The Hijacked Blue-State / Red-State Narrative Is Blinding Us
I turn the news on, and I don’t like what I see. This isn’t new. It’s been going on through most of the pandemic. There are riots today in Portland.
There was rioting there yesterday. There’s been rioting in Washington from both sides of the spectrum. I’m afraid there will be rioting tomorrow. And next month.
Yet our leaders look away. We hear these protesters are “peaceful.” And this is our fault. We’re either racists, rapists, homophobes, deplorables, or else we’re traitors, spineless losers, bad bad people, or cuckservatives. We don’t see leadership, but hubris being focused against us. Those in power do not care. They’re on the platform, and we aren’t. We are irrelevant. Objectors will be deemed “microaggressors” by the left and “spineless libtards who don’t care about our freedom” by the right.
No matter what we think, it’s wrong. Our leaders say so.
I believe we’ve crossed a threshold in recorded human history unparallelled since the advent of the printing press. In 1439, Gutenberg’s movable-type press upended the way people interacted. We are witnessing the Internet do the same in our own lifetime. It facilitates idea sharing, learning, or cataloging history. But something more is going on. Something we weren’t supposed to notice.
The Internet facilitates deplatforming.
Prior to 1439, we had a weapons-based economy. In it, whoever owned the weapons, we’ll call them “Rock People,” made the rules. But then, the printing press made possible a knowledge-based economy. Once rulers’ subjects learned to read and lawyered up, kings could no longer utter edicts without reference to laws printed on paper.
Dissemination of knowledge in print marked a power structure change. The printed word began to challenge kings and popes. Laws and “Paperthink” prevailed over more military “Rockthink.” Soon democracy prevailed over monarchy. Rock People were smothered by a rising class of “Paper People” who eventually became the white-collar middle class.
For more than half of a millennium, the paradigm of politics itself was drawn on paper with a right side and a left side. Liberals were on the left side. Most of them were Paper People. They organized their world with pen and paper, calculations, and legislation. To the right, many conservatives kept their powder dry. Rock and Paper People learned to coexist under this paradigm. Paper People needed Rock People to protect them against evil. Rock People needed Paper People to protect them from each other.
The Internet has rewired the way people read and think.
The left-right paradigm became formalized by Parliamentary seating in assemblies in the era of the French Revolution. It continues to our day with the Red State — Blue State paradigm of Democrats and Republicans dividing up our country. But this model is unraveling. Red and Blue narratives are changing. Many of us don’t like what we’re seeing.
A third more frightening narrative is seeking to displace them. Those who live by this third narrative we’ll call the “Scissors People.” I will say a little more about them soon.
Two engines drive this revolution. First, the Internet has rewired the way people read, learn, and think.
While people read, they don’t read books. Nicholas Carr has pointed out the ways the Internet is rewiring our brains.
People read Facebook posts and Twitter tweets when not looking at Instagram or videos on Tik-Tok. They google things they need to know. Why read Anna Karenina? With one quick google search we’ll learn she throws herself under a train. Why read all 800 pages? Within minutes, Scisssors People circumvent entire classics. Welcome to the age of the post-literate.
Scissors People cannot fathom other valid viewpoints. It’s too much trouble. All that’s needed is one short and snarky sound byte sufficient to destroy someone who dares to disagree.
When questioned, Scissors People cannot fathom other valid viewpoints. It’s too much trouble. All that’s needed is one short and snarky sound byte sufficient to destroy someone who dares to disagree. We’re going paperless. The new thing is to shred people with talking points. Today Scissorsthink pre-empts paper, inflicting “death by one-thousand cuts.” Rational argument is over, and on top of that, it’s boring. Who cares what you think? What we need to do is check with a celebrity, like Michael Moore, Madonna, Oprah, Ronald Reagan, or Donald Trump.
Today’s attention spans are short. Reading books is out of fashion. According to the Jenkins Group in 2003,
40 percent of college graduates will never read a book after they graduate. Seventy percent of U.S. adults have not been inside a bookstore in five years — brick and mortar or online. Eighty percent of U.S. families did not read a book last year. Those who read are now outvoted. Civilization has gone “post-literate,” and book readers are no longer a majority. Reading is out. Writers are history. Having “influence” is what matters. “Scissors People” specialize in influence. They are “cool.”
