Social Vectors, Part 2: Plantations

     Owing to the connection to slavery, post-Civil War attempts by plantation owners to keep their former slaves laboring right where they were, and the Democrat Party’s emphasis on identity politics, the metaphor of “keeping ‘em on the plantation” has acquired great contemporary resonance. A recent Breitbart article points at the chagrin of one set of identity-group hucksters over the defectors from their plantation:

     The Guardian called the rise of free-thinking, LGBT conservatives “troubling” in an article on Thursday.

     The article, written by Arwa Mahdawi, criticized popular LGBT conservatives, including former OUT Magazine employee Chadwick Moore, who was fired after coming out as a conservative, and the Log Cabin Republicans, attempting to paint right-wing LGBT men and women as an “influential group of gay, white, and financially well-off men,” made up of Nazis, white nationalists, and misogynists....

     “Some people might argue that the increase in rightwing LGBTQ people represents a move away from identity politics. Ultimately, however, it’s just a move back to the oldest form of identity politics,” she continued. “One in which the protection of whiteness and wealth trumps everything. But as some gay Trump supporters might be starting to realize, the right aren’t your friends, and eventually they’ll come for you.”...

     In February, LGBT writer Skylar Baker-Jordan also attacked gay conservatives in an article for the Independent, where he claimed he would refuse to accept gay people who “come out” as supporters of President Trump, while in June, Slate likened LGBT conservatives to “villains.”

     The hysteria is real and palpable. Just as with the emergence of strong black and female conservative figures – surely you’ve heard the phrases “race traitor” and “gender traitor?” — the plantation overseers fear a steady crumbling of their identity groups. The solidity of those groups is what makes the overseers valuable to the Democrats. It gives them negotiating power they fear to lose.

     However, the use of ostracism and condemnation to arrest those “traitors” and bring them back to the planation appears to be failing the Left. It’s worth a few CPU cycles to investigate why.

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     The desire to be thought well of is universal. We all want others to see us as worthy of respect. That’s completely independent of race, sex, and sexual orientation. But what makes a person appear worthy to others can be affected by social, cultural, and political factors.

     In yesterday’s piece, I poked at some of the vectors that are helping to propel male-to-female transgenderism. Those vectors have certain motifs in common with the ones gradually drawing individuals out of the racial, sexual, and sex-orientation plantations of the Left and toward a more independent frame of mind.

     In general, Smith will desire the good opinion of those who have Smith’s good opinion. If Smith thinks well of Jones but not of Davis, he will seek Jones’s approval but be relatively indifferent to Davis’s. Among the characteristics most commonly thought praiseworthy is independence of mind: the willingness to look at some controversy with no particular concern for what others think. When that trait is made perceptible, as is the case with black, female, and LGBT conservatives, the independent-minded individual becomes an accretion nucleus, around whom others of less intellectual courage will collect.

     It might seem that such independence is not ideologically directed – e.g., that if the great majority of LGBT persons were politically conservative, a “maverick” liberal would be an accretion nucleus for his views. Perhaps, if the logical and evidentiary bases of liberalism and conservatism were equally sound, it might prove to be so. But it isn’t that way today, in large part because the Left has attempted to wall off its identity-group plantations against ideological divergence.

     When the border guards’ guns point inward, at their fellow subjects, it’s clear to those subjects that the guards’ function is not to defend them – that there are things the subjects are not allowed to learn.

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     Courage is inherently admirable. Intellectual courage married to the will to speak one’s mind is admired in direct proportion to the forces amassed against the speaker.

     The irony is staggering. The identity-group plantation overseers would have more luck at retaining their intellectual serfs’ allegiance if, rather than denouncing the escapees as villains, they were to smile winningly, concede each person’s right to his own opinions, and argue persuasively for their preferred positions. However, fear can make one do stupid things, especially when one’s money, power, and prestige are at stake.

     The stupidity reaches Brobdingnagian dimensions when the overseers hurl invective at persons of such integrity and eminence as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Christina Hoff Sommers, Suzanne Venker, Tammy Bruce, Chadwick Moore, and Blaire White.

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     Let it be frankly admitted that many in the black, female, and LGBT cohorts sincerely hold left-liberal convictions that are little or not at all affected by the convictions of others. That having been said, identity-group politics is suffering a steady loss of allegiants. That has the Left in a panic. Coalition politics is the heart of its strategy; it has no other.

     To us in the Right, it’s a strong prescription for intellectual honesty and moral courage. It mandates that we eschew all tactics founded on the divide et impera approach of the Left, for our own sake. But let’s not be too vocally triumphant about it. After all, there’s Napoleon’s exhortation to consider: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. That's bad manners!” And we in the Right are all about good manners, aren’t we?