Source: Bigstock

Concerned mainly with the lives of working people, the Old Left, despite its unrealistic expectations, was still fairly grounded in reality. The New Left, by contrast, is characterized by delusional beliefs, the gospel of the identity-politics zealots. New Left intellectuals therefore seem to live in a different world from the rest of us. How does this happen? In part because these persons tend to come from wealth and remain at a certain comfortable remove from the destructive consequences of their ignorance. It is, indeed, the function of wealth to obscure what would otherwise be clear. Wealth not only corrupts the soul; it also makes one stupid, allowing for ideas that appear plausible only because they are never put to the test of practical experience, wherein something more than the approval of fellow frauds and cowards is at stake. Hence that curiosity of our decadent era, the intellectual who has no common sense. He is a chattering midget on a mission to chop you down to his own puny stature. If he has read many books and can quote many famous names, he still hasn’t the slightest understanding of the family and politics, although, in his foolish conceit, he thinks otherwise.

Unlike the ordinary academic “political theorist,” a white person living in a London slum can see for himself that, for women, Islam is de facto sex slavery. Observing Muslims live, he also notices no distinction between what we Westerners call church and state. For Islam, religion is the state. So this poor white person has no sentimental illusions about Islam’s compatibility with the West, because experience has shown him the impossibility of that project. And since his more honest and manly way of life does not require paying lip service to genteel cant—that is, what the vulgar success-crowd class calls morality—you won’t hear any intellectual herd chatter about diversity and inclusion and the like from this hearty and straightforward character.

It is not so with the diversity fundamentalists. Driven by needless guilt, petty envy, and, much less often, compassion, they have an anxious desire to believe that peoples and human nature itself are as conveniently shapable and interchangeable as the nifty gadgets affluent Westerners rely on to live lives of unprecedented ease, and correspondingly, unprecedented corruption. False conservatives—George W. Bush, John Podhoretz, Bill Kristol—demonstrate this naive thinking too; we see it in their mad belief that democracy can be exported abroad just as we export automobiles. Like the lamentable neocons, the diversity fundamentalists have a wildly simplistic understanding of human nature. Though any state that does not descend into sheer chaos must be bound by certain unifying principles, the diversity fundamentalists conceive of the United States as a kind of wonderful party funded by somebody’s rich and generous grandfather: Everyone in town is invited—including those who never got along—and there’s food and drink for all.

Such a bizarre sensibility is the product of sheer affect uninstructed by cold reason. Guilt, envy, and compassion are all affects that weak-willed leftists use to determine their worldview. Leftists are quite womanly in this respect. Where the conservative, like a man in the old sense, examines contexts objectively, then makes a judgment irrespective of how it makes him feel, the leftist projects feelings onto things themselves, as if the heart were the criterion for truth. Even worse, perhaps, for the leftist reason itself is nothing but an ad hoc justificatory tool. A typical example of the deluded, affect-driven leftist is University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann. With a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard (now a dubious eminence), this bluestocking has called for Penn to be a sanctuary campus within the sanctuary city of Philadelphia. It does not matter that we are in an international war with ignoble savages who are absolutely committed to destroying us infidels. Nor should Philly’s ever-struggling underclass get the jobs that now go to illegal Mexican immigrants who work under the table. Gutmann feels your pain, O wretched of the earth, so come join the young Itchy League rabble in their safe spaces. Of course, my gender analogy will strike most people as “sexist.” Well, get out of the kitchen, burning prigs! Because the stereotype that women are more emotional than men, and that they frequently think with their emotions only, is merely true, and indeed, as the excellent contrarian psychologist Lee Jussim has shown, stereotypes in general are true far more frequently than not.

That diversity is bad news is one of history’s most significant lessons. As a general rule, the more diversity, the more suffering and strife. James Madison, in the great “Federalist No. 10” (1787), observed that democracies have “in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” For, as the acute man understood so profoundly,

the latent causes of faction are…sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts….