Neither Left nor Right: Eventually Embracing Ethical Universalism
“You sound like that guy —Tim Allen—on that TV show. You should go to FOX and see if you could get your own show!”
“I don’t think of you as a Leftie but more like a rational person.”
“What happened to you since you moved to Vegas? Are you wearing a MAGA hat yet?”
“I told him that you were a Chicago Left kind of guy and that saying things like ‘Chinese Virus’ was going to set you off.”
“What? You mean you support the protests? I thought you weren’t a libtard!”
The strange need be a part of one side or the other like political thought is a high school football game has become more pervasive in the past decade or so. Reducing a population of 330 million individuals to the simplistic Red or Blue is no different than the ridiculous notion spawned by Robin DiAngelo and other “anti-racist” proselytizers that the very notion of individualism is a racist myth. Lump everyone into a sub-category, stereotype them, and go with that.
Friends back in Chicago believe I was a full Lefty (which is a bit like the idea from the Ben Stiller comedy Tropic Thunder that an actor should never go “full retard”) until I had my run-in with the Poisonous Latino Storyteller and her gang of Fuckheads. Not true. I was writing about the bizarre hypocrisy of the Extreme Left on my old blog years prior and due almost entirely from my experience of dating and living with a communist and racial activist.
I have never been “full retard” in this ideological gameplay. Perhaps because I’m too contrarian to ever completely follow a dogma or maybe because I’m just in love with having both sides of the coin despise me. Dunno. Don’t much care. I’m Irish, and Freud stated that the Irish cannot be psychoanalyzed so stop trying, already.
I find pretty much every single syllable of the Right Wing position on practically everything to be a bit noxious, so I’d gamble that I’m not conservative. There are conservatives who hate Donald Trump. I appreciate their hatred and that they will do their best to get rid of him but I am not on their side.
Likewise, I find the Culture of the Woke to be equally obnoxious and hypocritical. I see a coin with White Supremacy on one side and Critical Race Theory on the other. Both equally racist, both equally separatist, two sides of the same racist coin. To posit that rationality, being objective, relying on science, and being on time are vestiges of whiteness is just a flip of the coin to state that black people are irrational, wholly subjective, anti-science, and perpetually late. That shit is flat out racist.
It occurs to me that Twitter has become the FOX News of the Left, an echo chamber, an ideological bubble used to merely spread dogma and one-sided perspective. It’s just as dishonest, just as angry. The battle has devolved in to which side gets to be Big Brother in our Orwellian nightmare.
I suppose I am so much more vocally critical of the Extreme Left because I still consider myself, well, Left. In terms of embracing a label, the most recent one that fits is from Hidden Tribes which, after taking the quiz, indicates that I am a Traditional Liberal:
Traditional Liberals (11 percent of the population) tend to be cautious, rational, and idealistic. They value tolerance and compromise. They place great faith in institutions.
I’m no longer confused at my place on the ideological spectrum. Since Newt Gingrich adopted the politics of obstruction and winning at all cost—his no-compromise solution to power—the GOP has been playing an ugly game, polarizing a base of rigid social conservatives and using those social issues (abortion, gay rights, civil rights, and immigration scares) to do their level best to roll back everything FDR did.
According to most I meet in this camp, I may as well be wearing a Hillary Clinton pantsuit and singing L'Internationale while using my phone to film the police.
The Left was fairly fractured anyway, but the Woke nonsense was at best fringe until we had a nationwide shutdown due to pandemic and everyone spent a lot more time on Twitter. Suddenly, these crackpot extremes of socialist, Marxist, and the wholesale rejection of white people, men, and heterosexuality took hold on a confined population looking for something to do with their pent up frustration.
According to most I know in this camp, I’m a Neo-Nazi, KKK-sympathizer who routinely sexually harasses women while checking up their skirts for a hidden penis.
The core of the far-right's worldview is organicism, the idea that society functions as a complete, organized and homogeneous living being. Adapted to the community they wish to constitute or reconstitute (whether based on ethnicity, nationality, religion or race), the concept leads them to reject every form of universalism.
The core of the far-left's worldview is Identity Marxism, or the idea that society is comprised of two categories, the Oppressor and the Oppressed utilized in the same manner as traditional Marxism’s duality of the Workers and the Capitalists. Adapted to the community they wish to constitute or reconstitute (whether based on ethnicity, nationality, religion or race), the concept leads them to reject every form of universalism.
I, being the Traditional Liberal I am (maybe I should start a bowling league?), favor ethical universalism, that is the position that there is a universal ethic which applies to all people, regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, sexuality or other distinguishing feature, and all the time.
To quote the late, great John Lewis “We all live in the same house, we all must be part of the effort to hold down our little house. When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just... do something about it. Say something. Have the courage. Have the backbone. Get in the way. Walk with the wind. It's all going to work out.” [Bold is all mine.]
Funny that. That belief used to get me in the Leftie Clubhouse. As the Far Left and the Far Right continue to devolve into warring factions dragging the rest of us into their vortex, it seems that those of us less gullible and more skeptical of cultspeak have no clubhouse to occupy.
It’s okay, though. By the numbers (I know—you Far Right guys think the numbers are FAKE and you Far Left guys think the numbers represent white supremacy) there are far more of we Ethical Universalists than the two of the extremes combined.
I’m alright being in that club.
