The Coalition of the Worthless

The Opposite of Supremacy is Inferiority

Today’s loudest online radicals are, by and large, a singularly unimpressive lot. A significant chunk of the most active are unattractive, unpleasant, and incapable of feeding or housing themselves without government assistance and online begging. They collect mental and physical illnesses like so many M:TG cards and use them as clubs to beat those who are “privileged” by things like mental stability, conventional beauty, and gainful employment.

Many write this off as yet another manifestation of “Clown World,” a place where police are criminals and voting is a threat to democracy. Nietzschean Vitalists chalk it up to the ressentiment of the natural slaves. But when it comes to ugly leftists, there’s more than meets the eye (and nose). Let’s take a look at the historical forces that set this crew of misfits waddling toward Bethlehem.

Huey P. Newton

It is within this mass of humanity, this people of the shanty towns, at the core of the lumpenproletariat, that the rebellion will find its urban spearhead. For the lumpenproletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and from their clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 129

In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels referred to the lumpenproletariat (“ragged proletariat”) as “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society.” Children of bourgeois backgrounds, M & E distrusted the beggars, criminals, cheats, mountebanks, and malingerers who eke out an existence at the bottom of the social barrel. The lumpenproles were not to be trusted, as their loyalty was for sale to the highest bidder. Those layabouts who sang the Internationale at a Marxist event would happily act as police informers for a few pennies and lie under oath for a few pennies more.

During his three-year Siberian exile, Vladimir Lenin had a chance to meet the lumpenproles firsthand. His view of the marginalized underclasses was a bit more nuanced. While he recognized their shortcomings, he felt many could be saved by a proper political education. Still, the lumpenproles would play a secondary role at best in the Revolution. The real power lay with the honest, hardworking Proletariat.

In 1961 Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre (translated in 1963 as The Wretched of the Earth) became an international sensation. While he recognized the shortcomings of the lumpenproles, Fanon felt they could play an important role in decolonizing the Third World. For him the criminality of the unemployed shantytown masses was a sign not of their moral failings but of capitalist colonialism’s social destruction. He saw them as a powder keg that could, if properly supported, tear down the unjust system that kept them in chains. Fanon’s book was wildly popular in France, and came with a preface from Existentialist superstar and fellow Marxist Jean-Paul Sartre. 

Fanon also had an enormous influence on Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton, who wrote in 1967:

Black people can destroy the machinery that’s enslaving the world. America cannot stand to fight every black country in the world and fight a civil war at the same time. It is militarily impossible to do both these things at once.

The slavery of blacks in this country provides the oil for the machinery of war that America uses to enslave the peoples of the world. Without this oil the machinery cannot function. We are the driving shaft; we are in such a strategic position in this machinery that, once we become dislocated, the functioning of the remainder of the machinery breaks down.

Penned up in the ghettos of America, surrounded by his factories and all the physical components of his economic system, we have been made into “the wretched of the earth,” who are relegated to the position of spectators while the white racists run their international con game on the suffering peoples. We have been brainwashed to believe that we are powerless and that there is nothing we can do for ourselves to bring about a speedy liberation for our people.

Huey P. Newton, “In Defense of Self-Defense,” The Black Panther, July 20, 1967

Like many other mid-20th Century American Marxist-Leninists, Newton felt the White proletariat had been seduced by high wages and job security. Communities of color, forcibly marginalized by redlining, glass ceilings, and police brutality, were more amenable to a revolutionary message. The Establishment had little interest in seducing them or using anything but hard power to keep them down. The Black underclass in urban slums were brothers to the dispossessed natives in African shantytowns. Like Fanon, Newton hoped to turn them into a weapon that would destroy the occupying colonists.

Given that Engels was the son of a wealthy factory owner, it’s not unprecedented that these angry militants became heroes among many upper-class American liberals. Granted, much of the support then as now was performative. As Tom Wolfe wrote in his hysterically funny article about the Black Panther soiree at Leonard Bernstein’s Upper East Side apartment:

Radical Chic invariably favors radicals who seem primitive, exotic and romantic, such as the grape workers, who are not merely radical and “of the soil,” but also Latin; the Panthers, with their leather pieces, Afros, shades, and shoot-outs; and the Red Indians, who, of course, had always seemed primitive, exotic and romantic.

