Elitism and Oikophobia.

Brandeis students rally around fellow student who said she has no sympathy for dead police officers.

The National Anthem needs a Trigger Warning, according to CNN.

Your liberal betters despise you...

..so return the favor.

Our elites are in the grip of "Oikophobia" - the atavistic revulsion to their neighbors.

That's the plan, Stan.

The middle-class can't afford to live in liberal cities.

Oikophobia - British-style.

There is something about the Left that hates their neighbors as they are.  They hate the middle class and above, and they profess a love for the poor as an abstraction, but they hate the poor as a reality.

It's true in America and, apparently, it is true in England, as well:

//First, Scotland. The latest polls show that the United Kingdom is close to breaking up. This is a remarkable state of affairs when you consider that, a year ago, polls were two to one against partition. How has this occurred? Because we have allowed the British Labour party to lead the No debate.

This was a disastrous decision, given that, as Orwell noted, Labourites and Lefties revile and deride so many of the things perceived as quintessentially British. Take your pick from the monarchy, the flag, the Army, the history of rampant conquest, the biggest empire in the world, the supremacy of the English language, anyone who lives in the countryside, the national anthem, the City of London, the Royal Navy, a nuclear deterrent, the lion and the unicorn, duffing up the French, eating loads of beef – all this, for Lefties, is a source of shame.

The result, north of the Border, is plain to see. Whenever the passionate and patriotic SNP asks the No campaign for a positive vision of the UK (instead of dry economic facts, and negative fear-mongering) all we hear is silence, or maybe a quiet murmur about “the NHS”. Yes, the NHS. For many Lefties, the NHS – an average European health system with several notable flaws – is the only good thing about Britain. It’s like saying we should keep the United Kingdom because of PAYE. Thus we tiptoe towards the dissolution of the nation.

There is a deep irony here. If Scotland secedes it will hurt the Labour Party more than anyone, electorally. But such is the subconscious hatred of Britain and Britishness in Lefty hearts, I believe many of them think that’s a price worth paying: just to kick the “Tory Unionists” in the nuts, just to deliver the final death-blow to British “delusions of grandeur”.

It is a tragic state of affairs. And yet there is worse. Rotherham.

We don’t need to rehearse the facts. We’ve all read them, and reeled away in horror. The interesting question is how and why would any country allow the racialised gang-rape of its own daughters?

Why? Because too many in that country, especially on the Left, most especially in the Labour Party, despise their own ordinary people: the white working classes.

Take this comment by Jack Straw, Labour MP for Blackburn, and Home Secretary from 1997-2001, when the Rotherham atrocities were beginning. “The English are potentially very aggressive, very violent.” It is almost unimaginable that any senior politician would say this of his own people in America, Russia or France. Yet here it comes straight out of the mouth of a very senior politician indeed – along with many other expressions of Guardianista sneering: at the white working classes with their “chav culture”, “BNP values”, “Gillian Duffy bigotry” and so forth.

What kind of message does Straw’s statement send to everyone else? It says that the English are dislikeable, that they are to be feared, and contained, to be treated with contempt. It says that the ordinary English are a nasty race who need to be diluted by mass immigration; it says, in particular, that poor white English people are especially worthless.

And thus, Rotherham.//

Not too far off the American experience, but far more extreme at present.

Certain sectors of our society basically see their fellow Americans as their real threats.

From the Daily Caller:

The suspects’ identities – Central Asian Caucasians whose horrific acts may have been informed by a militant strain of Islam – have proven tricky for commentators who had hoped to frame Monday’s bombings as a lesson on racial politics and what they believe to be pervasive bigotry in contemporary America. 

Shortly after Monday’s attack, before any suspects were named, Salon writer David Sirota published a widely ridiculed piece expressing the hope that the bomber would be a “white American.” Sirota based his logic on an academic discipline known as Critical Race Theory. 

“If recent history is any guide, if the bomber ends up being a white anti-government extremist, white privilege will likely mean the attack is portrayed as just an isolated incident — one that has no bearing on any larger policy debates,” Sirota wrote.

Instead it is a radicalized Muslim immigrant...and it will be portrayed as an isolated incident.

Shorter Durbin - The references to "God" and "Jerusalem" were taken out because key parts of our coalition are "allergic" to Christians and Jews.

In "Tales from an Alternate Reality," Dick Durbin demonstrates that he really doesn't want to talk about the Democrat platform.

Oikophobia and the friendship.

Glen Reynolds posts:

OIKOPHOBIA UPDATE: Robert Wargas: Behold The Self-Hating White Person.“Since progressivism is largely a status game, in which people compete for social prestige by repeating a set of approved phrases and opinions to other status-seeking mandarins, it’s not surprising that some will go to sado-masochistic lengths to remain part of the alpha group. By now, the increasingly creepy tendency of using the word ‘white’ as a glib insult has become well established in left-wing commentary.”

To be fair, for many the self-hatred is fairly justified.

This seems to follow a recent facebook discussion about the loss of political power by American Protestants and whether Protestants should care:

SJ - I don't claim to speak for Protestants or any other group, just myself. And I am not above being concerned, I'm just not concerned. I've never thought of Protestants as MY team and Catholics as the other team. Is that how people think? Man,

I need to get out more! You may not believe it, or think I'm dodging the issue, and there is really no way I can convince you, but I really don't care what the "balance of power" is between Catholics and Protestants, and have never ever even thought about it. I believe that anyone that names the name of the biblical Jesus Christ is on the same team I'm on. Life was going just fine. Now I find that I lost control of the government and didn't even know it! Now remind me again why I should care.

12 hours ago · Like.

Peter Sean Bradley

You are making my point about the fissiparous future an of atomized Christianity.

Up until very recently, Christians have understood that they live in a community, that they are, in fact, a community. That understanding is
at root a biblical belief. Christ founded a church. The church is the body of Christ. Christians as a community share their faith, the ethical standards, their practices, etc.

It is natural for a community to seek to share its good, insofar as they feel they have a good to share. An aspect of sharing that good is to take pride when a member of the community excels and achieves recognition. We call this feeling “friendship,” particular when it is based on a sharing of some desire for excellence.

It is human to love the things in which we see ourselves. In fact, St. Thomas teaches that love springs from the sharing of the good as part of which we see ourselves in others and we see others as another self. To deny that natural human feeling that we feel when we see members of our community achieve is, well, inhuman, or else it means that the community we purportedly share no longer truly exists.

St. Thomas explains the point I’m making this way:

“Likeness, properly speaking, is a cause of love. But it must be observed that likeness between things is twofold. One kind of likeness arises from each thing having the same quality actually: for example, two things possessing the quality of whiteness are said to be alike. Another kind of likeness arises from one thing having potentially and by way of inclination, a quality which the other has actually: thus we may say that a heavy body existing outside its proper place is like another heavy body that exists in its proper place: or again, according as potentiality bears a resemblance to its act; since act is contained, in a manner, in the potentiality itself.

Accordingly the first kind of likeness causes love of friendship or well-being. For the very fact that two men are alike, having, as it were, one form, makes them to be, in a manner, one in that form: thus two men are one thing in the species of humanity, and two white men are one thing in whiteness. Hence the affections of one tend to the other, as being one with him; and he wishes good to him as to himself….”

Now, obviously, this natural and good human feeling can become distorted and become “chauvinism” and “bigotry.” However, that needn’t be the case, it often isn’t the case, and the attempt to stifle the natural human feeling - which is a virtue when properly ordered in that it permits collective action, orders the community and ensures that people have a stake in the just ordering of their community – is itself a disordering of human feeling and community.

As I said, if you don’t care, you don’t care. However, what that suggests is what I said earlier, the community – as opposed to your atomized, individualistic faith – which you should belong to as a Christian doesn’t seem to be making much of a claim on you.

8 hours ago · Like · .
Peter Sean Bradley -

Finally, I'm curious. Do you recognize the election of Barrack Obama as America's first black president to have a historical significance? Do you think it says something about America at this time?

If not, why not?

If you do, how could you not find the development of Protestants being "shut out" of the control of the institutions of American life, wherein they have had a hegemony for 200 years not to be equally interesting? For 220 years, except for one president who did not complete his term, all of our Presidents have been white Protestants. Historically, there has only been one Catholic on the Court at one time. Now, those rules don't seem to apply. Is that good? Is it bad? I don't know, but it would seem to say something as a cultural and historical matter.

