#i’ve been putting this off but i think it’s time i joined the marxists in my city

[beetlebitchywitch]

Yes, Professor

So our discord server might have come up with some professor AU’s for the Conglomerate and we might’ve gone a weeeee bit feral. So here’s what came of me deciding to target @realmonsterboyhours with two of her favorite boys, Zhuk and Bajo. Enjoy!

(If you’re unaware of the Conglomerate, a Mafia!Beej AU with 5 iterations of him, click here to get the full rundown courtesy of @monsterlovinghours

Warning: NSFW, some degradation, double teaming, spanking, just a fun time to be had

“Professor?”

“Hmm? Ah yes, come in, dorogoy.” 

You hesitated in the doorway to his office, taken aback for a moment by the lavishness of the decor before you slowly entered, shutting the door behind you with trembling hands. You took a deep breath, thankful that your professor’s eyes were trained on his tea as he raised his bobbing tea bag in and out of the steaming mug. The truth was, Professor Zhuk had always intimidated you. Though he was a physically imposing man, it was his regality that truly made you feel small next to him. He spoke with an air of confidence and intelligence that no other professor could match, save for-

...Oh dear God. 

“Buenos dias, querida,” Professor Escarabajo said from the plush armchair in the corner, a playful smirk playing on his lips. You stopped in your tracks, your brain sprinting to try and catch up with this unexpected turn of events. You knew you had to see Zhuk to speak about your grade in his Marxist Literature class, so why would the head of the History Department be waiting for you as well? You felt your cheeks stain a light pink despite your desperate attempts to keep yourself in check, already shrinking under the intensity of the professor’s mirthful gaze. 

“This is my colleague, Professor Escarabajo,” Zhuk said cheerily, seemingly unaware of your growing nervousness as he gestured to the other man. “He will be joining us for our brief meeting. I hope that this won’t be a problem?”

You avoided his gaze, simply nodding as you sunk into the chair across from the two of them, thankful for the plush softness enveloping your body. After a moment, you felt composed enough to meet Zhuk’s gaze with a polite smile, folding your hands in your lap to disguise the telltale tremble of an intimidated woman. 

“Not a problem at all, sir,” you replied softly, thumbing over the soft fabric of your skirt. 

“Excellent,” he said, sipping at his tea- Earl Grey, you suspected, given the earthy aroma- before fumbling with his little gold reading glasses, sliding them over the bridge of his nose as he read through a few papers strewn across his desk. 

God, what you wouldn’t give to be those pa-

No. Stop. You couldn’t be having those kinds of thoughts in front of the man you’d been fantasizing about for weeks. Christ, watching him command a classroom, demanding the attention of his students with a booming voice as he masterfully took you all through the intricacies of some of the most complicated literature you’d ever read...it made you want to throw yourself out of your chair and beg him to fuck you in front of the rest of the class. 

But you couldn’t think of that. Not here, not in his office, not in front of another professor. You pinched your leg softly, hoping to distract yourself away from the fantasies that could only be making your cheeks redder by the second. 

“Now, it seems you’ve been struggling on your reflections for Marxist Literature,” he said, looking over what you assumed to be a stack of the assignments you’d managed to turn in on time. “Tell me how I can be of help to you, moy dorogoy.” 

You felt like you were short circuiting, your mind lulled by the sweet timbre of his beautifully accented voice, especially when he called you something in Russian that you were aching to know the meaning of. Gulping, you straightened your body in the chair, attempting to look as professional and put together as you knew you could never be in their presence.

“Well, Professor, Marxist Literature has honestly been a challenge for me,” you replied, hoping honesty would truly be the best policy. “I find it hard to look at literature from a Marxist lens when I’ve learned so little of his political theory in my classes up until this point.” 

“Ah, should I tell Professor Scarabee that he’s slacking off in his teaching?” Escarabajo asked, his golden eyes alight with mischief. Your stomach lurched, oh God you were going to vomit, you couldn’t handle even the gentlest of teasing from this professor who was somehow just as handsome as Zhuk, except rougher, clearly looser, and apparently feeding off of your evident nervousness, if the look in his eye was anything to go off of. 

“No, no, not at all!” you stammered. “I haven’t had the pleasure of being taught by him, but I’m sure he’s great at what he does, Professor Escarabajo.” 

“Please, querida,” he said, his playful smirk softening as he gave you a little wink. “Call me Bajo.” 

“Bajo…” you replied, and, despite everything, giving him a little smile of your own. 

“Yes, well…” Zhuk said, clearing his throat to regain your attention. You snapped back, your stomach churning with anxiety as he stared you down. “I am happy to provide you with a few extra lessons, dorogoy. In fact, it seems to be fate that Professor...Bajo was here with me today. He just so happens to know quite a bit of Marxist political theory, yes?”

“Indeed I do,” Bajo replied, lounging back in the plush chair. “And I have nowhere to be. Will you allow for a bit of extra tutoring, pequeña?” 

This felt like something straight out of a romance novel. Two gorgeous professors giving you a private study session behind closed doors? You nodded, shooting them a thankful smile as you tried not to let those kinds of thoughts into your mind. You needed to learn about Marx, and your professors were kind enough to help you, so you wouldn’t waste their time getting distracted by the demands of your body. You pulled out your textbook and sat back in the chair, ready to finally get some work done. 

Of course, the world seemed to be against you from the start, because you simply couldn’t grasp a single thing the two of them were trying to teach you. It felt like your brain had turned to mush, the difficult political concepts sloshing around inside your skull and never finding a place to stick. Your answers were sloppy, your insights poor, and with every passing minute, you could feel the tension in the room grow. Zhuk was a patient man, you could tell he was trying to be gentle with you, but there was only so much even he could take. You could hear the growing aggravation in his voice, which only served to discombobulate you further. Finally, when you couldn’t even form an answer to the simplest of questions, Zhuk tossed your papers frustratedly onto his desk, running his fingers through his hair. 

“Dorogoy,” he began, his voice deep and tense in a way that made your muscles clench. “We are doing all that we can to help you, but we are of no use to you if you refuse to pay attention.”

“N-no!” you stammered, feeling hot shame flush your cheeks once more. “That’s not it!” 

“Then what is it, pequeña?” Bajo grumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose as he took deep, slow breaths. “Because I refuse to waste my time trying to help a student who won’t repay the favor by actually listening.” 

“That’s...I-I…” you fought the urge to curl in on yourself, your fingers digging into your sides as you tried and failed to put yourself together. Suddenly, Bajo stopped, looking down at you curiously before a broad grin spread across his face. 

“Look up at me, querida,” he demanded, putting two fingers under your chin to lift your face so your eyes met. Your cheeks were already shamefully flushed, but the minute you looked into his deep, golden eyes, they grew even redder, your breath coming out in soft, shaky pants. You could see the satisfaction in his gaze as he let go of your chin and turned to Zhuk. 

“I believe I see the problem, amigo,” he said slyly, striding back towards his chair and taking a seat, resting his elbows on his knees as he leered at you. “The only thing distracting our student from us...is us.” 

“What are you talking about, Escarabajo?” Zhuk replied, looking you over quizzically. “She seems fine to...oh.” 

You looked up at him with a soft gasp at the last word and were startled by the look in his eye. What started as confusion slowly morphed into realization, and realization quickly and readily became hunger. He looked at you like a man starved looks out over a Thanksgiving feast, and though it sent a shiver down your spine, you couldn’t look away. Could this be real? Could the man you spent class after class fantasizing over be looking at you like he wanted you back? The very thought felt shameful, and yet...right.

“So you see it too, hmm?” Bajo asked, startling you out of your reverie. “How naughty of you, mariposa. What ever are we to do with you?” You watched as he looked at Zhuk, his eyes silently asking, begging for permission. Zhuk nodded, letting his eyes flit over to you, frustration still present despite the ever-growing presence of lust, lust, God, you couldn’t even deny it. 

“Get up, dorogoy,” he commanded, and the unwavering dominance in his tone had you scrambling from your seat before you could even process what you were doing. You watched fearfully as Bajo strode confidently over to Zhuk’s desk, reaching into the desk drawer to pull out...a long, wooden ruler.

...Christ.

“You know what’s coming, don’t you, tonta?” he said bitingly, smacking the ruler threateningly against his palm. You could feel your legs tremble as you nodded, sniffling under your breath knowing you were about to get what you deserve. “Good girl. Over the desk.” 

You hesitated for a moment, a rush of mixed feelings taking you over; fear, shame, excitement, curiosity, desire...it was that last one that got your feet moving, and when you reached the desk, you bent over and braced your arms against the dark wood, the slight breeze against your bare legs making the blood rush to your cheeks once more. You kept your eyes trained on the desk beneath you, shivering at the sound of Bajo’s deep, foreboding chuckle. 

“What an obedient girl,” he mused, touching the ruler to your thigh and dragging it up to flip your skirt back, revealing your black, lacy panties. You jumped as his cold hand took hold of the waistband, pulling them down just enough to expose your ass in a way that somehow made you feel more exposed than if he’d taken them off altogether. You could feel Zhuk’s eyes on you, watching silently from behind his desk with his arms crossed in front of him, and you felt it best to sneak a glance at his face. You nearly choked on your tongue at the sight of him, gazing intently at the roundness of your ass like he didn’t know whether to kiss it, smack it, or make love to it. You never imagined your professor looking at you in such a way...well, no, you did, but you never expected those thoughts to come true. 

“You will count them for us. Do you understand?” he finally said, his words dripping with a stoic desire that somehow fit him just right. You nodded nervously, your fingers already curling against the wood in anticipation. You heard the whistle of the ruler through the air before you felt it, smacking against your ass loudly though still drowned out by your even louder cry as the pain radiated across your skin. Still, you remembered their command and were afraid of what might happen if you did not obey. 

“O-one…” you whimpered, your voice thick with unshed tears. 

“What a smart girl,” Bajo said mockingly, bringing the ruler down again with a sharp crack. “Though apparently not smart enough to pay attention. Is it going to take a fucking spanking for you to learn your lesson, mierda por cerebros?” 

