Abridged Regressive Left

 I'm not sure where to begin, because after writing about the regressive right, much of what there is to say about the regressive left seems redundant. So maybe just get the redundancy out of the way:

The regressive left, like the regressive right is tribal in nature and operates double standards depending on whether it identifies you as the in-group, or the out-group.

The regressive left, like the regressive right, albeit to a lesser extent has withdrawn the consent of the loser. It does not regard dissent as a legitimate right, or democratic exercise.

The regressive left, like the regressive right, are anti-liberal, anti-individual.

The regressive left, like the regressive right, has the fatal conceit of believing itself in possession of the ideals, subsequently all problems are merely a lack of commitment all opposition is a malicious waste of time, barely worthy of contempt.

That there is a regressive left, and that the left can be regressive, at this point in 2024 has been overdetermined. The work has been done to argue that case, even if the message hasn't penetrated. What is underdetermined, I feel, is how unconscious the regressive left is, relative to the regressive right, and even the more traditional left that criticize the regressive left.

When I hear: "We should all go to a free Palestine protest!" I feel I am hearing: "We should try the new Korean BBQ place, I hear it is fantastic." or "I want a pair of Nike Blazer mid-tops, I've seen people wearing them and I think they look really cool."

Which is to say, I feel the regressive left has the feel and flavour of a largely cosmopolitan fashion trend. I suspect it survives as a social phenomena by having, built in, a hostility to argument. 

On this front, I have described a traditional and useful conservativism as being routed in the idea of Chesterton's Fence, a vanguard, or check-and-balance, against unintended consequences, and a functional historical left as grounded in the observation that the Universe, World and subsequent society is dynamic and things therefore need to change. 

The regressive left seems fixated largely, on controlling the Overton Window. Probably what the regressive left has become most notorious for, are their attempts to police speech. To make certain subjects, or positions on subjects, unspeakable. I would guess the naive assumption being that, for example if people can't discuss fascism in public forums, then fascism will go extinct. 

That is largely how the regressive left self-organizes. It likely begins with an ideal, say for example that "Alegria" is the ideal art style. By the time an individual, such as you, notices the phenomena of the Alegria artstyle, it is basically presented to you as a fait accompli. The regressive left then tries to close the Overton Window's shutters such that the only publicly permissible discussion is about how great Alegria is, if for example, you personally have nothing against Alegria, but you really like comic-book dark-age over-the-top artstyle of 90s comic books, a la Rob Leifeild, Jim Lee, Greg Capullo etc. you would be assigned to the right, in a unilateral act of discrediting, because suggesting that other art-styles can viably co-exist with the ideal of Alegria, is to detract from the achievement of the ideal.

I presume that Sepultura fans lean largely left. "War for territory" seems to have seeped into the collective unconscious of the regressive left, who see the landscape of ideas as a warzone where all is fair, rather than holding positions that can be argued for.

So circling back to the Alegria vs 90s-Dark Age artstyles example, there are arguments, and probably compelling ones as to why, if you want to sell furniture or consumer software packages Alegria is superior to 90s comic book artstyles. The regressive left however, sees the very process of arguing for a position or against another, some kind of affront.

Subsequently, it isn't really the content of the regressive left's basket of causes that concerns me so much as their methodology. Like the regressive right, they are prone to being people who "believe in lies and therefore will lie for their beliefs."

Another example, the slogan "Love is love" employed in Australia in the leadup to a postal survey in which all Australian's of age could state whether they were for or against same sex marriage, the result of which was a large majority and though non-binding the incumbent conservative government of the time allowed a conscious vote (party members could vote with their conscious instead of along party lines) in which the legislation for marriage equality passed. "Love is love" is as effective a slogan as other superficial slogans like "build that wall."

You may feel the comparison is unflattering, until you have to argue why "love is love" is somehow an argument for same-sex marriage, but not an argument for bestiality, statutory rape, incest, pedophilia. The regressive left will get up in arms and incensed that same-sex attraction is being compared to criminal sex acts. That distinction that is the basis of offense - the difference between consenting adults and predatory behaviour is not made by a slogan as vacuous as "love is love" a deepity if ever there was one.

