SJWs and the Culture of Comfort

The rise of the #RegressiveLeft in recent years in the West has left many regular people confused about how this happened in the first place. I'm about to make a couple of ugly comparisons to prove a point, so consider this your 'trigger warning' if you're easily offended. We've been trained to think that authoritarian movements gain purchase during times of economic upheaval and unrest. Case in point, see the rise of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, which was caused by a confluence of economic problems including agrarian and labor issues, as well as issues related to the educated class, among others that were not solved in the 1905 revolution; Russian activity in WWI would be the catalyst that allowed the authoritarian movement to win final victory and found the USSR.

The second example is the uglier one, the rise of the Nazism in Germany. As is well document, the rise of Nazism can directly be linked to the economic conditions imposed on Germany after losing WWI. Unemployment was rampant, the currency was worthless, and the government inept to fix conditions imposed by unfair treaty conditions that left the country helpless to fix its condition. The political environment was fertile for the rise of a demagogue.

In comparison, the rise of the Regressive Left is mystifying. The concept of a Social Justice Warrior hadn't taken hold prior to the Great Recession, though conservatives were warning the rest of us about the worst tendencies in the left for decades running. Even so, the Great Recession was not even remotely on the same scale of economic instability as the other mentioned periods were. Instead, Regressives have risen amidst a condition of plenty and material comfort. The rise of the Regressive Left bears all the hallmarks of a bourgeoisie movement, coming from the sheltered ranks of the colleges and middle classes in the US and UK.

I use the 'b' word on purpose. George Orwell described the middle classes as the shock absorbers for the bourgeoisie, as the middle class would take the brunt of the negative consequences of economics and political disorder while the upper crust would fare fine. In Orwell's time it was the elites who lead the leftist movement. Today, as in the leadership of 'Black Lives Matter' and the rise of the Regressive Left on college campuses, again we see the children of the elite fighting against perceived privilege. One wonders if they've ever looked into a mirror.

When I was growing up in the 90s I distinctly recall spanking being a hot button social issue. Parents were admonished to put their kids in 'time out' (a sort of precursor to the safe space today) to punish them instead of giving a few well-measured swats on the butt. This was the first coddling that people my age and younger received from society and it's only gotten worse since. Poor kids weren't coddled, at least at home, but the children of the middle class certainly were.

The Social Justice Warrior culture is the direct result of this coddling. When you attend college you take your first steps into something like the real world. You encounter ideas that are different than the ones you were raised with, you gain a modicum of responsibility and you come face to face with the specter of crushing debt. Add in the propaganda administered in many classrooms by cultural Marxist professors and the result is a toxic environment that brainwashes people at a very impressionable age. The comfort has been altered – not even removed, just altered – and the result is a troubling environment that is always hostile to the mind that had previously been coddled. President Obama famously and rightly said that we shouldn't coddle college students. The problem is that we are talking about people who have been coddled their entire lives. The merest reduction in coddling has left these people unhinged, especially when radical political ideas that prey on the biases their parents raised them with have been hammered into their heads.

This is the result of comfort and a society that hasn't challenged people in a meaningful way in the lifetimes of the youngest people identifying as SJWs. There hasn't been a real conflict in the US since the Vietnam era. The Cold War and its accompanying threat of annihilation is as real to them as the Civil War – that is, things they read about in school and nothing more than that. Even 9/11 is historical, as it and the war in Iraq happened when they were children. Many SJWs barely remember George W Bush and the culture of terror fear that gripped the US from 2002-2006.

The lack of existential conflict has lead to really watered down social movements that are themselves vehicles for authoritarianism. To be sure, the Regressive Left promotes authoritarianism through raging activism that shows that the SJW-on-the-street thinks they are the member of the Revolutionary Vanguard, when really they are merely the shock absorbers for people like the privileged leaders of BLM. The irony would be funny if the results weren't terrifying. My only consolation is that the Regressive Left is failing. The growing movement against the authoritarian movement they represent illustrates that.