Summary: Feel the wind on our cheeks as we slide down the slippery slope to a New America! Here are two books about the next phase of the trip, as the Left guides us into the future.
For decades, the Left has assured us that we need not fear that they are taking us down a “slippery slope.” There is no such thing!
- The Guardian speaks: “The phrase ‘slippery slope’ is used all the time in public debate, but the argument behind it is a fallacy.”
- “No Slippery Slope” by John Corvino (Assoc Prof of philosophy at Wayne State U) at the NYT.
Every month brings more evidence that they are wrong. Years ago we passed the events described in the chain emails everybody’s crazy uncle Ned described at long-ago Thanksgiving dinners. Now we see the Left advocate for the next phase of our wild ride down the slippery slope. Those hoping for a happy landing will be disappointed. Here are two examples. Laugh as you like, but these people have been shaping America for 50 years.
Abandoning the pretense: destroy the family!
The Left has long sought to destroy the family, the most powerful obstacle to their social engineering programs. Now that they have gone mainstream, they can be open about it.
Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family
by Sophie Anne Lewis (2019).
See the review “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family” by Rosemarie Ho at The Nation. – “Feminist theorist Sophie Lewis’s new book looks at how rethinking pregnancy and the idea of family as forms of labor is central to emancipatory politics.”
Better yet, see this by the publisher …
“In order to become ethically acceptable, surrogacy must change beyond recognition. But we need more surrogacy, not less! The surrogacy industry is worth over 1 billion dollars a year, and many of its surrogates work in terrible conditions, while many gestate babies for no pay at all. Should it be illegal to pay someone to gestate a baby for you?
“Full Surrogacy Now brings a fresh and unique perspective to the debate. Rather than making surrogacy illegal or allowing it to continue as is, Sophie Lewis argues we should be looking to radically transform it. Surrogates should be put front and center, and their rights to the babies they gestate should be expanded to acknowledge that they are more than mere vessels. In doing so we can break down our assumptions that children necessarily belong to those whose genetics they share.
“This might sound like a radical proposal but expanding our idea of who children belong to would be a good thing. Taking collective responsibility for children, rather than only caring for the ones we share DNA with, would radically transform notions of kinship. Adopting this expanded concept of surrogacy helps us to see that it always, as the saying goes, takes a village to raise a child.”
“Collective responsibility for children”, much as in the Soviet Union they took “collective responsibility” for farming. Wrecking families means less power for people, more for the government. Pretty phrases for ugly policies.
About the author.
“Sophie Lewis is a writer, translator and feminist geographer living in Philadelphia. …Lewis is a member of the Out of the Woods collective, an editor at Blind Field: a Journal of Cultural Inquiry, and a queer feminist committed to cyborg ecology and anti-fascism.
“She has published her work, on subjects ranging from Donna Haraway to dating, in Boston Review, Viewpoint magazine, Signs, Dialogues in Human Geography, Antipode, Feminism & Psychology, Science as Culture, Frontiers, Gender Place & Culture, Jacobin, The New Inquiry, Mute, and Salvage Quarterly.” {From the publisher.}
Her PhD on gestational surrogacy, “Cyborg labour: exploring surrogacy as gestational work“, was defended at the University of Manchester (UK). She has a BA in English Literature at Oxford, an MSC in Geography at Oxford, and an MA in Politics at the New School for Social Research.
See her Twitter feed.
Pushing African-American men further down the Leftist hole
How to deal with African-American men is one of our greatest challenges. They have made great contributions to America, but today they are America’s unspeakable problem, due to their stratospheric crime rates. They are one of America’s few remaining reservoirs of masculinity – survivors of the gender wars. They can change the gender wars – & help us all win. But some want them to take the opposite path, joining the feminist crusade – as second class citizens – by seeing themselves as victims.
The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood
by Tommy J. Curry (2017).
See a review at the Black Agenda Report. Also see this from the publisher (red emphasis added) …
“Tommy J. Curry’s provocative book The Man-Not is a justification for Black Male Studies. He posits that we should conceptualize the Black male as a victim, oppressed by his sex. The Man-Not, therefore, is a corrective of sorts, offering a concept of Black males that could challenge the existing accounts of Black men and boys desiring the power of white men who oppress them that has been proliferated throughout academic research across disciplines.
“Curry argues that Black men struggle with death and suicide, as well as abuse and rape, and their genred {sic} existence deserves study and theorization. This book offers intellectual, historical, sociological, and psychological evidence that the analysis of patriarchy offered by mainstream feminism (including Black feminism) does not yet fully understand the role that homoeroticism, sexual violence, and vulnerability play in the deaths and lives of Black males. Curry challenges how we think of and perceive the conditions that actually affect all Black males.”
About the author.
Tommy J. Curry was a Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at Texas A&M University. He is leaving Texas A&M to become Chair of Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh (story here).” He is the author of The Philosophical Treatise of William H. Ferris
He serves as Executive Director of Philosophy Born of Struggle. His research has been recognized by Diverse as placing him among the Top 15 Emerging Scholars in the United States in 2018, and his public intellectual work earned him the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy’s Alain Locke Award in 2017. He is a past recipient of the USC Shoah Foundation and A.I. and Manet Schepps Foundation Teaching Fellowship, the Ray A. Rothrock Fellowship at Texas A&M University. He is the past president of Philosophy Born of Struggle, one of the oldest Black philosophy organizations in the United States.” {Paraphrased from the Texas A&M website.}
See his Twitter feed.
Conclusions
“The world revolves around the creators of new ideas, revolves silently.”
— Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Lewis and Curry are the kind of intellectual innovators who are molding our society. We can laugh at their ideas, just as people laughed at Andrea Dworkin decades ago (her ideas are now mainstream feminist thinking, or passé because too tame), or a few years ago mocked those who said protecting and encouraging the transgendered should be a major focus of public policy. Now liberal schools rejoice at every child who expresses confusion about their sexual identity, and recommend hormones to fix him/her/it. Expect even wilder changes to America in the future. The Left will tinker with America until it breaks.
Don’t worry about how this all will end.
Other posts in this series
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about the left-wing of US politics, about reforming America: steps to new politics, and especially these about the Left in America …
- Important: A 4th of July reminder that America is ours to keep – or to lose!
- Fear the rise of political violence in America. We can still stop it.
- America abandons the ideals that made us great.
- Visions of America if the Left wins.
- The Left goes full open borders, changing America forever.
- The key insight: the Left hates America and will destroy it.
- The Democrats will own America. Their past will sink them.
- America’s foes reveal themselves. They are many & strong.
Ideas! For shopping ideas see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
Useful books explaining what happened to the Left
I have not found a good book explaining what happened to the Left, causing its hatred of America. These are the best I have found, looking at our politics.
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted
What I don’t understand is why.
Where does this strange impulse to have everyone else live differently come from? All these writers, or the great majority of them, probably grew up in conventional families. This is pretty much a pre-requisite now to get the education you need for the kinds of jobs they have.
So where does this drive to change how everyone else lives come from? I can well understand it when it comes to reform of rights, to wanting to change foreign policy or economic or environmental policies. But when it comes to this desire to change personal social relations…?
Maybe you have some ideas. It baffles me. Sort of reminds me of conversations with a dedicated left acquaintance some time ago. At a certain point it became clear that he had a sense of involvement in something he thought of as society, which was different from my own. It was a feeling that the private space was much smaller, perhaps non-existent, and that the legitimate scope of political interest, which is to say other peope’s interest, in the everyday lives of other citizens was much deeper.
And yet this is often coupled with a tolerance of ‘multi cultural’ practices, such as FGM or forced marriage, or the restriction of womens rights that exclude the state.
Color me baffled.
henrik,
“Why” is usually the most important question, and the most difficult to answer.
My guess (emphasis on “guess”) is explained here: the Left hates America (and more broadly, the West). It is a deep, even visceral hatred – bred since the mid-19th century. I don’t understand its origins, but the hatred is easy to see.
My theory= because many people are caught in the “humility trap.” The more public humility that you can show, the more “woke” you are.
The ultimate humility (if you are “privileged” in any way) = “my cultural roots are worthless, I look to marginalized cultures for valid truths.” This is how (some) feminists can support utterly misogynistic ideas, because they dont bother to think much about patriarchy if it isn’t native to their own culture. Also, “punching down” is now a mortal sin. Only criticism of those who are definitely less oppressed than the criticizer is allowed, one must clearly be punching up at all levels of intersectuality at all times or they are a bigoted oppressor.
I think I got my pronouns “correct” on that last one…
In one way she is right, it does take a village to raise a child. This is something the right (and left) has forgotten in there rush to destroy labour and community in the west. The right has created the fertile soil for this kind of thought, if we cannot build and sustain our current nuclear family structure then people will come up with alternatives, which we may or may not like.
Gerard,
“It takes a village” is an ancient African concept repurposed by the Left, radically twisting its meaning. Much like “responsibility to protect” becomes the justification for military intervention around the world. Hillary Clinton deployed it as justification for massive government intervention in families.
Lewis says “Taking collective responsibility for children”, taking this several steps further. Like collectivization of farms in the Soviet Union, grand language decorated ugly measures.
Breaking other bonds between people, atomizing them, has long been an essential program for the Left in their social engineering to build a utopian society. The persistent failure of their programs, at massive human cost, never shakes their confidence.
“This might sound like a radical proposal but expanding our idea of who children belong to would be a good thing. Taking collective responsibility for children, rather than only caring for the ones we share DNA with, would radically transform notions of kinship.
Sounds like she wants the tax payers to pay for everyone’s else’s kids.
Sven,
“Sounds like she wants the tax payers to pay for everyone’s else’s kids.”
Yes. The middle class, careful only to have one or two kids each – so that they can raise them well – should pay for poor single mothers children. Leftists call that “supporting families.”
But equally important is collectivization of child-rearing – the continued erosion of parental rights and increased government interference with children.
All ties between individuals are barriers to full government power. Which is why the Left speaks of communities, but seeks to atomize individuals.
Your alliance idea is in the linked gender wars post is interesting but I doubt that it will be successful.
There’s a reasonable middle ground between “seeing themselves as victims” and acknowledging the ways that racism contributes to some of black people’s problems. Refusing to acknowledge when people are being victimized allows the perpetrators to get away with their misdeeds.
The idea that black men are oppressed by gendered racism is hardly new and there is ample evidence to support it. America has a long history of false rape accusations against black men with disastrous and often deadly consequences. The police, criminal justice system and lynch mobs that perpetuate these incidences are usually comprised of white men and women. This predates feminism and college campus kangaroo courts and will likely continue whether or not this type feminism is defeated.
Are black men to choose between being second class citizens in an anti-feminist movement and being second class citizens in a feminist America? This sounds more like an attempt by white men to use black men as a tool to defeat white feminists than a like mutually beneficial alliance.
JD,
“Are black men to choose between being second class citizens in an anti-feminist movement and being second class citizens in a feminist America?”
False dilemma much? AKA rebuttal by saying ridiculous things.
“Your alliance idea is in the linked gender wars post is interesting but I doubt that it will be successful.”
That’s because of the weird way you conceptualize the situation. Big time blinders. I doubt this will help, but here are my two posts explaining this possible solution.