Year: 2019

Globalization, broadly defined as the movement of human beings, social practices, and cultural attitudes over great distances through time, has been a phenomenon for millennia, beginning with the out-migration of peoples from Africa into West Asia and beyond, tens of thousands of years ago. The earliest out-migration of modern humans was around 70-50,000 years ago and spread across Europe by 40,000 years ago. By 5,000 years ago, human beings could be found on every continent.

For most of this history, people lived in egalitarian societies based on communal production. Around 10,000 BCE, what is known as the Neolithic Revolution, the development of agriculture would profoundly transform the human life-way. At that time there were between one to ten million people. Some five thousand years ago, in the Fertile Crescent, social segmentation, class and sex inequality, state and law, city life, writing, and religion emerged, and civilization was born. By the first century of the common epoch (2020 years ago), world population stood at probably no more than 350 million people.

Some 800 years ago (the thirteenth century), a radically different economic system began stirring in Europe, one in which private power captured the forces of production and commandeered the political and legal apparatus for the generation of profit. This elite, the bourgeoisie, or the capitalist class took command of Western civilization and became the ruling class. This development was aided by many changes, but two stand out: the emergence of the printing press mid-fifteenth century, which allowed for the distribution of subversive ideas, and the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, which, by breaking up Catholic hegemony over culture, law, and family life, allowed for the emergence of secularism and the emancipation of economic activity from state control. By that time, world population had grown to around a billion people.

Within a few centuries, a new phase of globalization had emerged, eventually spreading across the planet, an economic system, and its attendant social logic, based on commodity production, pulling other civilizations into its sphere of influence and integrating their peoples in a global political and legal web of human and natural exploitation. By the twentieth century it was clear that a new phase of globalization was underway.

Today, capitalism is the primary economic system encountered by the vast majority of the world’s nearly eight billion people. This encounter turns most of them into proletarians (workers or employees), persons who, deprived of direct access to the means of production, must sell, at the expense of their liberty, their labor power to capitalists to obtain the means of consumption, of survival, in effect they live by renting their bodies and their minds to others who profit from these arrangements. Because their labor power usually comes with their bodies, the proletariat sacrifice their time to get by, time they could be spending on their own creative endeavors. In some parts of the world, thanks to the emergence of social democracy, many proletarians enjoy relatively comfortable lives. In other parts of the world, the life of the worker is quite precarious. But across all of these situations, the fruit of proletarian labor is appropriated by those who do not produce it, under conditions largely unchosen by the proletarian. This is why capitalism must be replaced by socialism.

Beginning in the latter eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the capitalist class, allied with other social classes, established the system of modern nation-states. Following the conceptualization of anthropologist Robert Carneiro, I define the state as an autonomous political unit, encompassing many communities within a territory, and possessing a centralized government and a common legal system with coercive institutions to enforce the law. By nation-state, I mean a state as defined above marked by a common culture and language. The institutions that the various states organized during this period strived to establish a shared national identity, rooted in an organic national identities we now more commonly refer to as “ethnicity.” Shared identity provided a framework for building solidarity beyond familial and tribal identity. The nation-state detribalized Europe and, with the minimization of the monarchy, elevated persons from subjects to citizens.

In time, the modern nation-state replaced the feudal legal and political arrangements that had become fetters on the development of the capitalist mode of production. This development, which changed the character of life in many undesirable ways, also provided enormous benefits, the opportunity for emancipation from the shackles of primitive superstition and religious duty, from the oppressions of patriarchal sexual and heterosexual structures—that is, liberation from the backward norms and values limiting self-actualization.

For the first time in history, because of democratic-republicanism, ordinary people enjoyed conditions that made it possible to break the chain of elite rule. This development triggered democratic and libertarian movements, the worker movement to empower workers, the civil rights movement to emancipate individuals from racialized categories, the feminist movement to empower women, the movement for gay and lesbian rights, and the struggle for free speech and expression. All these movements culminated in the recognition of human rights, albeit their full recognition awaits and there is presently in the West a countermovement to thwart human rights by retribalizing populations along the artificial lines or race and religion. 

Moreover, by putting science to work, the modern world generated the technological means to provide for needs of all persons. The aforementioned democratic and libertarian movements represent the struggle to more freely access these means. In turn, these developments challenge the bourgeois legal and political arrangements that mark the current epoch. This is why the working class needs a nation-state founded on the cultural values of secularism and individualism. Identity politics is the bourgeoisie means to preserve economic privileges for a few by disorganizing citizens. Citizens defeat this strategy by rejecting tribalism and demanding equality before the law.

In her 2016 book The War on Cops: How the Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, Heather Mac Donald examines the “Ferguson effect,” a phenomenon identified in 2014 by St. Louis police chief Doyle Sam Dotson III following the police shooting of Michael Brown (the event spawning the myth and the slogan “Hands up, don’t shoot”). In a St. Louis Dispatch story (“Crime Up After Ferguson”), Dotson notes that police officers, cowed by popular antipolice rhetoric, had become reluctant to fully engage their duties, emboldening lawbreakers already encouraged by popular delegitimization of law and order. Mac Donald had first broached the subject in a May 2015 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The New Nationwide Crime Wave.” She expanded her argument in The War on Cops.

The release of The War on Cops in the context of Black Lives Matter upset progressives, their anger manifest in mob action threatening Mac Donald’s person at Claremont McKenna College (five students were suspended in the aftermath), and disrupting an event at UCLA at which she was the featured speaker, both events occurring in 2017. Black Lives Matter, which began in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, had reached its zenith in 2016, but was still a powerful popular force on the identitarian left in 2017. As one can see in the embedded video, the passions are still young (albeit students continue to disrupt Mac Donald’s lectures).

At the time of the book’s release, while not enraged and rioting, I was critical of Mac Donald’s arguments, in particular her July 2016 op-ed “The Myths of Black Lives Matter,” published in the Wall Street Journal. In an op-ed published in Truth Out, “Changing the Subject from the Realities of Death by Cop,” and in a radio interview with Project Censored (out of KPFA Berkeley), I accused Mac Donald of diverting attention from killer cops by raising the perennial problem of black-on-black homicide. I have since changed my opinion about Mac Donald’s thesis, as well as the motive behind asking the public to take a look at intra-racial violence. The latter concern is marked by a shocking statistic: half of all homicides are perpetrated by blacks on other blacks, the perpetrator overwhelming male, with black males comprising only around six percent of the US population. Moreover, in the period Mac Donald researched for her book, despite a decades-long decline in the rate of homicide, the percentage change for black victims of homicide had increased in by more than 15 percent.

An analysis of police shootings published the same year as Mac Donald’s book calls into question the premise of Black Lives Matter (henceforth BLM). Roland Fryer’s 2016 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” finds that, while blacks are better than fifty percent more likely to experience some force in police encounters (adding controls that account for contextual and civilian behavior reduces these disparities), for officer-involved shootings, racial differences do not appear in the raw data. Taking into account contextual factors and civilian behavior does not change those findings. Fryer’s research challenges a popular argument concerning police-civilian interaction, namely the alleged phenomenon of “implicit race bias,” a type of cognitive stereotyping discussed at length in this regard in Charles Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald Haider-Markel’s 2014 Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship, a book I assign to my advanced criminal justice students.

The classic treatment of cognitive stereotyping in criminology is Jerome Skolnick’s 1966 “A Sketch of the Policeman’s Working Personality,” which undertakes an examination of police subculture in the context of widespread rioting in America’s ghettos amid accusations of police brutality and authoritarianism. A chief feature of the occupation is a milieu of danger, Skolnick observes, and this milieu fosters the construction of “symbolic assailants,” idealized threat types routinely confronting the officer. Stereotyping under these circumstances is a cognitive practice reducing the complexity of potentially dangerous but ambiguous situations via heightened awareness of and attention to various signs, such as attitude, body language, and dress, that may indicate potential threats. It follows that phenotypic markers used in the social construction of race would play a role in this phenomenon. Stereotypes are learned from training, peer socialization, and the greater cultural landscape, as much as from experience. Acquired stereotypes shape threat perception. It is how, for example, an officer can claim to see a weapon when no weapon is actually present.

There are other problems with the BLM narrative, which I discuss in the essay The Problematic Premise of Black Lives Matter, but to stay with the subject of implicit race bias for the moment, Mac Donald usefully summarizes the literature on this problem in an article “Are We All Unconscious Racists?” published in the City Journal in fall 2017. She cites Joshua Correll, a psychologist at the University of Colorado studying police decisions to discharge their weapon, who finds that officers are slightly quicker to identify an armed black target as armed than an armed white target and slower to identify an unarmed black target as unarmed than an unarmed white target. However, Correll does not find that officers are more likely to shoot an unarmed black target than an unarmed white one. In other words, Mac Donald summarizes, “faster cognitive processing speeds for stereotype-congruent targets (i.e., armed blacks and unarmed whites) do not result in officers shooting unarmed black targets at a higher rate than unarmed white ones.”

With respect to the different reaction times, Mac Donald wonders whether that might be attributable to the fact that “black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population” or the fact that “individuals involved in the daily drive-by shootings in American cities are overwhelmingly black.” For Mac Donald these are rhetorical questions. Indeed, as noted above, according to the Uniform Crime Report, published by the FBI, black males are responsible for roughly half of all homicides in the United States. Blacks are similarly overrepresented in other serious crime, such as robbery and burglary. In light of these statistics, I argued in my essay “Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste” that it is not police racism that causes black overrepresentation in crime, but rather black overrepresentation in police statistics is a consequence of black overrepresentation in the types of crime on which the police focus.  

Even more damning to the implicit race bias claim than Correll’s failure to show that indications of bias explain police decisions to shoot civilians is Washington State professor Lois James’s finding that officers waited longer before shooting an armed black target than an armed white target and, moreover, were three times less likely to shoot an unarmed black target than an unarmed white target. James hypothesizes that, because of the contemporary racial climate surrounding policing, officers second-guess themselves when confronting black suspects. This finding provides evidence for Dotson’s Ferguson effect. Reflecting on his findings, in the NEBR research noted earlier, Ronald Fryer theorizes that the consequences of shooting suspects are sufficient to deter police officers from doing so to an extent that obviates any racial bias they may harbor.

It was more than merely digesting the research that supports Mac Donald’s argument that changed my mind (although, perhaps that should be sufficient). More broadly, I have reconsidered my attitudes about law and order in light of my humanist and socialist values. Thus readers will be happy to know that I have not jettisoned my leftwing values in this reconsideration but instead have more sharply focused them. I revisited the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as well as those of the left realist approach in criminology, where I was reminded of my true choice of comrade—the proletarian worker—and the power of the historical materialist methodology.

This reappraisal led me away from the left idealism that underpins critical criminology (I have long identified myself as a critical criminologist) and towards a standpoint emphasizing the preconditions for decent communal interactions that indicate the need for the police function in a complex society—that is public safety. This standpoint is reflected in the scholarly and popular contributions by the proponents of left realism, to whom readers will soon be introduced, if they do not already know of them. I differentiate these perspectives in this essay and suggest a practical way forward on the vital challenge of meeting the security needs of working class families, one that involves engaging the work of secular conservatives such as Heather Mac Donald. Academics and policymakers must confront the alarming rate of homicide in black communities, for therein lies the explanation for crime and violence.

To this end, I argue, the left should cease rationalizing inner-city violence by reducing action solely to abstract social structure. The left treats black street criminals as if they have no or diminished agency, as if they have no or retarded capacity to choose not to violate the rights of others, as if they are not or lesser moral beings. I hear in contemporary leftist rhetoric echoes of elite white paternalism and black infantilization. I hear, “They can’t help it.” Moreover, progressives feed the public the lie that the problems of the black community are the result of white privilege and systemic racism, rhetoric that breeds race resentment and hatred rather than promotes the class solidarity necessary for changing the structures associated with the criminogenic conditions that disorder communities and breed interpersonal violence, what the realist Marxist literature describes as a process of “demoralization.”

Situating crime and violence in the desperate conditions of urban life under capitalism helps us understand why many feel they have no stake in conforming to the fundamental moral rules of decent human interaction. But it does not follow that the victims of criminal violence, disproportionately black residents of affected neighborhoods, are receiving their just deserts. This is at least of the implications of the rhetoric. In this, the left is engaged in its own version of victim blaming. Orthodox Marxism is in contrast unkind to those who respond to immiserative and oppressive conditions with interpersonal violence, making clear the correct choice of comrades. Progressive rhetoric, by denying or downplaying human agency, the result of reducing individuals to suspect abstract categories, substitutes for collective political action frustration and helplessness. Because of its failure to work from a class analytical framework, and instead from its penchant for putting race matters central to its politics, progressivism is not a way forward.

* * *

This past June, I noted on Freedom and Reason that the country received some good news in this year’s Uniform Crime Report by the FBI. After increases in crime and violence during 2014-2017, rates of murder, robbery, and aggravated assault—as well as rates of burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft—all declined in 2018. I noted in that entry that rates dropped in cities of all sizes, covering 300 million Americans, and in all regions of the United States. I cautioned readers that it is too soon to tell whether the country is back on track with the record declines it enjoyed in the many years prior to 2014, but the news was welcome, as less crime is good for working people, especially those who live in high poverty areas.

I amend those observations here with the bad news that, despite the improvement in crime rates in the short term, America’s central cities continue to suffer from unacceptably high rates of violent crime. This fact makes the problem of popular action against law and order a pressing matter. Indeed, it is the significant increase in serious crime occurring during Barack Obama’s second presidential term that moved Mac Donald to produce The War on Cops. “The crime surge is reversing a two decades long decline,” she laments, “during which American cities vanquished a 1960s-era notion that had made urban life miserable for so many.”

Mac Donald identifies a line of thinking on the left that emerged in the 1960s that high rates of crime were “a symptom of social failure in the governmental neglect, or even an understandable expression of protest.” In this view, crime was the predictable result of “poverty and racism.” Mac Donald refers to this line of thinking as the “root causes” thesis and notes the New Left’s claim that “routine behaviors such as walking down the street, going to a park, or operating a store would necessarily remain fraught with fear and the possibility of violence” until society roots out the causes of crime.

Sixties radicals portrayed law and order—cops, courts, and corrections—as an element in the structure of oppression that perpetuates the criminogenic conditions of urban areas; the targeting and unequal treatment of racial minorities represented the authoritarian reflex of a racist society. In their view, it followed that reforming and curtailing the institutions of police, prosecution, and prison were necessary steps for achieving social justice. “Under the influence of this ‘root causes’ conceit,” Mac Donald writes, “acres of city space were ceded to thieves and thugs, to hustlers and graffiti artist. Disorder and decay became the urban norm.” Thus the result of liberalizing the criminal justice process was a drastic rise in crime and violence, which a review of Uniform Crime Reports from that period confirms, as least on the basis of police reports.

