wee bit insecure, don’t you think? That’s true for firebreathing mullahs whose reaction to a cartoon is to demand your beheading as it is for firebreathing climate mullahs whose reaction to a column is to demand your lifetime publication ban.

And speaking of the New Tribalism, David Thompson spots a doozy from the UK Guardian, basking in the warm embers of what Thompson dubs “Lovely, Lovely Guilt:”

The Guardian’s Natalie Hanman — who edits Comment Is Free, where the party never stops – urges us to cultivate some pretentious guilt. Boldly, she asks:

Should Benedict Cumberbatch say sorry for the slave owners in his family?

Not current family members, you understand. So far as I’m aware, Mr Cumberbatch doesn’t have some weird cousin with strangers chained up in the cellar. No, we have to project our agonising backwards in time, past parents and grandparents, and great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents – past centuries of people who are themselves strangers:

A newly appointed city commissioner in New York, Stacey Cumberbatch, told the New York Times last week that she believed British actor Benedict Cumberbatch’s fifth great-grandfather owned her ancestors on an 18th-century sugar plantation in Barbados. They “are related,” the newspaper noted, “if not by blood, then by geography and the complicated history of the slave trade.”

Which is to say, actually, not related at all.

The Cumberbatch case involves two high-profile individuals and so has had media attention, but these questions concern us all.

I suspect opinions on that point may differ.

For as long as structural inequalities persist, we cannot overlook how far the tentacles of history might reach into the present. The real challenge is to recognise, and address, how much the privileges of the past continue to benefit some, and wrong others, today.

We “cannot overlook” these things, you see; we must “address” them and weigh our privilege. Some more than others, it seems. So says the woman who gets paid to invent esoteric problems and then fret at length in print. But those “tentacles of history,” through which our “collective responsibility” is supposedly transmitted – and with it, lots of lovely, lovely guilt – reach an awfully long way, across continents, cultures and all manner of events.

I usually reflexively type something like “the far left UK Guardian,” when referencing the venerable British socialist house organ, but that phrase doesn’t quite cut it: with the notion of past guilt, they’ve gone so far left, they’ve bypassed Hillary and Barack and the EU, and driven straight into Pyongyang:

The most striking feature of the gulag system is the philosophy of “guilt by familial association” or “collective responsibility” whereby whole families within three generations are imprisoned. This policy has been practiced since 1972 when Kim Il Sung, the founder of communist North Korea, stated “Factionalists or enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations.”

Actually, three generations sounds rather modest compared to how far back the Guardian wishes to aim its collective guilt, as the new tribalism continues to advance “Progressivism” even further into the past. Tom Wolfe has written about the leftwing revolutionary urge to “Start From Zero” — even without an armed revolution, the left seems determined to get to Year Zero one way or another.

Update: How far back to Year Zero does the left wish to aim for? The Wall Street Journal reminds Al Gore-wannabe John Kerry, ” who as Ed Morrissey notes, “burned 12 tons of carbon to travel to Indonesia and declare global warming as the biggest WMD of all,” that Flat Earthers were the consensus, science-is-settled, the discussion is over position. Speaking of Kerry, as Virginia Postrel once told Brian Lamb of C-Span:

The Khmer Rouge sought to start over at year zero, and to sort of create the kind of society that very civilized, humane greens write about as though it were an ideal. I mean, people who would never consider genocide. But I argue that if you want to know what that would take, look at Cambodia–to empty the cities and turn everyone into peasants again. Even in a less developed country, let alone in someplace like the United States, that these sort of static utopian fantasies are just that.

As long as Kerry can keep his yacht, presumably, that all sounds fine with him.

* Sending Valentine’s Day cards? Don’t let the enviro-obsessed New Republic hear about that.