Will leftists ever come to see the basic flaw in their worldview?

You'll recall that earlier this week I posted a very condensed version of a history of America's countercultural movement, from the New Left and the Beats through the hippies, feminism, environmentalism, homosexual out-ness, and on up to the kaleidoscope of identity-politics and nature-denial obsessions that plague us today.

My cursory explanation of how modern feminism got revved up was terse indeed:

Then came feminism. Again, the strains had been in place for a while. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963, and the National Organization for Women was founded in the summer of 1966. The real breakout moment, though, was when women both in radical organizations and on hippie communes felt that they were being elbowed out of leadership positions.

Bookworm has a post today that fleshes that phenomenon out in jaw-dropping, stomach-churning detail.

David Horowitz first became aware of sex’s true role in the American Leftist revolutionary milieu when he was an ardent Communist revolutionary hanging out with the Black Panthers:

Seale had gone into hiding after Huey expelled him from the Party in August. As I learned long afterwards, Seale had been whipped — literally — and then personally sodomized by Huey with such violence that he had to have his anus surgically repaired by a Pacific Heights doctor who was a political supporter of the Panthers. A Party member told me later, “You have to understand, it had nothing to do with sex. It was about power.” But in the Panther world, as I also came to learn, nothing was about anything except power.

The same use of sex to demean people’s individuality (especially women’s individuality) and to subordinate them to the power structure showed up in the Weathermen’s Underground movement. (Warning: Contents NSFW.)

The army that f***s together, fights together. At least that was the unofficial motto of the Weathermen’s Smash Monogamy program of 1969. After an afternoon of bombing government buildings, members of the notorious radical leftist group would then go home, drop acid, party, and have sex.

But these orgies weren’t just to boost morale. They were designed to emphasize collectivism, while deprioritizing individual identities.

[snip]

But as the organization’s membership grew, leaders subjected recruits to intense initiation rituals. In Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, Bryan Burrough writes of all-night interrogations in which people would be hazed, verbally assaulted until they broke. If they didn’t, they could stay on as “obedient, unquestioning soldiers.”

In Detroit, the Weather Underground commanded every member to break up with his or her romantic partner. Eventually known as Smash Monogamy, the program scheduled mass orgies with the intent of making the relationship with the group the only one that mattered.

Read the rest here. It’s obscene and eye-opening. Obama’s buddy Bill Ayers shows up in this context.

While the Black Panthers and the Weathermen were extreme revolutionary groups, “softer” revolutionary groups also required that women provide sex for men. That was certainly the case for the Students for a Democratic Society, which was considered too weak and safe for the Weathermen splinter group:

The general assumption among SDS members at its inception was that freedom of men — whether from racism, the capitalist system, etc. — meant freedom of women.

[snip]

Sarah Evans, author of Personal Politics and a member of the nation’s first women’s group at University of Chicago, describes the discontent of female members of SDS as a process of gradual awareness, or a “rising consciousness.”  She quotes SDS member Casey Hayden as stating that, regarding the beginning of the New Left Movement, “If on some level the men thought of the women as secondary, the women were not aware of it then.”  This is understandable; given the fact that one would not expect the absence of a stated cause (women’s rights) to mean immediate neglect of it. Historians and feminists realized only much later that SDS’s founding document, the Port Huron Statement, mentioned nothing about women in stating its mission to free all men from racism and “the System.”

[snip]

Public denial of women’s right to equality was evident in a letter from SDS members Jane and Terry (last names not identified) to organizers Ken Cloke and Bernadine Dohrn in which Jane recounted an incident where a university class actually voted that women were not equal to men. One underground New Left newspaper, The Rat, founded by former University of Texas, Austin, SDS Vice President Jeff Shero, regularly featured discussions of pornography, crude sexual puns, and photos of nude women. The Rat—which received its funding from sex advertising—is an example of one of many publications which received little SDS criticism or backlash, hiding under the guise of “liberation” literature.

[snip]

One of the most famous protest-quotes in this camp—in an article by SDS activists Naomi Weisstein, Evelyn Goldfield and Sue Munaker—goes as follows:

“We were still the movement secretaries and the shit-workers; we served the food, prepared the mailings and made the best posters; we were the earth mothers and the sex-objects for the movement men. We were the free movement ‘chicks’–free to screw any man who demanded it, or if we chose not to–free to be called hung-up, middle class and uptight. We were free to keep quiet at the meetings–or, if we chose not to, we were free to speak in men’s terms. If a woman dared conceive an idea that was not in the current limited ideological system, she was ignored and ridiculed. We were free, finally, to marry and raise liberated babies and clean liberated diapers, and prepare liberated dinners for our ass-hunting husbands or ‘guys we were living with.’ What men just can’t dig is that we, females, are going to define our movement, that male advice is paternalistic—no less so than when given by a white to a black” (Gilbert, 2001).

She provides all this background in service of her main point, which is that the complicit silence of modern-day entertainment-industry women regarding the monster behavior of Weinstein, Lauer, Hoffman et al is entirely predictable, given that the leftist ethos has always been that women would have a submissive role in the service of the Revolution.

Now that the lid has been blown off it all, we have the #MeToo backlash and another ratcheting-up of the overall brittleness of post-American society.

Which gets us back to the main point of my post on the counterculture. It's the latest iteration of the centuries-old attempt to find some newfangled way to transcend the human condition.

Men and women are fundamentally different. The energies peculiar to each can either be harnessed for humane - indeed, delightful, indeed, flush with romance and warmth - ends, or they can be employed with brute ugliness.

The former type of application of those energies cannot, in the long run, flourish without some kind of deference to the divine Architect who willed these things to be so. A species entirely comprised of individuals who think their sovereignty is the end-all and be-all of the way these things work is going to stay mired in a cycle of aggression and resentment.

Then grace is the only possible recourse. But try telling that to hypocritical male monsters who aggress upon females at every opportunity, or bitter feminists who have been on the receiving end of the aggression. They're going to keep looking for some arrangement that excludes their acknowledgement that they had some basic things very wrong.

And the world will stay a very cold place.