U Not Gonna Like This

This Microsoft Word Document from International Men's Network:

In modern Europe, we don’t quite have Bedouin storming in from the desert (merely millions of depressed migrants trying to slip through the gates), but the tendency towards barbarism is an active force all around us. Hence the formula for overthrowing a Western society must be not “storm the walls” but “organize your own barbarians” within the walls. Those who hate European civilization know that it cannot be taken by direct assault. It must thus be captured from within. This was the plan adopted by many revolutionaries, most notably, of course, by Marx who constructed a new and hostile tribe within the West called “the proletariat.” They could be made into a revolutionary tribe by equipping suitable people (industrial workers for example) with a unified consciousness, so that in every transaction they understood themselves as a collective. They were being victimized by the oppressive bourgeois. Like the guardians in Plato’s Republic, these revolutionary insurgents had to be taught to be docile within the movement while snarling at those without.

Marx provided the model for all subsequent movements aiming to take power. His “make your own tribe” kit was found useful by nationalists, anarchists, and many brands of socialist. Hitler made the most creative use of it by playing down victimization and representing every Aryan as a superior type of person. It took the world in arms to get rid of him. But before long, revolutionaries discovered that a revolution based on the proletarian tribe only really worked if you were dealing with pretty unsophisticated peoples—preferably non-Europeans who lacked all experience of freedom and genuine political life. In socially mobile European states, the workers mostly found better things to do with their time than waste it on revolutionary committees and the baby talk of political demonstrations. Something new was needed.

It was provided by such socialists as Mussolini and Lenin who adopted the principle of the Praetorian Guard: a tightly knit vanguard party, which could use the masses as ventriloquial dummies and seek power on its own terms. This development was part of a wider tendency towards the emergence of oligarchies ruling through democratic slogans.

In the course of the 1960s, a new tribe was established that also sought to overthrow the Western citadel from within and had notably greater success. This was Betty Friedan’s radical feminists. It was a tribe constructed out of women who had taken some sort of degree and were living domestic lives. Technology had largely liberated them from the rigors of beating, sweeping, and cleaning, while pharmacology had released them from excessive procreation. In tactical terms, radical feminists made one innovation that has turned out to be crucial to the destiny of the West over the last half century. They suppressed almost completely the idea that their project involved a transfer of power and operated entirely on the moralistic principle that their demands corresponded to justice.

What lay behind this momentous development? It is a complicated question, but I think that Diana Schaub understood the essence of it in her essay “On the Character of Generation X”