The regressive left doesn't argue, it just loses its shit. I do not see it as an ideology, such that the content of its ideas are the main thing to consider, so much as the spread of a bunch of rhetorical strategies to control the Overton Window, likely through an unfounded belief in the power of media effects.

Now, as Michael Shermer points out, there are no pseudoscientists, nobody wakes up and says "off to my pseudo-lab to perform pseudo-experiments to advance pseudoscience" they most often have convinced themselves that they are doing real science. Just so, I'm sure nobody believes themselves to be on the regressive left or right. Nobody wakes up and thinks "I'm off to drive moral progress backwards by resurrecting racism, suffrage sessions and repressing free speech!"

On the left there is the distinct issue of what to call what Coleman Hughes refers to as "the thing", I have written before that I reject the self-identification of progressive. This is based on simple observations like if the Gender Wage Gap (adjusted or unadjusted) was 60c to the dollar in 1960s, 70c to the dollar in 1970s to 88c to the dollar in 2023, then the system we have is progressive. Progress is being made an an actual progressive should seek to conserve the system we have. Instead the wage gap appears analogous to crime, where I could be convinced that just as crime goes down, reporting on crime goes up leading to less direct suffering from crime but more psychological suffering from the perceived ubiquity of crime.

"Woke" is a useful and predictive descriptor. If someone says a movie franchise has "gone woke" it reliably predicts identity characteristics of protagonists, and of antagonists, the presence of heteronormative romantic relationships on screen, and the amount of dialogue that will be dedicated to lecture style content or if you will overt-social commentary vs. covert-social commentary.

The unfortunate thing, is that any short hand used to refer to the regressive left, will be denounced by the regressive left as a pejorative. It is quite consistent with the fixation and belief in the Overton Window. The regressive left itself, cannot be the subject of public debate.

Ariel Levy, author of "Female Chauvinist Pigs" gave an abridged history of the confusion caused by the simultaneous movements of second-wave feminism born out of Roe v Wade and the Sexual Revolution that also was born out of access to reliable birth-control. The regressive left, is still, unsurprisingly prone to confusing unintelligible collisions of movements. Feminism that I do not pretend to understand, has in part being trying to break down stereotypes of femininity, assertions that women are constrained by some essential female nature to be agreeable, risk-averse, emotional, abstract, etc. such that it could be seen to be championing the idea that there is nothing it necessarily means to be female. This naturally gets entangled with trans-rights, which can be broadly interpreted as fundamentally maintaining the right to transit from one identity to another. Such that you wind up arguing for a position that allows someone to transit from an identity with no real characteristics to another identity with no real characteristics. 

These confused and unintelligible positions I suspect are why the regressive left survives on rhetorical memes. I will concede this to postmodernism and power-knowledge. It can work in the short term. I suspect the regressive left are largely self defeating however, because things don't work in the long term.

An example of this, could be the Academy Awards, that I don't know, were possibly seen as a lever by which to control the Overton Window. I think it is fair to say, the right regressive or not, are particularly concerned with the employment of and representation of marginalized groups in cinema, I hope it is not a bridge too far, to call diversity qualifications to be considered for an Academy Award, as a left-wing reform. The trouble being, that you might eliminate the literal best picture, from nomination, or the literal best actor or actress, the best original screenplay and best adapted screenplay, all from pictures that were made because a WWII era biopic featuring every white male actor in the world and three white women was something a cinema going public were willing to see, so it got made, and a small indy-film competently made about a refugee community that live in a trailer park seen by a few thousand people but not meriting word of mouth is among five similar competent-but-forgettable movies that are all acadamy members are permitted to consider.

Leaving an awards ceremony where a shadow looms large, that we are watching what used to be an open professional competition that is now the under-12s flag football competition. I suspect the initiative will be quietly relaxed, and the modernising of the film landscape allowed to naturally progress on its natural timeline - it is worth pointing out that movies like Spiderman: Homecoming are diverse (cast wise) successfully, because modern NYC is different from the 60s NYC in which Stan Lee originally set Spider-Man. The same is true for forthcoming films like Ghostbusters: Frozen Kingdom, in which the 80s cast who are as diverse as 80s NYC was, will star alongside kids who are as diverse as contemporary NYC. It was the same deal with Gene Rodenberry's original Star Trek series, with Nyota Uhura, Hikaru Sulu and Pavel Chekov. Rodenberry's optimistic vision of the future can be characterized as propaganda, as can late-Dr.Who series, but propaganda selling a brighter tomorrow is progressive whereas propaganda retconning the past is regressive and does not appear to be working.

