The Danger of White Leftists
The demise of Elizabeth Warren should have been a wake-up call. While not the most formally leftist candidate—that distinction goes to Bernie Sanders—Elizabeth Warren was the most ‘woke’: the campaigner who couldn’t say the word ‘woman’ without ‘trans and cis’ qualifiers; who told a 9-year old that they could veto her choice for the Secretary of Education; who insistently employed the academic-progressive term Latinx despite some hostility to the word in the actual Hispanic community; who constantly stated her obvious pronouns and offered all the other superficial tributes to the woke gods.
When the campaign was suspended and the curtain raised, it turned out that all that pandering did little to excite actual minorities. Elizabeth Warren’s support was almost entirely white. She was the first choice of white college graduates and Democrats with postgraduate degrees—the same demographic who, in another era, filled the ranks of the spirited ‘white saviors.’
As it turns out, ‘wokeness’ is often parallel to education, class, and yes, whiteness. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign was emblematic of the ‘white left,’ who have a ‘different electoral lens’ than the electorate they claim to represent. As The Economist reveals: “whereas white progressives have moved to the left, non-whites remain moderate, skeptical and often conservative—especially on the sexual-liberty issues that energizes the left.”
Wokeness—the language that kids leave their hometowns and go into debt attending private universities to learn—and its attendant values of sexual liberty, agnosticism, renunciation of tradition, and deconstruction of gender isn’t indicative of many original cultures’ actual values towards sex, gender, God, and family. Removing political context, contemporary Asian, African, Muslim, Hispanic, and other immigrant cultures skew conservative.
This irony can beget the appalling sight of white radicals, on behalf of ‘ending white supremacy,’ attempting to silence people of color who defend traditional values. For example, white leftists seeking to cancel Kanye West or Dave Chappelle—men who, by most measures, have lived their lives in service of minorities. In the 2020 primary, Beto O’ Rouke—an affluent white man who ‘failed upward’ his whole life—declared he would revoke tax-exempt status for religious institutions that prohibited same-sex marriage. In practice, would financially ruin Orthodox Jewish synagogues, Islamic mosques, and African-American churches. But, as they say, progress is messy.
Before I continue, I want to clarify that I’m not speaking about white liberals: the concerned suburban mom, the staunch unionist, the learned barista who detests Trump and dislikes political correctness. Nor do I mean the fervent Democratic Socialists who eschew racial politics in favor of class solidarity.
This essay is about the worst of the white leftists: ‘the punishers.’ These people are not hard to find—you can spot them like vultures flocking to social media wokestorms, click and cringe at their Twitter bios, scroll down and see the expulsion of the bitter pills they’ve swallowed. I am talking about the angry white man with the “itchy cancelling finger”; the vindictive white woman who Tweeted a rape article about Kobe Bryant while his and his daughter’s bodies were still smoldering; the ‘pronoun enforcer’ who celebrates the interminable suffering of Jordan Peterson and his family; the humorless turd who tries to stop Asian people from making Asian jokes.
Social media is like a boysenberry bush to these whites. Twitter gives them a place to prove that they’re an ally—that they, in fact, love Lizzo, hate Trump, and agree that some Jewish conservative is a literal Nazi. Social media is a hermetic hamster wheel; it is the perfect instrument to enact modern ‘white saviorism’; to look good instead of do good.
Not to say that white people shouldn’t be interested in ending racism or promoting social justice. Malcolm X, at the end of his autobiography, urged whites to educate other whites on prejudice. Perhaps he meant in their kitchens, their taverns, and their cars—in the private, white-only spaces where meaningful conversations might happen.
But social media gives a similar psychological effect to being on camera, causing people to act inauthentically and over-the-top, as if on a reality show. For whites who constantly perform wokeness online, I suspect that they are less animated by their support of minority values than they are by white guilt. Their unsolicited rejoinders are a way to redirect the spotlight—to show they’re one of the ‘good whites.’ In short, their intentions are more about them and less about us.
“Twitter gives them a place to prove that they’re an ally—that they love Lizzo, hate Trump, and agree that some Jewish conservative is a literal Nazi.”
I understand the root of their behavior. For the first time ever, it is hard to be white. Maybe not economically, maybe not politically, but certainly culturally. Being white is uncool. Underpinning this paradigm shift is ‘the terror of extinction’—whites will be a minority by the year 2050.
