Looking back on it I think maybe my articles last week may have been a bit too vague regarding the Democrats’ consistently misery-inducing policies. I laid out the basic framework – because the Democrats brand themselves as the party of the downtrodden, the only way they can win close elections is by creating more downtrodden people – but I didn’t give a lot of specific examples of policies that cause this effect. So in this post I’m going to go over a few that have affected me or my family personally over the past decade or so. Some of these may resonate with you; and you may have thought of some that I have missed. Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
1. Trans ideology. Probably nothing stands out today so starkly as a symbol of our crazy era as the ideology of transgenderism. According to one recent poll, 40% of Gen-Z Americans identify as some flavor of LGBT, up from just a couple of percent in the recent past, and my educated guess is that a huge amount of that increase comes from disaffected teenage girls suddenly identifying as boys. As an anecdote, shortly before we pulled our kids out of the public school system, 3 girls in my daughter’s sixth grade class (in rural Alabama!) decided to “come out” as transgender boys – considering that female-to-male transsexuals were approximately non-existent just a few years before this, it seemed pretty clear to me that something was afoot.
Much has been written about this phenomenon, whereby the girls who in my youth would have been afflicted with anorexia or bulimia have now begun to gravitate toward transgenderism and “gender affirming” body mutilations and hormone abuse; I won’t even bother to link anything here, just go to Quillette and read every third article for the past five years, or pick up Abigail Shrier’s much-censored book. To some degree, these girls have probably been affected by viral memes and social media – although that was probably also true of other forms of self-harm in the pre-Awokening days of the early 2000s, so it alone can’t explain this massive increase in transgender ideation. More likely, some professional LGBT political activist groups, having won huge victories like Obergefell, had to justify their existence with something other than opposing nearly non-existent public disapproval of gay people. So they astroturfed, through a massive PR campaign on social media, an oppressed transgender class whose rights they could fight for with the help of generous donations from billionaires who needed alternative ways to launder their shady income streams.
Regardless of what caused the massive surge of late-onset gender dysphorics, it’s certainly true that Democrat media apparatchiks actively cheerlead transgenderism, doing everything they can to make the public believe that it’s totally normal that millions of young people suddenly want to radically alter their bodies. Anybody that pushes back against this becomes a right-wing Nazi extremist in their propaganda, justifying more censorship and more power grabs for Democrats. But it’s horrible; not only does it feed the narrative that America is somehow ruled by a cabal of bigots, but it directly harms the young people who buy into the story. “T” is radically different from LGB. LGB can change their mind at any point and become straight, or vice versa – nothing about gay sex renders one incapable of straight sex, and indeed I have known a number of people, particularly women, who have wiffle-waffled over the course of their lives about their sexual orientation. T, on the other hand, is encouraged to make changes to their bodies that can’t be undone, and that indeed tend to eliminate one’s capacity for anything like normal sexual pleasure. The use of cross-gender hormones at a young age permanently alters the development of one’s body, and blocks the development of a sexually mature human being. I can’t imagine anything that is more likely to cause long-term suffering than that – and it is a major platform of the Democrat party to normalize transgenderism, including for the very young.
2. Psychological drugs. One facet of transgenderism that is often ignored is its dependency on synthetic hormones, which of course are manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry for profit. Surely it can’t be the case that corporations would encourage social trends that led to greater profits for them – but just imagine for a moment the windfall that would come to the manufacturers of synthetic testosterone if the government were to mandate that insurance companies cover hormone therapies for legions of unhappy young women who want to pretend they are men. And consider all the other drugs that have been pushed – even mandated, in a soft way – on us over the past few decades. When I was a young adult in the 1990s it was Prozac – it seemed like all of a sudden everybody was taking it. Later the range of psychological drugs expanded – Zoloft for instance, and gods only know how many other manipulators of neurotransmitters; Ritalin and Adderall for “attention deficit disorder” – they tried to push these on my daughter because she liked to draw comics instead of paying attention in class – and arbitrary quantities of Xanax for anybody willing to shop around for a shrink that would write. All of these shared several characteristics in common: 1) they were prescribed for people with social difficulties of one kind or another, 2) they were not very effective at improving the problems for which they were prescribed, 3) they had a nasty tendency to lead to things like suicide and addiction, and most importantly 4) they required long-term consumption, leading to immense profits for their manufacturers.
Now I wouldn’t say that Democrats pushed the drugs on people per se, but it is striking how common it is for self-identifying leftists to be in therapy, and/or to be on these chemicals:
Are the lives of white leftist elites really that difficult, that they should need mental health treatment 2-3 times more often than people who actually work for a living? Seems more likely that this is a consequence of their worldview – the medicalization of everyday life, the dependency on the state to fix their problems, and the willful eradication of the organic social systems, like religion and family, that used to provide solace for people in pain. To embrace this Weltanschauung – that life’s problems are illnesses to be treated instead of obstacles to be conquered – is to embrace an identity of oneself as an agentless pawn, at the mercy of inhuman forces one can scarcely understand, much less resist. Not exactly the route to eudaemonia.
