My enemy wants to be my friend.
My enemy wants me to think I am like him.
He appeals to my intelligence, my education, my privilege, to warn me about the "unwashed masses," of which I consider myself a part. He doesn't accept the validity of that sentiment. But he wants me to validate him, to tell him he's doing good. He wants me to help him feel alright with himself and the world.
He doesn't want to believe he's a bad person. But the problem is, he still thinks it's personal.
It's really not, though.
What happens is, he flatters me. Tells me I'm smart. That I'm a leader.
I hear between his words, an exasperation with "the unwashed masses," a frustration with the inconvenience of more direct, participatory modes of democracy, and a belief that nothing positive can come of deconstructing power too consistently except "anarchy," by which he means "lawless violence."
But that is not what "anarchy" means. And I think Law is quite violent, in its way, not more or less so than lawlessness. He confuses peace with order.
And I don't have as much in common with my Enemy as he would like me to believe I do.
He underestimates my alienation, and he underestimates my solidarity with the alienated.
So, he flatters, praises, and chides me, like a knowing friend. But he is not my friend.
And when I reject his attempt to make of me, conspiratorially, with him, in his alliance, an "adult in the room," I see how he turns and declares me a naive, idealistic, woeful child.
Because, to a liberal, there are only two kinds of people: adults and children, and children do as they are told.
It is when I reject his first premise, these appeals to likeness with me, that he turns passive aggressive, and tries to project his spinelessness on me. He asks me "Don't I like my smartphone?" He has failed to appeal with reason, so he appeals now, instead, with toys. Bright, flashy, shiny things. This, he calls "progress."
But he fails to judge that I may yet define progress differently. That my vision of a more ideal society is not that we all become like him- elitists. I seek an end to elitism. I don't want to be like him. I want to drag him down to my level. I want the other people, the ones he dismissively ignores because he thinks they won't understand him, to hear his words, and for him to know he is understood as someone who sees himself as better than they are, as wiser, and more deserving of authority.
This Enemy is called the Liberal. Every thing he says today about Black Lives Matter, his forebears said about MLK, Jr. Everything he says about trans rights, has already been said about other groups he used to concern-troll into accepting their subordination.
He is not to be trusted.
He thinks he would make a good cop. A good politician. A good judge. He believes so much in his education and apartness that he thinks he is immune to bias or groupthink. He weaponizes rationality in service of the unreasonable. He weaponizes pity in service of the status quo, and he calls it Love.
But this is not the Love of equals. It is the love of a master for a pet. It is the love of a self-absorbed parent for the child whose autonomy and dignity they neglect. It is the love of the owner for the slave.
And when you lay this bare, when you point it out in no uncertain terms, this infantilizing paternalism, you can hear him turn on you. When you refuse to repay the flattering, when you do not give his intellectual and cultural elitism the due he thinks he deserves, he snaps. And he reveals himself as who he truly is: the self-proclaimed "adult in the room."
We need fewer people like that. As few as possible. Zero, preferably.
I have no patience for them anymore. I cut them from my life like thread. Every time I have let my guard down and ignored the yellow flags and let someone like this into my life, I have regretted it. And there are people I've known for a long time, who I respect much less, now, that I see him in them.
The next time someone tries to appeal to you as though you are the "adults in the room," figure out that person's sacred Bourgeois cultural cow. Find it, torch it, and watch how they react. That sacred cow might be aesthetic or it might be practical, but whatever it turns out to be, believe me, it is there. Waiting. And it's fucking ugly in the face. Set it on fire.
Then you will know where they truly stand. Then, you will know your Enemy.