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Here's More Research on the Left
I finished up my piece on “Understanding the Left” with the eternal comment: “more research is needed.”
And no sooner had I done that than I ran into tons of stuff on “ressentiment.”
Nietzsche, of course, is the go-to guy on this, as Google AI is forced to admit:
Nietzsche’s ressentiment is a profound, reactive psychological state born of weakness, where suppressed envy and hatred for the strong are transformed into a new moral system.
And clearly, a major strand in modern democracy, after the vote was extended into the shopkeeper class and the working class, is resentment. Resentment against the Jews; resentment against the rich. Obviously the Allyship narrative is pure resentment: the resentful oppressed peoples against the dastardly white oppressors.
And the point is that politicians immediately picked up on this. In Austria it was Georg von Schönerer (who was not an aristocrat) and Karl Lueger, before 1900. You could get votes, lots of votes, by playing the resentment card. That’s what all the blue states are doing with their billionaire taxes and their pied à terre taxes. That’s what FDR was doing with his “economic royalists.”
The other big thing that lefty politicians do is tell women that they deserve to have their wifely and motherly needs taken care of: free education, free health care, free child care, and all the things that women down the ages have needed from a good husband.
Notice that both ressentiment and free stuff fit into the mold of politics proposed by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his reduction of politics to friend and enemy: free stuff for our friends, death and taxes for our enemy.
I say that the politics of the next regime needs to delegitimize both these themes.
Isn’t that what libertarianism is trying to do? Not exactly. The problem with libertarianism, I suggest, is that it tries to imagine a world without resentment and without women expecting to be taken care of.
I say that the politics of the next regime has to deal with the fact of resentment. It must not ignore it and it must get beyond Nietzsche’s sneering about “slave morality.” How do you do that? I don’t really know.
And how do we deal with the fact of women expecting government to meet all their needs with free stuff? How do you redirect them from expecting government to expecting husbands to do all that?
The answer, of course, is in Andrew Breitbart’s notion of politics being downstream from culture, and my extension that culture is downstream from religion.
In fact, of course, Nietzsche was trying to do this. His notion of the Übermensch is about trying to celebrate people that push upwards with courage and with creativity. In The Mind and the Market Jerry Z. Muller writes about Simmel and Schumpeter echoing this. And if you listen to tech lords like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel you see that they are trying to do something about this: they are not just greedy Robber Barons, but men seriously thinking about the values that help society cohere rather than split apart.
But the fact is that as soon as we got “democracy,” defined as extending the vote to the lower classes, politicians discovered that resentment was the royal road to power.
Maybe things are different now. Maybe the politics of populist nationalism is about a majority of voters resenting the privileges of the NGO class, of Nick Shirleys exposing NGO-class fraud. And maybe the young Gen-Z men returning to religion are trying to rise above resentment and weakness to responsibility and strength.
We shall see.
| Wed, 22 Apr 2026 04:11:08 GMT |
Understanding the Left
Rule One, according to Sun Tzu, is to understand your enemy. Well, not exactly. He wrote:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
My mission, and I accept it, is to understand the Left.
One of the means I use to understand politics, apart from Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his Friend/Enemy Distinction, is the Political Formula of Gaetano Mosca. So Google AI:
Gaetano Mosca’s political formula refers to the legal, moral, or ideological justifications used by a ruling minority to legitimize their power over the majority.
And the left’s political formula is encoded by them in the notion of Allyism, that the left is the ally of the oppressed people in their fight against the oppressors.
So, the left adapts the Friend/Enemy distinction into a oppressed/oppressor relationship, so that the enemy is not just the Enemy but an all-powerful oppressor Enemy, and the left are the brave activists, the Friends of the oppressed, standing up against the oppressors.
You can see the political formula in Marx’s idea that, even though capitalism would collapse of its internal contradictions, the Communists were the allies of the working class in its fight against the bourgeoisie.
Then Lenin in Imperialism proposes that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, exploiting not just the workers but the whole world.
The feminists propose they are allies of women oppressed by the patriarchs.
The anti-racists propose that they are allies of blacks oppressed by the racists.
The anti-semites propose that they are allies of ordinary people oppressed by the Jews.
The LGBT movement is the ally of gays oppressed by the homophobes.
The unions propose they are the allies of the workers oppressed by the employers.
The left proposes that Palestinians are the helpless victims of Israeli oppressors.
Jake Tapper proposes that the Iran regime is the helpless victim of the Trump administration.
Here’s a piece on “decolonization” featuring a peaceful protest for Freedom for Palestine. They were in the streets only days after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. Helpless Palestinians under the knout of oppressor Israelis.
You know what I wonder? I wonder about the unconscious human instinct involved here. Is it the instinct to help the helpless? Is it an instinct in low status people to guilt-trip the high status people into helping them?
I wonder. I don’t think our lefty friends invented this. Of course, starving peasants down the ages have swarmed into the city demanding food. And whatabout the German Peasants War of 1524-25? And Watt Tyler’s Rebellion in 1381?
More research is needed.
| Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:46:20 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Analysis of Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation
