Democrats Want to Hate Their Way Out of the Pandemic
Democrats Want to Hate Their Way Out of the Pandemic
When identity politics is your answer to everything.
By Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
“As Virus Cases Rise, Another Contagion Spreads Among the Vaccinated: Anger,” the New York Times hisses. “Vaccinated people are ready for normalcy — and angry at the unvaccinated,” the Washington Post jeers.
“It’s O.K. to be mad at people who refuse to get vaccinated,” America Magazine reassures.
Hating people is a hell of a prescription for a medical crisis, but to the Left all problems are political problems. And they deal with political problems by hating twice as hard as ever.
Our media, like that of most totalitarian countries, exists to tell regime loyalists whom to be angry at today while distracting them from the regime’s latest disaster. The American Left only knows and understands identity politics. Its view of the world is rooted in the same Marxist theories that made the Soviet Union and every Communist government so dysfunctional, but the need to juggle the intersectional dynamics of multiculturalism has made it especially insane.
Anyone who wants to understand America’s racial divisions need only look at the perverse skill with which leftists divided the country between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated in less than a year. In a short amount of time people had been taught to hate each other and to form deep divides over an issue that hadn’t even been on their minds last summer.
If the Left can do that with a shot, is it any wonder they were able to do it with skin color?
America’s Left has become an identity politics generator, literally creating new identities overnight (the average number of gender identities went from 48 in 2019, to 56 in 2020, to 64 today), to compete in a packed victimhood Olympics whose only purpose is political power.
The Left has succeeded so well that all of the country’s political discourse is about rival claims of victimhood and dueling accusations of oppression. The identity politics generator works so well that in under a year a new identity can be up and running, and ready to register victims and demand political power to repress the other side of their binary identities. But all this does is give the Left an exciting new way to seize power and posture as the victims this week.
Faced with a pandemic, the Left built a new political identity around masks and vaccines.
That’s what it does with every challenge or crisis. When all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail and when all you have is identity politics, every problem is identitarian.
And every solution manufactures the same cliched binary identities, victims and oppressors, the enlightened and the reactionaries, and yokes them to the same tired narrative which organizes the latter against the former. The speed with which the Left turned personal medical decisions into an identity shows how the artificial assembly line of its identity politics really works.
Diversity isn’t really very diverse. Multiculturalism is really a single political culture. Identity politics offers the same product with a different coat of paint from the same identity factory.
Identity politics is a revolutionary tool, organizing everything from fifth columns to coalitions to seize political power, but revolutions solve the problem of who is in power, not real problems.
Revolutionary regimes are great at revolutions and bad at everything else.
The Democrats are great at identity politics and bad at pandemics. They excel at taking over institutions, rigging elections, and building narratives in which they’re the victims. They just don’t know how to do anything else. During the revolutionary phase, problems don’t need solving, only exploiting. As Lenin reportedly said, “the worse, the better.” A pandemic, a wildfire, tainted water, or an economic collapse is just another opportunity to churn out narratives declaring that identity politics groups have been hit hardest by the disaster before seizing power in their name.
This works about half the time. The half when Democrats are out of power. Revolutions work best when you’re not already on the throne and trying to blame someone else for your mess.
Power and identity politics can exploit a pandemic, but they can’t meaningfully address it. Much as the Soviets couldn’t address agriculture, and China can’t fix its environmental disasters, the Biden administration and its leftist allies lack the intellectual tools to cope with the problem.
Communist regimes reduced all problems to class warfare, declared that they had eliminated classes, and then blamed problems on domestic saboteurs or denied that they existed at all.
The Democrats blamed the pandemic on the Trump administration. After taking power, they began blaming Trump supporters. Unable to deliver on their promises, they doubled down on identity politics as their way of evading responsibility for the job they claimed they wanted.
But lefties want the job, they don’t want the responsibility.
Fixing problems is dirty and unrewarding work that requires humility, patience, and a willingness to listen. These are not the attributes of a radical movement of egotistical theoreticians who use identity politics to trick people into letting them test out their theories and then when their theories fail in the real world, pivot back to identity politics to blame others for their failures.
The revolutions keep coming, but utopia never arrives.
The Left interacts with reality through a series of abstract constructs filtered through an ideological matrix defined by social relations. This is an unfit model for solving anything except social problems and hasn’t even seen any success there. Reducing the problems of a vast universe, or even a planet, to social injustice is the laughably stupid approach of our elites.
An ideology that blames everything from forest fires to viral outbreaks on social injustice foolishly treats human social relations as the greatest force in the universe. Elites who embrace these ideas are announcing their inability to grapple with problems outside social relations.
Instead of dealing with the problems, they attach them to another identity politics group.
Then they blame some other group for their own inability to grapple with the problem. Democrat politicians and the media have blamed the pandemic on church attendees, Chassidic Jews, spring breakers, surfers, Trump supporters, and an endless list of out-group scapegoats.
Every instance of scapegoating has been undone by their own hypocrisy from the French Laundry to Black Lives Matter riots to the rejection of vaccine mandates by their own health care and teachers’ unions. And Americans are growing tired of their cynical blame game.
Democrats and their media are encouraging Americans to hate each other as they have since the very beginning of the pandemic and the very beginning of their radicalization as a party.
Every problem is met with identity politics and hate.
The Left wants Americans to blame everyone for their problems except the ones in power.