At the outset, at least, all three groups had something else to recommend them, as well: they were headquartered 3,000 miles away from the East Side of Manhattan, in places like Delano (the grape workers), Oakland (the Panthers) and Arizona and New Mexico (the Indians). They weren’t likely to become too much … underfoot, as it were. Exotic, Romantic, Far Off … as we shall soon see, other favorite creatures of Radical Chic had the same attractive qualities; namely, the ocelots, jaguars, cheetahs and Somali leopards.

Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.” New York Magazine, June 8, 1970

All silliness and virtue signaling aside, money given for social cred spends just as well as any other money. And if the majority of supporters were play-acting,  a few starry-eyed student activists were inspired by the Panthers and the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN), a Puerto Rican separatist group that carried out over 130 bombings between 1974 and 1983. Groups like the Weather Underground and Symbionese Liberation Army hoped to sock it to the man and overturn the unjust social order. Alas, while no one could fault their ambition, their efforts at seizing the reins of power failed to pan out.

We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we're in a time when there are not heroes, they just don't know where to look. You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates. Others, a handful in number, produce enough food to feed all of us and then the world beyond. You meet heroes across a counter, and they're on both sides of that counter. There are entrepreneurs with faith in themselves and faith in an idea who create new jobs, new wealth and opportunity. They're individuals and families whose taxes support the government and whose voluntary gifts support church, charity, culture, art, and education. Their patriotism is quiet, but deep. Their values sustain our national life.

Now, I have used the words ''they'' and ''their'' in speaking of these heroes. I could say ''you'' and ''your,'' because I'm addressing the heroes of whom I speak -- you, the citizens of this blessed land. Your dreams, your hopes, your goals are going to be the dreams, the hopes, and the goals of this administration, so help me God.

Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981

In 1980 the American people rejected Haight-Ashbury in favor of Orange County. Ronald Reagan promised to pull us out of Jimmy Carter’s stagflation and malaise. As Reagan made his way to the Oval Office and the hostages flew home from Iran, America dreamed that maybe we could finally be free of Vietnam and the Middle East and smelly protestors shrieking in the streets. And when the economy turned around thanks to what Reagan’s VP had once scorned as “Voodoo Economics,” it seemed that we were finally out of the doldrums. 

With conservatism ascendant, limousine liberals found themselves decidedly unfashionable. In 1981 the gay rights movement ran headlong into Gay Related Immunodeficiency Syndrome (GRID), soon to be called AIDS. In 1982 the Equal Rights Amendment failed to gain the support of the necessary 38 states. In 1984 Geraldine Ferraro became the first female candidate for Vice President – only to see the Mondale/Ferraro ticket lose in a 49-state landslide. The Democrats mocked Reagan as an intellectual lightweight and empty shirt, but to very little avail. 

Many erstwhile student rebels joined the Establishment and got wealthy working as stockbrokers and investment counselors. Meanwhile, bored hippies who once sought to dissolve the ego with LSD now puffed it up with cocaine. The Black community found itself ravaged by powder cocaine’s deadly cousin, crack. Reagan, who famously won votes by chastising “welfare queens,” set to work at tearing down the last remaining traces of LBJ’s Great Society. As the mental institutions closed their doors, we found our streets clogged with homeless people. 

But while the liberal star may have waned, it did not die. Academia remained considerably more liberal than the general population. The true believers continued their long march through the institutions. Left-leaning students looked back fondly on the student protestors of two decades past and wished they had the chance to occupy buildings and throw rocks at college presidents. The Grenada conflict was over before anybody had a chance to paint a sign. The Iran-Contra affair didn’t involve American soldiers dying en masse, so it wasn’t enough to get the masses excited.

I refuse to stop speaking out against the sin of homosexuality.

With God as my witness, I pledge that I’ll continue to expose the sin of homosexuality to the people of this nation. I believe that the massive homosexual revolution is always a symptom of a nation coming under the judgement of God.

Romans 1:24-28, Paul clearly condemns the sin of homosexuality. In verse 28, when a nation refuses to listen to God’s standards of morality, the bible declares, “God gave them over to a reprobate mind.”

Recently 250,000 homosexuals marched in the streets of San Francisco. Several weeks ago 75,000 more were marching in the streets of Los Angeles. Homosexuals are on the march in this country.

Please remember, that homosexuals do not reproduce! They recruit!

And, many of them are out after my children and your children.

Jerry Falwell, Fundraising letter to Old Time Gospel Hour listeners, August 21, 1981

In his 1976 primary run for President, Ronald Reagan encountered some pushback over his earlier divorce from Jane Wyman. By 1980 he was the darling of Evangelicals across the country. He welcomed Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and other Evangelical leaders into the Oval Office and sought their advice. While Reagan was never able to overturn Roe v Wade or bring back school prayer, he remained and remains a favorite with conservative Protestant Christians. 

The working classes continued to support Reagan enthusiastically even as American heavy industry continued to decline. No longer trendy, Liberalism became once again a counterculture. As the unions lost power and manufacturing plants closed their doors, a college degree became a necessity for most well-paying jobs. These students were largely taught by liberal professors and financed by federal student loans.  As the demand for college education increased, so did tuition costs and student debt. 

On August 22, 1989 Huey P Newton was shot and killed by Tyrone Robinson over a crack cocaine franchise. That same year, college students gained access to a new computer network called ARPANET. And on November 9, 1989, a year and a day after George Bush Sr. won the 1988 Presidential election, the Berlin Wall fell and with it the Iron Curtain.  

Kimberlé Crenshaw, 2018. (Photo by Mohamed Badarne, Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite — that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference in identity politics is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class.

Moreover, ignoring difference within groups contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that bears on efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as woman or person of color to an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling.

Kymberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,”
Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6 (Jul., 1991)

Kymberlé Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins” discussed the different ways in which individuals experience oppression. Crenshaw noted that anti-racist activists took “Black male” as the default setting, while feminists used “White female” as their baseline. She also noted that programs designed by well-meaning middle-class social workers often failed to take into account the special challenges that impoverished clients face. Toward that end, she recommended a holistic approach that took each individual’s lived experiences into account. 

While it attracted attention among legal professionals, “Mapping the Margins” had little immediate impact on greater American society. Most were more interested in the Soviet Union’s impending collapse. Not long after its December 1991 fall, Francis Fukuyama announced The End of History and the Last Man. Republicans tried taking credit for winning the Cold War, but in November 1992 Americans made George Bush Sr. a one-term President and elected Bill Clinton as the leader of a brave new Unipolar world. 

16 years after we celebrated the end of history and 8 years after George W. Bush came to power, we declared the end of racism with the election of Barack Obama, our first Black President. Critical Race Theory had become well-known on the Left, but most White Americans felt agonizing about race was no longer necessary.  They felt with Obama’s election that decency and the Civil Rights Act had finally triumphed. We were free at last, free at last of segregation’s shadow. But as Dr. Crenshaw noted in a July 2011 Connecticut Law Review article:

For those of us with vivid memories of the downshift of the late 1980s and the counterattacks waged openly against [Critical Race Theory] in the 1990s, 2009 seemed like a mirage. As if awakening from a bad dream, we opened our eyes to find an African American family living in the White House. The conservative Crit-baiting isn't quite the preoccupation it used to be, as it turns out, because their ammunition is being reserved for far bigger game than CRT. Apoplectic hand-wringing about the role of the entire Critical project in bringing down Western civilization seems even more absurd than ever before. 

With nothing else to disturb this view, this might well be the closing scene on CRT, a delightful conclusion that fades to black over rolling credits. Like the happy ending in the disaster flick The Poseidon Adventure, survivors rejoice in the realization that there is indeed a morning after. But to quote Derrick Bell, "[w]e are not saved."'

Kymberlé Crenshaw, “Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory,” Connecticut Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 5 (Jul., 2011)

While many glass ceilings had been shattered and many red lines erased, many inequities still persisted. Blacks remained overrepresented in prisons and underrepresented in corporate boardrooms. The financial and sexual exploitation of undocumented immigrants continued throughout the United States. And while America had technically recovered from the 2008-09 Great Recession, the job market remained tight and many Americans struggled to get by. Three months after Crenshaw’s article was published, a group of angry protestors decided to Occupy Wall Street. 

