Have we reached peak ‘White Leftism’?

It’s time hubristic Western elites humbled themselves sufficiently to learn from their wise Eastern counterparts

Photo by Roger Bradshaw on Unsplash

But now look at the elite class.

Look at the university graduates from the elite institutions, who work in financially secure if not well-paid professional jobs, who live in one of the big cities, the affluent commuter suburbs, and the university towns, whose parents also belong to this class, whose marriages and social networks are likewise filled with people from this class, who share the same backgrounds, values, and political loyalties, and who all lean strongly to the political and cultural left…

Increasingly, our societies are being radically reshaped around the values, beliefs, tastes, and priorities of a radicalising minority elite,… while the elite class likes to think of itself as representing the beating heart of the nation, the blunt reality, as major surveys show, is that most of its views are only held by a maximum of 10-15% of people in the West.

This is why, today, a much larger number of people are looking at the radicalisation of the elite class with a combination of bemusement, shock, and, increasingly, horror, wondering what the hell happened to the people who are ruling over them, claiming to speak on their behalf…

The real story here, the story my critics routinely ignore or get wrong, is actually not about me at all. It is about the radicalisation of the elite class, a minority radical elite that is imposing its values on the rest of society while simultaneously expecting ordinary people not to notice and certainly not dare say anything about it.
Matt Goodwin, Have I “radicalised”?, 21/8/24

To nobody’s greater surprise than mine, I have now reached the stage of life where I find myself nodding along vigorously with both op-ed columnists in The Australian and senior figures in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Perhaps I should begin by providing some background.

The view from Canberra
When I opened The Australian this morning (22/8/24), I clicked first on Peta Credlin’s column, as is my wont. With remarkably little schadenfreude, Credlin detailed the ALP’s latest vibrant diversity-inspired machine-gun-nest charge.

Credlin noted the ALP potentially risked the safety of Australian citizens to – somewhat on the down-low – grant entry to 3000 refugees from Gaza. The ALP was planning to grant them tourist visas, though everybody involved understood few if any of the tourists would ever return home. Senior Labor politicians also appear to have been, shall we say, not as rigorous with overseeing the vetting process as they potentially could have been.  

As Credlin observed:

It’s an extraordinary failure of governance to admit thousands of people from a terrorist-controlled war zone without any obvious formal process, blind to risks and logistics, and without any explicit formal explanation and justification to the public.

Both non-Australian and Australian readers who were unaware of this scheme are probably now asking why (bitterly) experienced centre-left politicians, half a world away from the Middle East, would engage in such a high-risk, low-reward gambit. Especially given other nations, most notably the neighbouring ones, have been vastly more circumspect.

Of course, this is partly about payback to the growing number of Muslim voters in Australia. Voters who’ve disproportionately supported the ALP in the past and who’ve recently made their wishes entirely clear.    

But the relatively small number of Muslim voters are not the demographic chiefly being targeted here. This ‘Come on in and make yourself at home, I’m sure everything will work out for the best!’ showily compassionate gesture is aimed at that faction of the professional-managerial class that likes to believe it exists on an elevated moral plane, and which nowadays votes Teal or Green. Or, if there’s no purer option available, holds its nose and supports Labor.

As Credlin concludes:    

Essentially, this has pitted those who believe in a civic patriotism against those who support ethnic separatism. Or Team Australia, where everyone is expected to subscribe to core values, against Hotel Australia, where all we have in common is living within the country’s borders.

Wherever you stand on this critical issue, and what sort of Australia you want for the future, it’s not something that governments should be allowed to decide in secret, without sober advice from agencies and then only revealed because the media caught them out. And yet that is where we are.

Indeed. But how exactly did we get here?

All the single ladies
For one possible answer, I’d recommend Adam Creighton’s piece on the new Hillary Obama. While teasing out the electoral upsides and downsides of the Democrats’ identity politics-suffused platform, Creighton observes:

JD Vance’s now notorious claim that “childless cat ladies” were running the country wasn’t far wrong... The Democrats are in power and their strongest backers undeniably are women who have never married. If this large and growing group didn’t vote, the US electoral map would be a sea of Republican red.

Single women have become a powerful voting cohort, increasingly targeted by Democrats as they embrace sexual politics to maintain control of the White House. It is conventional wisdom in the US that men lean Republican and women lean Democrat – but not all women.

While clear majorities of men and married women favour the Republican Party, according to a survey of Americans by Pew Research, 72 per cent of never-married women back the Democrats.

Creighton then quotes a recent Unherd piece by David Samuels:

Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. 

So, how’s that been working out?

Not particularly well, at least according to Samuels (and not a few others):

“A startling 56 per cent of liberal American women aged 18-29 have been diagnosed with a mental-health condition.”

As Creighton concludes:

More recently, Democrats and parties of the left throughout the West have even pushing for the creation of new groups, evidenced by recent obsession with the “trans community”, a group that has exploded from essentially zero to about 5 per cent of the US population according to another 2022 survey by Pew. Political discourse has become so dominant and powerful, perhaps it can create groups as much as cater to them – and not necessarily for their benefit.

