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I was thinking lately why I -- despite largely agreeing with the progressives on policy -- can never see myself as a progressive (or as a "leftist" or whatever you want to call it). I thought the answer was "wokeness", but it isn't. Not really. There's actually something deeper. None of things below should be read as endorsement of conservatism, which I also disagree with.
There's one thing the progressives keep doing which I wish they would stop. I don't think they can ever stop. Every once in a while, progressives annoint one group as basically saviors of humanity. All other groups, by implication get relegated to essentially NPCs at best or scum of earth at worst. The annointed group never lives to those high expectations, of course so progressives eventually discard them and annoint some other group. The discarded group is sometimes just ignored or sometimes declared scum of earth depending on circumstances and on whether kicking down such group would be considered racist or not.
Interestingly, this is not that disimilar to how a narcissist acts. A Narcissist tends to first lure the victim with love-bombing, and later devaluates and discards it.
Some 120 years ago the first group to wear the starry crown was undoubtably the working class. Progressives were marxist then and working class was the class. They were the one who will overthrow capitalism and establish the New Civilization. Not only was the working class better than other classes, they also deserved to act contrary to any common morality. To kill not only the fat cats but the kullaks too.
We all know how this ended. Although some good things did came from communism and the labour movement, like 40 hour work week, it was a disaster overall. The worker's paradise never materialized, but corpses did. Today, progressives are not overtly interested in the working class any more, and the white part of it is held in near total contempt as Trump base.
60 years ago, the mandate of heaven was on boomers. Or at least on part of boomer generation that weren't conservative. It is hard to remember now, but at the time many intellectuals had very high hope for boomers as a new, spiritual, highly aware generation that will clense the world of sins of the fathers. The flower children. And it is not hard to see that those outside of the "counterculture" were considered NPCs. See this 1963 song:
It starts with saying the houses were made out of ticky tacky and by the end it is the people that are made out of ticky tacky. Progressives were calling other people "NPCs" long before Alt-Right did. It is good that there are songs like this or I would no doubt be accused of enacting strawmen.
We all know how this all ended, too. Boomers are now seen as the narcissism generation. At least there were no mass killings this time.
The next group to be deified -- tho maybe not to quite the same extent -- was alienated male. This was actually happening in parallel with Boomers althought I think it only reached true prominence after the "flower children" promise faded a bit. The first work in praise of alienated male actually predates Boomers, it's On The Road by Jack Kerouac. But generally in the 70s and 80s you got lots of movies -- taxi driver being the most prominent -- starring alienated male. The reason for alienation varied but there was usually an implication that the society was at least somewhat to blame. There was also usually an implication that making society more friendly to alienated men was morally good, if not a moral imperative.
Now, this last example is a bit more complex because there are multiple types of male alienation, obviously, but one type that lasted longer than others was a nerd. For a while there was lots of material in praise of alienated nerd, the victim of NPC jocks. The nerd was the one with broader perspective than other crude people around him. He was the one who trully deserved the girl due to being such a nice guy. It is darkly funny in retrospect that back when the columbine school shooting happened, the progressives blamed everyone except the shooters. The bullies, the jocks, the popular crowd.
And then Mother Mercy looked away, as she always does. A nice guy became Nice Guy. School shooting were done not out of bullying but because of entitlement. Nerds are discusting sexists, who have exactly what they deserve, which is nothing.
In 2020 everyone got (rightfully) shocked by what Derek Chauvin did. But the answer was not to remove bad apples, it was to remove all the police. Because the newly deified minorities don't need any police, because they are better than you. So CHAZ was formed. Very shortly, it became more lethal per capita to young black men than the rest of the city ever was. Unlike with previous examples, minorities weren't villified, instead the whole episode just got forgotten. But I am not going to allow anyone to forget.
Another group that seems to be getting deified would be trans children. Now, I got nothing against trans people and think there are legit rights that should be protected here. But the surrounding rethorics still makes me unconfortable. There is very obvious implication that being trans is somehow a more profound experience than being cis. Trans peoples are the ones on a beautiful journey, unlike NPC me. And you got things like Trans Day of Revenge, whatever that is.
