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A Nietzschean Analysis of Lefty Politics

Elon started sending me posts of the passionate @grey4626 a month or so ago, and I’ve been a subscriber for a month. And a subscriber on her Substack.

One thing she likes to do is connect the political world to Nietzsche. Like today when she urged us all to self-overcome our ressentiment and get above hatred.

Do not waste your hatred trying to destroy people…

Turn that hatred into fuel. Become sharper. Stronger. Harder to deceive. The strongest revenge is not bitterness…it is becoming too powerful to be ruled by what hurt you.

Then in the middle:

The French Revolution did not produce liberty. It produced the Terror because the hatred of the old order remained reactive, creative only in destruction, incapable of building anything that did not require a permanent enemy.

The Bolsheviks inherited the same pathology and turned it into a century of corpses.

Every ideology that requires an eternal oppressor to justify its existence is ressentiment wearing a political mask.

How does that make you feel, wokies?

Never mind. It made me think.

Of course, in the official definition of Allyism, “we” are the Allies of the Oppressed Peoples in their fight against the White Male Oppressors.

OK. Let’s get the definition out of the way. Google AI:

Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment is a deep-seated, chronic feeling of powerlessness and envy that festers into a desire for revenge.

But don’t forget that the Allies are the educated elite. They do not feel powerless or envious of the White Oppressors. Not they.

And actually, I doubt if the Oppressed Peoples are feeling that oppressed. Typically if they have a job and three squares a day they feel OK. Unless there’s an economic downturn and they lose their jobs.

No, to quote Lt. Cable, “you have to be carefully taught / To hate and to fear”.

The Oppressed Peoples have to be carefully taught. And so do the nice liberal ladies and the scrollers on Bluesky.

Our liberal friends and woke Allies of the Oppressed are using the Oppressed Peoples as cannon fodder for their politics. “There is no politics without an enemy,” so the Woke Elite has to teach their followers to hate and to fight the enemy, the White Oppressors.

However, the Duke of Plaza Toro led his regiment from behind; he found it less exciting.

Do our liberal friends hate us, the White Oppressors? Probably not initially. But I suspect that as they get into the part of King Henry V urging his army “Once more unto the breach, dear friends” at Harfleur, they start to hate the enemy as well. Hate is infectious.

They descend into the pit of hatred.

Hatred that does not serve self-overcoming is self-betrayal wearing the mask of righteousness.

There is another way.

This is the difference between the reactive and the noble.

The reactive always needs something to push against.

The noble moves from abundance, from the overflow of a self that has integrated its own darkness and no longer requires external darkness to feel real.

Hatred, in the end, is a tool for those still in the process of becoming sovereign.

Once sovereignty is achieved, the tool is set down. The work continues… creation, defense, the perpetual self-overcoming…but it no longer requires the old venom as its engine.

Alas, I fear that our liberal friends belong in the ranks of the “reactive” rather than in the noble light of creation, perpetual self-overcoming.

It is a world where the venom of hatred has dissipated into thin air, left behind in the political binary of fighting the enemy and gifting the supporter.

| Fri, 05 Jun 2026 02:43:04 GMT |


Sacrifice and Modernity

Down the ages, we humans have worshipped women as the fountain of life.

For most of human history, women were seen as the givers of life, the preservers of continuity, the transmitters of culture, guardians of children as well as the mediators of both memory and tenderness.

Greek chappie Spyridon Andrews worries that we are in a “Death Spiral” with feminism.

Modern feminism preaches that women become women through the negation of life, through denial of empathy, and through rage rather than rational and pacific strength.

Traditional masculinity has celebrated the man who sacrificed to protect women and children.

Women become women today through negating their primal spirit and can only achieve fulfillment through imitating a gross caricature of the male… [Yet] Men who are small-minded and selfish have never been celebrated…

[W]hy we are living in a culture now that celebrates sterility, fragmentation, the rejection of inherited meaning, and hostility toward family and especially motherhood.

And there is individualism. We have

a culture that celebrates radical individualism at the expense of others[.]

I pondered this question in my heart, and then came up with the answer.

In our modern society we don’t have as much need for sacrifice as in the olden time. To go all the way back to chimpanzees, according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, the males did nothing but protect the troop territory from males in other troops, no doubt often giving their lives to protect their troop’s food-growing territory.

And women also gave their all. Back in 1800 as many as one woman in twenty died in childbirth.

And then it came to me. The extraordinary improvement in human prosperity and health means that there is much less need for sacrifice in modern society, in the sense of men giving their all to protect the women and women giving their all to make and to raise babies.

And so we have the space and the time to develop and worship ourselves as individuals. Creativity is celebrated today not in the communal creation and protection of human life but in the individual creations of artists and intellectuals.

Now I have a theory of sacrifice. Back in the day, humans sacrificed their first-born sons.

Because the firstborn was considered to belong to God, many civilizations practiced physical child sacrifice to express gratitude and devotion.

But later on, not so much.

Remember the sacrifice of Isaac? God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his first-born son, but then relented and let him sacrifice a ram instead.

You think that maybe Abraham wasn’t about to sacrifice his first-born son and cheated?

And then we come to Jesus Christ. Here, God sacrificed his Son so that humans didn’t need to. So now sacrifice has become symbolic.

Are humans cheating? Or are we reducing the salience of sacrifice from actual humans to domestic animals to religious symbols?

Whatabout the First Feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft?

Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men but appeared to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.

Reason and Individualism. But Wollstonecraft had two affairs and one child without marriage. Why? Because, in the 18th century, women lived not just as part of a family, but also in society at large as individuals. Society had become rich enough to allow such stupidity.

Notice that I say that human society has reduced its faith and worship of sacrifice, and has promoted the idea of humans as individuals that are not called upon to sacrifice except in a general way through their taxes and to help save the climate.

Because it can afford to.

Do you think we humans will return to the worship of sacrifice, even if only symbolically, like the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, because sacrifice is a basic characteristic of human society?

Stay tuned.

| Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:58:50 GMT |


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Christopher Chantrill Follow chrischantrill on Twitter

Christopher Chantrill (@chrischantrill) is a writer and conservative.

He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.


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A Commoner Manifesto

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TODAY’S MAXIMS:

Laffer: the more you redistribute, the greater will be the drop in total income.

#PleaseBelieve: Other Lives Matter / Government is War Plus Loot and Plunder / No Dog is Illegal / Love is Blind / Because Science / CO2 is Plant Food / Deplorable Rights are Human Rights / Everything is Everything

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BIG IDEAS:

The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.

My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.

I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.

And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.

But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.

The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.

The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.

IN BRIEF:
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