Tears spilled from your eyes as you stammered out a quiet “Two...”, a hot rush of shame filling your belly not at your lack of attention span, but from how much you liked his degrading words and the pain of each smack of the ruler against your slowly reddening ass. And God, the fact that Zhuk was just watching, staring you down as you were slowly taken apart by his colleague...

“Don’t you have something to say to us, gatita?” Bajo asked angrily as he brought the ruler down for the tenth time. “You made us waste an hour trying to teach you something that you couldn’t pay attention to because you were too busy being a fucking slut. Don’t you feel like you owe us something?”

“I-I...I’m sorry,” you whimpered thickly, watching as your tears dripped onto the wood of Zhuk’s desk. 

“Louder, malenk’iy,” Zhuk said sternly, finally moving closer to you and brushing his hand over the raised welts on your ass. You hissed, but still bucked into his touch.

“I’m sorry!” you cried out. “I’m sorry, sirs! I wasted your time, I was a bad girl, I’m sorry!” 

“Si,” Bajo said softly, running the ruler soothingly over your ass for a moment before suddenly, his hand was in your hair, yanking your head back so he could press his mouth right against your ear. “And you forgot to count.” 

Oh fuck. A deep sense of dread filled your belly, your eyes widening as your tears continued to pour down your cheeks. 

“I, no wait, I’m sorry! Please, sir!” you begged, but his hand in your hair only tightened, pulling a choked off whimper out of your lips. 

“Escarabajo,” Zhuk interjected, placing his hand on top of Bajo’s in your hair. Yes, your knight in shining armor, come to rescue you from your fate- “I believe it’s my turn.” 

...Well, shit. 

Your entire body shivered as Bajo’s hand was quickly replaced with Zhuk’s larger one, his touch gentler as he gripped your hair, pushing your head down until your cheek was pressed against the cool wood. 

“You were a very bad girl, kukla,” he said sternly, using his free hand to finally pull your panties down until they pooled around your ankles. “Wasting our time, forgetting to count...perhaps a stricter punishment is in order.” 

Your breath came out shakily as you heard him quickly unzip his zipper, his cock slapping against a welt on your ass and pulling a hiss from your lips. He chuckled darkly at the sound, letting his fingers trace gently over your reddened skin. 

“What do you say, Escarabajo?” he asked, shooting Bajo a bemused look. “Would you like to keep her quiet for me?” 

You could only imagine the wicked grin on Bajo’s face as he and Zhuk rearranged you, Zhuk still behind you while Bajo stood in front of you, your head now hanging off the edge of the desk and at eye-level with his hardening cock. He quickly freed himself from his pants, stroking it just inches from your lips with a soft groan. 

“You bet your ass I would. Time to put your mouth to better use, muñeca,” he said, rubbing the head of his cock against your lips. You opened them obediently, allowing him to slide inside and moaning softly at the weight of his cock against your tongue as he hit the back of your throat with ease. Zhuk’s fingers, now wet, slid between your legs, teasing at your entrance before sliding inside, making you gasp around Bajo’s cock. 

“That’s it, gatita,” he crooned, slowly starting to fuck into your mouth. “Fuck, she feels like fucking heaven, mi amigo.” 

“Treat him well, kotenok,” Zhuk said, his voice hushed as he marvelled at how wet you were from a simple spanking. “See if this teaches you how to be a good girl, da?” 

You moaned your assent around Bajo’s cock, looking up at him obediently as you did your best to pleasure him, bobbing your head in time with his thrusts as Zhuk’s fingers sent little bursts of pleasure all the way to your fingertips. You felt properly full, your mouth stretched around Bajo’s cock while a second and third finger slid inside you, Zhuk doing his best to stretch you in preparation for what you’d been fantasizing about for weeks. You never expected a second partner thrown into the mix, but you wouldn’t complain about the taste of him in your mouth, the delicious stretch in your jaw as you swallowed him down, the wonderful groans as he fucked down your throat…

It felt like an eternity when Zhuk finally pulled his fingers out of you, and you groaned in protest despite the ache slowly forming in your jaw. He chuckled, smacking his hand cheekily against your ass and amusing himself with your pained squeak. 

“Are you ready for your punishment, dorogoy?” he asked, dragging the head of his cock through the wetness of your folds. Confusion and dread took hold in you- you knew you had to be punished, but what could he possibly have in store that they hadn’t already put you through? Finally, he pushed inside of you, his thick cock stretching you more than you could’ve imagined as you let out a long, low groan around Bajo’s cock. When he finally bottomed out, he groaned softly, reveling in the way your pussy clenched around him. With a smirk, he grabbed your hair from behind, holding onto it like a leash. “Because if you’re going to cum...you’re going to have to beg.” 

Oh God. You could tell Bajo was getting close, his groans growing higher pitched and his thrusts growing more erratic, his cock sliding fully into your throat with each thrust inside. Your ministrations grew sloppier as you felt hot rushes of pleasure radiating through your body as Zhuk began to take you, his cock dragging so perfectly inside you. It was all rushing to your head, the feeling of being taken so completely, filled to the brim, taken apart piece by piece with unrelenting pleasure. You gazed up at Bajo, your eyes going cloudy as you silently pleaded for him to cum in your mouth, spill inside you, make you his. He obliged a second later, pushing fully into your mouth and holding your face against him as he spilled down your throat, his choked off moan reverberating throughout the small room. You obediently swallowed every drop, gasping for air as he pulled out of you and immediately slumped into the nearest chair, running his fingers through his hair with a blissed out look on his face.

“Ooh, gatita, look how pretty you are when you get fucked,” he crooned, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees to watch you intently. “Give it to her a little harder, amigo, she can take more than that.”

Zhuk obliged, grunting as he sped up with ferocity, pulling on your hair to lift you off the desk so your back was pressed fully against his chest, his hand moving down to wrap around your throat as he took you so hard you thought he was trying to breed you. The very thought sent a warm shiver down your spine, along with Bajo’s eyes watching happily as your tits bounced from each of Zhuk’s thrusts. The head of his cock dragged perfectly against your G spot, pulling pitiful moans from your fucked out mouth.

“What a good little slut,” he growled, mouthing roughly at your neck. “Does someone want to cum?”

“I don’t know, mi amigo, she doesn’t seem to want it that badly,” Bajo said flippantly, his eyes glinting with mischief. You groaned in protest, trying to reach down to circle your fingers around your clit, but your hand was immediately slapped away, Zhuk growling a warning into your skin. 

“I told you to beg,” he snarled, hovering his fingers teasingly over your clit, just an inch away from where you needed them to be. “Better make it pretty, too, if you want to cum.” 

“P-please!” you whimpered, desperation quickly bubbling up inside of you as the pleasure halted just on the edge of oblivion, needing just a little more in order to boil over. With each thrust, the desperation grew, your hands frustratedly scrabbling for purchase on the desk as you were assaulted and teased with pleasure that refused to finally peak. “God, I need it so bad! Sir, please, please let me cum!” 

“I can’t hear you,” he growled, tightening his hand around your throat until your voice was only a mere squeak. Bajo watched with delight, amused and aroused at the sight of you struggling and failing to beg for what you needed. “Louder!” 

“PLEASE!” you cried out, frustrated at the bare whisper you somehow managed with the large hand clamping down on your throat. You whined at the sound of their laughter, but it quickly turned to a soft cry as his fingers finally descended on your clit, rubbing in perfect little circles as you finally toppled over the edge, cumming with a silent scream. The pleasure rushed through you like waves, and you sunk deeper and deeper as each one passed until you finally succumbed to the darkness quickly clouding your vision. 

When you came to, you were surrounded with a pleasant warmth. Your eyes slid open to find your head nestled onto Zhuk’s chest, with Bajo curled up behind you with his head buried into your shoulder. You blinked away the fuzziness at the edges of your vision to see Zhuk smiling down at you, resting his head against his pillow.

“You got me to the bedroom while I was out?” you asked, nuzzling further into their embraces.

“Of course. It wasn’t exactly difficult, tsvetok,” Zhuk chuckled, stroking a hand comfortingly through your hair. 

“What did you think, mariposa?” Bajo asked, pressing a sweet kiss to your shoulder before hooking his chin over it, smiling over at you. “Were we convincing?” 

“Incredibly,” you yawned, smiling sleepily at them. “You make quite the literature professor, moy muzh.” 

“Mm, well I’m glad you convinced us to humor you,” Zhuk replied, leaning down to press a soft kiss to your forehead. “Now go to sleep, moya lyubov. You’ve earned it.”

He didn’t need to tell you twice. Your eyes slipped shut happily, comforted by the embraces of your favorite boys as sleep once again claimed you. 

[arcticdementor]

When we hear the term “Deep State,” we tend to think of people staffing the federal bureaucracy. I want to suggest to you that that is an incomplete way to think about it. The Deep State in Western liberal democracies consist not only of government bureaucrats, but also of the leadership in major corporations, leading universities, top media, medicine and law, science, the military, and even sports. A more accurate way to think about what we are dealing with comes from the Neoreactionary term “the Cathedral,” which NRxers use in more or less the same way that 1950s Beats used the term “the Establishment.” I like the term “Cathedral” because it entails the religious commitment these elites have to their principles. You can no more debate these principles with them than you can debate with a religious fundamentalist. They adhere to them as if they were revealed truths.

Yet they still like to pretend that they are liberals — that they favor open, reasoned discourse. This is, in fact, a lie. It is a lie that they depend on to conceal the hegemonic intolerance that they wish to impose on everybody under their authority.

…

It is true that no society can tolerate everything. What the Cathedral is now doing is radically limiting discourse, and demonizing as heretics all those within its purview who dissent, no matter how reasonable their objections. (And now Facebook is incentivizing some of its users to report their friends as potential “extremists.” Please get off Facebook now!) The Cathedral seeks to make all of society over in the mold of a college campus. The Cathedral is growing ever more radical. In recent months, we have seen the US military embrace wokeness (to use the slang term for the most vibrant and activist form of the Cathedral’s religion). You would think that it makes no sense for the leadership of a racially diverse armed forces to embrace and indoctrinate its officers in a neo-Marxist theory that causes everyone to see everyone else primarily in hostile racial terms, but that is exactly what has happened. In time — and not much time, either — we are going to see young people who were once from families and social classes that once were the most stalwart supporters of the military declining to join the armed forces in which they are taught that they are guilty by virtue of their skin color.

