VIDEO: A New Book By Leftist Ben Burgis Explores Why the Left's Political Culture is So Alienating
VIDEO: A New Book By Leftist Ben Burgis Explores Why the Left's Political Culture is So Alienating
Central to "Canceling Comedians While the World Burns" is the question of whether the western left wants to win. Watch my 50-minute discussion with the author.
The philosophy professor and writer Ben Burgis is as much on the political left as it is possible to be. A writer at the socialist magazine Jacobin, vocal supporter of Bernie Sanders, and advocate of socialist economic policies in the name of stopping corporatism and neoliberalism and elevating the quality of life for the working class, the bona fides of Burgis’ leftism are impossible to contest.
Yet his new book takes critical aim squarely at the political faction in which he resides. Entitled Canceling Comedians While the World Burns: A Critique Of The Contemporary Left, the book explores the numerous recent developments in leftist politics in both the U.S. and the West generally — particularly new cultural dogmas — which he argues are driving away and repelling the very people leftist politics ought to be attracting and representing. The portrait Burgis paints of dominant sectors of the left is one that is often dreary, joyless, repressive and intolerant. The book signals not Burgis’ renunciation of the left but his attempts to argue how it can attract rather than repel people.
I spent roughly fifty minutes in the video below discussing with Burgis his new book and contemporary leftism. It was a wide-ranging and candid discussion that examines whether the political left really wants to win or prefers its narrative of persecution, grievance, and victimhood, whether there is more overlap than people realize between the populist or anti-establishment wings of the left and the right, whether contemporary leftism can be meaningfully reformed without jettisoning its fundamental principles, and whether these categories of "left” and "right” now obfuscate more than illuminate. Burgis is an honest and insightful thinker, which is why I found both his book and this discussion so worthwhile:
There’s no mystery to what is happening. It’s about dismantling anything and everything that is even remotely tied to individualism. That, above all, is what the left despises.
All of these preposterous dated or vague terms of “corporatism” and “working class” (do wealthy people not work?) obscure the real philosophical difference:
It is either individualism or collectivism.
Socialism is collectivist
Communism is collectivist
Fascism is collectivist
State run mixed economies are collectivist with a pretense of liberty.
The goods and services in all of these centrally planned, dreary, shitty collectivist systems has to come from somewhere. So they allow for just enough pretense of liberty to keep *some* people working for the unearned benefit of others.
But ultimately the phony concern for the “working class” is just that: phony. What the left cannot tolerate is anyone being free of state compulsion. They simply cannot bear it. They have see people subjugated. And the politicians simply use the whole lie as a means to gain, consolidate, and maintain power.
I listened to this while I was cleaning my guns. That struck me to be pretty funny. Were it not for Glenn Greenwald, I would have zero exposure to Ben's new book. I always appreciate a nuanced discussion even if I don't agree with the conclusions. That is the marketplace of ideas in action.
To that end, Ben and Glenn touch on a number of very important issues. First, the left now exists to uphold the political hierarchy and the centers of power. They are able to maintain support through signaling on key issues without challenging established norms. This is not unlike the right.
Secondly, they both acknowledge that the left has been coopted by a puritanical brigade of assholes. Political and moral purity has displaced the liberal ethos of the innate human right to self-determination. Curiosity and humility has been replaced with moral certainty.
I was raised in the church but now, I consider myself to be an agnostic because the moral certainty for atheism and orthodox religion is too much to swallow. I choose the side of humility. I know what I don't know.
I am definitely not good or moral enough to be on team blue. I am not a proponent of a welfare state but the constant drone of moralism on the left is what makes me want to vomit. It is like an insidious virus that has infected every political issue.
It is just as creepy as it was on the religious right. I'm okay with going to hell if the religious left is who I can expect to find in heaven.