Political Playthings

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My most recent binge was the ITV series Poirot, which brought to the screen Agatha Christie's eponymous fussy little Belgian detective. In the series incarnation of Christie's (arguably) most famous work, Murder On The Orient Express, the episode opens with a confrontation between a Turkish man and woman in Istanbul, and a failed attempt by a British couple to rescue the woman. The woman had gotten pregnant by a man not her husband, and an angry mob (of men and women) dragged her off and stoned her to death.

The story is set in the mid 1930s, and Poirot at one point remarks something along the lines of "it's their culture, we mustn't interfere."

The episode was filmed in 2010, presumably prior to the time it became unwoke to criticize Islamism.

Hold that thought.

This long but illuminating expose of the Ford Foundation and its decades of spending billions to reshape America's culture offered something I already knew but was usefully reminded of:

Before the 1970s, Hispanics did not exist. Of course, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and people from other nations of Central and South America and the Caribbean existed. But they, and their many ethnic descendants in the United States, overwhelmingly saw themselves as rooted in their own specific nations—or as Americans—rather than as constituting a single, definable ethnic group. Nor did they want to be seen as a distinct, let alone oppressed, minority in the United States. Many insisted to disappointed academic pollsters that they considered themselves white.

Hold that thought.

A recent poll showed that 53% of American Hispanics favor mass deportation of illegals, and that 50% favor penning them up prior to deportation. That's pretty much an even split of the identity group pro- and con-, and I bet it's only a surprise to the Left.

Twenty years running a restaurant brought us many hundreds of Hispanic employees. Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, The Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and many more nations were represented, and one learned that mis-identifying someone's home nation was a transgression. In other words, they were Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, or Salvadorans first, and Hispanics or Latinos second. One also learned, as the above quote notes, that they cleave to their own cultures, not to some amalgamated mass under the Hispanic or Latino banner, and that there were definite frictions between those cultures.

It was the Best-and-Brightest that lumped them all together, just as they lumped together Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean, Mongolian, Maori, Bangladeshi, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Polynesian, and more ethnicities into the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) identity group. Again, no consideration for historically sharp divisions within that group, and no consideration for whether they agreed or even wanted to be clumped together.

In these cases and more, there's a presumption made that the members of each broad-brush identity group should have common cause.

Because skin color, if we are to boil it down to its essence. Which is both grossly offensive and grossly condescending.

The same dynamic, what FAIR executive director Monica Harris called “force-teaming,” is found in the LGBTQIA++etc “community.” As Harris notes in this piece,

[T]he only thing these recent additions have in common with the LGB community is that they, too, have been historically underrepresented and marginalized. Yet from a contemporary social justice perspective, the common bond of victimization is apparently sufficient to justify “force-teaming” these groups. This reductive mindset pressures victims to slavishly support one another, even if their interests are not closely aligned.

Back to the stoning episode. While Western apologists won't overtly condone that sort of mob justice in Islam, numerous Islamic nations have death-by-stoning for adultery on their books today, and it goes mostly without comment from the Woke, because “their culture,” we can presume. At least 150 stonings have taken place in Iran in the past four decades, and there have been recent reports of stonings in Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, and elsewhere. This is the culture that domestic pro-Hamas protestors are defending, no matter that many of them would be (often brutally) oppressed in those cultures.

All this returns a similar conclusion: that other cultures are essentially political playthings for the modern Left. As are any assemblages of demographic traits that can be deemed “oppressed.”

The elevation of identity groups comes with the expectation that each group's members will be loyal to it. Will think in the way that the Best-and-Brightest believe the group should think, and will vote as the group's interests are best served. Again, according to the Best-and-Brightest, who are very often not even of that group. If I were to describe the typical member of the Best-and-Brightest identity group, I would be describing an economically well-off college-educated white person.

So, Hispanics who reject the unchecked migration across the southern border, or who might choose to vote Republican as a result, are traitors to "their own."

It all, of course, flies in the face of the individualism that's at the heart of a liberty-based worldview, and it's why leftism is the biggest opponent to libertarianism in today's landscape. Reducing people to their outward markers, and either dismissing their illiberal behaviors or demanding they conform to a set of policy and voting preferences erases them as individuals and reduces them to pebbles in a bucket.

Once you understand this, the "manage them" mindset that pervades their politics makes more sense.

The Poirot series, where most mysteries involve the British upper class, serves as a quaint reminder of the paternalism and condescension that upper class held for the working and servant classes. As did Downton Abbey and other period shows. There were two types of uppers, of course - the caretakers and the condescenders - but both assumed the lowers would know their place and stay there. While such class divisions are archaic today, and while American history is an overt rejection of classism in favor of equality, we see a resurgence of this "uppers vs lowers" attitude in modern culture.

Class divisions have been the norm across history and across cultures for most of our existence, and it's only the last couple centuries where we figured out that equality and egalitarianism works far better at advancing human living conditions. We are, unfortunately, seeing this being eroded in favor of a new classism, with sorting based on viewpoint, not wealth or accident of birth. And, with a new racism, where "people of color" are exalted for their non-whiteness but not granted the ‘privilege’ of individual thought or self-directed life.

Liberty is not just a political philosophy. It's cultural and societal, and it rests on a foundation of equality. Not the outcome-based "equality" that has been renamed equity, but the sort of equality where each individual is free to pursue happiness unmolested by others. Government that serves liberty is government that treats everyone equally, that picks no winners or losers, and that stays in its lane.

That's the libertarians' message to those who would impose their will on us and everyone else. Stay in your lane, leave us alone, you do you, and we'll do the same.