…

That’s the Cathedral and its values. The Cathedral has also taken over corporate America, and the professions. I hardly need to elaborate on this further, not for regular readers of this blog. It was a hard knock this past week to see that the US Supreme Court, which some of us had thought would be the last line of defense for anybody traditional in this soft-totalitarian Cathedral theocracy, refused to take on the Gavin Grimm case, and the Barronelle Stutzman case. The Cathedral line in favor of privileging LGBTs over religious people and secular people who don’t accept the full LGBT gospel is hardening.

…

I realized over the weekend why I have been so affected by the experience of being here in Hungary these past three months. It has clarified for me the nature of this conflict. First, take a look at this powerful piece by Angela Nagle, writing about the views of Irish intellectual and cultural critic Desmond Fennell. 

…

What does this have to do with Hungary? Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his government have brought down the wrath of European Union leaders over Hungary’s recent law restricting sex education for children, and information about LGBT presented to children. The prime minister of the Netherlands, in extraordinarily bellicose language, threatened to “bring Hungary to its knees” over the law. I am reliably informed by an American source in a position to know that in Washington, even among conservative elites, Viktor Orban is seen as nothing but a fascist. I have been writing all summer about the radical disjunction between Hungary as it is, and Hungary as described by Western elite discourse (media and otherwise). This is by no means to say that Orban’s government is flawless — it certainly is not; corruption, for example, is a big deal here — but to say that there has to be some reason why Western elites of both the Left and the Right despise Hungary so intensely, and slander it so.

There’s a lesson in all this, I believe, for where conservatives and traditionalists in the West are, and where we are likely to go. I have come to believe that the standard left-liberal and right-liberal critiques of Orban — “Magyar Man Bad” — are just as shallow as the “Orange Man Bad” critique of Donald Trump. I say that as someone who was critical of Trump myself, though I credited him for smashing the complacent GOP establishment. I write this blog post in the spirit of Tucker Carlson’s excellent January 2016 Politico piece titled, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar, and Right.”

I’ve been reading lately a 2019 book, The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes. Both men are liberal scholars who undertake to explain why liberalism failed in Central Europe and Russia after the fall of the Cold War. It’s a remarkably insightful book, one that any conservative with an interest in the problem should read, even though its authors are liberal democrats. They write:

A refusal to genuflect before the liberal West has become the hallmark of the illiberal counter-revolution throughout the post-communist world and beyond. Such a reaction cannot be casually dismissed with the trite observation that “blaming the West” is a cheap way for non-Western leaders to avoid taking responsibility for their own failed policies. The story is much more convoluted and compelling than that. It is a story, among other things, of liberalism abandoning pluralism for hegemony. [Emphasis mine — RD]

You would have thought that in any reasonable pluralistic polity, a sovereign nation choosing to restrict what its children can learn about human sexuality would be of little interest to other nations within that polity. After all, Hungary is not France any more than Estonia is England. There is an immense amount of diversity in Europe. But see, the Cathedral’s liberalism — whether in America or in the EU — is not pluralistic, but hegemonic.

Krastev and Holmes (henceforth, “the authors”) point out that after 1989, the West expected Central European countries to imitate them in every way. The authors — who, remember, are liberals — write:

Without pressing the analogy too far, it’s interesting to observe that the style of regime imitation that took hold after 1989 bears an eerie resemblance to Soviet-era elections where voters, overseen by Party officials, pretended to “choose” the only candidates who were running for office.

…

The authors explain that the reforms demanded by the West weren’t like “grafting a few foreign elements onto indigenous traditions,” but rather “put inherited identity at risk” and stoked “fears of cultural erasure.” From my perspective, this is what you see when you get over here and start looking more closely at what George Soros and people like him, both within and outside of government, did, and seek to do. And so, as the authors put it:

[P]opulism’s political rise cannot be explained without taking account of widespread resentment at the way (imposed) no-alternative Soviet communism, after 1989, was replaced by (invited) no-alternative Western liberalism.

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know about Viktor Orban. After the 2008 crash, Western governments bailed out banks left and right. When Orban came to power in 2010, he chose not to do that, instead taking the side of hard-pressed Hungarian homeowners who had been allowed to take out home loans in Swiss francs. He and his party passed a law to protect homeowners at the expense of the banks.

…

Remember, they wrote this in 2019, but think of this principle applied to now. If you are Viktor Orban, and you look to the West in 2021, you see a United States that is destroying itself with Critical Race Theory wokeness, which is starting to come to Western Europe. You see the Left here in Hungary starting to embrace it (e.g., the Black Lives Matter statue the liberal Budapest city government erected earlier this year), and you know that it will be bad for your country if this poisonous ideology takes root. So you encourage Hungary’s national soccer team not to take the knee before matches.

…

And so, the disintegrating West, headed towards shipwreck, is going to bring Hungary to its knees for trying to protect itself.

…

The authors go on to say that what it means to be a good Western liberal is changing so fast that people in the East never know for sure what vision of society they are supposed to imitate. Think about what it was like for us Americans. I was born in 1967, and educated by schools, by the media, and by every aspect of culture to believe in Dr. Martin Luther King’s colorblind vision. I took it seriously, and I believed in it, and do believe in it. But now the same liberals who argued for that are now arguing that this vision was wrong — that to truly be against racism, you must train yourself to think in exactly the same categories that white segregationists used prior to the Civil Rights revolution. It makes no sense. You come to understand that you have been conned. Never, ever believe liberals: they will change the rules on you, and blame you for your own confusion.

The authors go on to say that sex education in the schools has been a huge flashpoint of conflict within Central and Eastern European societies. It has to do with parents losing the ability to transmit their values to their children. In the flush of post-1989 enthusiasm, young people didn’t so much rebel against their parents as to feel pity for them, and to stop listening to them. The young took their catechism from the Western cathedral. Sex ed was a neuralgic point of the overall struggle between Central European populists, who believed that the traditions and the national heritage of these countries were in danger of being wiped out by the West. Imagine, then, what Hungarian voters must think when they hear the Dutch prime minister threaten to bring their country to its knees because he knows better what they should be teaching their children than they do.

The authors tell a story about how Viktor Orban, at the time an up-and-coming liberal from the countryside, was publicly humiliated by a well-known liberal MP from Budapest’s urban intelligentsia, who adjusted Orban’s tie at a reception, as if doing a favor for a hick cousin.

They go on to explain Orban’s illiberalism by quoting his criticism that liberalism is “basically indifferent to the history and fate of the nation.” Liberal universalism “destroys solidarity,” Orban believes. (“If everybody is your brother, then you are an only child.”) Orban believes that liberal policies will lead to the dissolution of the Hungarian nation because liberals by nature think of the nation as an impediment to the realization of their ideals.

The authors go on to say that Orban has long campaigned on the abuse of the public patrimony by the regime that governed Hungary after 1989, when Communist insiders used their connections to plunder what was left of the public purse, and left the weak to fend for themselves. This attitude explains Orban’s hostility to the banks after the 2008 crash. “[I]n Central and Eastern Europe, defending private property and capitalism came to mean defending the privileges illicitly acquired by the old communist elites,” they write.

(Readers, did you know any of this context about Orban and other critics of liberalism from Central Europe? Doesn’t it make you wonder what more you’re not being told?)

…

What’s preposterous about it? I know these guys are liberals, but what Duda identifies is the difference between soft totalitarianism and hard totalitarianism. In both cases, the Poles don’t get to decide for themselves.

There’s more to the book, but I’ll stop here for today. You don’t have to believe that Viktor Orban or any of these other politicians are saints in order to understand why they believe what they believe — and why people vote for them. The Cathedral did the same thing to Trump and to Trump’s supporters. Yes, there were some Trump voters with disreputable motives, and in any case Trump was by and large not an effective president. But the anti-Trump opposition’s passionate belief in its own righteousness rendered it helpless to understand why so many people hated it, and do hate it still. Trump’s own incompetence made it harder to take that critique seriously.

Trump lost, and most everything he did was wiped away by his successor. Viktor Orban wins — and that is the unforgiveable sin in the eyes of the Cathedral.

Here is the radicalizing thing, though. As you will know if you’ve been reading this blog, Viktor Orban appears to be building a conservative deep state in Hungary. His government has transferred a fortune in public funds and authority over some universities to privately controlled institutions. It is difficult to accept this, at least for me. At the same time, it is impossible for me to look at what has happened in my own country, with the Cathedral now extending its control over every aspect of American life, and to criticize Orban for this. The alternative seems to be surrendering your country and its traditions to the Cathedral, which pretends to be liberal, but which is in fact growing even more authoritarian and intolerant than anything Orban and his party stand for.

It is becoming harder to think of liberalism in the sense we have known it as viable anymore. Me, I would actually prefer to live in a more or less liberal, pluralistic society, where California was free to be California, and Louisiana free to be Louisiana, and so forth. This is not the world we live in.

…

The controversy around Viktor Orban is not only about an obstreperous Hungarian politician who doesn’t play well with others. It’s about the future of the West.

UPDATE: To put it succinctly, we might need soft authoritarianism to save us from soft totalitarianism.

[michaelgambons]

This is my first ever Drabble/imagine/ fanfic (whatever you want to call it!) so please bare with! It’s set in the UK, so if you encounter any unfamiliar language, places or references, please shoot me a message!

This chapter is intended to set the scene and introduce the characters, but it will get more exciting soon!

Baseline Romantic

Chapter 1

It was pouring with rain as the train pulled into the station. Grimacing slightly against the cold wind that was coming in from the gap in the train door, Y/N turned the collar of her coat up and picked up her bag, ready to hop off the train and made a dash for the nearest cover.

Once off the train and under shelter, Y/N paused slightly before heading for the exit. She bowed her head slightly against the rain, but it still managed to trickle down her neck and a shiver ran through her. It wasn’t just the cold and the wet that was making her shiver, though. As much as she was excited to see her friends, the idea of spending a long weekend socialising was enough to make her take a deep breath to steady herself.

For the last 10 years, without fail, Y/N and her friends had gathered in Charlie’s mum’s house on the outskirts of Peterborough for the August bank holiday. The tradition had been borne out of the boredom of the university summer holidays, during which, when stuck at home, too broke to travel, too lazy to work and keen to return to the freedom of university, they had spent the remainder of their student finance on train fares to spend the long weekend together. Charlie’s mum’s house was perfect for the piss up that ensued; it was in the middle of nowhere so they could play music as loud as they wanted, as late as they wanted, and, crucially, Charlie’s mum spent most of the year living at her boyfriend’s in Surrey. The weekends had become the stuff of legend.

As she stepped out of the station and glanced around for a lift, a horn sounded. Looking around for its source, she spotted a battered Land Rover parked a few meters away, whose driver and passenger were waving furiously at her, grins splashed across their faces. Y/N’s face broke into a wide smile as she ran across the car park to join them.

———

Half an hour later, nestled in front of a roaring fire, gin and tonic grasped in her hand, Y/N had finally started to warm up. She sighed deeply to herself, closing her eyes and allowing herself to relax into the deep sofa, but a sudden roar of laughter brought her back to the room.

‘I’m so glad you managed to come, Y/N’ Catherine said. ‘I can’t believe you were going to put your *job* ahead of spending time with your friends’ she continued with a laugh.

Y/N smiles vaguely. ‘Mate me too’ she replied. ‘Honestly though, it was touch and go right until yesterday! If the shite weather hadn’t meant that the trip had to be cancelled, you wouldn’t have been graced with my company at all’

‘What trip was this?’ Dominic asked, putting down his beer.

‘Urghhh, don’t get me started’ Y/N said. ‘It was the most stereotypical thing ever. I was taking some MP’s on a ruddy fishing trip to talk to them about protecting freshwater rivers’.

She looked round and saw everyone staring at her, unsure whether to take her seriously or not.

‘I’m not joking!’ She said, laughing. ‘It’s as ridiculous as it sounds- I would have had to have worn fucking fishing trousers. Believe me, I’m much happier, and warmer, to be here.’

‘No Dan?’ Misha asked.

Y/N grimaced internally. She was hoping she could have had at least one G&T before she had to answer that question. She didn’t need reminding of the massive argument they had had just before she’d left. Her boyfriend Dan hated these gatherings; hated the fact that they pushed him out of his comfort zone by having to spend the weekend with people who weren’t constantly plotting the next Bolshevik revolution, like he was.

‘I just don’t understand why you like these people, Y/N. They’re all so painfully middle class and you just spend the weekend drinking overpriced wine and eating twattish Waitrose food’ he had shouted as she had packed.

‘You’re being ridiculous Dan’ she had yelled back. ‘These people are as left wing and educated as they come. Just because they don’t sing Red Flag to themselves every morning doesn’t mean that they’re as vapid as you seem to think they are.’

They hadn’t managed to resolve the argument before she’d had to leave for her train. There was, ultimately, no resolution to it. Dan had taken a dislike to her friends ever since he’d met them, two bank holidays ago. He’d spent the evening on the same sofa as she was now sat on, preaching about the Marxist benefits of agriculture. Happy to entertain this for the initial hour, Y/N and her friends had happily joined in. When, 2 hours later, he showed no sign of wanting to change the subject, they had all gradually excused themselves to bed.

‘Ignorant Tories’ Dan had muttered to Y/N as they got ready for bed.

Back in the present, Y/N took a gulp of her drink before she replied.

‘He had some protest I think? He says hello though!’ she said, trying to sound bubbly and casual as she lied through her teeth.

No one seemed to question this though, and the conversation gradually drifted back to what they were going to have for dinner. Catherine, however, caught her eye from across the room, and motioned her outside.

When Y/N joined Catherine outside, she’s shivering under her coat, cigarette in hand, glancing up at the sky and grimacing at the black cloud that is looming over them.

‘So’ Catherine says. ‘Why is Dan really not here? I didn’t believe a minute of that protest bullshit’.

Y/N might have realised that, if anyone was going to see past her feeble excuse, it would be Catherine. Catherine who had lived with her on and off for the last 10 years. The only one of her friends Dan liked and simultaneously the friend of hers who liked Dan the least.

She’d just finished telling Catherine the story, when the backdoor opened again and Ben came into the garden. He stopped as soon as he saw their serious expressions though and gestured back to the door.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt- just wanted a cig. I’ll come back...’

He turned to leave, but Y/N shouted after him.

‘Don’t be ridiculous Ben, it’s not a state secret. Just Dan being a shit’ Y/N said.

Ben smiles sympathetically as he comes over to the two of them. He lights a cigarette and runs his hand through his shocking blonde hair.

‘Actually Ben, you could be useful. Y/N tell Ben the same thing you told me.’ Catherine said.

Five minutes later, Ben had been fully debriefed. Both girls turned to him to see his reaction; he took a drag of his cigarette, brow furrowed.

‘He’s being a complete fucking idiot’. He says, bluntly. ‘Totally disrespectful. You don’t always have to like your partners friends, but you should always make an effort. That’s what being in a relationship is for fucks sake’

Both girls snigger and smile into their cigarettes, opinions confirmed.

‘Catherine?’ Charlie shouts from the kitchen. ‘What am I doing with these courgettes?’

Catherine sighs and stubbs our her cigarette, before walking back into the kitchen, leaving Y/N with Ben.

Ben was the only member of the group who wasn’t part of the original university crew. He had first come to their August break 5 years ago; Dom’s out of work actor flatmate from London who was going through a bad breakup and was in dire need of wine, company and good food. No one else had joined the group before or since, but Ben had slotted in perfectly, and remained a permanent fixture. He was undoubtedly one of Y/N favourite members of the group; down to earth, thoughtful, but with a cruel sense of humour which complemented Y/N’s well. The two could spend hours snorting with laughter at jokes their friends failed to understand.

‘Mate we need to have a SERIOUS chat about your last year’ Y/N said, turning to Ben. ‘We haven’t caught up properly since before Christmas, and you’ve been to the Oscars since then for god’s sake! What was it like?’

Ben snorts into his wine. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint but it was actually very underwhelming. Fucking long and you can’t go out for food or a cigarette’.

‘That is so disappointing. I’ve been rehearing my Oscar acceptance speech since I was at least 10 with a shampoo bottle- don’t tell me it’s not all what it’s cracked up to be’ Y/N pouted.

Ben laughed. ‘What on earth are you winning this Oscar for? Have you switched careers while I was in LA?’

‘Best Documentary’. Y/A answers firmly and quickly. ‘An expose of a corrupt politician where I go undercover as his campaign manager whilst hooked up to a wire. Critics would praise my bravery and unique take on the issue’. She grinned at Ben, who is laughing at her.

‘Dan really doesn’t know what he’s missing’ Ben laughed.

The smile fades off Y/N’s face. Ben immediately realises his mistake and tries to change the subject, but it’s too late.

‘I’m sorry Y/N I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s none of my business. I just... he’s... you deserve better’ he finishes faintly.

‘Dinner!’ Comes a shout from the kitchen, before Y/N is able to reply.

————

Two hours and several glasses of wine later, Y/N finally had finally forgotten about Dan for the moment. She was warm, well fed, tipsy and in good company.

‘And that’ Misha shouts, voice confident with the gin he’s been drinking since lunchtime, ‘is how I ended up as Robert Mugabe’s private pilot’

Everyone around the table roars with laughter. Y/N catches the eye of Ben who is sitting across her on the table. Y/N looks away quickly. She doesn’t want Ben to think she’s staring at him- but it’s hard not to when you’re sat opposite someone as ridiculously pretty as him. Instead she reaches for the wine bottle to refill her glass. When she next looks up, however, she swears she catches Ben quickly looking away from her. She shakes her head slightly to clear it of the wine fog that’s descended on her.

Y/N catches sight of her reflection in the back of her wine glass. Of course Ben wasn’t staring at her. Her curly hair was all over the place after the day’s travel, and her make up had faded and smudged under eyes. Whilst far from unattractive, she’s no where near as polished as the skin thin models he was undoubtedly fucking over in LA. And anyway, she had Dan to think of.

Brushing the thought from her mind, Y/N turned to Cleo who was sat next to her and joined in the conversation she and Charlie were engaged in. Out of the corner of her eye though, she kept Ben in her peripheral vision.

—————

‘Y/N I’ve got a banger lined up for you in a second’ said Dominic with a cheeky grin. He was controlling the music they are listening to in the living room, which they’ve retreated to now dinner had been cleared away.

‘Oh no, what have you got lined up? Cleo moaned.

‘It’s either Baseline Junkie or Rocky Racoon if it’s for Y/N’ Charlie said laughing.

Hearing this, Y/N sat up in her chair, which she had previously been slumped in, letting the conversation wash over her, content but tired by the days events.

~ Hey turn the base off, turn the base off

Big dirty stinking base, dirty stinking base ~

Y/N leaps out of her chair. The group collectively moans and laughs as they watch Y/N sing and dance along to the song- completely out of rhythm but with a huge smile over her face.

She turns to each member of the group in turn, signing a line of the song to them. As she reaches Ben, she realises he is recording her sing, grinning into his camera. Slightly taken aback for a moment at the fact that this would undoubtedly be posted to his million + followers on instragram, instead of stopping, Y/N redoubles her efforts at performing the song into his camera.

As the song comes to an end, she bows into his camera as a round of applause rings out.

She suspects she’ll regret that in the morning

Chapter 2 now out!

————-

[bongaboi]

Liverpool: 2019-20 Premier League Champions

30 years of hope: my life as an ardent Liverpool fan

After three decades of near misses, slips and tears, the Merseyside team’s wait for another league title is nearly over. So what does it mean to a scouser and lifelong fan?

by Hannah Jane Parkinson

I am three years old in the photograph, hugging a plastic, flyaway football. I am seven, arriving tentatively for my first training session at a local girls’ club. I am bounding back to my mother’s car, blowing hot breath on cold hands, beaming, the salt from the artificial turf embedded in the soles of my trainers.