And so, not that long ago, first trans school shooting has happened. People who say that school shootings happen because of white male entitlement are silent so far.
Okay, so what all of this means, you might ask?
I want to say right away that it is entirely possible to fight to people's rights without putting those people on a pedestial. Both civil rights in the sixties and gay marriage happened without pedestializing black people or gay people respectively. But all too often, progressives prefer pedestializing.
Progressives -- to the extent that they are aware of this dynamics -- often conclude that the problem is that they have picked the wrong groups. Those damn white male nerds were always too privileged, after all.
In my opinion, the problem isn't that progressives single out wrong groups for annoitment. It is that any group you annoint is all but guaranteed to become worse. Everyone sees that if you tell to an individual person that he is the center of the universe, that he is going to reedem the world, that all his problems are the world's fault, you are then likely to induce narcissism. Not always, because some people's egos aren't inflatable, others are (smartly) wary of praise, but in most cases you are going to end up with a worse person. Why is it so hard to see that it is exactly the same with groups?
Telling to alienated nerds that they are better than the morons around them, that they deserve more than this rotten world is giving to them, is going to turn a few of them into school shooters. If the other people are ants, why not step on them? But the same dynamics can be induced in e.g. trans people too, as we now see.
My current ideology is that the future either belongs to everyone, or it is a shit future. I am with everyone who thinks so and against everyone who doesn't.
The problem with this is that while the Columbine shooters were perceived as alienated nerds at the time, it doesn't look like they actually fit the stereotype. It wasn't progressive or pop-culture celebration of bullied nerds which set them off; they weren't even actually members of the group (the Trenchcoat Mafia) they're usually associated with.
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Well, I disagree with some of your specific examples. I don't think that Boomers, alienated men, or nerds were ever the "darlings" of the progressive movement like you say. Call them "young people," "lone heroes," and "dorks with bad social skills," and maybe they were promoted somewhat, but nothing like the way the movement supports other favored groups.
More broadly, I do agree with you, but I don't think it's an arbitrary change. It's all a part of "the revolution," going back to marxist rhetoric. You break down society into two classes, one the oppressor and one the oppressed. For Marx it was the capitalists oppressing the workers, and you can see the logic there- capitalists are rich but few, workers are poor but many, so they just need to organize, rise up, and seize the capital for themselves.
For women it's a little more complicated, since they don't have the numbers advantage and "abolish men," but it's still largely the same rhetoric. Organize, rise up, demand more stuff for your group and less for the others. It's justice! And then once that basic play was established, it was easy to start using it on every single other niche group with a chip on its shoulder, which you can somehow identify as oppressed and convince them to organize and vote/fight together. This is explicitly part of third-wave feminism, which is roughly "feminism, but not for women, it's for all the other oppressed groups." Cynically it's so you can be the organizer speaking on their behalf, or you can be less cynical and say it's just nice to fight for justice. It doesn't really matter, the result is the same either way.
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The progressive today is not the progressive of yesteryear, just as the cause to be championed changes from year to year. Yet the patterns repeat because the lessons are never learned, for This Time It Is Different.
The pattern OP rightly observes is that a disenfranchised group is championed by a vanguardist element (the vanguardist is typically a member of an elite class unable to function within elite society due to scarcity or more likely incompetence) as a morally righteous party whose interests must be advanced no matter the cost to current society, with the vanguardists administering said advancement and adjudication of costs/benefits. The whole point, now as in the past, is to allow the vanguardists a permanent hand on the lever of power, and the championed must be incapable of replacing the vanguardists hands with their own.
This is where the break point normally lies. It is easy to champion a group when said group is incapable of exercising their own agency and simply act as a formless mass to be grafted onto the vanguardist agenda, a silent blob that is asspuppeted for the vanguardist utopian dream. It is much less useful for the vanguardist when the blob finds its voice and says they actually like old system except with them on top, or that they like a new system but with the vanguardist removed.
