The anti-woke left against rootlessness

Great discussion from Aimee Terese and Benjamin Studebaker on the What's Left? podcast, with several variations on the theme of rootedness vs. rootlessness (as well as criticism of the MeToo movement). Unlike generic leftists, they're against rootlessness and anomie, and are in favor of preserving and conserving the distinct character of things, places, and collectives over time. A refreshing example of the overlap between the cultural left and right, provided both are populist in their economic goals.



That's also an indictment of most of the leftist media / social media / podcaster world, who glorify being transplants to the courtier zip codes, while bad-mouthing their roots as backward garbage dumps. It's the same libertarian Satanism as you find among the mainstream right. Today's elites are mainly split between culturally left libertarians and culturally right libertarians (i.e., who support all the degeneracy that left libertarians do, but like to complain about non-white people on the internet).

Right-wingers like to say that if we import enough Third Worlders, it's no longer America -- and the same goes for everyone living in Brooklyn being from outside the Mid-Atlantic, it's no longer New York. Under a regime of free markets uber alles, cities and countries become mere brands controlled by elite brand managers who shape it in whatever ways will deliver the most profit from the consumer base du jour. Radically alter that consumer base, and radically alter the product being offered.

Not only do we have to close the national borders to foreign scabs, we have to make moving around internally more difficult, to protect cities, states, and regions from being chewed up and spit out by status-striving carpetbaggers. It's bad enough when a rural person is forced into an urban area, but that can at least be contained within a state or region.

When the top 20% of society all struggles to converge on the same 10 cities -- really, a handful of courtier magnets within those cities -- then it's only feeding the problem of elite over-production. They have no right to occupy that land, and long-time residents and political stewards ought to be exercising power to prevent such a deluge of new residents, despite the higher profits it would deliver to private-sector slumlords and employers.

Crucially, the existing deeply rooted elites of those cities have a vested material interest in keeping out the scabs at their level of the class pyramid. Old wealthy New York families would rather not have to pay 10 times as much to hold onto their positions, just to outbid the legions of elite families who hail from outside of New York, whether they're coming in from Chicago or China.

That opens up a strange bedfellows alliance between the top and lower layers of the class pyramid, within a city / region, and makes it much more feasible in the short-term since there would be buy-in from the local elites (until the bottom 80% become collective actors again).

If you're somewhat new around here, I covered these themes in depth during 2014-'16. I mainly looked at the temporal pattern, where rootlessness tracks the status-striving and inequality cycle (high during the Gilded Age, falling during the Great Compression, soaring again in the neoliberal era). But I also looked at psychological and sociological differences between transplants and natives in a state or region.

The obvious link is between status-striving and transplanting in pursuit of ambition (vs. reining in your ambition and remaining where you came from), but there are others as well. Search the blog for "rooted," "rootless," "transplant," etc. to find those old posts, which should be a subset of the "geography" category tag.

If you're an older reader, give What's Left? a listen to hear similar conclusions being reached by those who are more culturally liberal. Follow "them" on Twitter (@whatisleftpod), where Aimee Terese posts after having been censored off of her own account by an anarcho-liberal witch hunt -- all for pursuing realignment with those who are culturally conservative or moderate while being populist on economic matters and anti-interventionist on foreign policy.

It's not quite the same as her old account, maybe just because of the avatar being impersonal on the new one. She could change the avatar to her Red Bull selfie, modified with a #FreeAimee banner underneath. There's just something about that iconic avatar that soothes her fans and triggers her haters, it's unbeatable.