Tag Archives: Marx

Democrats can’t get past “Oppressed vs. Oppressor”

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The nature of humans and their relationships is complex and interesting. It involves friendship, hate, cooperation, competition, love, impulse, greed, work, betrayal, family, tribes, envy, sympathy and dozens of other emotions.  

Great writers and even bad ones have written billions of words on these powerful feelings, and how they function and dysfunction in groups of humans. Writers keep writing about them and their readers keep reading about them because they strike a chord within us. We witness them in our everyday lives.

Democrats have reduced it all to one thing: class struggle. In this class struggle, everyone is pigeonholed into one of two competing categories: the oppressed and the oppressors. But beware, there are some arbitrary exceptions because there’s something of a hierarchy of oppressors and oppressed.

For example, if your skin color is dark, then you’re oppressed. Unless you’re a dark-skinned Asian who wants to be judged fairly on merit, or a Black man like Martin Luther King, Jr. who wanted to be judged on the content of his character, or a political conservative like Justice Clarence Thomas or Professor Thomas Sowell or Secretary of State Marco Rubio – in which case you’re an oppressor.

If you’re a man who likes to pretend he’s a woman, then you’re oppressed. Unless, like Caitlin Jenner, you object to men pretending to be women competing against women in women’s sports – in which case you’re an oppressor.

If you like to do sexual things with people of your own sex, then you’re oppressed. Unless, like several of President Trump’s appointees, you happen to be politically conservative – in which case you’re an oppressor.

If you’re one of the 51% of humanity who is a woman, then you’re oppressed. (Never mind that you live six years longer than your oppressor.) Unless, like most women, you think men don’t belong in the women’s locker room – in which case you’re an oppressor.

If you haven’t made much money because you’ve chosen to use your time doing things other than working hard at well-paying jobs, then you’re oppressed. Same goes if you’ve made plenty of money but you’ve chosen to spend it all.

Enough about the oppressed. On to their oppressors.

If you’re a white man, you’re an oppressor. (That’s true even in Africa where white men are a distinct minority because . . . reasons.) Unless you’re a white man who chooses to use his time doing things other than working hard at well-paying jobs, and therefore has no money or has spent it all – in which case, as mentioned, you’re oppressed.

If you’re . . . well . . . hmm.

I planned to set forth the other types of oppressors but straight white men are pretty much the only ones. Oh, and Thomas Sowell, Martin Luther King, Jr., Clarence Thomas, and a couple billion Asians.

Credit this oppressor/oppressed view of humanity to Karl Marx, an intellectually feeble straight white man hiding behind a grotesque beard of pseudo-intellectualism. Of the myriad human emotions, he was blind to all but one: envy.

His envy led to his famous formulation for how to run an economy, which I paraphrase:

“From each according to his ability to make things, and to each according to his desire to have them.:

Marx’s formula doesn’t work for obvious reasons that are replayed predictably through the course of history. People who have the ability to make things stop making them if those things are taken away from them, and people who desire those things are never satisfied with what’s given to them if they aren’t required to expend any energy to get them.

Of course, the government can force people who are capable of making things to keep making them, even if they know those things will be taken from them. And that’s what socialist states wind up doing. But then you’re not running an economy, you’re running a slave labor camp. That’s not a sustainable plan. 

The Democrats are blind to this logic and this history, perhaps because they want to see themselves as part of the oppressed du jour, to whom, conveniently, the oppressors du jour owe a living, and a good one at that.

Hence the Democrats’ obsession with heroizing losers who are failures in life, from the Rosenbergs to George Floyd to Hunter Biden. For a Democrat, the greatest achievement is to be a failure and therefore a victim, because that means you’re oppressed, and that means you deserve sympathy – along with the material things that your oppressors made and you want. 

Give the Democrats some credit. They’re good at the first element of this non sequitur – the element of failure. I would say they’re still working on the other elements, but that would suggest they’re engaged in an activity they’re unwilling to engage in – work.

Until Democrats learn to achieve and celebrate more than just failure – until they learn to walk the walk of complex human emotions and relations – they still have talk. They can still talk the talk of oppressor/oppressed and perpetrators/victims. From such simple talk, they evidently derive great pleasure.

I think Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Faulkner might say . . . yawn. I know I do.

Mamdani terrifies the Democrats

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After losing to the one guy they were certain they could beat, Democrats are making a show of puzzling over how to win elections.

It’s not really much of a puzzle. They simply need to get on the right side of some easy 80/20 issues. Like illegal immigration. Like men competing in women’s sports. Like catching and punishing criminals. Like the First Amendment. Like disclaiming Marxism.

Why can’t the Democrats see this?

Well, they can. Democrats are just pretending they can’t because they don’t want to alienate . . .  Democrats.

Do the math. If only 20% of voters are on the liberal side of an issue, and essentially all of those 20% are Democrats, and registered Democrats comprise about 37% of the voters (the other 63% being Republicans and Independents), that means that, among Democrats, about 54% are on the 20 side of those 80/20 issues. (54% of the 37% of voters who are registered Democrats equals about 20% of the total voters.)