Similarly, since joining a gym I've noticed that ads for Channel 7 and Channel 9 news teams, are not diverse. In fact their news teams look indistinguishable from each other, just a bunch of white people. These will be in between ads where an affable Polynesian male buying sleeping duck mattresses, affable Polynesian male buying property apps, affable Polynesian male buying underwear (I can't remember the brand) and affable Polynesian male choosing healthcare providers or something. You get the idea. There's nothing that doesn't really work although if I were a Polynesian male, I'd be concerned about being considered the human embodiment of the Alegria art-style.

There's an episode of BBC's Travelman, when Richard Ayoade was hosting it, where Richard meets John Hamm in Hong Kong for the show's natively advertised "mini-breaks" the horrible practice of jacking up your carbon footprint to spend a mere 48 hours in a foreign country. Their local guide takes them to sample local Hong Kong food specialty "Stinky Tofu" which the two foreigners do not like. Their guide explains that this vendor is one of two remaining shops that still serve Stinky Tofu, a food that is dying out and John Hamm remarks "So not only does it taste bad, it's also unpopular."

There are things that die out, like the chequebook, you can go watch old movies, perhaps none so memorable as "The Big Lebowski" where characters write out a cheque. Cheques still exist, but nobody pays for groceries or restaurant meals or clothes shopping with a cheque anymore and people do not generally carry a chequebook. Then there are things I suspect that there are simply supply and demand issues - like martial arts. A lot of people get a hard-on about fighting and dominating an opponent, but being good at martial arts is kind of redundant in a largely safe world. It is much cheaper and safer to just give your assailant your iphone, than to invest in getting good at BJJ. 

One of the things that makes the regressive left obviously anti-progress is likely a supply-demand issue. People who want to fight racism, often need to innovate more racism, with the unintended consequence of further racializing society and resurrecting racism. Taking people who do not as a rule, generally think about race, and "educating" them to think about race all the time, is likely to result in greater racism and bigotry. Furthermore, on the subject of race, we can see a symptom of the regressive left in 2023 media darling and sporting hero Sam Kerr, recently arrested for a racial slur directed at a police officer. She likely had no idea of the gap between one social sciences discipline theorizing that racism = oppression + power broadly conflated with it being not possible for BIPOC individuals to be racist, and another social science namely legal studies, defining bigotry as prejudice based on immutable qualities or something like that.

I think Sam Kerr probably has a genuine case to be made that she actually wasn't capable of distinguishing right from wrong before the law. I have written before that the last decade has left me with the distinct impression that the education I received failed to impart to most people any understanding of why Nazism was bad, what is wrong with racism. Most people merely remembered they can pass an exam by recalling that Nazi's are the bad guys, and racism is bad. The likely know nothing of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin or Mao.

The regressive left is profoundly ignorant, much like the regressive right is when it comes to knowledge of their own holybooks - I have linked before to The Atheist Experience's playlist of calls regarding biblical slavery. The ideals the regressive left assert differ from the regressive right because they are looking to an ideal fictitious future with some grounding in truth, rather than some idealized past.

For example, though I'm dubious that anyone who invokes "systemic" or even "covert" racism are actually talking about the concept explained in various explainer videos, there are notable truth's at the basis of this.

The regressive left for example, for all it's concerns with racism overidentifies and favours a US-centric worldview. Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Barrett's appointment to the US Supreme Court when compared via google-trends to the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests, dwarf the latter in terms of topic interest. An argument can be made that the overturning of Wade vs. Roe and affirmative action are issues more far reaching than the dismantling of Hong Kong as a special administration zone within China, but there's plenty of room for both. I suspect it is more to do with who we identify with and the narcissism of small differences.