In patterns possibly reflecting the rhythms of American capitalism, rates of crime, especially criminal violence, increased drastically during the 1970s and remained high throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, at many points reaching record levels (see chart below). 

The problem of crime in the post-civil rights period sparked a long national debate about the validity of the progressive domestic policy approach that had marked US politics in the post-WWII period. I will leave the details of that literature to one side and focus instead on a book published at the peak of violent crime in America that attempted to identify the character of the debate, Cornel West’s 1993 Race Matters. In this book, West distinguishes “conservative behaviorists,” i.e. those who emphasize cultural factors and personal responsibility, from “liberal structuralists,” i.e. those who identify patterns of economic inequality and occupational and residential segregation. Both suggest governmental solutions to the problem (police and prisons for the former, reparations and social welfare for the latter). However, in West’s view, both sides miss the core source of the problem, namely the nihilism eating at the heart of the black community, a condition evidenced by a widespread and profound personal despair and sense of collective worthlessness. For West, the problem of inner-city crime and violence is an existential one, brought about by a complex of historic and contemporary economic and social factors.

Falling into the camp of West’s “conservative behaviorist,” Mac Donald is too dismissive of the role structural inequality plays in weakening the moral integrity of urban areas. She has her own “root causes” thesis: urban crime is ultimately the result of the breakdown of the black family structure and the emergence of an oppositional culture that rejects bourgeois values of achievement, community, and lawfulness. There is something to this argument. However, ideological myopia notwithstanding, Mac Donald is right to criticize the standpoint—West’s “liberal structuralist”—that depicts inner city criminals as victims of racist oppression and therefore less accountable than others for wrongful action. Moreover, Mac Donald and I would agree that the claims of the New Left, however much empirical support they may enjoy, provide no cause for the police to stand down in the face of criminal violence.

Suffice to say, Mac Donald’s account—that the 1960s-era trend in depolicing and decarceration are implicated in rising crime rates—is compelling. And, in the end, the conservative behaviorists won the debate. By the 1990s, Democratic Party nominees for president and vice-president, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, built their 1992 campaign around promises to “get tough on crime” and “end welfare as we know it.” Perhaps in a cynical effort to secure a political base, Democrats moved to the right on social issues, explicitly preying on public anxieties about public disorder. They were a different kind of Democrat, they said in campaign stops marked by youthful energy. In high-profile media events, Clinton would break from campaign trail to return to Arkansas, where he was governor, to sign death warrants for condemned prisoners.

The rightward shift in the Democratic stance on crime was in part attributable to the fact that Republicans routinely polled high on the issue of crime, finding widespread popularity with conservative “get tough” policies, despite the failure of such policies to curb crime over their twelve years of executive power. Policy shifts in the Democratic Party also reflected the movement of the world economy towards open markets: a reaction to the social disintegration wrought by transnationalism. Identifying and controlling deviance was an ideological tool for maintaining social control at home, putting the finger on the usual suspects, polarizing public opinion, and marshaling popular support for a police state.

Crucially, the Democrats’ legislative initiative and policy changes built upon a foundation already established. “Starting in the late 1970s,” writes Mac Donald, “legislators demanded convicted criminals serve more their sentences; habitual felons were finally locked up for lengthy prison stays.” She contends that “police leaders challenged the ‘root causes’ concept with a countervailing idea: the police could actually prevent crime and in so doing we make civilized urban life possible again.” Mac Donald thus credits the historic drop in crime and violence the nation has enjoyed over the last two decades to the bipartisan expansion of the criminal justice apparatus and an emphasis on law and order. The cause of the historic drop in crime and violence is a complex of cultural trends, social forces, and law and policy changes. The emphasis on law and order certainly played a role.

* * *

As I have been arguing, there is a lot to the historical account Mac Donald presents. However, typically missing in theories about the combination of forces that led policymakers to reassert law and order is the role played by a community of criminologists in Great Britain that—from the left—bolstered Thatcherite law and order politics from the right. Among the founding works are Ian Taylor’s 1982 Law and Order: Arguments for Socialism, Jock Young and John Lea’s 1984 What is to Be Done About Law and Order, and Richard Kinsey, Lea and Young’s 1986 Losing the Fight Against Crime. (See “Marxist Theories of Criminal Justice and Criminogenesis” for an overview.) Their realism stood in stark contrast to the idealism of the New Left, represented the critical criminologists, such figures as Richard Quinney, William Chambliss, and Stephen Spitzer. Quinney’s 1970 The Social Reality of Crime arguably defined the genre. “Crime,” Quinney writes, “is a definition of human conduct in a politically organized society,” one characterized by segmentation and power asymmetries.

The message of the critical approach to understanding crime was for the police to stand down and for states to empty their prisons, as these represented the machinery of capitalist oppression. However, the left realist had not been seduced by Europe’s post-Marxist (postmodernist, poststructuralist) turn, articulated by such flamboyant French philosophers as Michel Foucault, or the social constructionism of sociology’s phenomenology school, represented by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, methods that were increasingly dominating humanities and social science curricula of the nation’s universities. In contrast, the left realists reached back to the foundation of historiographical and social scientific thinking about the problems of inequality and disorder, ground tilled by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of the materialist conception of history, or historical materialism. I next turn to a summary of this foundation.

* * *

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels refer to the lumpenproletariat—usually translated as the “dangerous class”—in these rather derogatory terms: “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society.” (Marx and Engels anticipated the fascist method of recruiting from the most impoverished segments of the proletariat the disaffected to serve as instruments in authoritarian action.) They admit that the lumpenproletariat “may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution,” but that the conditions under which they live “prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” The lumpenproletariat was thus identified as a problem not only for capitalism, but for the working class. Engels had earlier detailed proletarian life chances in Manchester in his 1845 The Conditions of the Working Class in England. There he identifies a segment of society excluded from the labor market, burdened by a low social status, lacking class consciousness, often hostile towards other members of his species. There was in this analysis recognition of the desperation that accompanies economic deprivation. Without a stable source of income, the lumpenproletariat turned to illegalities to survive. Thus crime results from deprivation.

What are we to make of these frank and rather harsh observations from the master theorists of the proletarian movement? In light of Engels’ portrait of city life—abject poverty, neighborhood overcrowding, substandard housing, vice industries and their corrosive effects (alcohol, gambling, prostitution)—the lumpenproletariat should be seen as those constituents of capitalist society alienated from mainstream normative expectations. This is the criminogenic link between structural inequality, life lived beyond the discipline of the workplace, and the social problems that fall to the state to police, an institution established to manage the dangerous class and the general disorder inequality systematically generated. Engels writes in the Conditions of the Working Class of the problem of a demoralization in which a stake in conformity is lost due to estrangement from hegemonic bourgeois and upright working-class values. The attitude of what-do-I-have-to-lose proves the inadequacy of the capitalist state to provide the preconditions for normal human existence.

In a 1853 New York Tribune article “Capital Punishment,” Marx rejects the theory of punishment presented by German idealists and instead blames crime on the societal conditions. At issue is Kant and Hegel’s contention that by depriving the victim of his rights, the criminal abdicates his own. Quoting Hegel: “Punishment is the right of the criminal. It is an act of his own will. The violation of right has been proclaimed by the criminal as his own right. His crime is the negation of right. Punishment is the negation of this negation, and consequently the affirmation of right, solicited and forced upon the criminal by himself.” However, Marx argues that, while this formula respects the criminal as a human being by honoring his agency, it does not provide an account of the criminal’s mental state and action. It is not, therefore, an explanation. The introduction of free will into criminal responsibility thus treats the problem abstractly rather than concretely. In doing so, society holds itself innocent of the conditions that ultimately cause crime, of the situation that systematically generates the criminogenic forces that imperil public safety. Society’s innocence perpetuates the status quo, and the status quo is criminogenic. Marx condemns a society that finds no other recourse against crime but the punishment response.

However, Marx and Engels do not romanticize the criminal in the manner of the left idealist. “Primitive rebellion”—a reaction to one’s conditions without any theoretical or authentic proletarian consciousness to guide it—is, as Marx and Engels make clear in The Communist Manifesto, a problem for working class politics. In The Conditions of the Working Class in England, Engels writes that of the many forms rebellion can take, “the first, the crudest, the most horrible form” is crime. Marx and Engels recognize that there were other avenues for paupers to change the conditions of their existence besides crime. They could, for instance, organize themselves politically for collective action (such as the Black Panther Party). So that, while the conditions explain it, they do not absolve society of the need to deal with it. Crime as an atomized revolt against the conditions of capitalism imperils those who should be the criminal’s comrades. Criminals are not working class heroes.

* * *

Fast forward to the recent past where we find left realism, having grown in favor alongside the Thatcherite mood, proving influential on the New Labor government of the mid-1990s (Tony Blair and Gordon Brown), which pursued a third way in accord with the New Democrats of the United States (the latter a “movement” organized by the Democratic Leadership Council, established in 1985, and the “radically pragmatic” Progressive Policy Institute, established in 1989). As with Clinton’s crime bill, New Labor’s 1998 Crime and Disorder Act promoted stiff punishments for wrongdoing while also going after the alleged problem of “social exclusion,” the view that denials of the opportunity to prosper and thrive is associated with higher rates of crime and violence, which in turn deters investments in communities that could address the problem of poverty and unemployment.

Jock Young was not convinced of this thesis, popular among Tories. For Young, the secular climb in crime rates defied an easy economic explanation. Young was skeptical of the deprivation thesis and instead latched onto Merton’s notion of anomie (or classic strain theory) that saw street crime produced in the disjuncture of cultural desire and structural means. It was not that those who committed crime did so because they existed outside mainstream culture, but rather because the structure of capitalist society was criminogenic. In his miserable state, the primitive rebel comes to see his antagonist not as the capitalist mode of production that fails to provide the means for his desire, but social control agents and rivals in his community—educators, police officers, gang members—who are oppressing him. His limited consciousness leaves him vulnerable to the lure of rhetoric blaming his circumstances on actors in his environment not on the structure of his situation. 

The contemporary rhetoric of racial victimization and “white privilege” gives permission to some of those who struggle in these conditions to blame their problems on his brothers and sisters who do not suffer his situation but nonetheless his class position, workers living and working beyond the inner-city streets, fences, overpasses, and walls that corral the descendants of slaves, share croppers, and migrant agricultural workers. They do not see others exploited by the same system, but rather view them with resentment. Such rhetoric fractures the working class, dragging the worker’s attention away from his class problem and towards the identitarian politics of imagined communities—those of ethnicity, race, and religion—preparing him for retaliation against perceived antagonists, which most often includes those in his immediate environment. The street criminal disrespects public safety because he perceives authority as the cause of his misery and so he disrespects authority and its associated normative demands. This, combined with crime and violence as available sources of economic opportunities (the process of criminal embeddedness), according to criminologist John Hagan, “play a role in maintaining the inner city on the moral, as well as physical, periphery of the economic system.”

* * *

Claims of racial oppression fuel rebellion and resentment while misidentifying the actual enemy. The rebellion is primitive because its source (structural inequality) is real, but its solution (scientific class analysis and collective political action on this basis) lies beyond its consciousness. Tribalism stand in the place of praxis. As a consequence, the lumpenproletariat visits his anger and frustration upon his brothers and sisters instead of their common oppressor, and makes trouble for those who are tasked with improving the public safety of his neighborhood. This was illustrated with the demise of the Black Panther Party, as I discuss on my blog in “The Black Panthers: Black Radicalism and the New Left.” There I write about how the shattering of the truce the Panthers had negotiated among street gangs saw the gangs soon devolving to the self-destructive tradition of continual warfare. “With inner city conditions rapidly deteriorating amid the mounting crisis of late capitalism,” I write, “gang violence escalated over the next two decades.”

Poverty and its manifestation in tribal thinking and primitive rebellion are corrosive to class solidarity. Today, the identitarian left, the BLM progressive, contributes to the fracturing of the working class by pitting the lumpenproletariat against those forces whose function is to secure his would-be comrades from crime and violence. Left idealism harbors the sentiments of anarchism; it dulls the instruments of the proletariat, that is the machinery of the state, the legal structure that can provide the legitimate preconditions for adequate life, by attacking the legitimacy of the state-itself. From a left realist perspective, the fact that the lumpenproletariat takes out his anger and frustration on other members of the proletariat is not lost in an idealism that forgets the importance of class struggle over identity—i.e. ethnicity, race, religion—and the role that functioning government plays in improving the conditions of the working class, the true source of aspirations and access to the juridical and legal instruments to achieve those aspirations.

Left idealism reflects a culture that disrespects the values of the enlightenment, of liberalism and secularism, dismissing these as “bourgeois values,” and substitutes for them values that leave the central city dweller receptive to reactionary intrigue that comes not from the fascist right but from the progressive left. Meanwhile, there is a leftwing politics that would use the state to restore order to cities and produce an environment where workers of all ethnicities, races, and religions could come together and struggle collectively for a democratic socialist order. The question for the left is whether the tools of law and order should be ceded to rightwing authoritarians who would use them for purposes of entrenching capitalist power—or whether they should be used by the left to take political control of working class communities.

* * *

New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani and police commissioner William Bratton were advocates of “broken windows policing,” a theory advanced by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in the March 1982 edition of The Atlantic. Their thesis was that tolerating forms of disorder as graffiti, litter, public drunkenness, and rundown property signals that social control has collapsed. This thesis was reinforced by the observations of Harvard sociologist turned policymaker and politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a widely reprinted article “Defining Deviance Down,” first published in a 1993 issue of The American Scholar, in which he contends that treating non-serious offenses less seriously signals that serious offenses are not as serious. He writes that American society has “become accustomed to alarming levels of crime and destructive behavior.”

Government response to crime seems to have had a positive effect. The success of New York City in reducing crime saw “broken windows” become a model for other American cities. The drop in crime, Mac Donald contends, “revitalized cities across the country.” “The biggest beneficiaries of that crime decline with a law-abiding residents of minority neighborhoods,” she writes. “Senior citizens could go out to shop without fear getting mugged. Businesses moved into formally desolate areas. Children no longer had to sleep in bathtubs to avoid getting hit by stray bullets. And tens of thousands of individuals were spared premature death by homicide.” All this is true. Crime rates plummeted after the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.

* * *

In contrast to the narrative that portrays the criminal justice system as merely an apparatus for controlling the proletariat, as the machinery of oppression, what I have identified in this entry as left realism, the Old Left attitude attributes crime to the conditions of capitalism, such as relative material deprivation, political marginalization, and demoralization. For the left idealist, the notion of a dangerous class is ideology. For the left realist, capitalism underpins conditions that are dangerous for working class people. Left realism is a response of the New Left’s failure to consider the suffering of working class at the hands of these dangers and for letting the right to monopolize law and order discourse.

To be sure, the left realists are not in the same camp as Mac Donald and her ilk. Mac Donald does not blame capitalism for the problem of crime and disorder. At the same time, the left realist argues for measures associated with conservative criminal justice policy. “Environmental and public precautions against crime are always dismissed by left idealists and reformers as not relating to the heart of the matter,” Lea and Young write in their 1984 What is to be Done About: Law and Order? “On the contrary, the organization of communities in an attempt to pre-empt crime is of the utmost importance.” What Heather Mac Donald’s The War on Cops brings into view is the failure of left idealism, and of leftwing progressivism generally, to grasp the need to reclaim the principle of law and order for the working class. It reminds us of our choice of comrades (I am borrowing this phrase from Ignazio Silone 1955 essay in Dissent).

Finally, Mac Donald registers concern over the future of the legitimacy of policing in the eyes of those who are most likely to encounter the police. In the preface to the paperback edition she writes, “Social norms, the legitimacy of authority, the rule of law—all are denigrated as the machinery of oppression, and the police are tarred as the most conspicuous embodiment of American injustice.” Elsewhere, she writes, “However much the recent crime increase threatens the vitality of American cities—and thousands of lives—it is not, in itself, the greatest danger in today’s war on cops. The greatest danger lies, rather, in the delegitimization of law and order itself.” “Riots are returning to the urban landscape,” she laments. “Police officers are regularly pelted with bricks and water bottles during the course of the duties.”

Antipolice rhetoric, especially the claim that policing is a manifestation of white supremacy, emboldens some members of society to be unjustifiably defiant. “Black criminals who have been told that the police are racist are more likely to resist arrest, requiring the arresting officer to use force and risk an even more violent encounter,” Mac Donald writes. This is not just a problem in inner city ghettos; anarchists in cities with progressive mayors are on the move, becoming more aggressive since the publication of The War on Cops, political elites telling commanders to order their officers to stand down.

“If the present lies about law enforcement continue,” writes MacDonald, “civilized urban life may once again break down.” While this may sound like hyperbole, the cost to those who live in neighborhoods where this attitude is prevalent suffer nonetheless. And it makes policing more dangerous. And that makes the police more dangerous.

Remember when President George W. Bush took the United States to full-scale aggressive war by lying to the public? American military personnel were killed, maimed, and traumatized in that affair. Thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed, maimed, traumatized. The war left a power vacuum filled by Islamists seeking to restore the Caliphate and impose the horrors of sharia on bewildered populations. Remember? How much money did you spend on that? You’re still paying for it. Iraqis are still paying for it. 

In 2008, when it became obvious to nearly everybody that Bush had lied to lead the nation into an illegal war, Donald Trump, then a private citizen, expressed surprise that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “didn’t do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush. It was almost—it just seemed like she was going to really look to impeach Bush and get him out of office, which personally I think would’ve been a wonderful thing.” “Impeaching him?” asked Wolf Blitzer, who was conducting the interview. “Absolutely,” Trump responded. “For the war. For the war. Well, he lied. He got us into the war with lies, and I mean, look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant, and they tried to impeach him, which was nonsense. And yet Bush got us into this horrible war with lies. By lying. By saying they had weapons of mass destruction. By saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true.” 

Check out this exchange I had with then private citizen @realDonaldTrump on Oct. 15, 2008. We spoke about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and he then offered his thoughts about impeachment. pic.twitter.com/mXlsG9SjbB

— Wolf Blitzer (@wolfblitzer) December 18, 2019

But Pelosi couldn’t push to impeach Bush—Democrats green-lighted the war! Besides, aggressive war—and even torture—isn’t really a problem for Democrats. Barack Obama did nothing as president to hold members of the previous administration accountable for lying to the public or for perpetrating war crimes. He was too busy warmongering himself. Bombing Libya into the slave trade. Destabilizing Syria. And so on. For this and other actions, his administration has been declared “scandal-free” by the true believers. Michelle adores George. And Predator drones? Watch out Jonas Brothers. A Clinton presidency? Poor Qaddafi. “We came. We saw. He died.”

Last night, along party lines, the House of Representatives impeached President Donald Trump over a suggestion of a quid pro quo with a Ukrainian official. The charges: “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress.” I watched the debate. It reminded me of just how mediocre Democrats are. At best. Republicans did better, but they should have hammered home the fact that witnesses called by Democrats could only testify to presuming there was a quid pro quo—an alleged arrangement that never happened, since military aid to Ukraine (half a billion dollars) was delivered before the deadline. And maybe they should have advised a member to not compare Trump to Jesus. Presumably the case now goes to the Senate, where Trump is expected to be acquitted.

On July 25, 2019, President Trump had a telephone conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukraine was scheduled to receive US money (some $400 billion) earmarked for security spending. Trump was concerned about corruption in Ukraine (an ongoing problem). Among the things they discussed was Trump’s concern that the Ukrainian government possessed information concerning criminal activities by US politicians, seemingly something the executive would be interested in, given that he oversees the Justice Department.

One item that interested Trump in particular was Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Joe could potentially be President of the United States. Hunter had accepted a board seat on Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings, which gave the appearance of a political favor to Joe, who was at the time the Vice-President of the United States. Biden admitted to an audience during a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations that he threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless they fired a prosecutor he did not like. He bragged, “I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

Democrats charged that Trump’s interest in this matter signaled an attempt to induce the Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 US election by publicly accounting an investigation into the Joe Biden, held by many in the US press to be the frontrunner for the Democratic Party nomination for president.

The nation does not need this impeachment. What it needs is a full-blown investigation into the machinations of the US intelligence apparatus in attempting to thwart the will of the people and what Democrats knew about what was going on and when they knew it. It looks all the world as if a rumor was planted among government officials purporting a quid pro quo so that witnesses could be produced who would “confirm” the existence of one. They were suckered. Once the pieces were in place, a “whistleblower” (a CIA operative) pulled the lever by alerting House Democrats, obsessed from the moment Trump assumed office to “impeach the motherfucker,” as Rashidi Tlaib put it.

Democrats either fell for the ruse or were part of the conspiracy (I’m sure most of them were suckered). No witnesses presented to Congress had any such knowledge. They all admitted under cross-examination to presuming there was a quid pro quo. It should have been embarrassing for Democrats, but the corporate media had their backs. For true believers, it really doesn’t matter what the excuse is for removing Trump from office. He was always an illegitimate president.

Before the Ukraine fiasco, the deep state tried to create an illusion that Trump was a Russia agent. As The Intercept and a handful of other sources told us, the story that Trump was a Russian agent was a hoax. The Ukraine Affair certainly looks like one, too. Behind all of it is an attempt to delegitimize if not remove a sitting president.

US intelligence agencies sought to compromise the Trump campaign and undermine his presidency from the very beginning. Glen Greenwald writes in “The Inspector General’s Report on the 2016 FBI Spying Reveals a Scandal of Historic Magnitude: Not Only for the FBI but Also the U.S. Media” that “the FBI’s gross abuse of its power—its serial deceit—is so grave and manifest that it requires little effort to demonstrate it. In sum, the IG Report documents multiple instances in which the FBI—in order to convince a FISA court to allow it spy on former Trump campaign operative Carter Page during the 2016 election—manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating evidence, and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.”

The country should pause and reflect on this. FBI agents lied to a FISA court to spy on the Trump campaign. They manufactured a story that Trump was a Russian agent. When that proved to be a hoax, somebody (at the FBI? CIA?) orchestrated the Ukraine affair. Where are Democrats condemning this? The deep state is surveilling candidates for office—and once they are in office—and it’s Trump rigging the 2020 election. Who’s running this fucking country? Determined to keep up the charade, the Democrats pushed on with impeachment. They got what they wanted.

Why would the establishment and the corporate media go to such great lengths to undermine a democratically-elected president? Because the globalist establishment then and now are terrified by what the Trump presidency represents: the possible curtailment of transnational economic integration, mass immigration, and the project to disorganize the population, and, by doing so, refocusing public consciousness on questions of popular sovereignty, national integrity, and social class. So they conspire to undermine a duly-elected president. The conspiracy includes the corporate media, including social media, the former refusing to report the name of the whistleblower, the latter hunting down and deleting any mention of the whistleblower by name. And in its reporting on the IG report, the establishment media is failing to alert the public to the truth that the nation’s intelligence agencies are working against the public interest.

The situation is so bad that the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, confessed to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC that Donald Trump is “really dumb” for picking a fight with intelligence officials. “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community—they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” He said that “even for a practical supposedly hard-nosed businessman, [Trump’s] being really dumb to do this.” Was Schumer recalling what happened to John F. Kennedy in 1963?

But the attempt to gaslight the masses is coming undone. Democrats are besmirching a president’s reputation in order to preserve the status quo, the agenda of the corporate neoliberal order that pays the piper. The globalists are terrified that they are losing sway. They have apparently lost the Republicans (we mustn’t completely rule out the possibility of a more sophisticated game being played). The Bush era is over—and it was Trump who told the truth about that dynasty. Surrounded by Republicans during the primary, Trump shamed them over that legacy. And with the fall of the House of Bush, so falls the House of Clinton. The power elite see their influence slipping away in Europe, as well. The conservatives just won in a landslide. Brexit is coming. The dominoes are lined up to fall. The European Union is fracturing, and with it the project of transnational economic integration. The elite are quaking before the movement to restore national integrity and faith in Western civilization. While the left pathetically hitches its wagon to the neoliberal elite, many driven by paranoia over fascism and racism, the fruit of identitarian framing.

It is crucial to understand that the capitalist class is not monolithic. There are different fractions. Trump hails from the nationalist wing. He always has been an economic nationalist. His politics are admitted and obvious. This is why Democrats are so eager to get him Bush, Clinton, Obama—these figures are functionaries of the global establishment, the transnationalists, the trilateralists. They must get rid of Trump or at the very least delegitimize him because he—like the Tories across the pond—throw a monkey wrench into global economic integration and the project to erase nation-states and diminish Western culture. Whatever you think of patriots, Trump is one—at least he is more patriotic than the globalists, who have other overriding loyalties. And Trump has done something astonishing: he has dragged Republicans out of the globalist circle. And while they are hardly the socialists we need in this moment, the right is the force defending Western civilization at the moment. Without the right, the West would be overrun with migrants and spiral headlong into an authoritarian world order run by technocrats.

Unless I am being bamboozled, this entire episode shows how ordinary in intelligence the power elite truly are. Convinced they’re always the smartest person in the room, the Davos crowd thinks the masses can’t see through the web of deceit they weaved. To be sure, it took time. But the worm is turning. That the progressive left follows the neoliberals in oblivious shows how vacuous the slogan of “democratic socialism” is. These aren’t socialists. They’re the handmaidens of corporate rule.

I did not vote for Trump. I will not vote for Trump. But seeing Democrats using the impeachment process for electoral advantage (a strategy almost certain to backfire) reinforces my decision, now more than a decade old, to withdraw consent from the two-party system by voting for candidates that lie outside of it—or not voting at all (although I have yet to exercise that option). It’s bad enough the Democrats don’t have an agenda I can support. It’s bad enough that that they enable the neoliberal dismantling of the Republic and the progressive deformation of our values, law, and culture. Today, Democrats misuse the Constitution to delegitimize a president they could not defeat at the polls—a president that a major party representing the authentic interests of the working class could have easily defeated.

Sunday is, for many in my culture, a day of religious observances. As many of my Facebook friends and acquaintances know, I often take this sacred moment to share a little antitheism. I do this to get folks to consider things in a different light, namely the light of secularism and, more broadly, human rights. Today’s bit of light is a hypothetical (albeit I lift some verbiage from a website of the character I mock here) that speaks to the secular foundations of the American Republic and the Establishment Clause, which forbids public institutions from promoting religion.

Is there a public relations outfit called “Book a Christian” (BAC) promoting Christianity by creating sympathy for persons persecuted as Christians, seeking to improve Christianity’s image by offering Christians who will talk about forgiveness, love, mercy, and tolerance?

If there were, I think some items on the “About” tab on its web page might look something like these:

“What is Book a Christian? BAC celebrates the talents, expertise, and stories found within the Christian American community. It takes pride in its diverse and engaging roster of speakers, performers, and artists. BAC strives to provide speakers and performers of high caliber.”

“Why Book a Christian? Christians are often talked about, but not always heard from, and we strive to change that. By giving Christians and their allies the opportunity to share their narratives, skills, and expertise, we are breaking down barriers, combating negative stereotypes, and giving voice to the diverse and authentic Christian American experiences.”

Imagine that one of BAC’s stars, let’s say his name is Norman Crosby, represents himself as the victim of widespread Christophobia, as well as the human face of Christianity. Imagine Crosby telling a harrowing story of surviving an attack by two terrorists at a Christmas Party in which fourteen Christians were killed. Injuries suffered in this event left Crosby permanently disabled. He tells a story of compassion, empathy, and forgiveness. These qualities, he will tell his audiences, represent the true spirit of Christianity. You can take his word for it. His identity is his proof.

Wouldn’t this sound to some folks like a project to spread Christian theology (an irrational, patriarchal, and heterosexist ideology responsible for a lot of pain and suffering in the world) by manufacturing the illusion that Christians were a persecuted lot in need of special consideration? Wouldn’t it sound like resistance to medievalism, atavistic desire, the child terrorizing myths of hell and eternal damnation, the imposition of Christian ideas in public spaces, and the other injustices of Christianity was being portrayed as the work of a hateful army of bigots and xenophobes, ignoramuses who don’t know what’s in the Bible, who are uninformed about all the wonderful things Christians have done throughout history? Have they even read the Bible? Do they even know what’s in it? Was it the English translation?

Certainly such a PR outfit is free to exist. But how should one feel if taxpayer dollars were spent on pro-Christian propaganda by booking BAC speakers, performers, and artists at public institutions, such as a university? Not a student group booking Crosby, but an initiative of the university itself. What if it were turned into an all day event in which other Christians were gathered to tell their stories before wide-eyed audiences desperate to signal their ecumenical virtue. What if students were led in Christian prayers and encouraged to express positive sentiments about Christian doctrine?

As most of you who read my blog know, I am not a Christian. I have never been a Christian. I never will be a Christian. Christianity is responsible for a lot of what is wrong in the world. I have personally suffered on its account. Others have suffered far worse than me. The good that advocates of Christianity purport to offer is found elsewhere, for example, in the rational ethics of secular humanism. It is not found in other religions. I would be personally offended if such an event were held at a public institution at my expense. My tax dollars already do too much work for religious institutions and practices.

This is not just a matter of my feelings. We live in a secular country, one that, at least in principle, separates church and state. The government, we are told in our foundational system of rights, explicitly enshrined in the first of these, shall never respect an establishment of religion. Teachers are not to lead students in prayers—not in our public spaces on our time and on our dime. What they do on their own time using their own money is their own business; those who subscribe to religious beliefs are free to exercise them in any manner than does not infringe on the liberty of any other persons. That’s the bargain: you get to believe in absurd things; I’m not forced to pay for it.

It’s wrong for the government to enlist the resources I provide with my labor in the promotion of religious ideas—whether I agree with them or not. My country is founded on this principle. Such an event as I describe here, if there ever were one, should be held in a church, or some other private space, funded by private interests.

If such an event happened at a public institution funded by tax dollars and I missed it, I would ask that it never happen again.

Brexit was a vote for sovereignty and democracy against neoliberalism and technocracy. Workers want their country back. They desire a return to the nation-state, to preserve their traditions, their culture, and their ability to make decisions for their families and communities. The globalists tried to deny the popular will. They thwarted Brexit in Parliament. Labour promised a do-over. Workers weren’t having it. Labour was crushed on December 12, 2019. The Conservative party claimed 364 seats. Labour could claim only 203, less than a third of the total. Conservatives smashed through Labour’s “red wall.” Conservatives were particularly strong in those Labour strongholds that voted to leave the European Union in 2016.

What happened in the election is not a mystery. One could see it coming with the rise of Donald Trump in the United States, the uprisings in France, and the right turn in Scandinavia. If Democrats and Labour are going to sell out the working class, if working people feel they have no way of protecting their interests in that arena with these parties, then the people will turn to defending their way of life, and if they believe that means voting conservative, then that’s what they’ll do. Europeans, as are Americans, are increasingly fed up with globalization, mass immigration, multiculturalism, the stifling of free thought, cosmopolitan gaslighting—as they should be. In this moment, it is the political right that is perceived to be at the ready to defend civilization. It is the degradation of the left that has created the vacuum filled by rightwing politics.

Predictably, the corporate media jumped on the election results. Desperate to push establishment Democrats in the US, NBC News carried the headline: “Corbyn’s UK Defeat was Bad News for Sanders, Warren and America’s Left.” The article went on to say, “A socialist or very left-leaning message—inspired to turn out young voters and unite the working class—simply didn’t work.” But that’s not what happened. This was not a rebellion against socialist messaging, but against globalism. Voters moved on the grounds of popular sovereignty. Indeed, the West is in a populist moment, a reaction to the rise of neoliberalism and technocracy. The left offers no realistic working-class alternative to globalism because they are part of it, integrated with the power elite, servants to the project of transnational economic integration, manifest at the political-ideological level as progressivism and identitarianism, using the language of diversity, equity, and justice to cover a betrayal of the class interests of those for whom they presume to speak. In light of this, the 2020 Sanders, if he were to secure the nomination, would likely lose, not because of his working class politics, but because he is increasingly burying them beneath the alienating rhetoric of the cultural elite. Sanders has likely moved too far in the direction of Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, progressives calling themselves socialists who paint a vision of the future workers don’t want to live in. The 2016 Sanders was a populist. That’s the Sanders who could win. At this point, it’s Trump election to lose. And it doesn’t look like anything he does is self-sabotaging. Like Boris Johnson, Trump doesn’t apologize at a time when people are tired of apologizing. He doubles-down with good effect. To be sure, he is himself an elite, but he speaks the language of the people, and he conveys their frustrations.

At the level of collective affect, working people are sick of elites trashing them. Calling them “bigots” and “racist” affirms the reason they voted for Trump. It’s part of the reason the British working class voted Conservative. They aren’t motivated by bigotry or racism. This is a bogus and tired narrative. Western civilization has largely overcome the racism of yesterday. Workers sick of seeing their standards of living erode while being shamed for it. They’re tired of their culture being depicted as backwards and illegitimate. They’re tired of a new racism (not one lefty academics talk about), where those who are of European descent (who haven’t managed yet to define themselves as “persons of color”) are depicted as the bane of the world, said to be responsible for crimes they couldn’t possibly have perpetrated. The truth of race is this: it is a category in the ideology of racism developed by capitalists to fracture and disorganize the proletariat. Perhaps they believed that it could be repurposed rather than disappeared. It appears this move guaranteed rightwing reaction, egged on by social justice warriors.

This is the situation: those who want out of the EU are being accused of racism to shame and marginalize them. The accusation of racism is now the standard delegitimizing tactic of neoliberal elites. The globalists and their cultural managers (those who run the university and mass media) racialize Western culture in order to undermine those elements thwarting their ambitions. Because Europe is full of Europeans, progressive identity politics finds it easy to racially stigmatize the majority—as long as good people participate in the big lie. Tragically, there is a good number of Europeans prepared to serve themselves up as sacrificial lambs, plaintively undeserving of their own cultural achievements which, objectively, stand as the greatest in human history. As self-loathers, eager to shame others, desperate to signal their warped sense of virtue, they function as useful idiots for globalizing elites.

At least that’s what the elites thought. But once the left became the party of identity politics, of tribalism, it set itself on a course of self-marginalization.  Workers voted Tory because they are sick of being cast as “deplorables” (Hillary Clinton’s notorious characterization of them) who have no right to country and culture. A people are not racist for seeking popular sovereignty, cultural integrity, the rule of law, and limits to immigration. Free people have a right to determine their collective destiny. Workers sent a huge message in this election to the left and to the elite interests it serves. If workers are going to have to live under capitalism, they will opt for national autonomy over their life chances over seeing their fortunes determined by unaccountable bureaucrats doing the bidding of the society of the opulent. With their votes, workers are rejecting a global order run by technocrats. The British proletariat have struck a blow for democracy. And that’s good for socialism in long run. For, as Marx and Engels write in their little pamphlet, “The proletariat of each country naturally must first settle accounts with its own bourgeoisie.”

Everybody agrees that almost all the gods and their divine agents—angels, miracle workers, and all the rest of them—are fictional characters. Osiris, Romulus, Dionysus, Zalmoxis, Mithras—none of them are divine or even historical. I say “almost all” because, of course, for some gods and their agents people make an exception. These exceptions just happen to be the divine beings in which they believe. The ones in which they don’t believe are obviously false.

Jesus—like Osiris or Romulus—was a remarkable figure in history because of the remarkable acts he is said to have performed and that occurred around him. Some say that we must not attribute to him all those supernatural abilities; he was, after all, an itinerant preacher with a message, like so many preachers of his time and place. It was only later that the supernatural stuff got tacked on. That’s how myths grow, right? Like a game of telephone.

Actually, no. It often goes like this: Zoroaster hallucinates a conversation with the angel Vohu Manah; Muhammad hallucinates a conversation with the angel Gabriel; Joseph Smith hallucinates a conversation with the angel Moroni; Saul of Tarsus hallucinates a conversation with the angel Jesus; etcetera. It is only later that the myth is historicized and humanized, or, after the Greek mythologist Euhemerus, euhemerized—myth masquerading as history.

So Jesus was just a preacher among many with no particularly compelling message. The secular historians who are sure of his historicity insist on this. Stripped of all the impossibilities, this is what we’re left with. But surely he existed, right? The historians readily admit that the gospels that tell us his biography were written decades after he lived, without the benefit of any records, and that they are contradictory and wildly fictitious. Yet none of the other dozens of preachers’ lives were recorded or embellished. Like Jesus, they don’t appear in any contemporaneous historical records because they also were unremarkable. To be sure, they had friends and family, but it didn’t matter. They are lost to history along with nearly every other human being who actually lived.

Why would we know about somebody like Jesus so many decades after he died when we don’t know about the dozens of others of his time and location? Somebody would have to do something very remarkable to stand out from the pact. Like miracles. But, like real magic, miracles are impossible. People don’t walk on water or through cast spells whither fig trees. Demons don’t possess pigs. The sun doesn’t go out for three hours without somebody noticing. Ditto all the graves of Jerusalem opening up and spitting out the walking dead.

Sure, absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. By why would we know about this particular poor preacher and not others? We wouldn’t. That’s why we don’t know about them. If the myth comes first, and it is a myth this a dying and rising god that is very appealing to people of that day (and still to this day), then it is just a matter of historicizing the myth, creating a biography of a man and inserting him into history—like Osiris. That’s especially easy when there’s no records that could attest to him actually existing—like Osiris. All of this goes on without anybody noticing until almost a century after he supposedly lived. That’s ample time to manufacture a person to fit the myth, a myth that just happens to claim that the word was made flesh. Roswell. The Cargo Cults. But with state backing.

Robert Price put it this way: one builds a comic book around Superman not Clark Kent. You only know about Clark Kent because he’s Superman. Superman’s the draw. Clark Kent humanizes him. You put Superman in history to help the audience suspend their disbelief. He fits into the background until he stands out as a hero. The remarkable against the mundane. But Superman is fictional. Just like Clark Kent.

The argument I make in this essay is that the working classes of western capitalist countries have benefitted from socioeconomic development in the trans-Atlantic sphere, and that this development provides the instruments for socialist transformation, but that globalism, neoliberalism, and multiculturalism imperil progress and potential.

Complicating the matter is that the situation has summoned, to prowl about on both sides of the Atlantic, the dogs of rightwing nationalism. Worker support for the center-left establishment and multiculturalist policy will not turn back the reactionary tide. On the contrary, it will accelerate the decline of the West and encourage atavisms that feed on cultural decay, for the center-left establishment is the cause of devolution. Structural adjustment, mass immigration, and the promotion of cultural pluralism diminish the working class, weaken democratic institutions, erode national sovereignty, and undermine western culture—the normative system sustaining the dynamic and forward-looking values of humanism, liberalism, rationalism, and secularism. Retrogression makes room for the right and, so, the question before us is, who will defend western civilization against the destructive forces of transnational capitalism?

With few exceptions, workers in the West enjoy greater freedom of speech and expression, higher standards of living, superior welfare services, and more advanced infrastructure compared to countries outside the West. These advantages not only make life better for workers, but they are also the tools workers require to take the world from the peril of late capitalism to a successful socialist future. National identity, a strong republican state and attitude, commitment to the rights of labor, dedication to secularism, social democratic traditions, and access to the public square—all these favor working class politics. And the need for socialism has never been greater. Global climate change is now an existential threat. Overpopulation and mass consumption are exhausting the planet’s resources. The species and its needs and wants (real and created) are exceeding the earth’s carrying capacity. The nonwestern world is waiting for the means to alleviate their own problems; billions suffer economic, patriarchal, political, and religious oppressions.

But an elite assault on working people and the democratic republic, and on the norms and values of the West is dulling the tools of modernization. Our governments have become little more than kleptocracies, arranging for the capitalist plunder of the common wealth. We see the work of the elite in the historic levels of income and wealth inequality, deterioration and privatization of public infrastructure, the looting of the public treasury, disinvestment in education and social welfare, political disorganization, wage stagnation, and burgeoning personal debt. We can see their strategies in the promotion of mass immigration and multiculturalism, a project to shift mass consciousness from acceptance of universal human nature, to be realized in modern humanist legal and social structures guided by scientific rationality, the values of the Enlightenment, to romantic notions of culture and identity conveyed through the relativistic lens of popularized cultural anthropology and history, thinking expressed long ago in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder, who, in the eighteenth century, circumscribed cognition in language and claimed that incommensurable differences between cultures militates against the homogenization supposed by such rationalist philosophers as David Hume.

As Kenan Malik writes in Multiculturalism and its Discontents, we are dissuaded from conceiving of “progress as civilization overcoming the resistance of traditional cultures with their peculiar superstitions, irrational prejudices and outmoded institutions.” This is a Eurocentric view of things. It assumes as true its culture-bound view of human nature. Thus it is an act of hubris to which the West, on account of its sins, is not entitled. The imperialist desire that comes with the notion of modern man explains the Third World. With culture essentialized and implicitly rooted in notions of race in this counter-Enlightenment view of things, the demand that immigrants in the West integrate with its values becomes reconceptualized as racism (indeed, the doctrine of antiracism I have been criticizing on my blog owes much to Herder). Instead, foreign cultures are to be celebrated for their distinctiveness, preserved for the sake of identity, and western peoples and their institutions changed to accommodate them. (But is this not still a Eurocentric view of things?)

Crucially, Malik demonstrates in his little book that it is not (or at least only) those immigrating to the West who demand this; it is the policy of western governments. But why would governments advance such a policy? To disorganize the national culture they endeavored to establish only a century earlier? At least to disorganize the working class majority. By the 1970s, for example, the government of France, under liberal president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, sought in Islam “a stabilizing force which would turn the faithful from deviance, delinquency or membership of unions or revolutionary parties,” here quoting Paul Dijoud, minister for immigrant workers. “When a series of strikes hit car factories in the late 1970s,” Malik writes, “the government encouraged employers to build prayer rooms in an effort to wean immigrant workers, who formed a large proportion of the workforce, away from militant activity.” Keeping newcomers away from native-born workers is an effective strategy to disorganize the national proletariat. How effective? In the 1950s, roughly one-third of French workers belonged to a trade union. Today, less than one in ten. (This mirrors the decline in organized labor in the United States during the same period. The decline follows the opening of the national borders in 1965.)

The widespread and general popular unease that comes with the decline of a civilization is portrayed by academics, pundits, and politicians as a threat from the right. Nativists, neofascists, racists, xenophobes—they are the problem. But this is subterfuge. The threat is really from the center and the establishment left, from the moderate and the social democrat, and the corporate and financial interests they represent. The function of major political parties is that of the sheepdog: keep workers away from politics organic to their interests. Folk devils and moral panic are powerful weapons to isolate and paralyze the populace. Arabization and Islamization of Europe are not problems for the West; resistance to them is. That’s the way they tell it, anyway. Elite command of the state machinery and the culture industry has fashioned an illusion in which the perpetrator becomes the savior. Salvation lies in diminishing, even losing western civilization.

Douglas Murray writes in The Strange Death of Europe (2017), “Europe is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide.” This pathology has come to America, as well. Elites across the transatlantic sphere are asking the public to abandon the Enlightenment and embrace the postmodern condition. This explains the strange fact that, excepting economics, social science disciplines in our institutions of higher learning, despite their extensive corporatization, peddle New Left ideology. Even in elementary education children are indoctrinated in cultural self loathing: they live on Indian land, live in a society built by slaves, supplied by the imperialist exploitation of the Third World As strange as it may seem, and not necessarily for the reasons we would like, it is the conservative and the populist, people of Douglas Murray’s ilk, who are today the safeguards of western culture. They defend free speech, secularism, and national integrity against the machinations of the globalists and the transnational network of corporations and financial institutions directing governments and steering policy worldwide to dismantle or render ineffective democratic-republican institutions.