Occupy Wall Street attracted protestors of all races, colors, and political affiliations. Libertarians, communists, and underemployed workers all agreed that the rich had too much money and the 99% didn’t have enough.  This focus on income inequity was something unprecedented in the land of temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. For a brief shining moment we dreamed that maybe the plutocracy could finally be brought to heel. But like our dreams of a color-blind America, these hopes were soon dashed. 

In November the Zuccotti Park encampment was finally cleared. That month Barack Obama had a 43% approval rating. While his rating would rise to the low 50s by the 2012 election, Obama would spend much of his second term dealing with resistance from a hostile Republican-led House and, after 2014, a Red Senate. Still, by 2016 most of America expected that the first Black President would be followed by the first female President. Nobody imagined that the Republican nominee, businessman and reality TV star Donald Trump, had any chance against a skilled politician like Hillary Clinton. 

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. 

On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.

David Remnick, “An American Tragedy,” New Yorker, November 9, 2016

For the American Left, the 2016 election was a repudiation of everything they had fought so hard to gain. Post-racial America was now ruled by a man who famously insisted Obama was Kenyan, not American. The first female President had been cheated of her triumph by a notorious pussy-grabber. Trump was a ghost risen from his tomb to haunt us, a reminder that we still had powerful enemies that wanted to destroy our gains and take us back to the bad old days.

A more reasoned analysis might have noted that 2016 America was in a notably Populist frame of mind. The Democratic Party had worked overtime to defeat its Populist candidate, Bernie Sanders, and replace him with the decidedly non-Populist Hillary Clinton. But after Occupy Wall Street the educated classes were careful not to stir up Populist sentiment. And so Trump’s victory was seen as the triumph of Racism, Sexism, and every other bad -ism and phobia you could possibly imagine – except, of course, Classism. 

Where once the Left had rallied for worker’s rights, they now scorned the uneducated “rednecks” and “hicks” who had so cruelly voted for Trump. Hillary had dismissed them as “a basket of deplorables” and her angered supporters dismissed them as MAGAts and Trumptards who wanted to lynch Negroes and consign women to the kitchen. The now-unfashionable stereotype of the bestial Black thug was now replaced by the gap-toothed White Supremacist clinging to his guns and religion. 

From 2016 to 2020, the Left’s sole concrete goal was getting rid of Trump by any means necessary. Leftists spent much of their time owning their privilege, confronting their internalized racism and implicit biases, and avoiding microaggressions. Workshops promised to help free earnest Whites of their original sin. Media companies worked overtime to prove themselves allies in the struggle. We might not be able to have a Black president, but we could have a Black Little Mermaid. And as the war against Trump grew more heated, online allies lined up to express their displeasure with White Supremacy.

Crenshaw’s theory of Intersectionality was now part of mainstream discourse. But where Crenshaw used Intersectionality as a tool to better reach underserved classes, the new Intersectionality saw weakness and disempowerment as a path to virtue. The most terminally online could now become admired by describing their various problems in detail. The success of the Gay Rights movement led to Zoophiles, Pedophiles, Age-Playing “Littles,” Autogynephiles, Furries, and sexual deviants of all stripes rising up to claim their power and demand their rights. 

These lumpenproles banded together to stop every kind of oppression by mass complaints. Those who questioned the narrative of White Supremacy and Christofascist Terrorism were soon banished from polite social media. Ultimately even the acting President of the United States was removed from Twitter and Facebook as a threat to the social order.  To question gay marriage was violence: to support the destruction of George Washington statues was patriotism. 

The Right laughed loud and long at the obese “dangerhairs” and wished death upon the “groomers” who were busy recruiting children. But their complaints were quickly silenced as “hate speech” and “misinformation.” And with the advent of COVID-19, these White Supremacists were now not just racists and nogoodniks, they were Science Deniers. The lumpenprole Radicals rebelled with Facebook frames declaring their vaccination status while insisting that anti vaxxers should lose their child custody and be locked up in quarantine camps. 