7 hours ago · Like

By the way, it is not the case that such people are "above" having a rooting interest in political outcomes; it's just that they have "re-ordered" the schedule of values by which they root. Hence, progressives aren't above rooting for their kind of people; rather, their kind of people are those with the far narrower social and cultural values of the "progressive block," which is a subset, generally speaking, of the broader and more inclusive category of "white person," a category that unfortunately in their opinion includes the de classe hoi polloi.

Are you part of the elite or part of the masses?

The Volokh Conspiracy explains the thesis of Charles Murray's new book:

In his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, Charles Murray argues that a new elite class has emerged that is much more ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans than were the elites of earlier generations:

As the new upper class increasingly consists of people who were born into upper-middle-class families and have never lived outside the upper-middle-class bubble, the danger increases that the people who have so much influence on the course of the nation have little direct experience with the lives of ordinary Americans, and make their judgments about what’s good for other people based on their own highly atypical lives...

Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers. It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.

If Murray is right, this kind of elite ignorance is the flip side of the general public’s political ignorance. Public ignorance is dangerous because it reduces the quality of voting decisions; elite ignorance because it reduces the quality of the decisions made by elites once they get into positions of power.

To illustrate his point, Murray includes in the book a 25 question quiz that is intended to test readers’ knowledge and exposure to mainstream non-upper middle class culture (he assumes that most of the readers are members of the upper middle class elite). I managed a middling 37 on his 0–99 point scale.

As Murray recognizes, one can easily quibble about the details of many of the questions. For example, I not only have “attended” a Rotary Club meeting, but actually gave a speech at one when I was 17. Maybe I should get extra credit for the latter. I would also have achieved a higher score if there were more sports-related questions. Other readers will have different complaints. Even so, there is no reasonable version of this test on which I would have come out looking like a Man of the People. More generally, Murray is surely right that there is a culture gap between the new upper middle class and the rest of the public, and that the former is often ignorant about the lives of the latter.

Here is the test.

I scored a 51, which puts me somewhere between first generation middle-class with working class parents and first generation upper-middle-class with middle class parents.

Which is just about right.

Interesting.

Oikophobia

Bill Whittle explains it for you -

Oikophobia -- fear and hatred of one's own culture and people. It has brought down civilizations since there have been civilizations. And now we're infected, too.

The loathing of the elites for those of us who - in their opinion - are engaged in the "dance of the low-sloping forehead."

Don't want the American flag burned?  Don't just stand there...behead someone! - The New First Amendment.

Glen Reynolds observes:

HOW CAN YOU GET A NEW JERSEY TRANSIT WORKER FIRED? Charge that he burned a Koran. Hey, it’s not like an American flag — it’s serious.


Lesson to people who don’t want American flags burned — behead people or something. Then you get a hecklers’ veto! Nonviolent reasonable discourse is for losers.

Here's the New York Daily story:

Koran burner Derek Fenton booted from his job at NJ Transit


The protester who burned pages from the Koran outside a planned mosque near Ground Zero has been fired from NJTransit, sources and authorities said Tuesday.


Derek Fenton's 11-year career at the agency came to an abrupt halt Monday after photographs of him ripping pages from the Muslim holy book and setting them ablaze appeared in newspapers.

Fenton, 39, of Bloomingdale, N.J., burned the book during a protest on the ninth anniversary of Sept. 11 outside Park51, the controversial mosque slated to be built near Ground Zero.

He was apparently inspired by Pastor Terry Jones, the Florida clergyman who threatened to burn the Koran that day but later changed his mind.

NJ Transit said Fenton was fired but wouldn't give specifics.

"Mr. Fenton's public actions violated New Jersey Transit's code of ethics," an agency statement said.

"NJ Transit concluded that Mr. Fenton violated his trust as a state employee and therefore [he] was dismissed."

Fenton was ushered from the protests by police on Saturday and questioned, but he was released without charges.

"He said, 'This is America,' and he wanted to stand up for it, in a Tea Party kind of way," a police source said.

Another police source said Fenton described himself as a "loyal American" exercising his "right to protest."

