The left is whatever belief (system) threatens the powers that be.
For Pagan Rome, Christianity, along with some other religions like Manichaeism, was a threat, because many Christians wouldn’t kneel before Caesar, and because while many Christians were docile, some were militant communists, and because all of them were just too bizarre for Rome, so they persecuted them.
But the more they martyred, the more converted.
After a couple centuries the empire was teeming with them.
Even some of the elite were converting.
If you can’t beat it, join it, or rather, co-opt it.
The more Rome’s upperclass converted, the more Christianity’s radicalness diluted.
Could a Roman emperor really be Christian?
Weren’t Christians to relinquish their power and give their wares to the poor?
Rome’s ruling class became theologians and began debating these things.
‘Why yes, yes of course, a Christian could be a rich, powerful patrician, in charge of sentencing poor farmers to death for not paying their taxes’.
And the pope could wear a big hat and waddle around the palace worth a fortune, enough to feed a poor country in Africa for generations.
And so the bible was forbidden from being read by Christian plebs who came to accept the emperor and pope’s reign because, ‘they were one of us now, 1st among equals’.
Finally they would kneel before the emperor.
And so the left, the antiestablishment, was co-opted, made toothless.
The bits that were compatible, were preserved, the bits that weren’t, discarded, or watered down.
Several centuries ago, classical liberalism, Protestantism and science were subversive, leftwing.
In many countries the clergy, nobility and royalty were overthrown and replaced with republics, in others they were restrained.
Gradually this lead to a period where there was no clear ruling class, but after awhile a group of banksters, bureaucrats and corporations began practicing monopoly capitalism.
The liberal democracy was largely corrupted.
Socialists, some wanting to merely reform liberal democracy, others wanting to topple and replace it with a ‘proletariat dictatorship’, and anarchists, the new left, emerged to challenge liberal democracy, the new right.
Most of these socialists were atheists, a challenge to the Protestant establishment.
Science, classical liberalism and Protestantism, Socialism and atheism, arguably had successes and failures.
Now wouldn’t the new ruling class, these bureaucrats and businessmen, these monopoly men, try to co-opt these movements, rather than overtly oppose them?
Well that’s exactly what they did, but I think increasingly the former, classical liberalism and Protestantism, is outliving its usefulness for them.
Classical liberalism and Protestantism is sort of like Paganism in the late Roman empire, the old dog, scientism, socialism and atheism, the new dog, is sort of like Christianity, its teeth are being filed down, so it has no bite.
They know revolution is coming, that the masses don’t have much of a future, so they’re leading the opposition.
The changes they’re making, are mostly cosmetic, like dolling and jazzing up a corpse.
The issues once paramount to socialism, are pushed to the side, while the molehills are made into mountains.
The movement lead by the rich and powerful.
I try to see the good and bad in everything, in science, classical liberalism, Protestantism, socialism and atheism.
I think all these movements had their pluses and minuses.
The elite tries to see opportunity, even in their opposition, especially in it.
I see science and socialism changing from things that could be used to challenge the status quo and free people in all sorts of ways, into a kind of religion, with a hierarchy of popes, bishops, cardinals, priests and laymen.
Into something that legitimizes a rigid hierarchy, a faith in woke politicians and technocrats, in woke industries, medicine and media, instead of the people having more faith in themselves, organizing things grassroots.
I think scientism and wokism could have great staying power, they could become the dominant religion of our times, for decades or even centuries to come.
Woke is the new clothes the old establishment wears, woke is in fact, rightwing.