I'm Sorry, You're Sorry: Why White Liberals Don't Need Gods But Do Need Devils

Progressive: You can’t blame a young Latino for something his parents did 20 years ago.

Also Progressive: Whites can never make up for things their ancestors did 200 years ago. 

Some suggest that oil powers the western world. But petroleum is for suckers. What really propels the developed world today is the hypocrisy of cultural guilt. In particular the white liberal guilt illustrated above. It has become the default position of liberals faced with the clash of cultures produced by immigration. And it’s a malign, crushing menace.

Comedian Rita Rudner used to say that the Jews are born guilty and the Catholics go to school to learn it. The current virtue signallers get their old-timey religion at the church of the Holy Secular. You only had to watch the Emmys to witness their services. 

This church— attended by highly educated, urban elites of the coastal silos— had it origins in the 1960s radicals who renounced their Judeo-Christian legacy because of unsavoury events in the past. Slavery. Imperialism. Sexism. The modern left knows nothing but shame for its past— as you can see in Ken Burns’ Viet Nam documentary series on PBS.

The first guilt bloom produced in the 1960s thrived for a time. But as the ‘70s and ‘80s wore on, the serious black revolutionaries were killed or exiled or took jobs on the Cosby Show. The socialist whites, like Bernie Sanders, descended into self parody. AIDS struck the gay community. Hillary Clinton became the face of feminism. Etcetera. 

After decades of clichés, the old ‘60s penitents found their voice again in Barack Obama, the loquacious black pretender who could rev up the guilt meter. Suddenly, it was Woodstock again. The hippies at the Nobel Awards were so thrilled they gave Obama their Peace Prize for simply being a black man elected president. The Ché fans and social engineers swore it would be Woodstock Redux in the White House— and throughout the privileged West.

So for eight years you had The American guilt: Slavery. The German guilt: Nazis. The French guilt: Algeria. The British guilt: Their economic empire. In Canada, the guilt was the natives, Japanese internment, the Land and, this just in, gays. These were the stations of the liberal cross from 2008- 2016— wholly endorsed by the media and culture industries.

The high priests of this guilt told their white adherents they were unworthy to judge, disqualified them from feeling pride in culture. Power was instead ceded to anyone who had a gripe from “micro-aggressions” to occupying too much of a bus seat. Rending your $50 K garment at the Oscars became the sanctifying moment of your existence.

The classic example of this Western self loathing is Germany's Angela Merkel’s invitation to the world’s refugees to treat Europe like a Holiday Inn Express. She saw mercy to refugees as payback for the sins of her forefathers. Even as the notion of integrating up to two million Muslims into a five-hundred-year-old Lutheran culture ran off the rails, she still told Germans there was a place in heaven for them if they just let in one more refugee.

But what is heaven or grace or forgiveness when conventional religion is out of bounds? The nomenklatura at the Emmys is too cynical to have Gods. But they absolutely need one very key feature of the Christian religious canon: Lucifer. 

An evil figure living in the shadows to animate them, a goblin ready to cast them into the pit of despond. Enter Donald Trump. Having achieved Om under Obama’s guilt-saturated lectures— remember “you didn’t build that company”?— they are suddenly awaken by this gauche prophet of profit who apologizes to “no one for nothing”. 

With the Obama legacy in doubt, progressives have created a Lucifer in a septuagenarian whose raw energy mocks their hip lassitude. When he labelled Jeb Bush “low energy” he knew what button he was pushing with the comfortable classes.

The backlash against Trump has, the words of writer Scott Adams, reached a collective hysteria in the congregants. Witness ESPN’s incandescently angry Jamele Hill who recently called Trump unfit for the White House and labelled everyone around him a white nationalist.

Or journalist icon Carl Bernstein, who believes Trump so loathsome and dangerous that his fellow journalists must abandon the fact-based reporting method he used on Richard Nixon in favour of a polemic-based crusade. How’s that working? (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/business/3-cnn-journalists-resign-after-retracted-story-on-trump-ally.html)

Here in Canada, where Trump is the American Beelzebub, holy orders are articulated by the prime minister himself. To abase themselves, Canadians must genuflect at the refugees streaming across the border, lament the treatment of Indigenous people and fell class loathing for the rich set-- from which M. Trudeau just happens to spring.

To disbelieve this catechism is a crime as serious as the original sins from 50, 75, 150 or 1000 years ago. From Trump to climate change to race relations, heretics must be burned at the Twitter stake. 

The aim of all this guilt was supposedly to lower “white privilege” while elevating “victims” in the past. But something went wrong with liberal guilt, says black historian and writer Shelby Steele: "...All this was meant to redeem the nation from its bigoted past, but, paradoxically, it also invited minorities to make an identity and a politics out of grievance and inferiority. Its seductive whisper to them was that their collective grievance was their entitlement, and that protest politics was the best way to cash in on that entitlement”.

The entitlement scam applies for Canada’s natives and the earnest attempts by politicians to assuage guilt over their treatment. While still called Indians or Eskimos by Americans, the eternally guilty in Ottawa run through euphemisms, each more craven in their aim to please the victims. So Indians become natives become first nations and now indigenous people. Eskimos morph into Inuit. Even as the recipients of this guilt laugh at those torturing the language. 

I have a solution for those white liberals rendered numb by their collective guilt over their heritage. Renounce the Salk vaccine, the automobile, the Apple computer, the Beatles, the jet plane, basketball, the assembly line, rockets to the moon, insulin, the artificial heart, Bordeaux wine, alpine skis, radio/ television, radar, golf, washer/ dryers, the steam engine, penicillin, plastic, the gas stove, the combine harvester, laparoscopy, the Bic pen, post-it notes, hockey, the cell phone— in short, all of the many thousand innovations or discoveries produced by the "degenerate" white culture.

When you’ve found a way to strip those vestiges of colonial repression and racial oppression from every facet of your lives, then come talk about guilt. We can meet at your fire pit down by the river. I’m sure the indigenous people there will be simply thrilled to see you.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy.is the host of the podcast The Full Count with Bruce Dowbiggin on anticanetwork.com. He’s also a regular contributor three-times-a-week to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also the best-selling author of seven books. His website is Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com)