Most Democrat politicians can do this math. And so, they understand that getting on the winning side of these 80/20 issues would cost them over half of registered Democrats – the kind that vote, donate money, speak out, and get CNN spots.

Even the Democrats who can’t do this math (here’s looking at you, AOC) can sense it from their interactions with their base, which is about the only kind of interactions they have with the public.

One solution is for Democrats to trick their base into believing they are still on the 20 side of these 80/20 issues while actually migrating to the 80 side in order to get some of the 80 side voters.

But it’s hard for politicians to trick their base. That’s because the base tends to be passionate and aware. Moderates, on the other hand, are easier to trick. Moderates are moderates because they aren’t paying much attention.

So, what do you do if you’re a Democrat?

You trick the people who can be tricked – the moderates. You put on an insincere, hand-wringing act pretending that you’re considering switching to the 80 side on the 80/20 issues, all while winking and nodding to your hard-left base to tell them you’re really not.

But now the jig is up. Zohran Kwame Mamdani (if you’re a Republican, you couldn’t wish for a better name for him) has put the Democrats on the spot.

He wants government-owned grocery stores because he thinks (or just believes) they’ll be less expensive and more equitable. He wants government control over rent and real estate prices. He wants government-paid public transportation. He wants government child care. He wants, well, you get the picture.

He has lots of wants, and he wants those wants to be satisfied by the government.

Except the police. His only want from the police is that they cease to exist.  

He let slip – nah, he bragged – that the government should seize control over “the means of production.” It’s not clear where he learned that phrase, but it was in fact coined by Karl Marx.

He’s an actual, registered socialist. And he’s not a European-style one. He’s more like a Cuban-style one or Venezuelan-style one or Soviet Union-style one.

Democrats, who have crept, slouched, and sometimes flown toward socialism like bats into hell over the last 25 years since Bill Clinton left office, are mortified. Not because Mamdani favors socialism – they all do – but because he says it out loud.

By saying it out loud, Mamdani smokes out those fellow Democrats. They have to either agree or disagree. They can no longer pretend moderation in order to garner votes from unengaged moderates while winking and nodding to their hard-left base.

Mamdani is forcing socialist Democrats into the thing that socialists abhor most – honesty.

He’s currently the favorite to be elected. The result will be a disaster for New York City. But it will also be a disaster for the Democrats. I’m willing to accept both disasters if it’s a package deal.

“Abundance” is the left’s latest rebranding, but it all means the same

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First, there were Marxists. The Marxists got a bad reputation for destroying economies. Seems the approach of taking from people in accordance with their ability to give, and giving to people in accordance with their ability to take, sounded nice but didn’t work well.

So, they rebranded to “communists,” as in community-ists. Everyone likes a community, right?

Same result, this time at the point of a gun. And murdering 100 million people in the “community” didn’t help their reputation.  

Then they rebranded to “socialists.” What’s not to like about being social?

The socialists didn’t pack guns, but did pack prison terms for people who refused to pay confiscatory taxes. People liked the prison terms about as much as they liked the point of a gun. 

Then they rebranded to “liberals.” That was shrewd, because it co-opted a word that meant the opposite of their Marxist, communist, socialist, censorious, confiscatory, murderous authoritarianism.

It took a while for the people to catch on, but they eventually did. The people came to realize that the “liberals” were anything but liberal in the true sense of that word.

Don’t even get me started on “woke.”

So, they rebranded to “progressives.” Sounds good – who could dislike progress? But it turned out that their idea of “progress” was to turn the clock back to nineteenth century Marxism, etc.

But this time they schemed to buy the votes of the few people who are oppressed – and the many who imagine they are – with “free stuff.” Free money in the form of free no-payback student loans, free health care, free or subsidized solar energy, free maternity/paternity/no-ternity leave, free vacations, free “working” from home, free federal government where the bottom 50% pay only 3% of federal income taxes, and free parking. (OK, that last one is made up.)

It worked no better that time around. Turns out, the “free stuff” was not actually free. It produced a multitrillion-dollar deficit and 9% inflation.

They deflected from the deficit and the inflation by suggesting that their opponents are racist. But people didn’t like being called racist any more than they liked the deficit, the inflation, the pointed guns, the confiscatory taxes, and the 100 million murders.

So, they lost another election. Big time.

Now they’re out of power. No White House, a minority in Congress and state legislatures and governorships, and they’re outnumbered 6-3 on the Supreme Court.

You might think they’d pause and reflect. Marxism/communism/socialism/liberalism/progressivism/free-stuff-that-ain’t-free might not be such a hot recipe for winning elections. Maybe they need a new idea or two?

Nah. Let’s just rebrand the free stuff, they say. Call it “abundance.” It’ll take people years to recognize that there’s no such thing as an abundant lunch any more than there’s such a thing as a free one.

Even then, they can be told that the abundant lunches provided for people who vote “correctly” are paid for by a tax on people who don’t. In other words, there may be no such thing as a free lunch, but there’s such a thing as lunch paid for by other people, and that’s almost as good. In fact, it’s better – because you get to punish the other guy for being more successful than you.

If that doesn’t work, they still have the race card. Maybe.