Her prediction premature, but ultimately correct, Rosa Luxemburg famously warns in her 1916 The Crisis of German Social Democracy: “As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism.” It is the purpose of this essay to think about how radicals can defend civilization and thus preserve the tools of socialist transformation over against the transnational bourgeoisie whose loyalties are to fortune and fame and little else. In thinking about this I travel a different path than perhaps one might expect. I ask, who are the conservatives defending the western civilization and what do they have to say about our situation? I have already mentioned Douglas Murray. Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton is another such voice and one of the most important (and he has suffered much scorn on account of it). I will lean on his Fools, Frauds and Firebrands (2015) to get some perspective. But, before getting to Scruton, I will consider briefly what it is about western civilization that makes it worth keeping. I will, therefore, first consider the matter of human rights and its enemies.

* * *

Human rights—the right to life and liberty, freedom of opinion and expression, freedom from slavery and torture, the right to drink, food, medicine, and to an education, the freedom to leisure and to creative endeavor—inhere in every person. These rights are universal because all persons belong to the same species: Homo sapiens. Human rights are not subjective. They are not relative. David Hume exaggerates when he writes, “Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular,” but he is basically correct. Natural history has formed humans in such a way that they require conditions for proper cognitive, emotional, moral, and physical development. This is to say that human rights are a recognition of the way evolution has made us.

For Hume, history is useful insofar as it allows us “to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials from which we may form our observations and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behavior.” To put this another way, human nature is scientifically determinable. Meeting the conditions that our natural history demands establishes the foundation for health, self-actualization, and well-being. Failure to meet these conditions indicates unjust social arrangements. History and cross-cultural comparison shows us that much of the world has failed and continues to fail to meet these conditions. The New Left redefines this failure as diversity and criticism of it racism.

What is our nature? Homo sapiens is a social animal who depends on his fellow animals not merely for survival and reproduction, but in order to thrive. Our species is empathic, or sympathetic, exhibiting the innate ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Adam Smith writes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) that, for each person, “there are principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” The wellspring of morality for Smith is thus found in “our fellow-feeling for the misery of others.” Smith writes that “by changing places in fancy with the sufferer . . . we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels.” What is more, Smith argues, in his Lectures on Jurisprudence (delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1762–1763), that the norms of society guide our action and hold us accountable to one another. The state exists to protect the rights to our person, property, and social relations. Morality is innate and normally reflected in our institutions.

On this account, the radical philosopher Karl Marx cautions us about “establishing ‘society’ as an abstraction over against the individual.” He writes, “The individual is a social being.” “Man’s individual and species-life are not two distinct things,” he insists. Marx refers to this unity as Gattungswesen, or species-being (alternatively species-essence or species-instance). Gattungswesen collapses the distinction between the human instance and the whole of humanity. In this view, species-being is no more found in abstract individualism than it is in abstract society; it is discovered in the totality of social relations that humans author together. Marx teaches us that “species-being confirms itself in species-consciousness and exists for itself in its universality, as a thinking being.” Human rights are therefore not an abstraction; they are a concrete part of being human.

The separation of the individual and his collective existence in consciousness, ubiquitous in the current epoch, is a form of alienation to be overcome. To adapt Marxian phraseology, we are a species-in-itself; but the recognition of human rights makes us a species-for-itself. The human capacity for imagination allows for reflection upon matters of social development, of which ethics and morality, the logic and practice of right conduct, are fundamental components. Because these are objective matters, reflecting on them requires objective methods. Marx pushes us to move consciousness beyond superstition and religious apprehension towards a scientific theory of human relations (see Marx’s Introduction to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, from 1843). The result, which is also the method, is the materialist conception of history, or historical materialism, and it posits that humans make history to provide for their species-needs.

Human progress generates a problem: the appearance of a social surplus, production beyond subsistence resulting from technological development, complicates the distribution of resources. Early social organizations were equalitarian and democratic, meeting the needs of the entire community. Marx identifies this stage of social evolution “primitive communism.” As humanity progressed, societies became large, complex, and segmented. In them, needs were more frequently and fully met for some, while others suffered deprivations, which in turn led to their subjugation. In this way societies became divided into social classes, and all hitherto social formations have been composed of different configurations of class-based hierarchies. Moreover, as Friedrich Engels shows in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), human society became segmented by asymmetrical gender relations, the natural sexual division of labor deformed into the systematic subordination of women and girls. Class segmentation remains true for all contemporary mass societies, as do the oppressions of patriarchal relations for most of them, their deprivations clear evidence of their inadequacy in meeting the needs of the people.

Associated with human history is culture, the body of patterns of beliefs and behaviors guiding interactions with nature and people, and transmitting acquired knowledge to succeeding generations. In the Marxian view of things, culture is ultimately emergent from the material relations of a given society. An integrated system of language and meaning, norms and values that guide humans in their daily lives, culture represents what we can usefully think of as the social mind. It is this mind that confronts the problems of existence. A more advanced and just social mind generally makes for a better social life, solving problems in an equitable way. A social mind encumbered by superstition, religion, patriarchy, and other limiting norms and values generally retards social development. Crucially, at any level of social development, culture may be biased to justify unjust social arrangements. For example, in capitalists societies, the ideology of abstracted individualism denies the unequal results of class segmentation, laying the blame for one’s troubles entirely upon his doorstep.

In Muslim-majority countries, women are obliged to cover their heads, and sometimes even their faces, not for the sake of the men who own their bodies, but because the one true God demands this of them. Unfortunately, as Bruce Bawer noted in his While Europe Slept (2006), “Ever since large-scale immigration in Europe began . . . the European establishment has encouraged a romantic view of Muslim immigration. . . . To criticize any Muslim for any reason whatsoever is racist, and it is that racism that is the sole cause of any and all immigrant-related problems.” “As a rule,” he writes, “the establishment strives to overlook the fact that being a Muslim is a matter of holding certain beliefs and living by them.” Thus attempts to organize to abolish, alter, exclude, or marginalize the harmful practices of Muslims is immediately met with establishment and even popular resistance. But to struggle for equality and justice means to identify cultural elements or cultures in their totality that are contrary to the ends of human health, well-being, and self-actualization and then organize to abolish, alter, exclude, or marginalize them.

This, briefly considered, is why western civilization is worth preserving, despite the continuing problem of labor exploitation under capitalist relations: it’s the West that discovered human rights, and it could make such a discovery because of the stress it lays on the values of empiricism, humanism, liberalism, rationalism, and secularism, values that enable an observer to negate the power of those other cultural elements that would limit his apprehension of natural history and social being. Because these are cultural values, one might suppose western civilization to be a culture like any other, just a different standpoint, with no greater validity, since each culture claims its own validity. But this would assume a priori the premise that truth is relative, and that, therefore, all cultures are equal in this regard. You likely learned this in primary school: no culture is superior or inferior, just differently evolved to suit these needs of its members (all of its members?). But this claim presumes that ways of knowing—science, for example—are merely cultural standpoints, that there is no method of apprehension that transcends its cultural framework, and that therefore the scientist’s claims about human nature are just as mythological as the shaman’s. The claim is easily proven false. Religion produces no miracles, while science prevents and cure diseases that afflict people in every culture. The medicine that works wonders throughout the world depends on the correctness of the claims of scientists. If the requirements for optimal health and well-being are the result of natural history, then they are objectively determinable through science.

I will now turn to the question of the law and jurisprudence, using Roger Scruton’s critique of Ronald Dworkin’s work to show that the conservative is a natural ally of the socialist over against the progressive liberal on account of the fact that the conservative intuitively grasps the necessity of preserving western civilization for the sake of humanity, whereas the progressive liberal is busy undermining it at the behest of transnational capital. I am keen on showing this because, in the United States for example, the largest segment of the working class—white rural and suburban workers—while rejecting progressive liberalism, is at the same time alienated from the politics that can empower them. A successful working class movement has to call these proletarians home, and that starts with understanding them. This also signals to those bamboozled by progressive politics the need to think differently about politics than they do currently.

* * *

In taking issue with the moral jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin, whom he regards as a thinker of the New Left, conservative philosopher Roger Scruton leans heavily on Friedrich Hayek’s opinions on law and legislation. Hayek is well known as a vigorous advocate of classical liberalism. For this reason I have students read from his The Constitution of Liberty (1960) in my course Freedom and Social Control. In that book, Hayek contends that the ideal of personal liberty is vital to the dynamism and success of western civilization. In Law, Legislation and Liberty (1982), Volume I of which interests Scruton here, Hayek aims to show how that ideal underpins law and jurisprudence in the West and is necessary for its future. The importance of the individual is not something made by man, but discovered and defended. “To modern man,” Hayek writes, “the belief that all law governing human action is the product of legislation appears so obvious that the contention that the law is older than law making has almost the character of paradox. Yet there can be no doubt that law existed for ages before it occurred to man that he can make or alter it.” Thus it is in western civilization that man finally consciously articulates the conditions that make him free, a historical fact the New Left denies.

It is with some irony, therefore, that Hayek’s statement on the law bears more than a superficial resemblance to Marx’s claim that the law emerges from the deep social relations that establish society’s material foundation from which consciousness of itself emerges (though not necessary ascertained in an undistorted manner). Yet, in contrast to historical materialism, which conceptualizes the law as the result of human activity, however alienated from scientific truth those actions are, or, to put this another way, however falsely conscious are the beings making and throwing them into motion, the conservative conceptualizes the law as “natural,” thus obscuring its origins in a term notorious for its ambiguity. For what is “nature” in the view of natural law? Is it race? God?

The conservative, following Herder, makes a similar move with national identity, seeing it as guided by a “spirit,” or Nationalgeist, a collective soul, or Volksgeist. And thus loses the thread. He decries the left’s accusation of false consciousness, yet he sees those who disagree with him as also suffering from false consciousness, except he has no objective metric against which to make this determination, only an appeal to some völkisch sensibility. And here they make the postmodern mistake of cultural relativism. There is no defense against Islam if you regard it as the expression of spirit by a people. You can only defend against such a thing the way you defend humanity against fascism and fascistic-like relations: by recognizing that there is such a thing as humanity.

Still, Scruton is correct when he writes, “People cannot form a society and then give themselves laws, as Rousseau had imagined. For the existence of law is presupposed in the very project of living in society—or at least, in a society of strangers. Law is real, though tacit, long before it is written down, and it is for the judge to discover the law, by examining social conflicts and laying bare the shared assumptions that permit their resolution.” This is a vital anthropological observation: law is emergent from the interactions of concrete persons in a community. Émile Durkheim, a founder of the discipline of sociology, saw the law as tied to a moral order, which is in turn subject to the dynamic of societal evolution. The law changed in tandem with the altering of the moral order caused the growing organic complexity of society. These are social facts to be discovered through rigorous sociological examination. For the postmodernist, this is narrative.

Scruton is, of course, interested in the discovered law in the Anglo-American sphere. And the conservative view is not so keen on articulating a grand sociological theory. “Law in its natural condition is therefore to be construed on the model of the common law of England,” Scruton argues, “which preceded the legislative powers of Parliament, and which for many centuries looked upon Parliament not as a legislative body but as a court of law, whose function was to resolve the questions they could not be answered from the study of existing precedents.” Scruton returns to Hayek, who “points out that written law and sovereign legislation are late comers to human society, and that both open the way to abuses which, in the common law, are usually self-correcting.”

Here, Scruton emphasizes the pragmatic and inherently conservative character of law, (properly conceived) in order to put the problem of Dworkin’s approach in sharp contrast: “Legislators see law as a human artifact, created for a purpose, and they endeavor to use law not merely to rectify injustices but also to bring about a new social order, in conformity with some ‘political morality’—which is essentially how Dworkin sees the American Constitution. For him law is not a summary of the rights, duties and procedures, but a blueprint for a new liberal society.” This tack concerns Scruton for the following reason: “There is nothing to prevent the radical legislator from passing laws that fly in the face of justice, by granting privileges, confiscating assets and extinguishing deserts in the interests of some personal or political agenda.”

“One sign of this is the adoption of ‘social justice’ as the goal of the law, rather than natural justice as a procedural constraint,” writes Scruton. “For Hayek, by contrast, the goal of the common law is not social engineering but justice in the proper sense of the term, namely the punishment or rectification of unjust actions.” In Hayek’s view, the judge, in examining a specific case, looks for a rule that will settle it. That is all that is meant by justice and justice is found in the common law. “Judges rightly think of themselves as discovering the law, for the reason that there would be no case to judge, had the existence of the relevant law not that implicit in the conduct of the parties,” writes Hayek.

At this point, a question might have occurred to the reader: can legislatures not also discover the law? Moreover, if Scruton has a problem with positive law, why is he so unsympathetic to Dworkin’s account of it? Of course, the problem is really an ideological disagreement. Dworkin sees in discovery the desire of the progressive liberal. Scruton sees in discovery justification for the conservative approach to such matters. Yet both see jurisprudence as an act of discovery.

This is what I find particularly fascinating about Scruton’s argument, namely how powerfully, albeit unintentionally, it justifies the construction of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not legislate rights but discovers them in the same way the United States Bill of Rights discovers the rights and liberties enjoyed by Americans. Human rights extend protections for speech and expression, religious liberty, and so on, to all humans, not just the inhabitants of the West of of the United States. The Universal Declaration seeks to protect the individual from the inequalities and injustices stemming from the problem of concentrated power in a manner analogous to the way the Bill of Rights protects the individual from the problem of governmental and religious power. They are both the product of western culture, but they speak to values that accord with human nature.

The defect in the Bill of Rights is not in its circumscription, rather the rights and liberties identified in it are ascertained at a point in time and by a class of people concerned to advance the interests of private capital, which they are careful not to constrain too sharply, while at the same time framing the discovery of principles conducive to this end in such a way that they apply in theory to everyone within the scope of state power. Scruton has no problem with this, of course, because he is a supporter of capitalism. In contrast, the Universal Declaration is written at a point in time and by persons painfully aware of the defects of capitalism, who endeavor, through social democratic means, to protect all persons from these defects (while still upholding property rights). The Universal Declaration is not a document of positive law. It is another round of discovery, of clarifying and elaborating the law of society, its elements natural in the manner described in the first section of this blog entry. That is, as a deepening of the knowledge of species-being.

Scruton’s complaint that the Supreme Court of the United States discovered in 1973 a right to an abortion in the Constitution betrays his mystification of natural law. Reproductive rights is a principled extension of the right to privacy discovered in the foundation of civil liberties. Scruton writes of Justice Blackmun’s “contorted decision” that it “depended upon finding the right to privacy in the US Constitution, despite the fact that the document mentions nothing of the kind,” thus “arbitrarily” asserting “that the unborn have no constitutional rights.” Scruton finds rhetorically convenient that the words “discover” and “find” are synonyms. But less convenient for his argument is this: that without a right to privacy, parts of the Bill of Rights are missing the underlying principle that gives them their meaning. What is the Fourth Amendment, which states that, without compelling reason, an individual’s right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,” without a privacy right assumed? And the Fifth Amendment, which forbids under all circumstances an individual being “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” The government has no right to know what it is my mind. I have a right to keep them private.