I can’t find the quote (maybe I wrote it?), but I remember reading once a suggestion that mood-flattening drugs like Prozac and Zoloft were absolutely necessary for human animals to tolerate the conditions we have created for ourselves in the modern technological world. Maybe it’s true? But ask yourself who in our society bears the most blame for creating that corporate cubicle dystopia, and which party they embrace in today’s political climate.
3. The victim narrative of human history. Democrats have also whole-heartedly embraced a version of Western history that makes everyone into either a villain or a victim. So-called “Critical Theory”, of which “Critical Race Theory” is one particularly Nazi-like incarnation, is essentially a conspiracy theory vision of humanity, wherein a hypothesized cabal of “white people” has somehow orchestrated all of human civilization, for the past several thousand years, into a diabolical plot to make the lives of “BIPOC” people (whatever the fuck those are) miserable. It’s laughably simplistic and silly – really a comic book version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion rewritten for resentful moderns – but it is unquestionably politically useful to frame history in an us-vs-them narrative that is nebulous enough that one can change out the villains to suit the current needs of the regime. One might ask, for instance, how Clarence Thomas’ ancestors benefitted from white supremacy culture, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s did not. But of course it doesn’t matter, because most of the people this messaging is directed toward have never heard of either one of those luminaries.
For the purpose of this essay, however, the relevant point is that this narrative demeans everyone it describes. Obviously Critical Race Theory is nothing more than a racist jeremiad directed against inconvenient white people, and therefore demeans and dehumanizes people of European descent in exactly the way the Protocols dehumanized Jews. But it also does the same thing to the people it supposedly elevates as righteous martyrs. By portraying everyone else as the doleful victims of white depredations, it reduces non-whites to dependency on whites. Do Indians and Chinese have cultures of their own, independent of the baleful influence of Europe? Have black Americans accomplished nothing of their own since 1865, except insofar as they have fought against their white countrymen? To embrace one’s status as a victim, to make that the source of one’s identity, is to permanently embrace a kind of psychic subordination. Presumably that’s not the route to a healthy conception of oneself, yet it is what the Democrats relentlessly push on society.
To say that this attitude has not traditionally been the only one, or even the dominant one, amongst non-white Americans is an understatement. Consider this quote from great Alabaman Booker T. Washington, from his autobiography Up From Slavery: “I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.” Dude was literally born as a slave; if he had put that Critical Theory shit in his head, he would have stayed one for the rest of his life.
4. The erasure of culture. The last point I’ll make here is that Democrat policies have aggressively cut society off from its own history and culture over the past few years. We could talk about the changing of school curriculums to cancel “problematic” authors from antiquity (or even the recent past); or the iconoclastic temper tantrums of the 2020 BLM rioters who tore down statues of cultural heroes all over the world in support of some random drug addict who got killed by a cop. But the thing that has stood out to me – as trivial as it might seem – is that my kids have far less exposure to the pop culture I grew up with than I had to the pop culture of my parents’ or even my grandparents’ age. It occurred to me recently that I was at least familiar with pretty much all of the popular TV shows from the 1950s and 1960s, through re-runs or whatever, even if I didn’t particularly like all of them. I had seen dozens of classic movies by the time I was an adult, and read a lot of the bestselling novels from decades past as well. Obviously this created ties with previous generations – these were things that helped keep the generations together even in the wake of fairly enormous levels of social change taking place in the late twentieth century. But millennials had none of that, and my kids’ generation has even less. Mostly they entertain themselves with YouTube videos produced only a few days before they watch them, which deal with memes or games or whatever only a few days older than that. There is almost no connection to even the recent past, no ties of affection with their family, and definitely not with their country or their ancestors.
This isn’t even an accident, or a product of social media and reduced attention spans. The media companies actively try to steer people away from classics by re-making nearly everything that was ever popular. The number of classic films that have been re-made in the last ten years, but with the genders or races or sexualities of major characters swapped to suit “modern sensibilities”, is staggering. It’s not just that Hollywood has no vision anymore; I think it represents an intentional obscuring of the past. But even if it’s just the effect of an industry cannibalizing itself for profit, the effect of this graying-out of culture, or its outright cancellation, is to render people rootless, unanchored, and atomized. Without ancestry or posterity, there is no reason to particularly care about anything other than one’s own immediate pleasure; no reason to struggle or sacrifice; no reason, importantly to resist whatever your betters tell you to do. There is nothing left but to consume products.
So that’s a pretty long diatribe about the many ways that the policies and worldviews of Democrats specifically, and leftists more broadly, immiserate the human race and degrade our societies. Neither side’s voters benefits from any of these policies — they cause pain to everyone affected by them. None of them correspond with reality either, so they have no redeeming qualities, other than their ability to get Democrats elected. It’s a bit of a blackpill, I know, but in my next post I will talk (much more briefly) about how I’m doing my part to resist it, and how you can as well.
The Antisocial Darwinist 