I am eight and glued to the television, watching teen wunderkind and my Liverpool hero, Michael Owen, score the perfect goal against Argentina in World Cup 98.

I am nine. I give up one of the few days I have to visit my father to attend my first ever match at Anfield, Liverpool FC’s famous stadium. A week later, my father dies. These two events are inextricably linked in my mind, and the guilt continues to whichever day you are reading this.

I am 10 and make my first appearance in print in a feature for the local paper, the Liverpool Echo, about girls getting into football. I am quoted as saying that all my sister cares about is boys and fashion.

Twelve years old and the fuzzy letters of “Parkinson” on the back of my shirt arch down my shoulder blades.

I am 13. Our team, known as Liverpool Feds, are approached by Liverpool FC to become their official girls’ outfit. We visit Melwood, the first team’s training ground. The full-size goals loom like scaffolding.

I am 14. My hero, Owen, makes the same move to Real Madrid that Steve McManaman made five years before him. This breaks my heart. Suddenly, all I care about is boys and fashion. Without really making a decision, I give up football. Cold winter nights are spent inside on the sofa watching Sex and the City. I discover live music and MySpace.

I am 15. I own the entire range of Clearasil products. A group of my schoolfriends and I take a night off GCSE revision to watch the 2005 European Champions League final in Istanbul; the first the club has reached since the mid-80s, and so it is forbidden not to watch. Liverpool are losing by three goals at half time. A lost cause. Minds wander to the second biology paper… But wait. Liverpool pull back to 3-3. And win on penalties. Pandemonium. We join the throng in the streets; the blaring car horns; the beer jumping, like salmon, from pint glasses; the embrace of strangers; the straining vocal cords.

I am 18 and living in Russia, watching games on my first-generation smartphone via a 2G internet connection. Each time a player goes through on goal the signal drops to endless buffering. Liverpool finish second in the league, four points behind bitter rivals Manchester United.

I am 26, we are bearing down on the title. Steven Gerrard in an impromptu on-pitch team talk, after a crucial win against the newly flush Manchester City, shouts hoarsely at his players: “This does not fucking slip now!” The next home game, Gerrard – one of the best players the club has ever seen, captain, scouser, Liverpool FC lifer – literally slips on the turf against Chelsea to concede a goal. We lose. Manchester City finish top of the league by two points.

I am 29. I am in Cuba, where the internet is heavily censored. But I manage to watch the last game of the season, which will be decisive. Liverpool finish the league with 97 points; the highest points tally ever for a team that doesn’t win the title. City win again. With 98 points. Liverpool do, however, win the Champions League – for the sixth time ��� after scoring four goals in a sublime semi-final comeback against Barcelona. The injured Mohamed Salah, watching on the bench, wears a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Never Give Up”. The T-shirt sells out.

I am 30. I have never witnessed my beloved Liverpool FC lift the title. Two months from now, this is going to change. As I write Liverpool have a 22-point lead at the top of the table. Of 84 points available this season, they have taken 79. Next Monday is the derby against Everton.

I want to untangle what this will mean to me – the fan who met Steven Gerrard a couple of years ago, grinning like a child; the fan who, two weeks ago, was unbelievably touched when current star Trent Alexander-Arnold recorded a video message to cheer her up during a bad time. What it means to other fans: those who witnessed the dominance of the 1980s, and the younger ones who have known only disappointment. And what it means, too, for the future of the area of Anfield itself.

It’s late February in the Flat Iron pub, one of the many dotted around Anfield. Steve Dodd, who is 49, is with his friends Dan Wynn, 26, and Gerrard Noble, 47. All from Somerset, they are having a pre-match drink before the home game against West Ham. Steve talks of the current Jürgen Klopp-assembled side as the best Liverpool side he thinks he’s ever seen.

The friends have been scouring the internet for places to stay in the city for the last home fixture of the season, but to no avail. “Rooms are going for £400 a night,” Gerrard says, his eyes widening. He and Steve are allowing themselves to get excited, but Dan, who like me has yet to experience a league title win, looks anxious and rubs his thighs. “No,” he says, “I don’t want to jinx it. Though I’ve been kicked out of various WhatsApp groups for being smug about all the results.” Steve tells me they weren’t prepared for it, this three-decade-long wait: “I just thought we’d go on winning.”

We talk about how important it is that Klopp’s politics match the club: Liverpool is a leftwing city; Liverpool is a leftwing club. At the last election, Labour retained all of its 14 MPs on Merseyside. The city has never forgiven the Tories for former chancellor Geoffrey Howe’s strategy of “managed decline”. Thatcher is a hated figure. But so is Derek Hatton, the former city council deputy leader and member of the Marxist group Militant. Last month, Italy’s rightwing politician Matteo Salvini was forced to deny that he had pulled out of a visit to Liverpool after the metropolitan region’s mayor called him a “fascist”. During several games last year, chants rang out for Jeremy Corbyn. The current prime minister conspicuously avoids visiting. As Gareth Robertson, who is a part of the immensely popular The Anfield Wrap podcast, with more than 200,000 weekly downloads in 200 countries, puts it to me: “Not only do we want a good football coach, we expect almost a political leader, someone who gets us, and our city, its values.” Humorously, there have been petitions for Liverpool to become a self-determined scouse state, and “Scouse not English” is a frequent terrace chant.

The club has a mantra: “This means more.” It pisses off other teams and is, understandably, dismissed as marketing speak. But isn’t it true? Isn’t the 127-year-old club what people think of when anyone, anywhere in the world, mentions “Liverpool”? The famous football team that plays in red – allowing for the Beatles, of course.

The city has another team, the blue of Everton. I have nothing against Everton. I consider Everton fellow scousers and too little a threat to focus animosity towards. In a way, the clubs are unruly siblings; we love and scrap in equal measure. Totally different personalities, but born of the same streets.

Four years ago, a man named Jürgen Klopp arrived on these streets. Or more accurately, he arrived in the suburb of Formby, renting the house from his managerial predecessor, Brendan Rodgers. Klopp is the football manager that even non-football fans like. He’s Ludovico Einaudi, seducing those previously uninterested in classical music. He is a man of principle; a baseball cap permanently affixed to his head, as though at any point he might be required to step up to the plate on a blindingly sunny day. Perhaps for the Boston Red Sox, owned by Liverpool FC’s American proprietor, John W Henry.

Klopp is erudite. He is proudly anti-Brexit in a city that voted 58% Remain. “For me, Brexit makes no sense at all,” he has said. He is a socialist: “I am on the left … I believe in the welfare state. I’m not privately insured. I would never vote for a party because they promised to lower the top tax rate. If there’s something I will never do in my life it is vote for the right.” He grew up in a humble village in Germany’s Black Forest, and it shows. There’s a saying in the region: “the hair in the soup”. It means focusing on even the tiniest things that can be improved.

He has the good looks of one of my favourite 1960s Russian film stars, Aleksandr Demyanenko. He hugs his players as though they were the loves of his life and he might never see them again. Journalists like him for his press-conference banter as well as his eloquence. He visits children in hospitals. He is funny. When Mario Götze, one of his star players at former club Borussia Dortmund, left for Pep Guardiola’s Bayern Munich, his explanation was: “He’s leaving because he’s Guardiola’s favourite. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine. I can’t make myself shorter and learn Spanish.”

Liverpool have had many famous managers, of course. Bill Shankly (there’s a statue of him outside the ground); Bob Paisley (ditto); Kenny Dalglish. But Klopp is already being talked of as one of the best ever.

Liverpool the city has evolved from its shamefully prominent role in the slave trade – in common with other major British ports – to a place with a diverse population and a well-won reputation for being friendly and welcoming. But the tragedy and scandal of Hillsborough, in which 96 fans were crushed to death in 1989 at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground, is etched into the nation’s sporting history, and its social justice record. After a 27-year-long battle to clear the names of the Liverpool fans whose reputations were smeared, after inquests that lasted two years – the longest case heard by a jury in British legal history – a verdict of unlawful killing was returned. But, as Margaret Aspinall of the indefatigable Hillsborough Family Support Group pointed out, after David Duckenfield, police commander at the ground, was cleared of manslaughter last year, no one has yet been found accountable for those killings.

The Sun, which categorically did not report “The Truth”, as the infamous headline went, but was found to have published untruths that blamed Liverpool fans for the disaster, is a red-top pariah here. The paper is the bestselling national in print, but shifts a measly 12,000 or so copies on Merseyside. A branch of Sainsbury’s was once found to be selling copies under the counter, as though they were counterfeit cigarettes. It’s a boycott that has lasted longer than many marriages.

The socially progressive values of the club extend to it supporting an end to period poverty – free sanitary products are available in every women’s loo at Anfield. Last month, the Reds Going Green initiative saw the installation of organic machines to break down food waste into water. The club even has its own allotment, which grows food to serve to fans in the main stand. It was the first Premier League club to be officially involved with an LGBT Pride event in 2012, at the invitation of Paul Amann. Amann tells me how he set up the LGBT supporters group, Kop Outs, because: “It’s essential that our voices are heard, our presence is welcomed and respected.” The group works alongside the Spirit of Shankly supporters’ group and the Fans Supporting Foodbanks initiative and has regular meet-ups. These things mean something to me: a football fan as a girl, and now as a woman. A woman who dates other women. A woman who doesn’t want to hear homophobic chants on the terraces. Or, it goes without saying, racist ones. Jamie Carragher, ex-player and pundit, has apologised on behalf of the club for its backing of striker Luis Suárez, who was banned from playing for eight matches in 2011 for making racist comments. “We made a massive mistake,” Carragher said. “What message do you send to the world? Supporting someone being banned because he used some racist words.”

Back on the pitch, some of this season’s performances have been, quite simply, balletic. Others as powerful and muscular as a weightlifting competition. Formations as beautiful as constellations. Forward surges as though our fullbacks were plugged into the mains. Possibly the best fullbacks playing today: 21-year-old local lad Trent Alexander-Arnold (known just as Trent) and the fiery Scot Andy Robertson (Robbo) are spoken about by pundits as innovators. Gary Lineker and I text, rapturously, about the two of them.