Yet Scruton nonetheless admires the liberal values articulated in Constitution and sees in their use by the American left something quite distinct from the “Marxist marginalization of institution, law, and the moral life,” “the ‘domination’ theory of Foucault,” or “the Frankfurt School attack on the ‘instrumentalization’ of the social world.” “Thanks to the American Constitution, and the long tradition of critical thinking inspired by it,” he writes “American leftism has more often than not taken the form of legal and constitutional argument, interspersed with reflections on justice that are mercifully free from the class resentments that speak in the works of European leftists. Hence, even though they argue for an ever-increasing role for the state in the lives of ordinary people, Americans on the left are described not a socialists but as liberals, as though it were freedom, rather than equality, that they promise.” Perhaps this is Scruton, seemingly outside of his own awareness, winding up in accord with Dworkin’s assumption, which is really about finding justice in the law, however constrained by the necessity of private property. It is also, I suspect, an expression of Scruton’s admiration for America’s unique philosophical tradition of pragmatism.

Despite partisan efforts to highlight those things that differentiate their respective worldviews, conservatives and liberals (and socialists) make an common argument positing that the law is, in some substantial way, an emergent organic phenomenon. Liberals may wish to universalize rights, while conservatives may wish to provincialize them, but they both nonetheless ascribe to them some intrinsic force where they apply. (Scruton’s attribution of strict positive jurisprudence to the political left is therefore a bit of a straw man.) Since this claim is true, and given what I have argued about the relationship between culture and human rights, we ask whether there is a consensus in the West regarding the importance of cultural integrity in preserving law that supports the advancement of human rights? In answering why there isn’t, since my feelings on the matter are probably obvious to the reader by now, it is useful to briefly review the ideological lay of the American political landscape and consider the concrete problems of immigration and growing cultural diversity.

* * *

The claims that rights inhere in every individual and that individuals are culture-bearers are not in contradiction. Indeed, they depend on each other. In order to obtain the optimal conditions for human thriving, the culture must be adequate to them. Culture can therefore advance or impede the realization of human rights. In practice, this understanding interferes with liberal economic desire, which, as I have alluded to, is capitalistic in orientation, in that it shifts the emphasis of public action away from the maximization of surplus value and realization of profit and towards safeguarding western civilization from the corruption of backwards cultures. Why is this? Capitalism is not a system devoted to general well-being and self-actualization, but to private accumulation by those who control the means of production. To maximize private accumulation, capitalism require labor markets where workers are pitted against each other. If workers can be found who will accept less compensation for their labors (or who are not in a position to demand more), then these workers will be welcomed in. Indeed, the more workers competing for work, the less any one of them will be paid on average. Supply and demand.

The anthropological suggestion implied by the demand for cultural relativism, that all cultures are created equal, is of course untrue; as already demonstrated, some cultures are objectively better than others at supporting the conditions necessary for human thriving, their role in advancing or retarding social progress judged in light of cognitive, emotional, moral, and physical development. This fact is true both internally to a given society, especially in large regionally-differentiated ones, and externally across societies. Stating this may draw the charge of “cultural racism,” but, as I explain in a previous blog entry “Smearing Amy Wax,” this is ideology. Culture therefore matters because of its effects on human potential. We have to ask when determining cultural adequacy whether it enables or limits the development of every person.

Culture also matters because people carry their culture with them wherever they go and settle. They are, as Malik describes them, culture bearers, very often striving to establish that culture in new places, gathering around them those who think and act and look like them and, with them, carrying on with the familiar norms and values.

As expected, the liberal and the conservative regard new arrivals differently. The liberal, with his multicultural experiences and expectations, sees the diversity brought about by immigration as merely a greater variety of cultural items on the urban buffet, more options for food, music, art, etc. As former New York City mayor and now presidential candidate said, “We need immigrants to take all the different kinds of jobs that the country needs—improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion, our dialogue and certainly improve our economy.” Improve our religion? The state will certainly prevent the imposition of theocracy. No worries. Moreover, the bourgeoisie attitude understands competition as between individuals, not between cultures. Those who can do the work are just as welcome as other. The conservative, on the other hand, sees a clash of cultures, as groups differentiated by norms and values compete for control over social space. The greater diversity immigration brings is not regarded as a strength to the conservative’s way of thinking; it dilutes and weakens the traditional foundation of the society he knows and loves. The conservative sees its effects in the problems of urban life: crime, disorder, disorganization, homelessness, poverty, and welfare dependency.

These attitudes emerge from their ideological orientations. The liberal, holds that the nation-state is a means by which the rational interests of atomized individuals are realized. The relationship between the individual and society is conceptualized as antagonistic, resolved in favor of the individual, whose rights are guaranteed by the state. Such a society is described as substantively secular, even if it keeps a state church. The emphasis on liberty and equality, understood as the freedom of the individual to be about his business undisturbed and the absence of discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, race, religion, sex, and sexual orientation, is of course troubled by property. It is after all a bourgeoisie view of things. Liberals live largely an urban existence and appear rather indifferent to what the people who move about them believe, since government is supposed to protect persons from the imposition of unwelcome beliefs. They pride themselves on this ethic: individuals are free to believe and express all manner of notions as long as they do not interfere with the beliefs and expressions of others. As Thomas Jefferson puts it in his letter to the Danbury Baptists: “the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions.” Thus there is in the urban milieux considerable social pressure to appear tolerant towards people with different cultural orientations and religious beliefs. This is the cosmopolitan attitude.

For the conservative, the nation is the manifestation of a spiritual sense, an expression of the collective unconscious, sentiments existing deep within the human psyche, in which individuals submit to a cultural ideal that pertains to them as a unique community and are obliged to align with an identity. The attitudes of the conservative therefore lean towards the traditional, the provincial. The emphasis is on authority, hierarchy, piety, deference to social status. Here, nation intersects with ethnicity, the notion that shared language and traditions make a people. Of course, the modern conservative also believes in private property. But, in contrast to the liberal, conservatives emphasize culture in sustaining societies, especially the role of custom and tradition, especially as organized by religious faith and ritual. Their rural and suburban existence limits interaction with other cultural agents. Their experience is more parochial. One suspects they do not appreciate other cultures because they have limited first-hand experience of them. Conservatives experience multiculturalism vicariously. But their perception of it as the balkanization of their society is nevertheless the correct one. And their suspicion that it is the progressive liberal who is responsible for this balkanization is well-founded.

The progressive liberal has undermined the ethic of diversity as individuals pursuing their ends as individuals by conceptualizing the social order as, what Amartya Sen calls “plural monoculturalism,” the idea that “society is made up of a series of distinct, homogeneous cultures.” The blog Communication Today, run by Communication and Digital Media and International Relations students from Tec de Monterrey Estado de México, defines plural monoculturalism as “the doctrine that individuals ought to remain faithful to their ancestral cultures and that a good society ought to be a ‘salad bowl,’ where diverse groups maintain and persistence of ethnic communities should be encouraged.” This is Horace Kallen’s notion of “cultural pluralism,” wherein individuals pursue their ends as ethnic, racial, and religious groups in the same national framework. This sounds good in the abstract. But it has an isolating and ultimately disuniting effect. Moreover, it leads to culturally oppressive effects at the individual level.

“The starting point of multicultural policies is the acceptance of societies as diverse,” writes Kenan Malik. “Yet, there is an unstated assumption that such diversity ends at the ends of minority communities.” As a result, multicultural policy, by “treating minority communities as homogeneous wholes,” ignores “conflicts within those communities.” He continues: “Multicultural politics, in other words, have not responded to the needs of communities but, to a large degree, have helped create those communities by imposing identities on people and by ignoring internal conflicts arising out of class, gender and intra-religious differences. They have empowered not minority communities but so-called community leaders who owe their position and influence largely to the relationship they possess with the state.”

One can see this in the way secularized Muslims, for example Maajid Nawaz, because he is a secular Muslim, is not seen as an authentic Muslim, whereas Muslims committed to Islamic orthodoxy are regarded as authentic. To the progressive mind, the hijab wearing woman represents Islam, and is therefore authentic, her liberty to be free from the imposition of modesty rules obviated. Multicultural policy enables her oppression. And so the publication of cartoons depicting Muhammad by Jyllands-Posten in 2005, were said by establishment voices to have offended the Muslim community, which assumes that the authentic Muslim is the person who would be offended by such depictions of Muhammad. In this way, the concrete individual is absorbed into an abstract community and his agency negated. (Not to mention that the liberty of those outside the Muslim community is compromised by laws and norms restricting access to cartoons depicting Muhammad.)

Multicultural policy thus sanctions patriarchal and religious oppression. So, while there exists a law demanding gender equality, this law may be suppressed for the sake of a religious demand in a particular community. In any case, those practices that would not be tolerated in the host society, are seen as exotic and therefore excusable if they occur in an ethnic minority. A nation may desire to pass a law protecting children from genital mutilation, but it will be reluctant to do so for fear that it will offend a religious community, a reluctance, if carried through, representing a failure to defend the rights of a human on a fallacy that an infant is necessarily part of that community and able to willing subscribe to a doctrine and a ritual that will permanently alter his physical appearance and his sexual function.

Malik also shows that by ignoring the conflicts within an imagined community, multicultural policy creates conflicts between these communities, as the various groupings seek to maximize their (perceived) collective interests, whereas before individuals had an interest in maximizing their personal interests, which often meant working together across ethnic, racial, and religious lines. An atomized individual coming forward will find it hard to secure some benefit. But if he appears before government agency representing an ethnic or religious minority, then the government will listen. “People mobilize on the basis of how they feel they will get the resources to tackle the issues important to them,” Malik notes. Thus, ethnicity becomes “a key to entitlement.” “Rather than thinking of meeting people’s needs or about distributing resources more equitably, organizations are forced to think about the distribution of ethnicity,” writes Malik. “And people begin to think in those terms, too.” He cites Joy Warmington of the Birmingham Race Action Partnership: “People are forced into a very one-dimensional view of themselves by the way that equality policies work.”

One can see how multicultural policy, then, systematically prevents formation of socialist consciousness by preventing the liberation of the individual from tribal associations (the promise of liberal democracy) and the possible reintegration of the individual into organizations based on a common class position. Multiculturalism is therefore a false consciousness very much engineered by the establishment representing bourgeois interests, and the progressive liberal’s function is to refine and upload it into the operating culture of society’s dominant institutions.

* * *

One does not have to reject secular society and embrace conservative values of authority and intolerance to resist multiculturalism. But one must recognize that there is a problem with large influxes of persons bearing norms and values that do not uphold the cultural features that support human rights and an establishment policy that discourages their assimilation. The foreign culture-bearer brings patriarchal, heterosexist, superstitious, theocratic, and other odious norms and values with him, cultural elements that are associated with lower levels of societal development that are, for this reason, inadequate for establishing the conditions for generalized well-being and self-actualization.

It is especially troubling when the new arrivals are determined to keep and spread their cultures to the West by resisting assimilation to the societies that have welcomed them. This problem is typical and therefore indicative of the more backwards cultures, particularly those with a religious zealous character. We see this resistance in the formation of exclusive cultural enclaves in the West, as we have seen resistance enabled by multicultural policy. This situation undermines the ability of more developed societies to sustain their cultures, and it just so happens that, for the wrong reasons, the conservative-traditionalist has better instincts when it comes to the threat posed by competing cultures. In this case, culture-mindedness acts as an instinctive warning system. The liberal, operating with a more abstracted view of persons, in particular a ethnicized and racialized view of them, is less aware of the threat of foreign cultures to the integrity of his own society.

At the same time, the liberal is aware of the threat the cultural backwardness in his own society poses to the secular foundation of the West. He loathes white Christian conservatism and reflexively votes for the party he thinks will save him from it. I am speaking here mainly of the situation in the United States where the savior is the Democratic Party, one of two bourgeois parties administering the state. To be sure, the liberal is right to worry about this threat. In the struggle for a more free society, urban values ought to be protected from the atavisms of the countryside. But there is a double standard here; for, at the same time, the modern liberal has come to believe that assimilation is a bad thing because it robs the immigrant of his cultural identity, which a good liberal person is supposed to tolerate, if not appreciate and celebrate.

I have been suggesting all along that the liberal is not really an agnostic on the culture question. Culture is important to him in a particular way. He will decry the backwardness of his fellow countrymen, mock and criticize their cultural values, while he will resist criticizing the backwardness of the newcomer. He will shutter at the treatment of girls in the white conservative Christian household, but allow his public school to take his own daughter to a mosque for a day to learn how to properly affix a hijab to her head. For this reason, in the current phase of civilizational crisis, humanists ought to be thankful for conservatives and demand that their objections be given a hearing.

* * *

On the question of a consensus regarding the importance of cultural integrity, there is not a lot evidence for it when all mainstream views are considered. With its postmodern character and advocacy of multiculturalism, progressive politics, especially for those declaring allegiance to democratic socialism, is not conducive to upholding the cultural foundations underpinning western notions of rights and liberties. Marxist orthodoxy, as most adherents articulate it, treats culture as at best superstructural, at worst epiphenomenal.

In a 2018 interview with Encounter Books, Roger Scruton characterized the contemporary democratic socialists in this way: “there is a lot of socialist rhetoric, but it is completely detached from the kind of substantial theories of society and its development that were given by Marx.” In perhaps the worst of all possible alliances for the moment, the culturally-minded liberal-pluralist and the antiracist social democrat have come together around identitarian politics, apparently taking over from the bourgeoisie tactics used for decades to undermine class analysis, politics, and solidarity, but in actually implementing a new and improved version of it developed by the bourgeoisie intellectual.

What makes this alliance, represented in America by the Democratic Party, so odious could not be more obvious than in the analysis of the current situation articulated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the darling of the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA). “The reason [Trump is] trying to center issues of race, of immigration, etc. is to sink the economic agenda.” she said in a radio interview. “He’s trying to eclipse it. And the only reason that has power is because we refuse to talk about. And so race is going to be an issue, and the key is whether we’re going to allow him to define that conversation, or if we’re going to insert ourselves into that space and define that conversation.”

But if economics is what the progressive left wants to focus on as self-proclaimed democratic socialists, then where are the interests of working Americans represented in this formulation? “We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few,” the DSA states on its website. Why are they instead representing the interests of the denationalizers, the transnationalists, who cleave the working class by race and ethnicity? This is not an interpretation of their politics. Ocasio-Cortez explicitly treats immigration as a race issue over against economic reality. But immigration is foremost economic issue, as well as a cultural one (and, no, culture is not race).