Regardless of political affiliation, I’d invite the reader to consider the state the US now finds itself in. And the situation Anglosphere nations culturally downstream from the US will likely soon be in. If they aren’t already.

• Younger, university-educated, middle-to-high-income women are increasingly calling the shots politically, particularly on the Left

• Despite now having more clout than most demographics, and vastly more than those much-despised white working-class males, progressive women don’t appear to be much enjoying their boss bitchdom

• Marriage and childrearing are becoming increasingly politicised. Married women lean conservative and never-married women lean extremely progressive. (This made me wonder if women who get divorced become more socially liberal/economically leftist. According to ChatGPT, it’s complicated but, “Generally, single and divorced women are more likely to lean toward liberal political views compared to married women.”)

This divergence has long existed, but the matrimony-based ideological split has widened alarmingly in recent times. I presume this is part of the reason both camps invest so much emotional and intellectual energy in trying to wrest control of the trad-wife narrative out of the hands of their catastrophically misguided opponents.

Regardless of political affiliation, I’d invite the reader to consider whether this is a happy or even sustainable – beyond one generation – state of affairs.

Spoiler alert: Xi Jinping doesn’t think so.

The view from Beijing  
Granted, China now has its challenges. But I think we can all agree the CCP has played an absolute blinder for the last four decades. And that perhaps Western politicians could learn a thing or two from their wily, clear-eyed counterparts in Beijing.

I was alerted to the existence of this paper by China analyst Nathan Levine by Rod Dreher. (Be warned, Dreher makes me look like a veritable ray of sunshine. And it appears Levine isn’t going to be winning any ‘Pollyanna of the Year’ awards anytime soon either.)

Here are the money quotes from Levine’s piece:    

Debates connected to the culture war, including even on such amorphous issues as the West’s slide into spiritual nihilism or the loss of its inner will, are directly relevant to international politics and even international security. Western strategic thinkers must take these issues into account just as analysts in Beijing or Moscow do…

In this pessimistic view – the overall truth or falsehood of which must be left to the reader – the Western world, despite national differences, is notably united in generally sharing many of the same core civilizational challenges. As commonly reflected in Chinese as well as Western conservative discourse, these challenges, which have accelerated over approximately the past decade, include:

• Widespread sociocultural and political upheaval produced by the emergence and rapid proliferation of an ideology that foregrounds extreme attention to issues of identity (including racial, gender, and sexual identity) and victimhood, a morality of collective “social justice,” and a revolutionary objective of universal liberation from historical “oppression.” This ideology, an outgrowth of progressive left-liberalism, is today colloquially known as “Woke” in the West and “Báizuŏ” (白左: “White Leftism” or the “White Left”) in China. Báizuŏ has a generally derogatory connotation that implies that the White Left are bourgeois and insubstantial. It features what can be described in sociological terms as an “inversion of values,” or the subversion and reversal of traditional moral beliefs, strictures, and value judgements. This inversion means that the ideology manifests as distinctly oikophobic (fear of and hostility to one’s own homeland and culture) and ultimately antagonistic to Western civilization itself [my emphasis]. This has resulted in sharp, largely generational divides over what previously were widely held Western values, such as the importance of freedom of speech, objective reason, meritocracy, patriotism, or the idea that individuals (rather than collectives) should be held culpable for crimes…

• A crisis of social atomization, loneliness, low social trust, mental illness, and drug addiction, contributing to a proliferation of “deaths of despair,” including by suicide, overdose, and alcoholism…

• A culturally significant background of persistent structural economic weaknesses, including the offshoring of manufacturing and an overall pattern of deindustrialization and financialization, the hollowing out of middle-class economic security, high rates of debt, and exceptionally tight housing markets that have largely priced out younger buyers. This has fostered persistent popular resentments about economic inequality and lack of social mobility…

• A breakdown in gender norms and relations between the sexes along with a collapse in family formation and fertility rates, driving a worsening demographic crisis [Yes, I’m aware the Middle Kingdom faces its own challenges here]… a concurrent rise in the percentage of the population, especially among the young, identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) or other alternative sexual and gender identities…

• A significant collapse of public trust in major institutions, including across all branches of government, the law, corporations, media, education, and even the military…

• A decline in overall levels of both patriotic sentiment and approval of democratic governance… Intensifying partisan political division, factionalism, and rivalry, producing growing risks of political instability…

Taken together, these problems paint a picture of a civilization facing internal sociocultural challenges serious enough to risk steep decline. This image slots easily into a broader Chinese view, as expressed by CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s frequently used slogan asserting that the central fact of the 21st century world is that the “East is rising, the West Declining.”

Unlike Dreher, I haven’t quite reached the point where I’m resigned to Western civilisation being in an inescapable death spiral.

But I’m now not sure how much time is left to course correct.