To grapple with their looming minority status, and the fear of some sort of retribution—which whites, from Europe to South Africa, have historically had—whites will respond in different ways. Some will renounce their whiteness, purposefully marrying and bearing people of color. Some will try to camouflage their whiteness, by either fervently joining ‘the right side of history’ or discovering and embellishing the ‘oppressed identity’ within. Some will openly advocate white unity and white nationalism.
These tendencies may collide in the same person. I imagine a pale white guy, spaghetti hair and sunken cheeks, glaring at his computer screen at night as ‘the underground man,’ constantly pruning his Twitter following to ensure it displays an up-to-date list of the ‘woke authors,’ retweeting said authors during relevant shitstorms, sometimes inputting snark of his own, while, offline, secretly grappling with the intersectionalist worldview that permits unrestrained abuse of people like him, a constant affront to his sense of being special that he must smilingly swallow.
This is why LGBTQ identity is so important for some whites. It allows them to ‘cross the picket line’: to, in a way, erase their whiteness—ceasing to be the enemy, but a victim themselves. This is why you see the peculiar phenomenon of practicing heterosexuals proclaiming they are queer, or a young adult author lying about being bisexual. This most cynical step—claiming an ‘oppressed identity’—allows what most whites want anyways: it allows them ‘to be black.’
Of course, people are not gay or lesbian or transgender because they don’t want to be white. But if they use their identity as a crowbar in a Twitter riot, or act as if it absolves them of the sins they project onto others, then they should be eyed with suspicion by left and right alike. Such turpitude has created a human centipede of white LGBTQ people calling out straight whites, white women calling out white men, and white men calling out other white men.
“This most cynical step—claiming an ‘oppressed identity’—allows what most whites want anyways: it allows them ‘to be black.’”
I am not recommending that white people embrace whiteness—being ‘white’ robs whites of the rich history of their disparate backgrounds: Sicilian-American, German-American, Irish-American, Armenian-American, Slavic-American. Many of these groups have a history of oppression themselves.
An alternative exists. Try as some might to conceal it, the history of this country is filled with inspirational, entrepreneurial, resilient, and brilliant Americans who, in a world-historical sense—in their advocacy for democracy, human rights, and other revolutionary ideas—were on ‘the right side of history.’ People like Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Dwight Eisenhower, and Albert Einstein.
I think for whites, there is a way to claim their European ancestry or American heritage without being overly connected to whiteness. However, such Americanism to modern palates is unsavory and uncool. Contemporary leftists discard the genuinely lofty ideals of the Quakers and Framers, visions that, while not always implemented, are still worth fighting for. This spurning of the past as ‘all bad’ is quite recent—Barack Obama’s first election was all about harnessing the latent patriotism of liberals.
Many white leftists refuse to accept this heritage. Thus, the adage that ‘whites have no culture’ only really applies to white leftists. Some leftists are also agnostic—associating religion with oppressive norms and traditional roles—and instead cringily dabble in Eastern religions. As a result, their ‘culture’ becomes a patchwork of the tatters of the hippie movement, vague and appropriated Eastern mysticism, amorphous intersectionalist values gleaned from social media, and bad taste. A Godless, cultureless people—people who, in many ways, are the diametric opposite of a storied people from the Old World.
“I think for whites, there is a way to claim their American heritage without being overly connected to whiteness.”
I admit that I’ve gone ‘savage mode’ on white leftists. I know this essay is somewhat polemical—I am not an academic. I tell the truth as I see it. But I hope I’ve scattered enough seeds for the birds to feast upon.
I’ve simply seen too many white leftists focused on the performance of morality than its actual application. Too many people content to bitch on social media, or at best, work in mainstream media, where their haughty ideological stance changes no one’s mind and further alienates regular folks from the news.
The most admirable whites I know avoid digital performance and create real change in their communities. Unfortunately, because of social media, we often only hear from the most punishing white leftists—the ones wringing out their identity crises in hysterical, fatuous ‘activism.’
For this country to repair, we all need to come together, whether it’s through civic nationalism or a working-class revolution. I’ve heard Bernie Sanders referred to as ‘left but not woke,’ and I respect that, along with anyone else who focuses on unity. But the white leftist who contorts to weaponize identity politics, the kind of person who wants to sacrifice people for the ‘good of society,’ who acts from a place of vengeance, nihilism, and resentment, rather than purity, goodness, and compassion, who furthers division and seeks to topple America—be afraid of this person. Especially if you’re a person of color.