But who is influencing, especially since our families have mutated? The role of fatherhood is fading for Millennials and Zoomers. Most grew up in broken homes. Fatherhood has been deplatformed. An angry generation who have rarely known their fathers is now overturning everything associated with forbearers. As Mary Eberstadt has written in “The Fury of The Fatherless,”
The explosive events of 2020 are but the latest eruption along a fault line running through our already unstable lives. That eruption exposes the threefold crisis of filial attachment that has beset the Western world for more than half a century. Deprived of father, Father, and patria, a critical mass of humanity has become socially dysfunctional on a scale not seen before
She continues:
Their resentment is why the triply dispossessed tear down statues not only of Confederates, but of Founding Fathers and town fathers and city fathers and anything else that looks like a father, period. It is why we see generational vituperation toward the Baby Boomers, like the diss of “OK, Boomer” and the epithet “Karen.” It is why bands of what might be called “chosen protest families” disrupt actual family meals. It is why BLM disrupts bedroom communities late at night, where real, non-chosen families are otherwise at peace.
Today, 39% of U. S. students (all races) in grades 1–12 live in homes without their biological fathers. Yet while fathers have been deplatformed by our “woke” intelligentsia, according to 72.2% of the U.S. population, fatherlessness is the most significant family or social problem facing America.
Even President Obama titled his 1995 memoir “Dreams of My Father,” and writes of how he overcame the handicap. It was a theme that seemed to resonate with so many Americans it helped catapult a young ambitious senator into the White House. Much of the discourse on “white privilege” is attributable not to people’s color but the presence of a father in the household. In Nigeria, a land furnishing some of our most successful immigrants, only four percent of children live in single parent households.
Similar numbers hold for Ghana, Jamaica, and Carribbean nations whose expatriates have also seen remarkable success upon our shores.
But what happens when the father isn’t there? And what if backstops aren’t there either? What if our schools are “diagnosing” boys with some sort of disorder, and we drug our boys with Ritalin for acting out like — boys? What if our churches are dysfunctional and don’t know how to help us? What if our military grinds boys down in never-ending wars? What if our media convinces women masculinity is toxic? I study history, especially the history of extremists. I’m noting extremists have a lot of similarities no matter which edge of the red-state-blue-state paradigm they come from.
The Ku Klux Klan had merely come to fill the voids in empty men, people who needed validation that the Klan was there to offer… Extremist groups arise from unpaid bills of our society.
Frederick Lewis Allen in his classic Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s, writes of the Ku Klux Klan’s resurgence in the early 1920’s. By 1925, Klan membership peaked at five million. But these were not the well-heeled Camerons and Stonemans that we saw in Birth of a Nation, D W Griffith’s epic picture about the Klan. “You think the influential men belong here?” an observer says to Allen on an avenue where the Ku Klux Klan is marching. “Then look at their shoes when they march in parade. The sheet doesn’t cover their shoes.” Hiding under fancy sheets men wore dilapidated footwear, a dead give-away they came out of hard times and troubled families. The Ku Klux Klan had merely come to fill the voids in empty men, people who needed validation that the Klan was there to offer. They were told they were “real men,” part of an “Invisible Empire.” Extremist groups arise from unpaid bills of our society. The 1920’s anti-drinking Ku Klux Klan was no exception. The Mafia, McCarthyism, Hippies, Students for a Democratic Society are all validation rackets, flawed substitutes for family, validating those who couldn’t find acceptance growing up, even when (and even more so) if both parents were at home.
We now have “Scissors People” hellbent on dividing us.
Today we see it in our street gangs. Today we see it in Antifa and the anti-father rhetoric of groups like BLM. Today we see it in the Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, White Nationalists, Neo-Nazis, QAnon groups, and Identity Evropa. We are seeing a resurgence of a far left’s and far right’s extremist parodies of the red-state-blue-state paradigm we’ve known. Epithets are growing worse. Those who once were labeled moderates are neo-Nazis to the left and “cuckservatives” to the right. It seems there is no neutral ground. Identitarians aren’t leaving us alone. We now have “Scissors People” hellbent on dividing us.
