THE POLITICAL CASTE SYSTEM AND REVERSE GRAMSCIANISM

by Colin Liddell

There is plenty of evidence that politics is not about ideas, facts, data, and ideology, and is much more about personality types.

A few years ago there was a popular theory that political affiliation was an expression of J. Philippe Rushton's r/K theory, with Leftists being frightened little rabbits, while Right-wingers were alpha predators with high investment in offspring.

The Anonymous Conservative site was the centre of this biopolitical view, but it also surfaced in many other forms, including the more ornate and fascinating theory of Dr. Jim Penman.

While the details and causation can be quibbled over, I think it is quite reasonable to put forward the idea that there are different fixed "political types," just as there are different psychological and racial types.

It should however be pointed out that a "political type" is a sort of oxymoron, as our culture pushes the idea that political beliefs are somehow malleable and arrived at through data, debate, and discussion, rather than through preexisting biological and psychological predispositions. Sadly (or not), our culture appears to be wrong (again). "Political" types clearly exist.

Indeed, there may be dozens of distinct political types whose affiliations with various ideologies or specific aspects of ideologies is determined not by the merits or demerits of those ideologies but instead purely by a psychological affinity with those ideas.

Although these psycho-political factors may have great complexity, under our present political system, with its simplistic Left-Right axis, they are reduced to two main types, namely a Left-wing type and a Right-wing type.

So, if we assume that there are two main political types that are psychologically or biologically predetermined, how does this effect the greater political ecosystem?

The most obvious outcome of such a premise is that neither side can be destroyed by argument and nothing can be resolved by debate.

If political affiliations stemmed merely from the validity of certain ideas, then all that would be necessary in order to destroy those groups would be discredit their ideas or allow those ideas to discredit themselves.

But while certain ideas -- especially Leftist ideas -- have been destroyed again and again by facts, reality, and logic, Leftists as a group have not disappeared.

This is because they have nowhere else to go.

They can't simply vanish into thin air, just because all their economic predictions and ideas have been shown to be false or all their victim narratives absurd. The option of shrugging their shoulders, admitting they were wrong, and becoming Rightists is unlikely, even though this may occasionally be accomplished by aging or emerging from being pushed into the wrong biopolitical category in their youth by, say, an over-active education system.

Now the question would be "Do
magazines need to hire Commie editors?"

Apart from that, we should not expect someone in one category to convert to the other. No, instead a Leftist whose Leftism is defeated in one area, soon finds another area in which to "be Leftist" again in. This would also apply to Rightists.

The clearest historical example of this principle that I can think of from personal recollection is what happened in the 1980s in Britain. As a child and teenager, I didn't fully understand it at the time. But over the years, as I reflected on it, things became clearer and clearer.

In the 1970s, the Left was much more involved in economics. No one disputes this. This was also an era of potent trade unionism and hard Left ideas on how the economy should be run. There was a sense of Capitalism being on its last legs, and an almost smug belief in the coming ascent of utopian Left-wing societies. However, in the 1980s, all that crashed and burned for various and complex reasons.

Economics, which had been moving Leftwards for decades, suddenly swung to the right. In the USA you had Ronald Reagan and Neoliberalism, while in the UK this phenomenon expressed itself in the rise of Margaret Thatcher and her policies (actually the policies of people like Sir Keith Joseph who formulated them).

Globally the Soviet Empire was clearly in its death throes.

But at the very moment when Thatcher was most triumphant in the UK, I noticed that Leftists did not just vanish into thin air even though they had nothing to offer.

Yes, they deserted the battlefield of national economics. State-run industries that had been government-run since the 1940s were slaughtered, like so many sacred cows, and sold off to private shareholders. Public housing too was privatised on a mass scale, and trade unions were intimidated with the word "global competitiveness" and then had their powers curtailed by new legislation. The Left's main challenge to fight back, the 1984 Miners' Strike, was crushed. Everywhere on the field of economics the Left was massacred. Yet, they did not die with their unrealistic and discredited ideas.

Instead, around this time what happened was that as the economy moved Right, the culture moved radically to the Left.

The BBC, from being a vaguely stuffy, small 'c' conservative organisation -- with a guilty sideline in "sexual liberalism" -- transformed itself into an increasingly proactive Cultural Marxist organisation.

Old comedy, which was rife with what today would be called "racist," "sexist," and "homophobic" stereotypes was overtaken by something called "Alternative Comedy." OK, some of it was funny, and some of it was even funny against its own intentions, but increasingly comedy had to have a woke message, no matter how much that started to get in the way and drag things down.

Days in Europa by the Skids

The music business too followed the exact same trajectory. Punk and New Wave bands were all about "the fash" -- just check out the names of bands and albums from the 1970s and 80s: Joy Division, New Order, "Days in Europa," Spear of Destiny, London SS, etc. Also the lyrics:

I'm closer to the Golden Dawn
Immersed in Crowley's uniform
Of imagery
I'm living in a silent film
Portraying Himmler's sacred realm
Of dream reality
          David Bowie, Quicksand

But then as the 1980s progressed, an increasingly Left-wing and conformist tone came to dominate the music business, driven especially by a music press that was more Leftist than the first Bolshevik government.

To top it all, right in the middle of the 1980s, we had the big Left-wing signalling event called "Live Aid," a moment that for sanctimonious posers never ended, as they pumped out cringey anthem after cringey anthem to the likes of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and racial harmony.

But as the economy and the "normie" part of society swung right, it wasn't just the culture that swung Left. Another victim was local government. This too increasingly became a space in which to be "Leftist."

The epitome of this was the Greater London Council (GLC) under the leadership of "Red Ken" Livingstone. No longer was basic competence in providing local services the yardstick. Instead, local government became a platform for pushing old Leftist causes like nuclear disarmament and new Leftist ones like "racial inclusion" and "gay rights."

"Red" Ken Livingstone pioneering impotent Leftism

Problems that didn't have an obvious political pay-off, like White homelessness, were, of course, neglected.

What happened in 1980s Britain is of course a massive and complex topic. All sorts of arguments can be made and different causations given. But what this decade most looks like is the displacement of a political caste from one area of society (economics) to others (culture and local government).

In fact, this is rather different from Antonio Gramsci and Rudi Dutschke's famed "Long March through the Institutions," which also supposes that political beliefs are somehow malleable. Instead of the Left infiltrating and taking over institutions as a prelude to seizing economic and political power, we see the exact opposite in the British example: the Left giving up on political and economic power, and fleeing to the institutions as an alternative place to "be Leftist" in.

As the Leftists of the 1960s and 70s were economically exposed, and as their most cherished ideas were shown to be unworkable absurdities, they had to find new "safe spaces" to exist in, spaces less critical of their absurdities. Given their obvious idiocy, these spaces had to be sheltered from the cold, harsh winds of reality and falsification.

The parasite economies of local government, along with the cultural realms of television, music, the arts, and comedy -- along with a reinforcement to the ballooning education sector -- became the perfect places for this refugee caste to eke out a new homeland and bring in their comrades.

The clearest proof of this is that since they took over, those very same areas have all gone into a deep, sharp, and possibly irreversible decline, while occasional forays from here to the real world of politics have not ended well.

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Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia).