Division, Exclusion, & Intolerance

Editor’s Note: I wrote this bit before yesterday’s attempted attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and was going to run it later this week. In the wake of that shooting, and as I wait for more information about the shooter and evidence of motivations, it seems an apt time to remind the hate-stokers out there that fomenting the sort of blatant tribal divisiveness we see today can have terrible, tragic, and unintended consequences. Trump is OK, but two other people are not. As I write this, one rally attendee is dead and another is in critical condition, both victims of the would-be assassin who was killed by the Secret Service.

Political Horseshoe Theory hypothesizes that the extremes of a political spectrum are more alike than different, that a left-right political axis bends so that the ends are close to each other. This concept works especially well in the European form of "left-right," where fascism is considered "far-right" rather than being, as it should properly be placed on an American left-right spectrum, on the left, just shy of socialism. The operating difference between the European and American forms lies in the notion that everyone* in Europe is a statist and they're simply arguing over what form of collectivism they want to embrace, while in America we argue about how much government we want in our lives.

Dry political theorizing aside, horseshoe theory is also emerging in culture, especially with the ascendance and "corporatization" of identity politics. Eric Hoffer's aphorism,

apt as it may be, doesn't quite cover the rotten core of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) politics. Rotten, that is, since its conception. What has been sold to us as a way of combating racism and bigotry in our society has actually advanced racism and bigotry, and was always destined to do so.

Yes, it was inevitable.

If you highlight rather than ignore our superficial differences, you ensure that those differences will be part of people's thought patterns forever.

If you elevate the group above the individual, you make the group more important, and encourage people to stick to their groups rather than integrate.

If you insist that people view others as "what" rather than "who," you prompt people to dehumanize all those who aren't like them - in identity and in thought.

All this has become most prevalent people who purport to be the most forward thinking, inclusive, and tolerant of all.

It has been, like Joe Biden's mental decline, obvious for quite some time to anyone who dared look rather than listen to the deniers and obfuscates. Our society has been fracturing, and not just in a binary left-right sense, ever since DEI and identity politics won the culture war. The pulling back of the curtain on DEI, the moment all this poison and rot got revealed beyond anyone's ability to hide it anymore, was the unmasking of rampant Jew hatred on America's left in the wake of 10/6.

Hate is the end product of DEI, and the sooner we all come to terms with that, the sooner we can as a culture realize its proper expansion is "Division, Exclusion, & Intolerance" rather than "Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion."

Then, we can finally put it into the dustbin of history, re-embrace the cultural ideal of "content of character," and remove the pejorative stigma from “color-blind society.”

The “horseshoe” in all this is the strong resemblance the woke-leftists raging against the Jews on college campuses and elsewhere with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists on the reactionary right. That the former are mostly excused by the legacy media taste-makers that have roundly and properly denounced the latter is its own telltale.