Douglas Murray at the Spectator checks out Portland: ‘My Week With The Baying Antifa Mob.‘
Christopher Rufo from his site: ‘The New Segregation’
What can I say about the current Seattle political leadership and much institutional authority, other than I don’t agree, and usually find it hard to muster respect?
Deep problems of human nature, the hard problems of creating and maintaining legitmate moral and political authority, tend to elude such people and ideas. ‘The Man’ is always holding somebody down, and liberation is always next.
Ocasionally I hear a word I might recognize, like ‘budget’ or ‘Amazon,’ but it’s soon drowned out by angry cries.
In my experience, if there is a predominant culture in Seattle, it’s one of counter-culture anti-establishmentarianism (whatever they’re for, I’m/we’re against, man). Publicly, it seems the kinds of sentiment that taxpaying, respectable sorts can safely gather around is a protest sign at the Church Of High Protest (coming to a sidewalk near you).
Politically, this tends to harden around a progressive and very Left-Of-Center raft of actors and policies, and in my experience, when this culture is not openly socialist, it’s unsustainably utopian.
Out of this protean, reactionary counter-culture, one can find a fair amount of individual freedom, personal kindnesses and tolerance, especially when resolving to the individual level (you know, people talking with people). I’m grateful for each kindness.
Mid-to long- term, however, as someone interested in which kinds of ideas and people come to positions of authority and consequence, it’s insane.
As I see things, CHOP was a physical manifestation and congealment of these many ideas floating in the ether. Unfortunately, these ideas go all the way to the top. As predicted, this has ceded the public square and private property to anarchists, criminals with guns, and radical sorts of all kinds costing citizens’ time and money and security.
Someone’s got to pick up the tab, and it will be the many people managing their lives competently, usually without glorifying mental illness, childish resentment and anti-fascist liberation; desperately seeking meaning aginst ‘the oppressor’, wrapped within the warm blanket of ideology, condoning violence if necessary.
If this sounds a little harsh, that’s because, at this point, there are always choices.
Choosing to isolate such people and ideas sounds like a pretty good choice.
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Past Seattle links:
The closest corollary I can think of are the actions of still Evergreen State University President, George Bridges, wedded to activist logic, alternately sabotaging institutional authority and responsibility while supporting bigotry, revenge, and violence in the ideological utopia to come.
When it came to a lot of postmodern nonsense, ‘art’ activism and specious claims to knowledge and truth vs. personal integrity, academic honesty and much better claims to knowledge and truth, guess who won?:
Socialists publicly pushing green causes have been more rare out in public in the U.S., but there have been more lately, conflating political ideology and failed theories of (H)istory with ‘science.’ Socialists also apply their ideological beliefs onto conceptions of Nature and keep doing what they tend to do best: Political organization and appeals to sentiment.
A poster from Seattle a little while back:
There’s more than a little anti-corporate, anti-industrial activism that often finds expression within environmental movements. This activism can make its way into laws, and forms a major plank in the Democratic party platform nationally.
Whatever your thoughts on the natural world and conservation, I think it’s fair to say that from cartoons to schools to movies, there’s also been remarkable popular success in making environmental activism mainstream conventional wisdom; easy, cool and fun to join.
Interesting read here.
As found in a yard, on Capital Hill, in Seattle:
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I’m not sure the intellectual provenance of such ideas, nor even if they form any kind of coherent doctrine, but they strike me as a melange of Christian principles, liberal idealism and radical activist causes.
I still don’t see the greatest threats to political liberty coming from the political right at the moment:
“7. What is meant by enthusiasm. This I take to be properly enthusiasm, which, though founded neither on reason nor divine revelation, but rising from the conceits of a warmed or overweening brain, works yet, where it once gets footing, more powerfully on the persuasions and actions of men than either of those two, or both together: men being most forwardly obedient to the impulses they receive from themselves; and the whole man is sure to act more vigorously where the whole man is carried by a natural motion. For strong conceit, like a new principle, carries all easily with it, when got above common sense, and freed from all restraint of reason and check of reflection, it is heightened into a divine authority, in concurrence with our own temper and inclination.”