Although the SJW author of the piece that quotes Selbourne in the New Statesman attacks Selbourne, what Selbourne describes is nothing less than the Alt Left itself.
In a very early bulletin board post, a poster described my Alternative Left as “conservative Leftists.” When Norman Mailer ran for mayor of New York in 1969, he called himself a left conservative. Mailer has continued to describe himself as a left conservative to this day.
Well, that’s exactly what we are.
We are somewhat socially conservative on the Cultural Left Freakshow, but we are Left on everything else. According to our dispensation, Selbourne would be Alt Left, as he despises the moronic SJW Left. And as he brilliantly points out, the unlimited freedoms (not really unlimited though as look at how SJW Feminism wants to stop heterosexual flirting, dating and sex) to be as weird and crazy as you want are really the freedoms of neoliberalism.
This is radical individualism taken to its ultimate without any regard for the good of society. And radical individualism in Culture goes right along with radical individualism is business and the rest of society. If government has to get out of the lives of all the SJW freaks, then obviously it has to get out of the lives of US business and the rich too, right?
Those who want the right to choose, and who object to moral or social restraint as ‘authoritarian’, cannot logically object to the rights of Capital to do whatever it wants also.
Capitalism runs on a culture of individualism, and radical individualism is the ultimate capitalist society. Capitalists say, “There is no such thing as society.”
And in a Cultural Left world where everyone is running around flying their freak flag du jour, there’s no society either. Everyone has a different hair color. Everyone has a different sexual micro-orientation and gender micro-identity.
Everyone is divided against everyone else. The women workers are egged on to hate the male workers. The Black workers are egged on to hate the White workers. The gay workers are encouraged to hate the straight workers. The tranny workers are prompted to hate the cisgender workers. Everyone hates everyone. No one works together on any societal goals because everyone hates each other too much.
Now that the working class is divided into factions at each other’s throats, society is demolished, all humans are atomized, and the capitalists can go on their merry rapacious way, destroying everything in their path, including whatever is left of society, like they always do.
In fact, we are now landed with a “Left” concept of freedom which is little different from Milton Friedman’s “right to choose”, a Libertarianism that has overshadowed the social in what used to be socialism. It is itself a market freedom; after all, self-restraint has less market worth than self-indulgence.
I like how he describes the Cultural Left as the free market of culture. That’s exactly what it is!
David Selbourne, in the left-of-center New Statesmen, writes::
With socialism at the end of its historical evolution, the “Left” now lacks a coherent sense of what progress is. It has only a ragbag of causes and issues, rational and irrational, urgent and idle: a politics of personal rights and ‘lifestyle choices’, of anti-racism and environmental protection, of multicultural separatism, individual identity and gender, and much else besides.
Neither rhyme nor reason — and certainly not socialist reason — can be made of it, especially when mere transgression is confused with progress.
In fact, we are now landed with a “Left” concept of freedom which is little different from Milton Friedman’s “right to choose”, a Libertarianism that has overshadowed the social in what used to be socialism. It is itself a market freedom; after all, self-restraint has less market worth than self-indulgence. Nor is today’s ‘freedom’n’liberty’, whether Right or ‘Left’, the freedom fought for in the Reformation or in the revolutionary overthrow of the anciens régimes. It is not the freedom for which the 19th-century emancipationists and the suffragettes struggled. It is the freedom to do what one wants and the devil take the hindmost. No wonder that the far Right is advancing.
There is ignorance too in this pseudo-Left Libertarianism. It is reactionary, not progressive, to promote the expansion of individual freedoms without regard to the interests of the social order as a whole. Those who want the right to choose, and who object to moral or social restraint as ‘authoritarian’, cannot logically object to the rights of Capital to do whatever it wants also. The rapacious equity trader has as much right to be free as you or me; these ‘rights’ differ only in scale and consequence, not in essence.
I would actually agree with the following, and this is why I am an extreme statist at heart because face facts, socialism is statism taken to its ultimate ends.
From the Libertarian author:
It grabbed the methods of conservatism, embracing state power as the means of planning permissable changes and preventing others.
We don’t hate the state. We love the state! The state is the people personified as a single governmental entity, acting in the interests of the people to whom it serves, as Mao points out.
“The effort to escape from State control has always been the sign of liberty; the effort to enforce State control has always been the sign of Conservative reaction.” For this reason: “Socialism, in so far as it postulates State control, is Conservative in thought.”
Oliver Brett, Defense of Liberty, 1922
Fine. We are conservatives then. We are the Conservative Left!
Professor E. Harris Harbison of Princeton, concurred: “The truly ‘radical’ movement of the later medieval and early modern period was the growth of economic individualism, not the appearance of a few communistic books, sects, and communities. Against the background of nineteenth century individualism, ‘radical’ is today almost synonymous with ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’. …It is essential to the understanding of utopian socialism to remember that when it first appeared in European history as a fairly consistent theory, it was very largely a reactionary protest against a new, ‘progressive’ and poorly understood economic movement, an appeal to turn the clock backward.”
Socialism and Modern Life, 1952
Fine, not a problem! I was always wondering when the Rightists and Libertarians would reclaim the word liberal.
Walter Lippman wrote: “…I insist that collectivism, which replaces the free market by coercive centralized authority, is reactionary in the exact sense of the word.”
Carl A. Keyser, Spare None: the Federal Octopus: How it Grew and Other Tales, 1972
Sounds good.
Liberal historically has never meant anything like US social liberalism. In most of the world, liberal is a dirty word. It’s synonymous with neoliberalism. Liberalism in economics means classical liberal or neoclassical economics. It’s Ricardo and Smith all the way to Mises and Hayek, without stopping.
In the rest of the world, it tends to mean the “free minds and free markets” garbage that American reactionary foreign policy claims to support in their lying propaganda. Note once again the tie-in of social freedoms with freedom of Capital. You want free elections, gay rights, feminism, porn, civil liberties and the rest? Fine, you have to let the market run free with no restictions from the state whatsoever.
According to this nonsense, you can’t have free minds without free markets, and you can’t have free markets without free minds. Any restrictions on the free market are automatically symptomatic of a dictatorship or authoritarian regime.
This is why every Left government on Earth immediately gets called a dictatorship by US foreign policy. Because to the sick American way, socialism in any way, shape or form is automatically undemocratic and dictatorial by its very nature.
This nonsense places economics over politics as Economics Uber Alles. Here economics determines the nature of the state.
If the market is free, you have a democracy automatically, no questions asked. Never mind the death squads that just murdered 200,000 people and all the peaceful opposition, the election that was just stolen, the US sponsored coup to “restore democracy” that resulted in the 17 year long “democracy saving” dictatorship, the politicized police, army, judiciary, the rich owning all the media and rendering freedom of speech a sick joke, the money-based elections giving rise to the “democracy of the dollar” and the dictatorship over the people.
And if you have any type of socialism, you automatically have a dictatorship. I suppose Norway and Sweden must be dictatorships then. Never mind that you have the freest and fairest elections on Earth as they have in Venezuela. No matter. Elections can never be free enough in a socialist country. Even if they are the freest and fairest elections on Earth, it’s automatically a dictatorship simply by dint of being socialist.