For the record, I think that one shouldn't burn the Koran, but, then, I also think that one shouldn't burn the American flag or desecrate the Eucharist.  At least, I'm consistent, and I think that the law should be applied equally, regardless of content, and that we shouldn't give be giving foreigners a "heckler's veto" over American political discussion.

Insanity Squared.

My "outrage of the day" was this amazing observation from Justice Breyer [via NRO and this interview]:

Last week we saw a Florida Pastor – with 30 members in his church – threaten to burn Korans which lead to riots and killings in Afghanistan. We also saw Democrats and Republicans alike assume that Pastor Jones had a Constitutional right to burn those Korans. But Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told me on “GMA” that he’s not prepared to conclude that — in the internet age — the First Amendment condones Koran burning.


“Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” Breyer told me. “Well, what is it? Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?”

So, the living Constitution is heading toward accepting the "heckler's veto" so long as the heckler's are not Americans?

For nearly one hundred years, the Supreme Court has taught that heckler's do no get to veto free speech.  If there is a chance of violence, the police are supposed to protect the speaker and maintain the peace by arresting the people who violate the law.

Moreover, every time this kind of issue has come up, the Left tells us that the offended parties - Catholics and Evangelicals in the case of putting a crucifix in urine, Catholics in the case of a state employee desecrating the Eucharist - are the ones trying to engage in "censorship."

But apparently that only applies to Americans.  If the problem is foreigners who issue fatwas, the Constitutional rules applicable to Americans no longer apply, and the foreigners are entitled to a "heckler's veto."

This seems to be yet another example of Oikophobia - the elitist fear of their neighbors.

Perhaps, therefore, it is understandable that this kind of Oikophobia generates a xenophobic reaction.  Mark Shea points to this post from What's Wrong With the World that contains these comments:

We need a new Crusade.


I don't know about that. We just need our country to be an Islam-free zone. The presence of Mohammedans and the threat of Muslim violence is paralyzing. There is simply no alternative. May I suggest a gentle five point plan?

1. Halt Muslim immigration.

2. Revoke the visas of Muslim students.

3. Offer Muslim families $100K to return to the Muslim country of their choice.

4. Halt the building of mosques.

5. Halt the printing and distribution of the Koran.

Yes, I know, first amendment and all that. But the the first amendment is dead, and Islam killed it. There is no "freedom of speech" or "freedom of religion" with the threat of Muslim violence hanging over your head. Once this "five point plan" does its work you can have your first amendment back.

Posted by Jeff Culbreath September 11, 2010 9:20 PM

And as far as I can tell, you could do points 1 and 2 without any actual First Amendment problems whatsoever, whatever the courts might say.

If you don't like 3-5, we could try adding--

3'. Pass jihad sedition laws and enforce them by seeding federal agents in mosques and arresting relevant imams.

4'. Local agencies refuse some mosque-building permits on plausible non-religious grounds. (E.g. "That coat factory has such wonderful architecture that we just can't destroy it.")

5'. Tear out all Muslim foot basins in public buildings.

6'. Federal and state enforcers of religious non-discrimination laws issue guidance statements to businesses indicating that a heck of a lot of things that have previously been required or thought to be required as "reasonable accommodation" of Muslim religion are actually _unreasonable_ accommodation and that they will get in _no trouble_ if they refuse these accommodations to Muslim employees.

7'. Revoke the passes of all Muslim prison chaplains.

8'. Begin extra screening of military personnel based on risk factors for Nidal Hassan-style violence, where these risk factors clearly include Islamic self-identification.

I believe that not a single one of these creates First Amendment problems. Remember re. #8 that military personnel do not as it is have all the constitutional freedoms, including rights to due process and freedom of speech (they can be punished for criticizing the President, for example), that civilians have. If any one would have to be cut on First Amendment grounds, it might be 7. But all the others should pass with flying colors.

They should cumulatively make Muslims in America feel uncomfortable. Which is fine with me.


Posted by Lydia September 11, 2010 9:43 PM

Mark Shea is right.  This is nutty, over-the-top stuff.  But when you have a sitting Supreme Court Justice suggesting that the liberties of Americans can be curtailed by the American government because of the sensibilities of foreigners, it is not entirely surprising when Americans start looking for a way out of that paradigm.