For a football team to be consistent, for a team to win the league, it must be capable of winning in many different ways. The aesthetically pleasing playing out from the back. Lightning counter-attacks. Scraping 1-0 wins in the final minutes (and, particularly at the start of this season, we have done a lot of that. It’s something Manchester United used to do in their 90s pomp, and naturally, I hated them for it). Mindful of the trauma of The Slip, the agreed club line is “one game at a time”, said again and again, as another scouse son, Pete Burns, once sang: “like a record baby, right round, round, round… ” And my God, how many of those we’ve smashed. The current side is the first in England to hold an international treble (the Champions League; Uefa Super Cup; Fifa Club World Cup). We have not lost a home game for almost two calendar years. Shortly, we’ll no doubt break the record for the earliest title win during a season; the most points across Europe’s top five leagues.

It is, even to the neutral, extraordinary stuff. It is, even to the haters, albeit grudgingly, extraordinary stuff. In 2016, one of the greatest stories of modern football was the previously mediocre Leicester City winning a surprise title. Liverpool’s dominance this season surpasses that for drama. It is watching history in the present.

Being at a game at Anfield is like being high while ingesting nothing. The stands seem to have lungs. Though You’ll Never Walk Alone has become supremely emotional, an anthem for strength and perseverance post-Hillsborough (“walk on through the wind / walk on through the rain”) it’s a song originally from the musical Carousel. It was a standout 1963 cover version by Liverpudlian band Gerry and the Pacemakers that kicked off its adoption at Anfield. “It’s got a lot of lovely major-to-minor changes at often unexpected moments that have the effect of emotionally blindsiding you,” music journalist Pete Paphides says (although he’s a United fan, so feel free to discount everything he tells me). “But it’s also obviously very hymnal, with a chorus which invites that religious ambiguity. It was Aretha Franklin’s version that John Peel played after Hillsborough and rendered himself incapable of carrying on by virtue of doing so.”

Anfield has always been something special; players from countless teams often talk of it being the greatest ground they have ever played at. Or the most intimidating. Or the most electric. But of late, there’s an extra buoyancy. The crowd salivates.

Watching the game against West Ham, we take the lead within 10 minutes, but they quickly equalise, before going ahead. We score twice more. It is our 21st consecutive home win, setting a Premier League-era record. At the end of the game, Klopp and his players applaud the Kop end, fans’ eyes glistening with both emotion and wind chill (“walk on, through the wind… ”)

Adjacent to the stadium at the redbrick Albert pub, Clara, Tom, John – all in their 20s, students, and local – and John’s dad, David, who is 53, are cheering the last-ditch win. I repeat what I asked Steve and his friends: just how excited should we all be?

“Very fucking excited,” says John. “Very fucking excited,” Tom concurs. (Scousers use swear words as ellipses. And the speed of Liverpudlian patter matches the rat-a-tat-tat of freestyle rappers.) The Albert is floor-to-ceiling in flags; unassuming from the outside, iconic inside. Across the road at the Park – the “Established 1888” sign above its door – it is Where’s Wally? levels of rammed, entirely usual for a match day. But the mood is as disbelieving as triumphant. It hasn’t happened yet, but it already feels as though people are waiting to be shaken awake from a dream. Around the corner, posters at another fan favourite, the Sandon, advertise a huge end-of-season victory party. I grab a burger at the Kop of the Range, a kebab joint not far from a scarf stall that has seen its business rocket over the past three years.

My Uber driver, Mohamed, 35, moved to the city from Sri Lanka. A massive Salah fan, he tells me his own revenue booms when the club win a game – happier fans means higher fares. “People don’t want to spend money on a loss,” he says. “If we win, the whole mood lifts. You can feel it in the car. Though when you start driving with Uber, they tell you not to mention what football team you support. Because football means a lot to people. There are many feelings involved with football.”

It’s unsurprising to me that even back in Sri Lanka, Mohamed was a fan. Liverpool is a global behemoth. The richest club in the UK outside Manchester.

A £1.7bn valuation; £533m turnover; pre-tax profits of £42m. Matchday ticket revenues increased (thanks to a regenerated £110m main stand). Visiting the club shop, there is LFC-branded gin; babygros; even a Hello Kitty tie-in range. As Richard Haigh at consultants Brand Finance tells me, next season’s kit deal with Nike is “expected to represent the largest in history. Brands will be willing to pay to have some magic dust of LFC.” There are official stores as far afield as Dubai and Bangkok.

John W Henry has won the support of the fans for his positive handling of the club. And yet, despite this huge wealth, Anfield is the 10th most deprived neighbourhood in the country. Boarded-up houses surround the stadium. The club has not covered itself in glory in the past, accused of buying up properties in unscrupulous ways. But it is hoped that local enterprises, such as the community-run Homebaked cake shop and new housing association properties, will make the neighbourhood better.

Last week, we were knocked out of the FA Cup in a match against Chelsea. Or, as I call that fixture, Kensington versus Kensington. (In Liverpool’s “Kenny”, 98% of residents are among the most deprived 5% nationally. In London’s, residents earn three times the national average.)

In the league, there has been a blip. Last weekend we finally lost. And we lost 3-0 to, with the greatest respect, Watford; not a bad side, but a side ensconced in a relegation battle. Arsenal, who once went a whole season unbeaten (“the Invincibles”), and are keen to keep that record, tweeted from the official club account: “Phew!”

But I am not panicking. It’s possible Dan from the Flat Iron is panicking. But Klopp isn’t panicking. In typical fashion, he said the fact we played an absolutely awful game of football was “rather positive… ”

“A couple of years ago,” our hero reminds us, “I said we wanted to write our own stories and create our own history, and obviously the boys took what I said really seriously. It is so special. The numbers are incredible.” In a nod to Sir Alex Ferguson’s famous line that his greatest challenge was “knocking Liverpool right off their fucking perch”, Liverpool chief executive Peter Moore says now: “We are back on our perch.” As The Anfield Wrap’s Gareth says: “In a dream scenario, a period of dominance follows. Not so long ago that dream was just that. Now, it’s a reality that is much easier to imagine.”

Four more games. Eyes on the prize. For me, at last, 30 years in the making, eyes on the prize.

[clusterassets]

New world news from Time: Ivan Duque is Colombia’s Youngest President-Elect Ever. Now He Has to Fix the Divided Country

Long before he got the chance to enter politics, Iván Duque was a local rock star. As a teenager in the 1990s, he sang in his high school band, Pig Nose. His onetime bandmates say that even then he was looking for something deeper than rock ‘n’ roll. “I was always looking for energy in my music,” recalls Rafael Gavassa, an old friend of Duque’s. “But Iván was a little more about substance.” The grunge music of Pearl Jam and Nirvana informed Duque’s songwriting. “I was more transcendental with the lyrics,” Duque remembers.

It’s hard to imagine Duque as a long-haired grunge lover now. Sitting in his campaign headquarters in Bogotá, the 41-year-old sports the sober dress shirt and tie of the political class–a look no doubt honed by his years in Washington working for a Latin American development bank. The wardrobe will also work in his next job. On June 17 he became the youngest person to be elected President of Colombia.

This country of 49 million is something of a regional outlier in terms of its politics; its democratic institutions have withstood the rise of Latin American strongmen and populists who ran military dictatorships in the late 20th century in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, and, more recently, the socialist experiments in Venezuela and Bolivia. Duque, a partly U.S.-educated technocrat who speaks fluent English, is more in the mold of a Macron than a Chávez or a Pinochet.

Like France’s upstart President, Duque says he wants to govern from the center. He joins a generation of younger leaders, like Canada’s Justin Trudeau and New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, who are committing themselves to a new kind of neoliberalism that attempts to move past left and right.

“I’ve always considered myself an extreme centrist,” Duque told TIME a few weeks after his election victory. “We need to have the right balance between development and environmental protection. The right balance between entrepreneurship and worker rights. The right balance between free markets and the ability to fix market flaws … It’s a matter,” he says, as if the point could be lost, “of putting things in the right balance.”

The President-elect promises to take Colombia forward by uniting its divisions. But the obstacles are huge. Corruption and rising unemployment top a list of concerns in a country that is only now emerging from a half-century of armed conflict. Coca production is reaching new highs, and powerful criminal mafias control territories in Colombia’s outer periphery. Next door, Nicolás Maduro’s iron grip on Venezuela’s failed experiment is pushing hungry and sick migrants across the border.

Duque’s first and greatest challenge when he takes power in August is to bridge the divide over Colombia’s peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which was at war with the state for five decades. Although a 2016 agreement earned outgoing President Juan Manuel Santos a Nobel Peace Prize, Colombians are bitterly divided over its terms. “Colombia has presented a paradox for the last two or three years,” explains Michael Reid, author of Forgotten Continent: A History of the New Latin America. “Santos’ government has been hailed globally for the peace accord. But at home his government has been unpopular for a long time … partly because of disillusion with the peace agreement.”

Duque, who won office on a promise to overhaul the deal, must solve that paradox if he is to succeed in his ambition to become a new archetype for what a Latin American leader can be. The agreement, he says, “left a fracture in Colombian society. And I think now it’s time to heal that wound.”

  Born in 1976, Duque grew up when the drug baron Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel was at the height of its powers. Duque’s father governed Antioquia, the economically muscular province of which Medellín is the capital, during the early 1980s. Over the same period, cocaine began to rival extortion and kidnapping as FARC’s primary source of income. The Marxist group had formed in 1964 after farmers armed themselves and holed up in mountain camps during a government crackdown on left-wing ideology.

While the cartels and FARC were battling for control of Colombia, Duque was immersed in his studies. School friends remember him always walking around with a book in hand. “There we were with Batman, and at 14 he was reading The Prince!” Gavassa chuckles, referring to Machiavelli’s treatise on power. Duque studied law in Bogotá and, a year after graduating, left to work at the Washington-based Inter-American Development Bank, which finances development projects across Latin America.

He remembers the era as a period of violence back home, when many feared that Colombia could become a failed state. A week before he returned to get married in 2003, FARC blew up a business club in Bogotá, killing 36. A distant relative was among the dead. “It was shocking for everyone,” he says of the attack. “I think that was a big change in the way people felt about FARC and about violence.”

