Every now and then one runs across a very good, thoughtful and even intellectually courageous Quora submission. This is one of them.
Two thoughts came to mind while reading this splendid piece. First, a few on the left are beginning to catch a glimpse behind the curtain. Recall that many Western communists in the 30’s and 40’s defected because they felt as if they simply were trapped on a treadmill of lies and self-contradiction.
We are beginning to see this now among at least a few on the left. A Few younger people are peering behind the curtain. What they discover are the same sorts of scabrous, self-aggrandising people associated with earlier iterations of the left who employed rhetoric purely with the intention of securing and remaining in power.
I also was reminded of something I read in Barbara Branden’s bio of Ayn Rand. Rand left the Soviet Union after it became apparent that she, as a bourgeois, college-educated Soviet citizen, would be enlisted throughout her life solely to work in an auxiliary role, consigned despite, her gifts, to menial tasks to serve the needs of the vanguard (working) class.
That is precisely what a few whites and principled people of color are realizing. A relative mentioned to me recently that this topic even comes up in the Showtime series White Lotus, which satirizes white privilege, guilt and all the other sundry pathologies allegedly bound up in Western culture.
Many affluent and middle-class whites are beginning to perceive that citizenship in the future will mean assuming middling jobs – support roles to serve what the elite class regards as vanguard groups, namely, people of color.
Indeed, I think that we will begin to see a growing number of middle-class whites foregoing college entirely in favor of trade-school, knowing full well that college, even elite colleges, no longer will afford aspiring whites upward mobility. This country will come more and more to resemble the post- Russian revolutionary world that faced Rand and other products of bourgeois backgrounds.