But these aren’t Goldwater conservatives or Barack Obama liberals, who not only were well read but authored thought-provoking books. Today’s validation rackets like the Proud Boys and Antifa rely on slogans they can fit onto a baseball cap or t-shirt.
Please recall they are “post-literate.” Their fathers didn’t teach them self-control or the attention span required to read a book. So they rely on self-esteem and on expressing their emotions. Self-esteem has now pre-empted self-control.
If they are easily offended, then perhaps they have discovered being offended is a way to fill their needs without much effort. Children throw tantrums — if a temper tantrum gets them what they want. They’ll repeat whatever strategy has worked for them for as long as such exertions are reliably rewarded.
I have no quarrel with either liberals or conservatives. Without a right foot AND a left foot it is difficult to walk. But we are seeing something different on the streets of today’s cities. People are cutting down our heritage and cheering its destruction. These aren’t “patriots” or “progressives.” People are marching to destroy us. I’ve been lectured that Antifa is just folks who dislike fascists, like our GI’s in World War II landing at Normandy. Except our soldiers never looted or tore down statues when they came home, didn’t throw bottles at police, didn’t blind people with laser pointers (violating the Geneva Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons
didn’t loot and set the local businesses on fire. And if one’s distaste for Fascism qualifies one as Antifa, shouldn’t leftists be conceding Josef Stalin was Antifa.
Nor do “patriots” storm the Capitol and threaten those in Congress to back a President whose lawyer wants to shoot his own vice president
We’re seeing anarchists who’ve hijacked the terms liberal or conservative and now use them to defend their constant tantrums. They are our enemies and narcissists. We need to understand them. And we certainly don’t want to underestimate these people.
Because the fatherless will otherwise divide us and enslave us if we try to sneak through life without offending them.
There is more to Scissors People than just households without fathers. Even with a father present, children sometimes grow up angry. Take the case of Henry Fonda and his children in the fifties. Henry was clearly in the household. Henry cared about his children. He was a war hero along with Jimmy Stewart, his best friend. But when the Sixties happened, Jane changed from an actress to an activist even joining Donald Sutherland in an “Anti-USO” troupe, FTA to counteract any good will from those Bob Hope tours. The letters stood for “F___ The Army.” Soon Jane was in North Vietnam, posing for pictures on an anti-aircraft gun making it look like she was eager to shoot down her fellow countrymen she hated. On the radio, she claimed to be ashamed to be American. Stories even worse than this have been alleged, perhaps not proven, but many vets and POW’s still swear they are true.
So what happened? Jane had a father who was there … only he wasn’t, Jane protested in an interview about On Golden Pond.
And while Jane’s mother was bipolar, killing herself in 1950, Henry Fonda soldiered on the way he’d learned to in the war. Jane claimed her father used his acting as a mask to hide emotions. Many veterans become very good at hiding their emotions. Jane wound up modeling her life on roles her father played on screen, roles like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, Juror 8 in 12 Angry Men, or Young Mr. Lincoln. If Henry hid behind his dramas….
…So did Jane.
Today our Scissors People have gathered up a lengthy list of grievances many are hoping to cram sideways down our throats. Some receive help from our enemies, Russia, Hamas, the CCP and Islamofascists, who funnel money through back channels to tear down our civilization. But for all their “woke” social justice, or their born-again alt-righteousness there seems to be a pattern among Scissors People. They are simultaneously hurting and yet hurtful.
Like with the Ku Klux Klan, it’s worth taking some time to understand them before we let them do more damage than they need to.
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DJ Phinney is novelist who writes what he calls Red Car Noir, suspense novels steeped in history we would often rather forget. Phinney is also a civil and mechanical engineer, a Vietnam-era Air Force veteran, a Catholic by faith, and an historian in his free time. Politically he is a centrist who subscribes to neither party, although he likes Ike, and he really-really likes Harry Truman. www.dennisphinney.com
