Naomi Gets Close

One of the features of the nationalist re-awakening occurring now in Europe is the prominence of women in leading roles.  Feminist activist and author Naomi Wolf has noticed this and has something to say about it.

Many lower-income women in Western Europe today – often single parents working pink-collar ghetto jobs that leave them exhausted and without realistic hope of advancement – can reasonably enough feel a sense of nostalgia for past values and certainties. For them, the idealized vision of an earlier age, one in which social roles were intact and women’s traditional contribution supposedly valued, can be highly compelling.

And, of course, parties that promote such a vision promise women – including those habituated to second-class status at work and the bulk of the labor at home – that they are not just faceless atoms in the postmodern mass. Rather, you, the lowly clerical worker, are a “true” Danish, Norwegian, or French woman. You are an heiress to a noble heritage, and thus not only better than the mass of immigrants, but also part of something larger and more compelling than is implied by the cog status that a multiracial, secular society offers you.

The attraction of right-wing parties to women should be examined, not merely condemned. If a society does not offer individuals a community life that takes them beyond themselves, values only production and the bottom line, and opens itself to immigrants without asserting and cherishing what is special and valuable about Danish, Norwegian, or French culture, it is asking for trouble. For example, upholding the heritage of the Enlightenment and progressive social ideals does not require racism or pejorative treatment of other cultures; but politically correct curricula no longer even make the attempt to do so.

It's interesting how close Wolf gets to the truth here. It's almost as if the Leftist lens has cracked a bit, allowing an unsettling glimpse of something one would rather not think about.  Three things stand out here.

First: She understands that the nationalist right is making an appeal not for this or that political program or reform but for the re-establishment of traditional social roles.

Second: She understands the vapid nothingness of the modern liberal democratic state, which views its citizens as interchangable cogs, nothing more.

Third: She understands that various family civilizations in the West have something special and valuable to offer.

Now, all of this has to be qualified by the multitude of the usual Leftist errors: that any appeal to tradition is a nostalgia-based appeal to an ideal which never actually existed; that any problems encountered by human beings in the face of the mostrously inhuman liberal democratic state is not due to its nature but simply because its Enlightenment roots have not be translated correctly; that any belief in one's own culture and civilization is a form of racism, etc.

These errors are too common-place and boring to spend any time one.  One's mind simply notes the presence of the usual suspects and moves on.  And yet....

...there is something else here.

The feminist looks at my people's women and is *scared*.

As she should be.