Alt Left: The Insipid Bond between Culture and Economics Is As Tight As Ever

As usual, the bond between culture and economics that we were so desperate to break here with the Alt Left remains confirmed.

Once you develop rightwing cultural views, soon you develop rightwing economic views. I have seen so many formerly liberals talk about how they went conservative. It usually starts with understandable disgust with the Cultural Left Freakshow. So they move right on culture. You would think they would stop there, but of course being sheep, they don’t.

They buy the whole rightwing package, economics especially but then usually everything else. It’s so tiresome. You spent all that time on the Left working for progressive, pro-worker economics and then just because you got disgusted with Destin is Amazing the 11 year old drag queen, you went full Ayn Rand. Way to go. You’re really using your brain. You shithead.

The problem here is that people think there are two ideologies, and you are either with one or the other:

The Right.

The Left.

And that’s it.

Disgusted with transsexual bathhouses for all ages, the latest outrage in the Cultural Left Freakshow, so you head on over to the Right to see what they have for sale.

If you align with them, they hand you a list of 500 positions and order you to check all of them or they throw you over to the Left. You check only 499 out of 500, and they call you a Communist and throw you over to the Left. Confused, you head over the Left.

“What are you doing here?” the liberals ask

You say: “Well. I thought I was a conservative, but the conservatives said I’m a Communist, so maybe I am. In any case, here I am, good sirs, and how may I be of service to you?”

“Well, let’s see if you fit the qualifications,” the libs say. “We have some pretty strict qualifications, you know. We cancel people all the time for forgetting to cross one liberal t or dot one liberal i. Then their lives are ruined forever LOL.”

The liberals laugh sadistically but self-righteously, seeing themselves pure as Jesus in an all-White robe.

You hand them the list. “They said I’m conservative on 499 things but liberal on one thing, so that makes me a Communist,” you say, confused.

The liberals look at the list and start screaming that you need to be canceled for being a Nazi. They call all their liberal goon private investigators around and order them to the dox you. You can’t run away fast enough.

You’re halfway through life right now, and it’s never been worse.

Politically, you were lost. Stumbling along a road in a darkened wood, you were tired that night and had lost your way, politically and geographically. In the morning, up ahead, where the valley sloped into another hill of life to climb, rays of the sun’s hope appeared. Perhaps there was a way free of this politics of confusion and folly after all. Your fear seemed to settle a bit.

You looked back at the pass of politics and all the people foolishly stranded there who would never make it through the pass to the least bit of enlightenment. They were as lost as you were, but yours was temporary, and theirs was for life.

Then one of the vicious creatures of our partisan politics appeared, frightening you. A wolf? A puma? It moved towards you, demanding that you take a side, any side. Terror filled your futile heart and you were driven back into the silent sun to the east, returning to the depths of politics of confusion from which you came.

What lies ahead?

Is it infernal Hades? Is it Paradise? A Seer to vigilantly show you the way to a politics of reason and logic?

Ahead, two roads of American politics diverged in the yellow forest. One went to the Right and one went the Left. You peered down each one, wanting to take the one less trodden by some  superstitious impulse. But the roads were blocked, the well-worn one and the little-used one both. Up ahead you saw people partying down each road, Right and Left, singing, dancing, fucking like no tomorrow, secure in their political homes. You stood there, abandoned, with not a friend in the world, lonely, homeless again, until…until forever. This was your destiny.

Such is the plight of the politically homeless. This is the fate of the Alt Left. Everywhere I go, I never see one Alt Left person. Everyone is either Left or Right. If they’re Left, they’re all the way to the Left, every punctuation mark perfectly placed. If they’re on the Right, they bought the whole package, checked every box on the form.

Every time I try to talk to them, I tell them about my politics, and the response is always, “Ok, so you’re a Martian” or “Sorry, you do not compute.” That’s when it’s not a blast from the liberals: “You are not on the Left! You are a moderate conservative!” or “Guess what? We don’t want you on the Left.  Go over there to the Nazis where you belong!” Then they ban me from whatever leftwing sub, bulletin board, or website I was destined to get banned from that day. I get banned from around one leftwing site a day. And I’m a Leftist! What the Hell.

What’s odd is the conservatives always take me in. They’re quite pleasant people, despite their awful politics and on Culture, sadly, nowadays they are more right than wrong. Many conservatives are also very smart. I’m not sure why that is but I like it. They are shockingly open-minded. And they’re tolerant! They listen to my story and accept me. “Well, you are sort of one of us, so have a seat. Can I get you a drink of anything?”  They say,  “You know, we could make alliance with a Leftie like you. In fact, we should.”

This is so horrible. All my life we on the Left have been the nice and kind ones, the educated and erudite, the open-minded and open to new ideas, and  of course the tolerant. We were proud of these things because conservatives were the opposite: Hostile, mean, stupid and ignorant, closed-minded and subject to prejudicial thinking, closed to anything but their own narrow, backwards ideology, and of course utterly intolerant, their worst tendency of all.

Good God can you see what has happened. We liberals have turned into the conservatives of old, the ones we hated so much. We now embody many of the psychological attributes we hated about them, that made them such monsters that we considered the essence of conservatism.  And those backwards hillbilly redneck conservatives with a blade of grass between their teeth have in turn embraced all of the psychological attributes that we prided ourselves and that we thought of as the essence of liberalism.

We turned into our worst enemies. And our enemies turned into our glorious beknighted selves of yesteryear, stealing our pride and putting its crown on their head. I don’t think anything  makes me more angry than that we turned into the  hated conservatives of old and  they turned into the beloved liberals of old. It makes me sad, angry, frustrated, hopeless, and mostly just utterly baffled. It’s horrible. We turned into the monsters that  we hated so much. Congratulations my fellow libs.

The best things in life are mixtures. You hardly see a recipe with a single ingredient. Too much of a single ingredient ruins the stew.

Pure lines tend to die out. Hybrid vigor, mixing a bit of the opposite in, increases health and vigor.

The sages all say that variety is the spice of life. It’s even coded into Nature, where opposites attract to balance each other out as Nature demands. Imbalance wrecks ecosystems, but only for awhile, until Nature balances the scale once again.

The way of the Dao says only, “Moderation in all things.” In your views, your tea, your work, your play, your everything, and your nothing. Excess kills. Judiciousness keeps us on two legs.

Some day, perhaps, the cancer of American ultra-partisan politics, one of the most insipid trends in recent US history, will slither away, having done its damage. It will leave us with the wreckage of the destruction and idiocy that it brought. But I am not optimistic. Partisan thinking after all is just more Black and Whiting, and Black and Whiting is just what folks do.