UNDERSTANDING THE LEFT'S WEAPONIZATION OF CATEGORIES

Watch carefully...

by Colin Liddell

The greatest humiliations are to be outwitted by morons and shamed by scumbags, but that is exactly what keeps on happening to Conservatives whenever they run into the Left.

Based on what they espouse, the Left are clearly the lowest of the low. They freely believe in any number of ostensibly absurd and immoral ideas, but they nevertheless manage to run rings round their Conservative opponents, using a formula that should be relatively easy to understand and counter, but which Conservatives fail to do.

The way that the Left gulls Conservatives is as follows. They take two categories that are central to human identity, and which were formerly taken for granted, namely gender and race, and apply them to the social, moral, and cultural realms.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it requires a lot of complexity and subtlety, and calls for a case-by-case analytical approach using data and context. But, instead of doing that, the Left takes advantage of the fact that most people experience these categories on the individual level as identitarian absolutes. This allows the Left to give them a simple on/off moral character, a process that is facilitated by invoking the negative/positive dichotomy and turning them into simple moral negatives. The process is complete when the "-ist" suffix is added, marking them as somehow "sinister."

This is how the Left distorts things. Race and sex—extended from the individual to the social, moral, and cultural levels—should be categories of multifarious interpretation but the Left magically transforms them into crude moral simplicites with a prepackaged verdict. Categories that could have been applied productively to a wide range of issues, are thus reduced to mere "racism" and "sexism"—fixed, over-emotionalized states that either exist or don't in the same way that murder or pregnancy is or isn't.

But, even in its negative form, as a weaponized tool of the Left, Racism, given its polymorphous application, continually resists its oversimplification as a crude moral tool. It has many degrees that range from extremely harmful ethnomasochism all the way through to psychopathic and self-harming hatred of the Other, via a number of beneficial and even mutually beneficial states in between. This is something that the Left has to work constantly to stop us seeing.

Just right!

The various degrees of Racism and Sexism can be likened to the three bowls of porridge in the children's story "Goldilocks and the Three Bears": One is too hot, one too cold, and one just right. What the Left has done however is to convince "Goldilocks" that all the bowls of porridge are scalding hot, and thus scared her away from ever going anywhere near porridge. In the same way, the Left manages to convince Conservatives that racism and sexism are "always too hot," even when there are clearly examples of them being "just right."

From a debate over whether something is harmful or beneficial in a specific situation, or about what groups benefit and to what degree, we have moved into an inquisition and an assertion of evil. In short, a medievalist approach has prevailed. This suits the regressive nature of the Left.

When the Left decides to attack something, you will often see stories that start with headlines or intros asking the question whether such-and-such a thing/person is "racist" or "sexist," or,  if the Left is soft-peddling for some reason, "symbolic of our racist/sexist  past," etc. 

This simplification and weaponization of categories gives the Left an enormous advantage over their opponents, because, almost everything human touches on gender or race in some way, and involves inequalities. Thus anything can be spun as "racist" or "sexist"—and therefore deeply negative—in order to suit whatever agenda the Left wishes to run with that day.

Once the Left is able to point to something that indicates any kind of inequality of outcome and connect it to race or gender, it is essentially game over. Conservatives have little option but to pack their knapsacks and resume their endless trudge backwards.

The way that this can be fought is to simply reject the Left's relentless imposition of moral simplicity and absolutism on categories that are complex, contextual, and gradated, and which include beneficial as well as detrimental aspects.

To defeat the Left we must recognize that there are in fact good forms of "racism" and "sexism," as well as bad ones, plus many gradations, none of them necessarily evil. The goal of political and philosophical debate should then be to identify where the good lies and which groups benefit and to what degree, and to slot this into a framework of the greater good.

A version of this article was previously published at Counter-Currents

Connected Article:
Racism and Sexism Viewed as Aristotelian Virtues