Trumpist insurgency failed, and though shocking, was a poorly organised uprising by a group of people that could generously be called clowns. Meanwhile, President Xi quietly became paramount leader of China for life. The regressive left, it can easily be observed is more concerned with when a woman of colour can be president of the US, than when a non-Han Chinese will be paramount leader of the CCP, something presumably far off, given that Xi will not step aside until he dies or is forced out. Simultaneously, the regressive left would likely roll their eyes at me, if I suggested that the three female Prime Ministers and incumbent South Asian Prime Minister of the UK (all from the conservative party) are indicative of any moral progress.

On this front, the regressive left is particularly ill-equipped in my experience to appreciate that as bad as it would be to see Trump serve a second term as president, and as bad as George W Bush and Ronald Reagan were, even Clinton and Obama (remember Rage Against the Machine - they recorded most of their songs in response to the Clinton years). As bad as Mitch McConnell is, and everything going wrong with the US republican party in the past 30~40 years, do you have any idea how bad they would have to be to cause anywhere near the abject human suffering and attrocities of Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism and Maoism? 

My understanding is we are talking about regimes that killed some 120 million people. I would concede that the brutalizing of one's own people indiscriminately, seems more palatable than the Nazi brutalization of the Jewish diaspora. Compared to the problem faced by the Russian people when the Bolsheviks seized power, modern political disputes between left-and-right are truly trivial.

For my money, which is admittedly, not much, Karl Popper provides the best bulwarks against regression into horror: the first is tolerating anything but intolerance. I struggle, given the difficulty of dealing with the regressive left, whom I have access to in a way I do not the regressive right, with the moral obligation to not tolerate their intolerance. The second, is to insist on clarity, the regressive left is fairly characterized as being intellectually opaque to the point of unintelligible. There is nothing Judith Butler has said or written, that she could not have said or written in plain English, except for the fact that it would make obvious, that she has nothing much to say at all.

"Gender performativity" is just an obtuse and specific (therefore inferior) way of saying "we are what we do" except that behaving in a masculine way as regards attitudes toward sexual intercourse, will interact with human biology. The consequences of an unplanned pregnancy differ greatly between sexes. As do legal consequences. One can become in my experience enraptured with the seeming promise of complicated esoteric language that produces memes like "performativity" while not critiquing the dubious process at which such conclusions (were more often than not, not even) arrived at.

Bringing us, if not full circle, to that extreme of the left on a shoe-horn where the far left, the regressive left winds up resembling the far right. The process is the same, the commit the fatal conceit of thinking themselves already in possession of some determined ideal, a universal ideal being probably impossible (hence favouring Popper's intolerance of intolerance) that being a lie, the regressive left is forced to lie for it's beliefs. It becomes not political but totalitarian, Machiavellian. Believing itself to understand the wonderful ends, all means are justified. Debate, argument, engagement become a waste of time. Consent to lose is withdrawn. Opposition is illegitimate. Suicidally, the regressive left eats its own and assigns the left, increasingly to the right. Through rigid intolerance, a complete lack of epistemic humility that borders on grotesque hypocrisy, the right, even the "alt-right" or far-right, becomes anyone right of you, creating a further cannibalistic cottage-industry of inventing new "problematics" to denounce those impeding you and advance you further left. 

I would conclude, by saying that my amatuer diagnostic that the regressive left is obsessed and overly invested in the Overton Window, is my attempt to be charitable. That the regressive left isn't merely a modern phenomena of exposed cynical narcissist careerists fighting eachother for dominance over a society that is worse for their interventions. I believe at core, it is just a naive assumption that if people cannot discuss bad things, then bad things will cease to exist. Most often I assume, left wing voices can be characterized as "Nice people who want things to be nice" and we must stoically accept them. Making analogous errors to the devoutly faithful, that naively believe that some holy book if adhered to by everyone, would make a kingdom of heaven here on earth.

That if straight men can only look at "body-positive" lingerie ads, everyone will be better off for the expanded dating pool. When it is more likely, some complicated feedback loop where advertisers notice what women notice men pay attention to, even catering to distorted lenses resulting in women thinking men prefer thinness over muscularity and vice versa. 

I know skinny jeans on men baffled me.