On pet victim protection
Left-wing minoritarianism and learning the wrong lessons
Author's note: There will probably be growing pains as I get my legs under me. This is not going to be a publication with a regular schedule.
Many people who live in cities that have a major problem with vagrants are extremely unhappy that their local leftist groups go out of their way to defend antisocial behavior such as public defecation by either demanding impractical solutions1 or by going full Godwin. They really shouldn’t have been surprised, because supporting vagrants is well within the path that leftist ideology leads to.
Similarly, many were shocked that people would defend Rashida Tlaib’s equivocating statement on the Hamas invasion of Israel or castigate Joe Biden’s support of Israel in such an event. I argue that this is entirely keeping with the left-wing ideology of pet victim protection.
Origins
After the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed, the civilized world rightly determined that future genocides should be prevented. From this, a cottage industry of think tanks dedicated to “genocide prevention” sprung up. Since their staff are not the kind of people who would strap on a kevlar vest, pick up and AK-47, and fight perpetrators such as the Interahamwe or the Janjaweed , they confined themselves into influencing elites into acting against genocidaires2.
Decision makers have gatekeepers who usually like easy rubrics that they can boil down and summarize for their bosses. These think tanks came up with exactly those in an example of supply meeting demand. Here is the most prevalent:3
Similar to how activists realized that “white supremacy” was a much more powerful charge than “racism”, others4 realized that it was easier to level charges of genocide preparation against their opponents rather than defend their policies on the merits. Saying “you made an offensive joke” doesn’t have the same heft as “your joke shows that we are on Stage 4 of Stanton’s model of genocide”.
Minoritarianism and “punching down”
There’s recently been an outpouring of articles decrying the anti-majoritarian elements of the American political sytem, such as the Electoral College and Senate. The tl;dr of most of the aforementioned is that some structures of the American electoral system disadvantage the Democratic coalition in a way that ensures that the median voter in the electoral college/senate is several points to the right of the median voter assuming there were a nationwide popular vote. Republicans and conservatives tend to respond with something that boils down to “our coalition is in the minority5 and needs to be protected from those urban dwellers who are going to steamroll our yeomen farmers”.
The left-wing stance is contrasted by positions towards minority groups. A very telling moment was during the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, especially the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Charlie Hebdo was a satirtical magazine known for caustic criticism of many, many aspects of French society and politics, including Islamists/Muslims. This included drawings of Mohammad, which Muslims consider blasphemous. Two Islamists attacked the magazine and killed 12 in the process. Most of France was united in outrage. However, some leftists claimed that Charlie Hebdo was wrong to satirize Islam/Muslims. An extremely telling quote is as follows:
Blasphemous, mocking images cause pain in marginalized communities. The elevation of such images to a point of high principle will increase the burdens on those minority groups. European Muslims find themselves crushed between the actions of a tiny group of killers and the necessary response of the majority society. Problems will increase for an already put-upon group of people.
The throughline was that Muslims were disadvantaged and that any criticism of their religion or practices would only add to their alleged pain, and therefore self-censorship was right since it would protect them. In this, leftists positioned themselves as the protectors of the Muslims against a society they allege was out to harm them.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to French Muslims - witness what happens when anyone brings up homophobia among black Americans. This isn’t new and has a term - regressive left.
What caused this?
It depends on how cynical you are. The low cynicism explanation is that good intentions have gone wrong, the high cynicism explanaition is that left-wing coalition politics means tamping down criticism of odious views.
Low cynicism
Since I am not going to pull a James Lindsey and treat “wokeness” as a mathematical theorem to be disproven, I’ll lay out the thought process as follows:
Majorities can inflict a great deal of harm upon minorities (reference the genocide prevention bit above).
“Harm” can also include measures that prevent minorities from doing whatever they want.
Minorities by themselves generally do not have the means to defend themselves from the depredations the majority will surely inflict upon them if allowed to.
The only way to protect minorities is for “privileged” and right-thinking members of the majority to “lend their priviledge” to members of marginalized groups.
Since majorities can “harm” minorities by demanding they change their behavior, any demand a majority makes upon a minority is presumptively illegitimate and a sign of bigotry.
This includes demands that they cease holding regressive views.
Any criticism of a minority engaging in antisocial behavior is dehumanization6.
As protection, minorities are allowed to vote and act as a bloc in the political sphere.
Backlash to any unpopular demands is prima facie evidence of bigotry.
There should be no backlash because these groups consist of individuals, even though they act collectively. Yes, we want to have it both ways.
The reason why this piece is called “On pet victim protection” is because the above strips people of agency and presumes they need to rely on their leftist protectors the same way that the owner of a yappy dog is expected to protect the pooch against angry neighbors.
High cynicism
Left-wing politics in developed nations increasingly relies on ethnic and religious minority voters. This tends to come in conflict with the most left wing segments of those polities, which have demographics heavily weighted7 towards the majority group. This creates some dissonance whereby the activists don’t want to think they’re being “white saviors” for their pet victims. At the same time, the left wing coalition contains people who genuinely believe in socially progressive views and are repelled by regressive attitudes. Some of this group
Turn into conservatives (such as Dave Rubin),
Fight within the tent to suppress regressive views
Adopt willful blindness to deal with the cognitive dissonance.
Others cynically see minorities as their springboard to power and are interested in tamping down any criticism to prevent defections from the coalition and electoral loss. Pet victim protection is a way of demanding that Group 2 shuts up.
Tying it together
This article is not about why leftists are sympathetic to Palestinians. It argues that an ideology which holds that one mustn’t make demands upon the “oppressed” lest they be “harmed” further is behind a great deal of stupidity emenating from that quarter.
Fortunately, there is a solution. The people who practice the full spectrum of pet victim protection are small in number. Raising your voice against them can work if oyu have influence, the same way that Bill Ackman’s castigation forced Harvard to call out it’s nest of antisemites and terror apologists.
The usual response to “the vagrants refuse shelter” is “shelters aren’t comfy places”, as if that means that antisocial activity should be tolerated or taxpayers should turn them into Disneyland.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1410&context=gsp
The venn diagram is close to a circle, but not quite
The GOP has lost the presidential popular vote in 6/7 of the previous elections
Try expressing discomfort at vagrants shitting on the streets when you are in a left wing space and see how it goes
"Progressive activists are Eleven percent more likely to be white (80 percent v. 69 percent)”