I have explained this elsewhere, but it bears repeating here: immigrants come in all races, but they come with one property in common, their cheap labor. Capitalists use cheap labor to raise profit rates and drive down the wages of native-born workers via competition, injecting in the labor market a cheaper (although not necessarily inferior) commodity while expanding the industrial reserve. For well more than a century capitalists have used large-scale immigration as a conscious strategy not only for raising the rate of profit but also for politically disorganizing the masses. A constant influx of people from other cultures undermines national solidarity and weakens the labor movement, a point that Marxist economist Melvin Leiman makes in his The Political Economy of Racism (1995).

Marx himself notes this in an April 9, 1870 letter to Sigrid Meyer and August Vogt. “Ireland constantly sends her own surplus to the English labor market,” he writes, “ and thus forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class.” Marx grasps the function of immigration: “Every industrial and commercial center in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life…. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker.” “This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation,” Marx concludes. “It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.” In other words, it was a conscious strategy by capitalist elites. And what we are seeing today is the evolution of this strategy. (See Bernie Sanders Gets it on Open Borders for a more detailed discussion of Marx’s observations in this letter.)

This is why multiculturalism (or cultural pluralism, as it was first formulated) is pushed as a progressive value by the bourgeois political establishment and culture industry. Resurrecting and polishing these strategies in the post-war period, the bourgeoisie has smashed labor, opening the borders to large-scale immigration and incentivizing US corporations to move production overseas (along with other union busting and wage suppression tactics). When working people complained about stagnant and deteriorating standard of living, progressives branded them nativists, “racists,” and “xenophobes.” Ocasio-Cortez is doing the bidding of capitalist elites, perpetuating false consciousness by moving immigration to the race side of the ledger while divorcing it from economics, and then calling on white people to do antiracist work, thereby implying that they’re the problem—that is, using racism to divide the proletariat. Enlisting oneself in this strategy is allowing oneself to be used by the capitalist class to keep his bothers and sisters divided and disempowered.

* * *

Western societies are distinguished from nonwestern societies (with few exceptions) by having reached a higher stage of societal evolution, marked by free and open societies guided by scientific rationality. Thanks to this development, the West enjoys a comparatively superior capacity for meeting the needs of its inhabitants. This achievement is in part attributable to a unique culture that emphasizes individual rights and personal liberties, secular reasoning, and democratic government. The liberal character of the modern nation-state, substantially variable in that character, nonetheless embodies this culture. Inhabitants in most western nation states are materially better off than countries elsewhere in the world and because of this enjoy greater opportunities for personal development. It is this culture that recognized human rights and established international law.

As I wrote in “Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism,” leaning heavily on Marx’s observations in “Zur Judenfrage,” civil society is, in the democratic-republican nation, emancipated from politics. Thus, in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and in the changes this transition forced into law, “man was not freed from religion; he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property; he received freedom to own property. He was not freed from the egoism of business; he received freedom to engage in business.” And, while Marx recognizes that this is an incomplete revolution from the standpoint of achieving species-being, he recognizes that it is an advance over the conditions of the Ancien regime and a necessary step towards finishing that revolution. The tools a democratic republic provides are the tools with which socialism works.

In Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, Scruton criticizes the class reductionism of those twentieth century intellectuals who deigned themselves worthy of speaking for Marx and the working class (for example Eric Hobsbawm). This move marginalized the organic elements of western culture that helped give rise to the civic emancipation Marx describes in his early work, developments relatively independent of the class struggle, elements that move western men of all social classes to defend free and secular society from totalitarianism. “When challenged by the rise of Nazism,” Scruton writes, aping Marxian phraseology, “this ‘nation for itself’ proved more effective than the international solidarity of the proletariat, which showed itself, by contrast, to be a mere dream of the intellectuals.” For conservative thinkers like Scruton, the liberal and secular values of the West are worth keeping even if they press against his conservative provincialism. They allow him to be a conservative. And while that community has its deprivations, it is freer to develop in than the nonwestern cultures disrupting it. It has this potential because it is in the West.

So it is that the proletariat, estranged from collective self identity, its consciousness disordered by those who claim to raise it, remains in embryo politically, its future development dependent on perhaps the most unexpected of political orientations: the modern conservative and the rightwing populist who defend civilization against the denationalizing drive of globalizing neoliberalism, unembarrassed by expressions of national chauvinism, who preach the virtues of limited government, the common law, and other exceptional customs of the West. And while we should desire to transcend aspects of conservatism (foremost its perverse desire to control the body), we should not wish to transcend the civilization that conservatism defends.

Bristol merchants financed more than 2,000 slaving voyages between 1698 and 1807. Their ships carried more than 500,000 Africans to labor as slaves in the Americas. Olivetti Otele, the “first black history professor in Great Britain,” is keen on researching Britol’s slave trade. She will do so based at the University of Bristol. According to The Guardian (“UK’s first black female history professor to research Bristol’s slavery links”), Otele has been charged with undertaking a two-year research project on the involvement of the University of Bristol and the wider city in the transatlantic slave trade. According to Otele, “I hope to bring together Bristolians from all communities, and scholars, artists and educators who are willing to contribute to a stronger and fairer society.”

Reflecting the cosmology of identity politics, which fetishizes collective guilt based on race and other imaginaries, Judith Squires, provost and deputy vice-chancellor at Bristol, clarifies: “As an institution founded in 1909, we are not a direct beneficiary of the slave trade, but we fully acknowledge that we financially benefited indirectly via philanthropic support from families who had made money from businesses involved in the transatlantic slave trade.” Otele presence, Squires continues, “provides us with a unique and important opportunity to interrogate our history, working with staff, students and local communities to explore the university’s historical links to slavery and to debate how we should best respond to our past in order to shape our future as an inclusive university community.” Note the jargon. What could possibly remedy something that happened more than 210 years ago? Even if we can imagine something, how would it make for a more inclusive community?

In no way am I suggesting we should not react in revulsion to the extent and cruelty of the practice of chattel slavery. Nor would I suggest we should fail to rejoice in the overthrow of chattel slavey and the creation of societies in which persons are equal before the law regardless of skin color. Horror and ecstasy both speak to the importance of historical study. The stories and lessons of history explain the present and help prepare the future. However, while grievances may, in the span of a lifetime, be redressed, the intergenerational past is inaccessible to remedy. Justice exists at the level of concrete (and obvious living) individuals. It is profoundly immoral to advocate consequences for people on the grounds that others with their skin color—past or present. Collective punishment is barbaric. When it is based on skin color is it racist. The fact of the matter is that no person alive in Great Britain today is responsible for the historic trade in slaves.

Otele’s career is a paradigm of the way history is marshaled by those who bash Western civilization. (See the piece on Otele “The privileged don’t get to tell us when slavery stops hurting” in The Times.) Moreover, her case demonstrates how race has become a fetish in contemporary society; it is representative of the nonsense of identity politics that people are celebrated (or condemned) on the basis of their skin color. One can see clearly Otele’s standpoint in the titles of her essays (for example, “Within and outside Western feminism and grand narratives”) and the books in which her work appears (Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University). This is the work of postcolonialism, a framework heavily influenced by the rot of postmodernism, a politics that fractures the epistemology of truth-seeking into standpoints based on gender, race, and other sociocultural categories. Otele holds a PhD in history from Sorbonne University in France (the university where Michel Foucault earned his).

Postcolonialism is a political agenda that aims to delegitimize Western societies—societies based on civil and human rights, equality, liberalism, and secularism—in order to retribalize the populations that dwell in there and establish a de jure hierarchy of privilege based on an ever expanding plethora of imagined communities. Central to this politics is the demonization of Europeans, typically those identified as white and especially males, by hanging around their necks an historical albatross, namely the sins of colonialism and slavery, practices perpetrated for thousands of years by a myriad of societies, including African. With the practice of selectively reaching into the past for perpetrators from which to extract some good or service, Bristol University becomes responsible in some special manner for a wrong they did not perpetrate—even if we reckon the dead among the defendants.

Wielding this cosmology, Otele is like a religious zealot. When you read her words you are imbibing religious-like dogma full of spooky jargon.
It’s from this standpoint that Otele feels it is appropriate to claim a higher moral plane that permits her to tell others who do not share the sacred stigma of skin color that they are because of their privileged ancestry not in a position to make judgments about the present with respect to other groups—on just about any matter, for that matter, even their own realities, since the deeds of their ancestors disqualifies them from claiming equal measures of agency and humanity. But people who were never slaves have no special claim to make on the matter. I’m quite sure Otele was never a slave. Nor was she raised by parents who were. Nor were her grandparents or great grandparents slaves. Slavery is not in her realm of possible experience. Certainly skin color gives her no claim to the pains of slavery. Ancestry provides no special platform from which to preach a gospel of racial resentment. I’m just as qualified as Otele is to make judgements about whether it is wise to dwell in the past or move on from it.

Ironically, Otele is claiming a privilege based on ancestry, a privilege she claims white people collectively enjoy. Apparently hypocrisy is not a sin in her religion. When people claim skin-color privilege they confirm the racial bias that lies at the heart of their worldview, a worldview that drives the grievance industry. To be sure, there are those who enable this dogma, chief among them those “woke” whites who have been convinced of the fiction of inherited guilt. But this mythology should have no hold on those who reject the dogma—which we must if we want to keep a society based on individual rights and personal freedom. Of course, the dogma will continue to enthrall those who see benefit in a society organized around the unjust redistribution of resources (which should in any case be determined on a material basis, not on the basis of imagined communities).

There is a fundamental truth here: You cannot really be hurt by something that never happened to you. Of course you can feel for those who have suffered. And you can regret the loss and pain of a loved one. This is empathy. But you can only imagine that embody a past historical person, a person you never knew, a person who has become an group abstraction. Imagining somebody else’s suffering entitles you to some thing—such as a claim to emotional privilege—is an exercise of manufactured victimhood. It’s shamefully laying claim to the suffering of others, in this case those who do not suffer in their graves. Akin to stolen valor, this is vicarious martyrdom.

Why are so many people enabling this practice? And at their expense? Does this mass psychology speak to the diminishment of organized religion in the secular nation-state? The alienated clamoring for the transcendent? All the more reason to promote humanism and reason as the basis of ethical and moral understanding.

Sanders has recently abandoned his populist position on immigration for the progressive agenda—eliminating CBP and ICE, halting deportations, and reviving amnesty for those here illegally—promoted by the class entities Sanders until only very recently had condemned. It is a disappointing development. I explain why in this blog (or you can listen to my podcast on the matter posted below). For an overview of Sanders plan, see John Washington’s “Bernie’s Immigration Plan is Good,” published in The Nation.

“Nothing shows the class bias of American media like the way we talk about immigration. We almost always talk about it from the point of view of the employer seeking to pay less for labor, rarely from the point of view of the displaced or undercut employee.” —David Frum.

The first thing I consider in thinking about social class matters is choice of comrades. With whom do I ally? Do I side with the capitalist class? Or with the working class. For me, it’s the working class. Working class Americans. Working class Swedes. Working class English. Working class French. Working class Germans. I ally with workers in the West because the West has produced a culture that rests on the norms and values that have created the greatest prosperity and justice in history—these are humanist, liberal, rational, and secular norms and values. Enlightenment values. It is vital for the sake of progress that we defend these values while advocating for workers. And the way to defend them is by defending the integrity of the modern national state.

My thinking about the interests of workers is two-fold. First, I consider the material conditions of their existence. What are their life chances? Are they able to feed their family? Are they able to pay the rent? What is their standard of living? Are the able to pay it forward? Pass their affluence to future generations? Do they live in safe, stable, and rewarding social environments—environments rich in common interests and communal solidarity? I oppose those things that threaten these things. The second thing I think about is their political and cultural situation. What are the necessary conditions, the necessary political and legal machinery that will afford the working class the means to effectively fight for and secure their interests? Again, I oppose those things that threaten these things.

Because of my theoretical frame and knowledge of social dynamics and human history, I know that the working class, even if most workers don’t know it, is in a epic struggle with the capitalist class. The evidence is clear: the capitalists have been busy dismantling the political and legal machinery and the cultural and social conditions that workers need to organize for their interests. The capitalists have been transforming culture and society through globalization, exporting capital—industrial and agricultural production—to foreign lands to exploit cheap labor over there, while importing cheap labor from foreign lands to work the machines and the farms over here. American and European workers are losing their jobs to foreign workers overseas and they are losing their jobs to foreign workers in their own countries. They are losing their standard of living and their nations.

Domestically, half a trillion dollars is transferred from the native-born working class of the United States of America to the capitalist class in wages annually, wages that otherwise would have been paid to workers to meet their needs. In other words, what workers should receive in wages is appropriated by the capitalist class by exploiting immigrant labor. That’s money the capitalists saves using cheap foreign labor domestically. Wages lost by production being taken overseas is a vast amount on top of that figure. The working class is thus being fucked over in two ways, ways celebrated by the power elite in the halls of business, government, the corporate media, and, bizarrely, by many on the left, which I will come to later in this entry.

Workers are fucked once again by subsidizing the capitalist deployment of cheap labor in their country with the public infrastructure and public services they provide with their taxes. They pay these taxes after having had a vast amount of surplus value appropriated by the firms for which they labor—thus tens of billions more dollars are extracted from the working class to facilitate the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars from one social class to another social class, from the class that produces value to the class that doesn’t. Workers are subsidizing the very mechanism by which their standard of living is being undermined.

To facilitate all this fucking, the class that is at war with the majority of people in this country and their cultural managers have manufactured and deployed an ideology of radical multiculturalism, an identitarian politics that fetishizes diversity while thwarting equality, which they have pushed down into the masses using their control over the means of ideological production. As polls indicate, the masses have largely accepted the propaganda, internalizing values and interests that are not organic their social class location, and thus have come to take the position of capitalists. They have been deceived. They are falsely conscious. They don’t think through or about things in the right way because they lack the theoretical tools to do so, the result of indoctrination in public schools and by a vast culture industry. Workers are taught to take pride in virtue signaling support for immigrants. Cultural pluralism, different values and norms, different languages, different religions—workers do not see these as elements of a strategy to fuck the working class. They have been taught to see them as enlightened and superior moral values. And when they do complain they are accused of nativism, racism, and xenophobia.

This was not always true. The working class organized in the early twentieth century and restricted immigration, a move that began a long march towards democratic socialist ends—not through revolution, but through evolution. Cultural homogenization, national integrity, and rising affluence raised expectations and helped form class consciousness. The West pursued social democracy wherein unions flourished. But the ruling class got wise and, in the 1960s, opened borders to the free flow of capital and labor, to the detriment of the Western standard of living and its popular political organizations. The elite disordered national cultures and confused the working class.