@anti_dan below (above?) is right. The hated group is the animating force vanguardist progressives are trying to act against, not acting on behalf of a new downtrodden to be raised up. If progressives truly gave a shit about downtrodden marginalized oppressed you'd see much more support for copts, middle eastern jews, dayaks in East Malaysia, hindus in Bali, dalits in India... the list goes on. The progressives only seem to champion disenfranchised criminal minorities in their local sphere who need the guiding hand of the progressive, and this serves only to expand the list of groups who are the Hated Group. JK Rowling was the crazy woman who kept inserting weird racial minorities in Harry Potter long after she got her bag, now she's UltraTERF because she refuses to let men exploit womens only groups.
Progressives now, as in the past, fail to consider that the groups championed have their own agency, and can bite the hand on the leash as easily as choosing a new leash to be attached to based on their own preferences. The ANC suppressed necklacings primacy as a weapon only briefly under Nelson Mandela, with the EFF now looking longingly to restarting the practice. The SDS allied with the Black Panthers and were already suffering from internal splits thanks to Black Panthers eschewing socialist theory in favor of afrocentricism. The Iranian and Egyptian socialists joined hands with the Islamists only to be brutally suppressed by the Imams. The progressives of Europe opened the floodgates to refugees only to (continue failing to) discover that muslims love welfare, love raping nonmuslims, hate working and hate nonmuslims.
Whether progressives are aware that their ideas are not actually that popular or that their pets can and will rise up to advance their own interests is irrelevant. So long as an unsatisfied elite feels that they can exploit a wedge to upend the current hierarchy to put themselves on top, they will use that tool to the hilt. Right now the meta of Disparate Impact is still effective as a tool to be exploited to the hilt for DEI managers to continue creaming off the fat. Lets see if this state of affairs can continue.
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There are some interesting things here. But one thing I would avoid is bait when writing a broader point. There is no agreement and definitely not “rightfully so” he did a bad thing or was a bad man. My opinion is he was an unfortunate societal victim of the left who is just an average blue collar guy who showed up to work one day and ran into a struggling for life perpetrator having a fentanyl overdose. He may have used inappropriate technique (which he may have received training on) that caused a vulnerable victim to die. It should also be noted Floyd was saying he “can’t breathe” long before he was restrained.
It’s bait for me when something is presented as an “agreed upon fact” which is not at all agreed upon. Bait tends to distract from a broader point you are making and it’s bait because I just have a thing that I don’t want something to be said so then other think it’s settled science.
I wasn’t aware of alienated men being a progressive thing in the past. And the pedestialization does seem problematic. Personally, I see the connection with communists and the working class. I am not sure if this was as present 1930-2010 America. It feels to me like why woke is Marxists that it has reintroduced these ideas in new ways.
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I think you have this all completely backwards. There are rarely progressive "anointed groups" where the group is as narrowly defined as you say. There is only the hated group. The most central example of your examples is the "jocks". Jocks have always been progressives central enemy, because they represent successful (now white centrally in the prog mind) men, particularly those forming families. Successful men dont care for their policies.
Now, initially, Progressives tried to target this demo with their "working man" schtick. But it turned out quite quickly that men actually working and married to a girl from their hometown don't care much for the crazy stabby stabby guy on the corner. So they were quickly abandoned by the movement as "idiots" and "class traitors". In the end its always a movement of the outliers against the core. Because, why would the core ever vote to give their money to bums, criminals, and people sitting in ivory towers "thinking" for a living?
That is why much of progressive fiction is just complete fiction. Revenge of the Nerds, while a fine movie, does not represent high school nerds in any way. HS nerds can't assemble a computer from scratch, nor can they play an awesome concert. Heck, even the crowning achievement of that movie is rape by deception, which is out of the actual HS nerd's playbook. In real life, the jocks get with the prom queen, and get good on the SAT, then go to a way better college than "Adams" then marry a hot girl from there; whereas the nerd does like D&D, but he also ends up as a bedpan changer.
