The New Left

THE NEW LEFT

The elites in the USA and elsewhere in the West determined that they could enfeeble the political left, those who would challenge their wealth and power for the benefit of the whole society, if the left were transformed from a movement organized around the struggle of labor vs. capital into a movement that would inevitably be divided against itself.  So these elites provided support to such a fundamentally divided version of the left, what is known as the "New Left," which focused on the formation of and empowerment of competing political identity groups, usually based on gender, race,  or ethnicity.  The support was in part direct, but mostly indirect, as the elites provided the New Left with access to mainstream media and the messages, ideas, and values of the New Left were broadly spread, widely promoted, and sometimes even celebrated.  This was all done at the expense of the Pro-Labor Left, which had posed a much greater threat to the political-economic power structure, and over time the New Left supplanted the Pro-Labor Left as the mainstream of the left.

This is problematic over the long term for any human society at a fundamental level.  It not only insulates the elites from any serious challenges to their power, allowing problems to fester and the rise of other abuses that follow from unchallenged power, but most importantly it sets women against men, which can only lead over the long term to social disintegration.  Men and women were designed by evolution to be different pieces of the same puzzle, so that they would fit together with different needs and different abilities to make a harmonious and healthy society that could survive over the long term.   When men and women are convinced that they are competing groups and even enemies, then the myriad of interdependencies between the sexes, some known and many unknown, that human societies have depended on for survival throughout their hundreds of thousands of years of evolution are severed, leading to  innumerable unpredictable ripple effects that could very easily cripple the society.

Humans evolved in small groups, and these small groups grew, by various means, to become larger and larger groups over the evolution of human civilization.  The path to the development of a large society with sufficient social harmony to be healthy and sustainable has been long and torturous and only was achieved after much experimentation with different rules of social behavior.  Of course the social rules were often crafted primarily for the benefit of elites, but often enough the elites crafting the rules recognized that they would benefit from improving the general welfare of the society, particularly in the societies that survived long term.  Sometimes the rules were found to be inconsistent with general welfare by later generations, or by those leading rebellions in the same generation, and were overturned or modified, but this was always best treated as a delicate process as over time human rules become entangled with the values, belief systems, expectations, and patterns of behavior that are common in the society and which members depend on as they build and maintain the web of human life.

However, in the modern era, in the pursuit of their own narrow short-term interests, elites in the West have promoted and empowered this New Left which is radically changing social rules that human societies have depended on to provide for the general welfare for millennia.  The genie is out of the bottle as the New Left movement may, soon if not already, become too powerful for those same elites to control, with the consequence that all humans will suffer, including the elites who enabled this process.