Wobblies and intersectionalist social justice postmodernism

From Booknotes on American Character by Brian Lamb. A collection of interviews on C-Span of non-fiction books. From the interview related to Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America by Eric Rauchway.

We have lost four presidents to an assassin; Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy.

McKinley was the third. On September 6, 1901, William McKinley, the 25th President of the United States, was doing a meet and greet on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition at the Temple of Music in Buffalo, New York when Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, shot him twice in the abdomen. McKinley died eight days later on September 14 of gangrene caused by the gunshot wounds.

Rauchway makes an important point early in the interview. So much of our contemporary reporting lacks perspective, is stripped of context, and is absent empirical grounding. All our media platforms wish the citizenry to believe ourselves living in apocalyptical end times when, in fact, we are in the midst of a golden era. A book such as Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America by Eric Rauchway reminds us of relatively recent times which were much darker.

It's important to the McKinley assassination to put it in a slightly more international context. In 1881, the Russian czar, Alexander II, was killed by a bomb exploding under his carriage. In that year, there were meetings of hundreds of anarchists in Paris and London who adopted the propaganda of the deed - which is a euphemism for terrorism - as their model for attacking industrial civilization.

And over the next couple decades, there were many bombings, many assassination attempts and many assassinations. McKinley's fits into that context. There were bombs exploding in Paris and London streets. The French president, the Spanish prime minister, the Italian king and one of the Habsburg heirs were all murdered in the decade preceding McKinley's death, and that was the context in which people saw it at the time.

Indeed, as part of that continuing wave of marxist/nationalist/anarchist assassinations, many leaders died, culminating in the assassination of the heir apparent Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his wife on June 28, 1914 leading to World War I and the deaths of some 37 million in battle, through genocides and as a consequence of the war related Spanish Flu.

From the Haymarket Massacre in 1886, through the violence of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) 1905-1910 up till World War I, there was an association between anarchism, nihilism, and labor unions which seemed to threaten civilization across the globe.

While the racism, violence, intolerance, and authoritarianism of modern day intersectionalist social justice postmodernism shares many of the traits of the anarchists, nihilists and wobblies, they are in fact pretty weak tea.

Intersectionalist social justice postmodernism may appear an existential threat, and conceptually they could be, but they are mostly a cognitive nuisance, not a real world threat. They have air play because of academic cowardice, not because of their actions, capabilities, or numbers. They are a minuscule group in numbers (<1% in any particular demographic), in age (mostly a phenomenon of non-adults) and geography (mostly in college towns and old cities.)

We treat them as a crisis in part because they are such a nuisance, but we only need to look back at the era of anarchists, marxists, and nationalists circa 1885-1914 to see what real threats look like.