Forget White Privilege, Let's Talk About Leftist Perogative.

Social Justice activists think they have some officially sanctioned moral authority or recognized social position that grants them the prerogative to intervene in any situation they stumble upon.

I’m beginning to think leftist activists believe that their social views and moral opinions give them some sort of default authority which everyone else has to respect. It is as though they just take for granted that once they step forward and begin to protest that everyone else is supposed to just recognize that they are to be listened to and to step back and allow them to take charge. It’s like when a person is having a medical emergency in public, and then someone steps out of the crowd and confidently declares “I’m a doctor!” at which point everyone else steps back and lets the doctor take charge. Nobody challenges the doctor because everyone recognizes that he has the medical expertise to intervene appropriately, and so they step aside and allow the doctor to do his thing. I think leftists think that they are entitled to the same freestanding culturally sanctioned authority over political and social situations that doctors get to exercise during medical emergencies. They seem to think that once they begin pulling out their signs and start chanting and protesting during an ICE raid (or whatever) that this is like a man saying “I’m a doctor” during a medical emergency, and that the ICE officer or whoever else in attendance is supposed to just step back and let them take control of the entire situation. They seem to think that they can simply gather to protest an ICE raid or confront the border patrol (or whatever else), confidently declare “I’m a social justice activist with a degree in sociology,” and then everyone else is supposed to step back and start taking their cues from the activist.

It would be tempting to call it “leftist privilege,” in order to turn the social justice activists’ own language back around on them, but that doesn’t quite capture the phenomenon I have in mind. Privilege refers to the supposed unearned advantages, benefits, and power that are given to people because they belong to the dominant social group (i.e., straight white males). So the term “privilege” doesn’t quite capture the point because leftists aren’t asking for privilege, they are acting like they ought to be treated with the same deference that we treat doctors during medical emergencies.

I think the right term is “leftist prerogative.” A prerogative is a special and exclusive right, power, or authority that a person holds by virtue of their social position, status, or rank. I think leftist activists see themselves as occupying some sort of de facto social office or position that grants them prerogative to act outside the boundaries of civil society when they want to interfere with the affairs of other people for reasons of social justice. They believe they have some officially sanctioned moral authority or culturally recognized social position that grants them the prerogative to intervene in any situation they happen to stumble upon, and everyone else (including law enforcement) has to defer to them.

Following this line of reasoning they violate the laws, rules, and norms of civil society during their protests (blocking cops, shutting down roads, vandalizing property) while acting as though it should be taken for granted that they have the prerogative to do so. When approached and asked about why they think they are allowed to do this, the leftists very often reply with something like “ICE raids are racist,” or “we’re marching against ICE” as if those things call attention to some relevant feature of the situation which explains why they are allowed to interfere with law enforcement. The only reason they think this is a good explanation is that they think that there is a culturally recognized convention that gives activists the right to protest using whatever methods they want, even if those methods break the law or interfere with law enforcement. So, when they say “we’re resisting ICE” they think this provides the information needed to allow one to intuit the morally and socially relevant factors which, when combined with what they see as their default freestanding moral authority, grant them the prerogative to declare themselves exempt from the normal functioning rules, laws, and norms of civil society. In other words, they think the fact of their leftist prerogative to do as they wish is obvious, all that is needed is to answer questions about why they are protesting is to provide the context within which they are invoking their rightful prerogative to interfere with law enforcement. Further, since they think that their leftist prerogative is a social convention that is widely recognized by everyone, they therefore believe it is the job of everyone else to adjust their actions in order to accommodate the leftists as they exempt themselves from the same norms, rules, and conventions that everyone else has to follow.

The early 2020s were home to the peak of leftist prerogative, as leftist activists and protesters walked around society with impunity canceling people, intervening in other people’s lives, interfering with law enforcement, and generally acting like they owned the place. They held struggle sessions in corporate settings, tried to get their bosses fired by ginning up internet mobs, mobbed people online, and generally engaged in all sorts of horrific antisocial behavior while trying to make society “unpalatable” for those whose social and political views they opposed.

The best explanation for this is that they think their adherence to leftist social and political opinions bestows upon them a sort of moral authority that grants them the prerogative to suspend the typical expectations and conventions of civil society, and to flout the norms, rules, and laws that govern everyday life in the pursuit of their social justice ideology.

All of this comes from the fact that they believe they have leftist prerogative to do whatever they want to advance their cause.

This isn’t an argument for allowing police to declare open season on protesters, nor is it to serve as a justification for curtailing First Amendment rights. The point here is that the reason so many leftists feel totally comfortable accosting well-known conservatives in public, blocking highways, getting in people’s faces, or surrounding people in restaurants and intimidating them as we saw during the summer of 2020, is that they think they have the social standing, moral obligation, and cultural authority to be able to do those things with impunity and still be immune from the consequences.

These people faced no consequences for this

Part of the reason they think this is that for a period of about 8 years (from 2016-2023) most of our important governmental and civic institutions legitimized this behavior by allowing it, cheering it on, providing support for it, and by refusing to enforce the laws, rules, and norms against such behavior. Charges against vandals were dropped, work-place rules against harassment were not enforced against social justice activists who targeted co-workers, and norms of civility were tossed out the window writ large when it came to leftist activists. The result was that leftist activists essentially DID have the prerogative to engage in any sort of behavior they wanted so long as it was done in the name of social justice, and nobody put a stop to it for fear of reprisals.

For a very long time leftists have believed that everyone else needed to rearrange the world in order to accommodate their activism, and they acted as though the public space belonged to them, and everyone else only got access according to the good graces of the left. This is no longer true, and now the activists are beginning to face consequences for their antisocial behavior. Companies are firing people for trying to take over companies, police are standing their ground, arrests are being made for vandalism, and people are getting fired for trying to bully their co-workers in the name of social justice. Additionally, as shown by the recent dustup over comments made by Zohran Mamdani’s Tenant Advocate, Cea Weaver, leftists are now beginning to face much tougher scrutiny for their bombastic rhetoric, authoritarian social views, and outright communist economic policies. (Cea Weaver’s explicitly stated position is that communist position that property is theft and home ownership is a weapon of white supremacy).

I don’t think that leftist prerogative was ever legitimate, but I do think leftists believe they are entitled to leftist prerogative and that their political views give them moral authority which entitles them to act as though they have the prerogative to enforce their moral views wherever they go using whatever tactics they see fit. So now we are stuck with an entire generation of leftists who think that enforcing their social views on everyone is their cultural and political birthright to which they are entitled by virtue of being leftists. However, as they are about to find out, it is no longer 2020, and people are refusing to be subject to the moral authority of resentful woke scolds and downwardly mobile political activists with an axe to grind. Leftists who continue to act like they have the prerogative to enforce their views on everyone using whatever means they feel like, are about to find out that they really do not have the social standing, moral authority, or cultural power to act as though they run the place.

I predict that we are going to see an uptick in confrontations with police, and in violence against law enforcement as leftists who think that they have the right to act with impunity fail to understand the gravity of the situation when they resist the orders of law enforcement. The 2020’s are over, and the latitude and deference that was given to leftist activists during that era has long since evaporated. Police are no longer willing to negotiate the terms of order with protestors looking to block roads, takeover parks, or otherwise hold the public hostage by illegitimately interfering with other people’s lives…they are looking to enforce the law, and they are not asking the permission of the activists to do it.

Again, none of this justifies over-reach by law enforcement, nor does it venerate the use of force against peaceful orotest by law-abiding people. It merely serves to explain why Social Justice activists behave as though the laws, rules, norms, and expectations that apply to everyone else in society do not apply to them.