And, of course, this also reflects the anti-police sentiment that runs through now. These are successful men who are, in particular, doing it outside the progressive-approved system of success (college in a specific indoctrination area) which cannot be tolerated (see also engineers, for now). Its all the same.
Now, I think your post is a useful jumping off point for discussion, but I also think its wrong. Its all about who the enemy is, and what they think is the best weapon of the current day to wield against it. It being success and family formation.
I wasn't there to have a personal historical anecfote, but I think how we remember the canonical "jocks v. nerds" conflict is heavily skewed because, to a large extent, the nerds won in the huge financial jackpot of the tech industry starting in probably the late 80s.
Although I think the categories are also poorly defined (sometimes to sway arguments being made): at least in my experience most of the sharpest, most technical people I've worked with manage to find enough time to stay at least moderately physically fit, so I don't think it's as well-defined a boundary as is frequently presented.
I think in the 1980s nerds and geeks were rather undifferentiated in the public mind. Geeks would have had intellectual interests, but there were a couple of things that separated them from nerds. First, those interests were generally useful skills — building things, fixing things, useful intellectual skills like math and science and later computers. Second, that they actually became quite skilled and those things — they could actually build a rocket model, do a chemical synthesis, write a program or speak a language. Third, they were, while somewhat introverted and awkward, not completely inept at social relationships. Nerds were the ones hyper interested in useless trivia. They’d memorize the call numbers on starships, they’d learn all the lore of their favorite TV shows and movies, they’d be interested in medieval history or something. If those things required skill, they probably wouldn’t be all that good at it. There is a bit of a difference between a Nerd who can quote S2E5 of Babylon 5 from memory and a Geek who can speak Korean because he’s just into learning a language.
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The "nerds" that won those financial jackpots have little to do with fictional portrayals of nerds, because Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc were not unable to secure prom dates. Larry Ellison was a tennis player and popular at South Shore.
I don't know if it was true, but Gates has an anecdote about how it took him two weeks to work up the courage to ask a girl to prom, and she turned him down.
Jobs was more hippie than nerd; Wozniak was the nerd. I have no idea if either had a prom date.
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It's not about high school nerds; it's about college nerds. Doesn't represent them either, of course.
I uncharitably suspect that one is pure Hollywood.
LOL, no. The successful jock gets with the prom queen, marries a hot girl, and ends up a managing director at Morgan-Stanley (actual current job of one of the QBs in my high school), the successful nerd hires that guy (or at least one of his subordinates) to manage his money. The bedpan changers are drawn from the stoners and just regular dumb people.
Nerd != Smart
Successful nerd is just a smart jock that doesn't prioritize his sports too much most of the time.
No, there's plenty of other differences. The jock is likely to be extraverted while the nerd is likely to be introverted. Even if the nerd isn't either of the 1980s non-athletic nerd stereotypes (fat slob or very pale skinny dude), any sports he does are less likely to be team sports than the jock; a high-school jock, after all, is not a jock just because he engages in physical activity, but because he does it in the school teams. The successful jock is probably good at schoolwork; the nerd is probably actually interested in one or more academic subjects.
When you start going down from the top jocks, they meet the "dumb jock" stereotype more.
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This is like if you went to Beverly Hills High School or a school on the north side of Chicago.
The average QB becomes an electrician or pool repair guy. Which those jobs can pay well if independent. The average nerd has some middle office white collar job.
I went to school in semi-rural Frederick County, Maryland. (though it's not semi-rural any more)
Of course there are and were less successful jocks and nerds; before the tech booms, if you weren't in Silicon Valley, a middle class white collar job was indeed what a nerd could expect. That's way better than "bedpan changer" though. And the stereotypical ordinary jock job was sales, which has a rather large range.
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To relegate the rise of the working class victories to just the 40 hour work week is criminal. You used to have 6 year olds cutting their fingers off shucking oysters. We've come a long way.
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