Thread by @JewhadiTM

What Happened to Social Democracy?

“... we now find a kind of progressivism that focuses on gender, sexual preference, race, and climate change...” quillette.com/2021/04/07/wha…

“In the United States, the Democrats have become almost indistinguishable from the big Wall Street firms and tech oligarchies, mainstream media, and other wealthy elites.

Democrats once ruled mining and manufacturing towns; today, they represent 41 of the 50 wealthiest Congressional districts.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, has evolved from the country club Wall Street party into one reliant on white working-class voters, and increasingly minorities, like Latinos, who appreciate that Trump delivered the first real income gains in a generation.

As part of its radical neo-Marxist ideology (with kudos for Lenin and Mao as well), Black Lives Matter actively opposes the “oppression” of the nuclear family in favor of a more collectivist model.

The uncritical embrace of BLM by the cultural industries reinforces a growing gap between the artistic classes and a large part of the population. Now mainstream culture embraces increasingly radical positions on family, gender, race, politics, and the military.

In today’s post-social-democratic world, views on race, not class, have become the central organizing principle.

Ibram Kendi, a major recipient of funds from billionaire-backed non-profits, actually embraces conscious discrimination against whites, even poor whites, in the name of “anti-racism.”

These views have become de rigueur within the Democrat Party, with the Biden Administration backing legislation that provides aid only to minority farmers. These approaches have now infected the private sector.

Coca-Cola now impose racial “diversity training” on their employees, seeking to remove anything associated with the plague of “whiteness” from their ranks. Some businesses, like Uber Eats, have offered free delivery for African-American-owned firms only.

Oakland has initiated a $500 monthly basic income program for poor people, funded by rich non-profits, but with the proviso that whites need not apply.

Arguably the single greatest distinction between social democracy and the new progressivism lies in the word agency.

The original social democrats sought “to enhance their economic power” by mobilizing grassroots support.

In contrast, today’s “Left” tends to favor rule by experts—a reprise of Wilsonian progressivism.

Like its contemporary analogue, this was more a product of the university and the boardroom than the union hall.

And like the original model, today’s progressives increasingly embrace Wilson’s preference for censorship and the political repression of uncooperative political tendencies.

There’s really no way to reconcile this progressivism with social progress.

Climate change policies, in particular, wipe out any gradual way to increase wealth for middle or working classes, although enforced strictures like “de-carbonization” create bounteous opportunities for highly profitable renewable energy speculation among financial & tech giants.

The obsessive emphasis on race and culture reflects the concerns of the faculty lounge and the media newsroom.

... as families become more dependent on government transfers, they may choose to confiscate the wealth of the uber-rich. Great inequality, Adam Smith suggested, naturally leads the poor to “invade” the “possessions of the rich.

Some on the Left already propose using the riches of the oligarchy to fund a “fully automated luxury communism,” a kind of technologically enabled collectivist paradise.

Given the history of utopian musings like these over the past century, they should be feared.”