His work in Washington brought him into the orbit of Alvaro Uribe, the President of Colombia from 2002 to 2010, who became a mentor. After Uribe began the center-right Democratic Center Party in 2013, Duque returned home to run as a Senator. He quickly gained a reputation among his more hard-line colleagues in the Senate as a moderate consensus builder.

His signature issue became the peace deal struck by Santos in 2016, which ended fighting between the state and FARC. The agreement won international praise but proved hugely divisive in Colombia. Over 50 years, the sprawling armed conflict involving rebels, paramilitaries and the state left some 220,000 dead, millions displaced and large tracts of the country littered with land mines. Now FARC’s leaders were being allowed to walk free–and, to many Colombians, escape justice for their crimes. During a referendum on Santos’ proposed accord, Duque campaigned against it. “My whole life, I’m a person who believes in peace,” Duque says now, “but I believe that the only way to ensure peace in any society is with the rule of law.”

His opposition to the deal gave the freshman Senator a platform to become his party’s candidate for the presidency last December. During the elections that ushered him to power, it was a central plank of his campaign. Now Duque must tweak the agreement in a way that pleases everyone: the signatories, the Colombian people and the global community.

LUIS ROBAYO—AFP/Getty Images Duque speaks to supporters on the campaign trail in Cali, Colombia, on June 8.

What he proposes is effectively an upgrade of the deal that would give stronger sentences to former FARC leaders and scrap amnesty for crimes by guerrillas linked to the drug trade. But Duque pledges to keep the provisions that he says are working, like the reincorporation of FARC into civilian life. The mistake Santos made, he says, was “dividing Colombians between friends and enemies of peace. For me, there are no enemies, and we all want peace.”

The divisions in Colombia aren’t all a product of the peace deal. The country has one of the most unequal societies in Latin America. Over half the population works off the books, while the public sees the government as a corrupt, elite institution dedicated to enriching itself. According to Gallup, in 2017 only 22% of Colombians had confidence in the government. To fix that, the President-elect says he will build a Colombia that works for everyone. “I want to be the President of social justice in Colombia. To increase and improve the quality of health coverage, education, housing and sports but at the same time guarantee the level of security and justice throughout the country so that no one feels threatened by criminals. That’s the way to ensure peace.”

  Globally, Colombia is known for its most infamous historical export: cocaine. Although the days of Escobar are gone, the drug remains a multibillion-dollar industry. Acreage planted with coca, the hardy Andean shrub used for making cocaine, shot up to 180,000 hectares last year, compared with 48,000 hectares in 2012 at the start of the peace talks.

Those numbers have caught Washington’s eye, especially as Colombia has received $10 billion in U.S. aid since 2000 to fight drug trafficking. Last year, President Trump pushed to decertify Colombia as a partner in the war on drugs, a move that would threaten almost $400 million that has been pledged to post-conflict remediation. Advisers talked the U.S. President out of it, but the message to Duque on his recent visit to Washington was clear: the next Colombian President must deal with the cocaine problem in order for relations to prosper. “The reduction of illegal crops is vital for Colombia,” he says.

Duque also plans to work with the U.S. in rallying regional neighbors to take a harder stance against Venezuela, where Maduro is consolidating power. “I think our regional diplomacy during the last 20 years has been very weak toward Venezuela,” he says. He plans to withdraw Colombia from the Union of South American Nations, an organization created in part to challenge U.S. hegemony in the region, and denounce Maduro in front of the International Criminal Court. “We need to take actions when we see things that can be a threat to the entire continent,” he says.

Duque’s vision to set the region against authoritarianism may also help strengthen relations with Washington. “I think this is a government that will be very active in helping the U.S. convince other governments in the region that Venezuela is a rogue actor,” says Raul Gallegos, associate director at risk consultancy Control Risks.

The economic collapse of Venezuela has caused a regional humanitarian crisis, and at least 500,000 people have crossed the 1,300-mile border with Colombia in search of work. Duque suggests starting a “humanitarian fund” to deal with migrants on the border and creating a unified set of policies that would give migrants the same employment rights as Colombian workers. But ultimately the crisis won’t be solved until Maduro is out of government, Duque says. “Now is the time for the whole continent to put enough diplomatic pressure to open the road for Maduro to step out.”

It’s not yet clear whether Duque will govern with a populist streak, but he does know how to display a popular touch. During his campaign, he danced salsa with TV hosts and sang folk music, in contrast with the aristocratic Santos. “I think he models himself a little on JFK,” says Mary Roldan, a Latin American historian at Hunter College. “The young man who comes without any political baggage, who represents youth and a pragmatic, modern, untainted approach to politics.”

But Duque does indeed have baggage: a perceived synonymy with his hard-line mentor that he hasn’t been able to shake. Uribe is a controversial figure in Colombia. While the former President demobilized brutal paramilitary groups, close associates were found guilty of cooperating with them, members of his government spied on judges and journalists, and his military murdered civilians. He is seen by some as symbolic of the corrupt elite that Duque says he is against–and many see the younger man as a puppet of his predecessor. “The big question about Duque is to what extent is he his own man?” Reid says. Duque insists that he has his own political agenda, separate from his mentor. “We disagree on a lot of things,” he says.

When they first met in Washington, Uribe was a presidential candidate, and Duque says they bonded by reciting the Gettysburg Address together and exchanging book recommendations on the 16th President of the U.S. “What I admire about Lincoln is his humility, creativity, love for his people and capacity to build consensus in times of crisis,” Duque says. “[He] had this capacity to govern the country with all the people in the past who were his adversaries.”

But it was also Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election that helped trigger the American Civil War. That President found greatness by holding together a young nation that had descended into a cataclysm. Duque’s challenge is to manage the peace in his own.

This appears in the July 30, 2018 issue of TIME. July 19, 2018 at 03:55PM ClusterAssets Inc., https://ClusterAssets.wordpress.com

[nebris]

Angela Nagle: What the Alt-right is really all about

Their key concern is race, as they embrace slippery use of irony and sense of hip elitism  

Currently the subject of a major Twitter storm, Nick Pell’s article for The Irish Times’ website “The Alt-right: everything you need to know” omitted the main thing you need to know about the alt right – that its central concern is race.

Richard Spencer, a movement leader named in the article, who popularised the term Alt-right, couldn’t be clearer or more explicit about his goal, which is to create a white racial consciousness in America. Some of the more ambitious aims discussed exhaustively in Alt-right circles include the creation of a white ethno-state in America and later a pan-national white European consciousness, uniting North America, Russia and Europe in a bloc or Empire.

Spencer is in the strict dictionary definition of the term, a racist. He claims “race is something between a breed and an actual species” and believes non-white Americans should leave in a “peaceful ethnic cleansing”. He believes the Alt-right will infiltrate mainstream American culture and politics, starting with deporting undocumented immigrants under Trump. Spencer’s Alt-right takes influence from the French New Right who were often called “Gramscians of the Right” applying the theories of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, arguing that political goals would best be achieved through changing the culture and media from which formal politics would follow. And so far, it seems to be working.

The strictest definition of the Alt-right includes other overtly racial thinkers like Jared Taylor who calls himself a “race realist”, Steve Sailer who writes about “human biodiversity” – a pretty transparent euphemism – and Nick Land who explores the idea of the “Dark Enlightenment”. All of these are to varying degrees preoccupied with racial IQ, the Bell Curve, Western civilisational decline due to increased racial impurity, cultural decadence, cultural Marxism and Islamification.

Social media celebrities

In its broader milieu, there is the “alt-lite” made up of charismatic social media celebrities like Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopolous and VICE founder Gavin McInnes, mentioned in Pell’s piece. The alt-lite don’t share the hard alt right’s racial politics, despite the constant conflations of liberal media hyperbole – real Alt-righters regularly remind Milo he’s a “kike faggot” – but all these groups have emerged online around the same time, and interact and promote each other, sharing many of the same hatreds of political correctness, feminism, immigration, the welfare state and the cultural left. They also share the same aesthetic sensibility that emerged from the anarchy of 4chan, the anonymous site that popularised the Pepe the frog memes, which proliferated during the Trump campaign.

But let’s put some of this in perspective. While Alt-right leaders like Spencer are deadly serious and irony-free, it would be absurd to suggest that there has suddenly been a mass explosion of popular and sincerely-held white separatism in the US – a fevered liberal fantasy now mockingly associated with the expression “literally Hitler”. There are many in the Pepe-meme-sharing, Alt-right online world who probably aren’t that political but like the transgression and subcultural subversiveness.

No matter how familiar you are with the Alt-right, and I’ve watched them closely for many years, “explaining” the Alt-right’ to a general audience will always make you sound like an overwhelmed grandparent trying to figure out how to work the internet, in part because of their slippery use of irony. Stylistically the Alt-right is like the music subcultures of past decades, with its hip elitism that rolls its eyes at normies who don’t understand its conventions and argot – even though they are of course designed to be opaque to outsiders so as to resist easy interpretation.

The online culture wars of recent years have become ugly beyond anything I could have ever imagined. The seemingly sociopathic levels of amoral cruelty found in comment threads wherever Pepe memes lurk suggests an unpleasant answer to the question posed long ago by Plato’s Ring of Gyges – would we behave morally if we could be invisible and thus consequence free?

New generation

And this doesn’t apply exclusively to the Alt-right. A new generation of liberal left-identitarians display chilling levels of pack pleasure when conducting career-ending, life-destroying hate campaigns against people for minor infringements against the liberal moral code such as off-colour jokes. Some examples were chronicled in Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. I think what has led so many young white men in the US in particular to openly flirt with the Alt-right online is a sense that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Why grovel when you can join an anonymous army of trolls to fight back with pure offensiveness. This is what the Alt-right offers.