What we see in the aftermath is a disconnect between productivity and wages. Prior to globalization, successive generations did better than their parents. My parents were able to retire on their pensions. But the situation is different now. Capitalists did this to restore high rates of profit. With national economic development, the capitalists had seen declining rates of profit. One-third of workers in the Untied States belonged to unions. Union power kept workers’ wages in line with productivity gains. Ordinary Americans became affluent. They had a national culture and an understanding of their national interests. These developments sparked the civil rights, feminist, and environmental movements. Capitalists were compelled to meet their popular demands at the cost of profits. When they finally had enough, and when world socialism collapsed, the capitalist crushed the organizations of the working class through globalization and ideological manipulation.

Tragically, in what can only be described as a spectacular propaganda achievement, we see progressives demanding more globalization. They demand more immigration and more cultural disorganization. The left has lost the thread of class struggle and the fight for sexual equality. They embrace instead regressive ideologies like Islam, while trashing the truly progressive values of the West—the values of the Enlightenment. The latest causality of the power of the American political establishment is Bernie Sanders, who this week announced his embrace of immigration. I lavished praise on Sander’s for his views on immigration only a few months ago. Now it appears that the last leftwing populist figure has been lost to the rot of progressivism.

Government is obliged to make law, policy, and judgments without regard to race unless the purpose is remedying a situation of race-based discrimination. Race is regarded as a “suspect classification,” that is a class more likely subject to discrimination, and thus considerable only under very narrow circumstances or “strict scrutiny.” Standing law regards race as comprised of inherent, significant, and recognized phenotypic traits, such as skin color, eye shape, and hair texture. Legal principle allows courts to consider redress for those racial classes disadvantaged historically or marginalized in the political process This is obviously a complicated affair.

To count as discrimination, an action must lack a rational basis and violate the principle of equal protection, meaning that a governmental or analogous body may not deny persons equal treatment under the law. Put another way, a public agency must treat concrete individuals similarly in similar circumstances. The doctrine of “separate but equal” as a regime to get around the Fourteenth Amendment was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1954 because individuals were treated differently in public facilities formally segmented by race. A decade later, Congress extended equal treatment to public accommodations; businesses were barred from discriminating against customers and workers on the basis of race.

Because race is a social construct and not a biologically-discernable reality, demands that race-as-class exist as a discrete entity, that it exist as separate and distinct enough to determine who belongs to a particular race and who doesn’t, complicates matters. How do you really know whether a person is really a member of a particular race? The principled way is to demand equal treatment without determining whether the offended part is “actually” a member of a racial minority. Everybody is treated as individuals. However, governments have sought to entrench and perpetuate discreteness by codifying elements of racial identity. Here, the state defines race into existence by drawing subjective boundaries around a phenomenon that has no natural or objective boundaries.

For example, for some time in the United States, governments operated according to the “one-drop rule,” which classified persons with any sub-Saharan African ancestry as “black.” A similar blood quantum rule was devised for determining American Indian heritage. The biological or constitutional definition represented the conception of race established by racism, an ideological system holding that the human species can be meaningfully divided into subgroups that are predictive of cognitive ability, behavioral proclivities, and moral aptitude. The rules have been abandoned. But with modern DNA testing, and the push for reparations for certain minority groups based on historical injustices and justified by intergenerational and collective guilt and victimhood, one can imagine a new regime of blood quantum to determine worthy recipients from redistributed resources.

As I have blogged before, a political effort is underway, one buttressed by the postmodernist turn in the social scientific enterprise (giving ideological work the appearance of objectivity), to expand the definition of race to include traits not historically or legally recognized as such. I show these essays how, in the eyes of those advocating for the expansion, prejudice and discrimination based on biological or physical traits is respecified as “biological racism,” while emphasizing that prejudice and discrimination takes another form, that of “cultural racism.” (One problem with this is that the enlargement of the definition allows progress in race relations to be trivialized in light of the new racism society must overcome, a problem I take up in some of these entries.)

Thus, in addition to the historically and legally recognized definition, the definition of race is expanded to include fashion, hair styles, and other cultural features, even accents, comportment, and grooming practices. This is the source of this notion of “cultural appropriation,” an racist offensive in which somebody of the “wrong” race adopts the fashion or hair style of the race who claims exclusive access to fashion or hair style (or music, art, etc.). This politics means to keep racial groupings discrete by policing cultural and ethnic borders. In light of the perceived inadequacy of informal social control in the task of boundary maintenance, the movement demands the government do the work of racially segmenting society by defining race in particular ways. Thus we find ourselves in a period of re-racialization.

One might think that the practice of classifying racial groups is what society sought to do away with when it criminalized race discrimination and debunked theories purporting to explain culture on the basis of race. But one risks perpetrating “colorblind racism” for saying this. To be sure, during the civil rights movement, racialization was a negative thing to overcome. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed of a day when people would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Nowadays a person may be presumed a conservative for embracing the colorblind ideal. For post-civil rights progressives, racialization of populations is a positive thing, a necessary step in achieving social justice. Embrace difference and back it with the force of law.

Let’s be frank about this. With the reification of the social construct of race that comes by officially defining its attributes, then seeking to redistribute things on that basis, by privileging concrete persons on the basis of group identity, individual rights gives way to group rights. Put another way, claims of reparative justice require careful delineation of who can claim group membership and what freedoms and resources one can therefore express, possess, and access on this basis. This requires racializing the population in new ways.

* * *

In a June 17, 2011 Guardian article, “School’s refusal to let boy wear cornrow braids is ruled racial discrimination,” we learn that the high court of London ruled that school authorities must consider allowing boys to wear cornrows if it is “a genuine family tradition based on cultural and social reasons.” To be clear, the ruling did not allow boys to wear cornrows. It allowed only some boys to wear cornrows on the basis of cultural and social reasons. This means that those boys who wanted to wear cornrows for their other reasons were not permitted to do so.

The headteacher, Andrew Prindiville, of St. Gregory’s College, justified the school’s hair policy—“short back and sides”—as necessary to suppress gang culture. Haircuts are used as badges of gang membership, he said. The judge, Mr Justice Collins, said that cornrows were not necessarily gang-associated. Other styles, such as the skinhead, might well have that connection, he said. Emphasizing that the school’s hair policy was lawful (why?), the judge declared that exceptions had to be made on ethnic and cultural grounds (why?). The judge noted that exceptions were already made for Rastafarians and Sikh boys who wore their hair below the collar (why do past errors validate present ones?). Why should it be any different for African Caribbean boys? The boy’s solicitor, Angela Jackman, said, “It makes clear that non-religious cultural and family practices associated with a particular race fall within the protection of equalities legislation.”

We can see in this case the manner in which the definition of race is being expanded to include non-phenotypic features, namely presumptively exclusive cultural and social attitudes and habits. We also see in the rhetoric that attire and practices permitted for some boys denied to other boys on religious grounds is presumed as given.

To be clear, I don’t like what skinheads stand for. But the government should be content-neutral on such matters. Is skinhead not a cultural phenomenon? Is it not part of a tradition? Indeed, it is. Does a boy not have a right to wear a skinhead if he wishes? Or to hold racist views? Is it the now the government’s job to determine what are legitimate cultures and traditions? If everybody is allowed to wear their hair however they wish, then the state doesn’t have to make any exceptions at all. The government also gets to avoid discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, or whatever. That would be individual liberty at work. But, here, the court is acting on the basis of group rights. Members of one group have access to hair styles while members of another group do not. And this is offered as “justice.”

To be clear, it’s fine for people to debate what is or is not part of a ethnic identity (hence the tedium of “cultural appropriation”), but the government should not be in the business of determining what is appropriately ruled in or out of imagined communities the state does not and should not constitute. It is not for government officials to determine who is a legitimate member of this or that racial group or who can engage in a cultural activity. We can’t have the government policing such things. 

What is more, culture is not race; so why are hairstyles, a product of (often fleeting) culture, even at issue? As I have demonstrated on my blog, race is constructed around socially-selected phenotypic features resulting from ancestry. At least there is some genetics there. For example, you could, using DNA, racially define subpopulations on the basis of ancestry (which would necessarily enter the problematic of hybridization). How one wears his hair is not a genetic trait at all. Neither is how one dresses. Is this a return to the nineteenth century notion that tattoos are an atavistic expression? And what would it do to make a skinhead wear a different hairstyle in any case? Or cover his tattoos.

Remember when people immediately recognized that the state defining who is and who is not this or that race was racist? Now we have the state including in the definition of race things that are not even part of the phenomenon. A court in Great Britain is officially racializing culture and privileging people on account of it. In this ruling, if a boy is the right race, then he can wear his hair in a differently prescribed way. But the principle of equal treatment demands that the government does not treat individuals differently on the basis of race. Angela Jackman’s distinction between religious reasons and non-religious cultural reasons is no distinction at all. It would be just as discriminatory to allow an exception for an individual on religious grounds that was denied an irreligious person. The codification of special rights on the basis of culture, race, or religion is antithetical to the pursuit of equality and liberty.

You may be thinking: “Well, that Great Britain. They’re not as bad as the French, but they have a very poor understanding of individual rights and personal liberty.” Unfortunately, the social logic of group rights is spreading in the United States. In early July of this year California governor Gavin Newsom signed into law the CROWN Act (Bill SB-188), which bans discriminating against “natural hair.” The act had passed both the California senate and the state assembly unanimously. The law expands the definition of race to cover culture. In doing so, it writes race-based discrimination into the law. Sociologist Chelsea Johnson, who studies the “natural hair movement,” speaks for many when she says that bill SB-188 is a “much needed first step toward protecting women of color’s rights to wear their hair in its natural state and according to common cultural traditions across the African diaspora.”

But what about protecting the rights of individuals of any color to wear their hair the way they wish? In taking issue with New York City’s Commission on Human Rights ruling that it will protect “the rights of New Yorkers to maintain natural hair or hairstyles that are closely associated with their racial, ethnic or cultural identities,” Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford, an expert on civil rights and anti-discrimination law, argues that hairstyle is not a civil right. “Moreover,” he argues, “the new hairstyle rights can’t apply just to minority groups. If black employees have a right to wear, say, multicolored braids or an ‘untrimmed’ Afro, then it follows that white employees have a right to wear unusual hairstyles associated with their race too, such as a messy shag cut, a regrettable 1980s style ‘Mullet’ or glam-rock teased hair.” “And who’s to say which hairstyles are associated with which races?” he adds. Indeed. In an early essay, Ford argues that banning dreadlocks at work is not racially discriminatory even if it should be illegal. “We could clean up this mess by simply establishing a legal right to autonomy in personal appearance,” he argues. In his 2006 Racial Culture, Ford argues that courts should give up on trying to figure out what counts as race.

I hasten to add that the natural state of hair of many white people falls within the domain claimed by some “people of color.” I had white friends in high school who wore afros. For them, the afro was the obvious choice. It’s where their hair wanted to go. And it allowed them to express their freaky selves. But what if a white boy wants to wear dreadlocks? Egyptians, Germanic tribes, Poles, Vikings, Pacific Islanders, early Christians, as well as the Somali, the Galla, the Maasai, the Ashanti and the Fulani tribes of Africa—all have worn dreadlocks. As University of Richmond professor Bert Ashe writes in his Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, the better question is, “Who hasn’t worn dreadlocks at one time or another?” White women have kinky hair. So do white men. Will they be discriminated against if they wear dreadlocks or cornrows?

There is a disturbing development in all this. People don’t actually own culture. One can appropriate any cultural element they choose. Humans have been doing this for millennia. Yet, armed with identity politics, people are claiming cultural items, and they are doing so using the rhetoric of group rights. Does it not seem that the idea of cultural appropriation is a manifestation of the internalization of corporate branding. Black moral entrepreneurs are defining blacks as a corporate body. Remember how Rachel Dolezal—an “objectively” white woman—was attacked for defining herself as part of that corporate body? Islamic leaders have also declared themselves a corporate body. Both the postmodern and religious view of things is that identity is what determines the individual. These notions undermine personal freedom by sacrificing the individual on the altar of group identity.

“Natural hair” laws are easily repurposed to discriminate against whites who wear “black” hairstyles. If a court or a legislature declares dreadlocks a racial feature, and on this basis disallow businesses from demanding employee adhere to a dress code, then a person not of that race could be compelled to adhere to a dress code by cutting their dreadlocks. We already see this with religious accommodations. As I recently blogged on Freedom and Reason, school authorities tell my son that he can’t wear a hoodie at school, but the girl who subscribes to (or is forced to observe) the Islamic dress code can wear a hijab. Those who advocate such practices seem oblivious to the principle that makes religious discrimination wrong in the first place. The principle that decisions cannot be based on religion in such a way that gives members of a religious group the right to cover their heads but forbids individuals who do not belong to that religious group from covering theirs escapes the radical multicultural subjectivity. It’s sexist, as well. Girls can cover their heads, but boys cannot.

“This is not just about hair, it’s about acknowledgement of personal rights, it’s about checking bias,” says California State Sen. Holly Mitchell, a Democrat who wears dreadlocks and proposed “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair” Act, or CROWN. Banning ethnic hairstyles “upholds this notion of white supremacy,” Patricia Okonta, attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund says. She continues: “While there isn’t a consensus among federal courts about whether racial stereotypes violate Title VII, the federal law that prohibits workplace discrimination based on race, sex and religion, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund has argued that natural hair and styles should be covered by that statute.” The New York City Commission on Human Rights agrees. “The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., has taken on several cases including one filed on behalf of two Boston-area sisters, Mya and Deanna Cook, who were forbidden to wear braid extensions to Mystic Valley Regional Charter School in 2017. The policy has since been rescinded.” The hair stylers are part of their authentic selves. Society must reject “Eurocentric beautify standards.” Alan Maloney won’t be refereeing high school wrestling matches for a while because he asked a wrestler to cut his dreadlocks or be disqualified. Despite the fact that dreadlocks can cause eye and other injuries, his ruling was condemned as racially discriminatory.

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I had very long hair from much of my life. Many in my family hated my long hair because poor people have long hair. You know, white trash. I couldn’t get a job for years because I had long hair. People thought I wasn’t looking for work. But it was the hair. I did not want to give up my hair because businesses thought men should wear short hair. Cops targeted me for my long hair. They presumed I was a drug user. I cut my hair in my early twenties so I could eat and pay rent. I’m not proud of it, but I gave in. Poverty will do that to a person. I realized that my hair wasn’t as important as food. I didn’t have a “natural hair” movement to change rules and perceptions for me. I had to wait for attitudes to change. In time, I grew it long again. This was the most common conversation I had when meeting new people: “So why do you grow your hair? Is it a political statement?” No, I would answer, it’s always felt like part of my identity. (I did not act as if I was the victim of a microaggression.) I tell people I first grew it when I was 12-years-old. For some reason, nobody found that a compelling argument. Well, music and music shops and construction work gave me situations for time in my identity. Not my “group identity,” mind you. My identity. I am an individual. I am a person.