You're Living Too Well - Stop It!

Daniel Greenfield takes on the idiot, inbred, would-be king of the limousine leftists.

Prince Charles recently visited a Mumbai shantytown and praised its "sustainability" in which residents recycle their waste and build their own homes out of whatever materials come to hand. There is of course a word for this form of "sustainability", it's called grinding poverty.

Charles is of course not the first rich European to romanticize poverty as some sort of higher spiritual principle. But it's easier to apply that brand of orientalism to India, to assume that people with brown skin who live in terrible poverty are more spiritual, rather than poor. Had Prince Charles gone back in time, he could have seen that same form of "sustainability" in London. But people do not recycle their wastes and use found objects as building materials because they are environmentalists, but because they have no choice. When posturing hipsters in the United States dig through trash cans for food, they're Freegans. But when people who have to dig through garbage cans for food do it, we call them impoverished.

But Charles' attitude is typical of the dementia of the left, which confuses poverty with moral superiority. But the idealization of poverty is the liberalism of fools. The left started out by claiming that materialism provided a saner perspective on human existence, yet the left is abandoning even that in the pursuit of some New Age notion about moral superiority emerging from misery and deprivation. The left once denounced such thinking as cruel and superstitious. Now it is embracing it wholesale, and urging Westerners to use the Third World as a model for how to live.

The left has gone past the idea that their campaign is to improve the lives of the poor, by reorganizing the mechanisms of wealth distribution, to a call to keep the poor in their place, and for everyone else who isn't an entitled environmental activist with a busy schedule of promoting cardboard housing, to join them in that state. Going from materialism to anti-materialism, the left is reaching a pitch of inhuman insanity that even the most radical socialists would not have recognized.

The rest here.