George Floyd’s death brought us an orgy of Negrophilia that would have impressed the Black Panthers. Cities burned across America and young women declared their support for the violence on TikTok. Major corporations and wealthy suburbanites put up virtual and real signs declaring that Black Lives Matter, that we Trust the Science, that Love is Love and that No Human is Illegal. Much of this support and breast-beating was performative, but when all dissent was silenced and dissenters threatened with unemployment and debanking, it felt sincere enough to those on the receiving end.  And finally, after long years of whining, and lots of support from major corporations and the Democratic party, the Coalition of the Worthless achieved something they had rarely seen before: success. 

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day.  Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

Molly Ball, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” Time, February 4, 2021

In November 2020 the Democratic Party, with the help of a “fortified” election, finally seized power from the Bad Orange Man. With Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, we had Obama’s former VP at the helm and the first Black female vice-president at his side, the Left could imagine that the Long Orange Nightmare was finally over. Finally we could fulfill Obama’s post-racial promise and get rid of the ever-looming threat of fascism once and for all.

There was lots of skepticism about the vote, and a sizable protest at the Capitol Building. But those who participated in the January 6 storming found themselves facing lengthy prison sentences. And those who questioned the election propriety were besieged by lawsuits and disbarment. Still, no matter how often mainstream journalists talked about “election fraud lies,” the distrust, like the White working class, stubbornly refused to fade away. 

While he is certainly a competent politician, Joe Biden was never known for his intellectual acumen or speaking skills. From his first days in office, there were rumors that Biden was showing signs of dementia. These rumors were ignored in mainstream media and dismissed as “ageism” and “Russian propaganda” by online Democratic partisans. Like the election fraud lies, the unwashed masses stubbornly refused to let go of their misinformed beliefs. But their complaints echoed through a void – or through Gab and Truth Social, which is the same thing. 

In 2022 the Social Media wall crumbled when Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, purchased Twitter. The PMCs and dangerhairs alike screeched in outrage as he expressed his skepticism about “misinformation” and declared his support for free speech. But, as the dangerhairs had learned earlier with JK Rowling, once your bank balance reaches 10 figures you become very resistant to cancellation. Under Musk, many who had been cast out of Twitter for their sins were now welcomed back on X with open arms. And while there was much wailing and gnashing of keyboards, there was now a major social media site that allowed discourse outside the increasingly narrow official narratives. 

By the time we started thinking about the 2024 election, Donald Trump had been found guilty of 34 felonies and held financially liable for a decades-old sexual assault. Surely this time he was finished for good. Surely this time the Republicans would run somebody else. But when the smoke cleared and the primary season ended, the Bad Orange Man was back on the ballot again. And, after a disastrous debate, all those lies about Joe Biden’s senility could no longer be dismissed. The same, alas, could not be said of Joe Biden, whose resignation was every bit as sad and confusing as his debate performance.

Four years after becoming Vice-President, America still knew very little about Kamala Harris. But it soon became clear that when it came to intellectual acumen and speaking skills, she was no Joe Biden. The Democratic Party worked overtime to create an image based on buzzwords like “brat” and “joy.” Harris even managed to score some points in her debate with Trump. But after several unimpressive debates and public presentations, many Democrats wondered if maybe they should have stuck with the senile guy. 

Which brings us to where we are now. Most pollsters have found the race between Harris and Trump is too close to call. Betting markets like Polymarket have Trump as an overwhelming favorite. There is certainly less buzz for Harris than Trump. But the same was said about Biden in 2020, and we all remember how that turned out.  As of this moment (October 29, 2024) we have Schrödinger’s election. Until we open the box, we will not know whether the Orange Man will be heading back to the White House or back to Florida. We know that no matter who wins, half the country will be convinced the election was stolen by outside forces. What that disgruntled half will do in response to their disappointment remains anybody’s guess. 

But no matter who wins, the Coalition of the Worthless has already lost.  Americans have grown weary of histrionic, self-righteous shrieking, and I expect the Dems to move Right and begin downplaying pet causes like defunding the police and opening the borders. Whoever wins the election will be facing a hard economic downturn, and we’re no longer going to have the resources to humor complaints about fat-shaming, oppressive beauty standards, and the right to unlimited pornography access. The CotW will look back on these days like Al Bundy remembering his four touchdowns. Then they will return to the lives of mediocrity and misery that were always their birthright.