But like the US socialist writer Shuja Haider recently argued: “It should go without saying that left-liberal identity politics and Alt-right white nationalism are not comparable. The problem is that they are compatible.” Tumblr needs 4chan just as neo-masculinist misogynists need a perpetual supply of listicles about man-splaining, and the Alt-right needs finger wagging “Dear white people” liberal commentary to denigrate ordinary white people at every opportunity. None of them would make sense without the other. While Spencer’s plans are unlikely to catch on any time soon, the emergence of the Alt-right should warn us of a now imminent nightmare vision of what the coming years might hold – a public arena emptied of any civility, universalist ideas or openly competing political visions beyond a zero-sum tribal antagonism of identity groups, in which the boundaries of acceptable thought will shrink further while the purged will amass in the fetid forums of the Alt-right.

Angela Nagle is a cultural critic for The Baffler, Current Affairs and Dublin Review of Books.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/angela-nagle-what-the-alt-right-is-really-all-about-1.2926929#.WG8tRfnL7ms.twitter

[chiseler]

Ridicule is Man’s Most Potent Weapon

During an appearance on Firing Line in December of 1967, radical activist, community organizer and author Saul D. Alinsky told host William F. Buckley Jr., “Controversy is a matrix of everything creative that comes out of life." He further quipped, “All progress comes in response to a threat.”  The core of his argument that evening, however, was that the only way people can get power is when they take it for themselves. As undeniably intelligent as he  was, Mr. Buckley seemed to have a difficult time comprehending any of these notions. Or at least he pretended to have a difficult time for the sake of his audience.

Out of simple contrariness, when I was about twelve or thirteen I began working my way through the entire political spectrum, from the extreme Right to the extreme Left and beyond. I became an outspoken True Believer at each stop along the way—I was a fascist, a conservative, a revolutionary Marxist—sometimes for a few days, sometimes a few weeks. By the time I was in high school, I considered myself a Bakuninist with strong Nihilist leanings. It was around that time I first read Alinsky’s last book, Rules for Radicals, originally published in 1971, less than a year before his death.

After three decades of working tirelessly to mobilize the nation’s urban poor to empower themselves one neighborhood at a time, the book was Alinsky’s attempt to distill the lessons he’d learned from personal experience, adapting them for the new generation of young student radicals emerging from the Sixties.

I found the book insufferable and obnoxious. Not only was I not interested in having some liberal blowhard preach to me about “rules,” I had no interest in organizing anything, let alone “communities.” What’s more, Alinsky’s standard m.o. for achieving social change—namely unifying a disparate group of people by identifying a common enemy for them, then letting their hate do the rest—struck me as not all that different from the tack used by Germany’s National Socialists in the Twenties and Thirties, and by the racist rabble-rousers who worked their way through the American South in the Fifties and Sixties. At the time I took it as more confirmation that at heart there was no discernible difference between the Right and Left, they simply used different vocabularies to achieve their goals via the same methods.

Forty years later, still an unrepentant nihilist, I decided it was time to reassess Alinsky. Considering the present circumstances, it only seemed fair.

Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909, and received a degree in archaeology from The University of Chicago in 1930. Quickly recognizing there wasn’t much call for archaeologists during the Great Depression, he went on to grad school (again at the U of C), this time studying criminology. He left grad school after two years, and began working part time as an organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). But having attended college on Chicago’s South Side, all Alinsky had to do was venture a block off campus in any direction to be confronted with the sort of living conditions experienced by the city’s poor blacks. A firm believer in the value and power of participatory democracy, it occurred to him that a large percentage of the American populace had effectively been silenced and forgotten, and had no say in the kind of local policymaking that affected them directly.

Toward the end of the decade he began edging away from labor issues after recognizing the much more widespread and devastating issue of the daily nightmare facing Chicago’s poor black community. With his organizational skills, he took it upon himself to try and show the residents of a blighted neighborhood near the Stockyards how they might unite in an effort to get local officials to pay attention to them at last. It was a ballsy move in 1939 for a young Jewish intellectual, but having encountered pervasive anti-Semitism for much of his life, it was an issue he could relate to, perhaps even more so than the problems facing factory workers.

After organizing several politically active community groups in neighborhoods around the South Side, and after those groups at long last finally started having their voices heard by city and state officials, Alinsky took his methodology on the road in the Fifties, helping organize similar community groups in the slums of other major cities around the country. In the early Sixties, he returned to Chicago to begin mobilizing disenfranchised poor blacks in some of the city’s other ghettoes, which did not place him in the good graces of Mayor Richard Daley.

For all his good intentions, Alinsky was, like most of us, a mass of contradictions. He once famously said, “I’d rather steal than go on welfare.” Although often wildly misinterpreted, the underlying message was that his goal in mobilizing these groups was to help them empower themselves. Help them become more self sufficient instead of being dependent on government entitlement programs. Ironically, had his intentions been understood, it was an idea and a goal that would have been roundly applauded by the same staunch conservatives who were attacking him at every turn, just as he was attacking them.

He insisted he only organized in neighborhoods  where he’d been invited, that he never marched into a new place like some kind of evangelist promising to give the people what they needed.  At the same time, as laid out in Rules for Radicals, the standard tactic went like this: He’d enter a community and establish friendly contact with a neighborhood church. Then he’d appraise the local situation, identify a major problem, and most important of all, finger a demon, usually a local politician, businessman, slum lord or the like. He’d make contacts and spread the word using the church as a headquarters. The new community activist group would then choose their own board of directors. In the best of all possible worlds, the newly-chosen enemy, after being publicly goaded and ridiculed by protesters, will in turn try to vilify, demonize or somehow discredit the protest’s leaders, and once that happens you’re good to go—it will only strengthen your position and spur other people to join up. Then he would offer a few tactical suggestions and back away, letting the newly-born activist group do what needed to be done to fix the problem. In short, it’s a process of not only pointing out, but often creating a conflict that needs to be solved. Again, it’s a tactic that works just as well for Nazis and  racists as it does for the struggling underclass desperate to be heard, and in many cases works much, much better.

He was adamant in his refusal to join any organization (“Even those I’ve set up,” he once said). He despised religious and political groups of all stripes, saying once you join one, you are expected to adhere to their dogma and doctrines, which was something he could not stomach.  At the same time, he was not reluctant to cut deals with religious or political groups when it was expedient or somehow served his purpose. It also seems a bit contradictory that a man with such disdain for the doctrinaire would go on to publish a book of rules he hoped people would follow.

That said, unlike most activists, Alinsky at least had a sense of humor, and was a major proponent of the unorthodox protest. The third rule he lays out in his book states, "Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Marching around with picket signs and chanting “The people united will never be defeated” simply wasn’t going to cut it anymore. He counseled newly-minted community activists to go beyond the general experience and thinking of the enemy. Give them something they can’t quite fathom. He further counseled them that people always do the right thing for the wrong reason, so they should use that to their advantage whenever possible.

Case in point, when it was learned a slum lord who owned several decaying housing complexes in Chicago lived in a wealthy white suburb, Alinsky arranged to send busloads of black protesters to picket on the clean suburban sidewalks for days on end. In time the slum lord’s neighbors began putting pressure on him to do something about the conditions in his buildings, not out of any solidarity with the protesters, but simply in an effort to make them go away.  

He also learned that sometimes merely the threat of an outrageous protest was enough to make local officials agree to hear the activist’s grievances. All progress comes in response to a threat, after all. A threatened Piss-In at O’Hare, in which hundreds of blacks would commandeer every urinal in the airport for as long as it took did the trick, as did a threatened Fart-In at a local philharmonic concert in Rochester, NY.

So I like to think of Alinsky as a radical who was earnest in his intent, but not righteous, which again sets him apart from most social activists.

As an aside, going back to Alinsky now after so many years it occurs to me how much an (utterly subconscious) influence he was on the Dadaist revolutionary group a friend and I formed in college, The Nihilist Workers Party. Particularly that third rule mentioned above, though we referred to it as “Semantic Interference.” Instead of threatening Piss-Ins to further the social good, however, we threatened to immolate (imaginary) puppies in public, marched outside the student union with blank protest signs and smoked large black cigars in fancy sweater shops for no reason at all.

Toward the end of his life, after spending thirty years attempting to empower disenfranchised poor blacks, Alinsky next set his sights on the white middle class, who in the early Seventies were feeling a bit disenfranchised themselves. Following the turmoil of the Sixties, their world had been turned upside down, they were frightened and dismayed and confused. THe comfort and security of the Eisenhower Era was gone. As Alinsky saw it, if he didn’t do something to help spur them to be more politically active and socially conscious, help them feel like they still had a voice in this new world, some Right Wing extremist kook would come along promising to set the clock back to a better day, and they’d follow. What’s more, if middle class whites and poor blacks couldn’t find some kind of unity, didn’t start working together to wrest power back from the wealthy, we would all remain as fucked as ever.

Well, forty-five years on now, it’s clear his warnings were fairly prescient.

What is interesting, however, has been the rise of countless grassroots movements across the country over the past eighteen months. Some are pro-Trump, some are anti-Trump, but most in one way or another arose in direct response to that single unifying figure, most are reacting to a perceived threat from one side or the other, and most, wittingly or not, seem to be employing Alinsky’s tactics.

But one widespread criticism of Alinsky’s tactics over the years holds that too often the activist groups in question lose sight of the real problem, that bit of social justice they were after in the first place. Instead they concentrate their energies on destroying their chosen enemy assuming this is all that needs to be done, or they get sidetracked and focus on some petty issue only tangentially related to the original conflict.

This is certainly what seems to be happening today, with most of the stated goals becoming so petty and wrongheaded as to completely lose sight of the larger picture. Will removing a bunch of statues really do anything to put an end to racism? Will impeaching the president really do anything to turn the clock back and make it all right again? Will burning down a Washington DC pizza parlor prevent a thousand children a day from being shipped to Mars to become sex slaves of the Satanic liberal elite? Of course not, But try telling any of them that. They’re doing something, they’re seeing immediate results, and that’s all that matters.

I do have more respect for Alinsky now than I did when I was in high school. What he told Buckley about the role of conflict, controversy and threat simply seems a given now. But looking at the present situation I have come to understand that his greatest, his ultimate failure—and this is true of most activist and political theorists of any shade—was neglecting to admit that most people are vindictive, bone-stupid sillyasses by nature, and we will always be fucked as a result.

by Jim Knipfel