In the summer of 1969, I was seven years old and watching Apollo 11 blastoff into space. This event put in me going forward an outlook of optimism about human possibility. I did not know that all around me 100,000 people (out of 200 million people or .05% of the population) had died from influenza strain H3N2 during the 1968-1969 flu season. The death toll likely would have been much higher but for the herd immunity acquired a decade earlier when the same strain swept the world—with a much greater proportional death toll (116,000 out of 175 million people or .066% of the population). All I knew is that we were going to put men on the moon.
Had physicians, pundits, and politicians framed H3N2 like they are framing COVID-19, which may in the end produce a proportionally comparable death toll (currently 140,000 out of 330 million or .042% of the population), albeit with a much lower lethality potential for children and adults under 50 years of age, my outlook going forward would have very likely been very different. It almost certainly would have been worse had I been younger while experiencing this trauma. Unable to have much of an abstract grasp of the risk, I would no doubt have been terrified. Like many children, the terror would manifest in ways that may not be immediately apparent to those around me. But I would nonetheless be a different person inside than I otherwise would or should have been.
Most of the brain development in our species occurs after birth, during the first five years of life. It is during this time that our nervous system potential is activated and elaborated. Depending on how the child experiences the world, this system can develop along normal and healthy or abnormal and pathological trajectories. We will discover in time—many parents already see it in their children—that the societal reaction to this virus has traumatized a generation of children and young adults. Trauma and crisis change the organism. In this case, it will be for the worst.
I confess, there is a selfishness expressed in the world today that angers me. Adam Curtis puts it well when he describes this as the result of a “century of the self.” Part of this is due to the sociopathy mass consumer culture has produced, a dehumanizing social logic engineered by corporate power for the sake of profit. But it is also the result of those whose nervous systems developed in the grip of trauma.
When I see people hellbent on deepening trauma by doubling down on hysteria, I do understand and sympathize at a certain level. I see the fear of the wounded and frightened animal in their eyes, peering over the mask. They want to keep the pandemic panic going because they’re scared. Characteristic of moral panics, it’s the paranoids and phobics acting in often unconscious ways to generalize their specific traumas to the rest of the population who become the most aggressive advocates for hysteria. They soothe themselves with the fear of others. It makes them feel not quite so alone. Their empathy deadened, they think of their own emotional and psychological needs first, and that manifests in shaming, scolding, and, if possible, coercing others into their regime of pathological anxiety and fear. The stress response becomes a political and moral cause that sweeps everybody into their pathology. This explains the remarkable degree of intolerance for the choices others make in their lives.
Salem witch hysteria—the classic case of moral panic
As a consequence of all this, a great many of our children will grow up to see other people and social situations as disease vectors, especially those who do not give into the fear that the victims of panic have become convinced is warranted. Moral panics—witch hunts, red scares, pandemics—breed suspicion of others. Mass hysteria trains people to perceive invisible enemies in need of identifying and stigmatizing for the purposes of making uncertainty manageable. It is a world of pariahs and scapegoats. Those who do not fear the invisible enemy in the way they are expected to—in the way they should—are not merely wrong but evil and dangerous. These are signs that trauma victims are imposing their victimization on others.
Many of our children will carry the anxiety and fear that others have put in them into their interactions with others. They will project their victimization in this same way. They will spread a different kind of virus, a virus of fear and loathing. Pathological fear and loathing, i.e. phobias, generates avoidance behavior. Pathological fear causes people to avoid the wellspring of common humanity—the intimate social relations that forge the well-developed and potentially self-actualized personalities that keep alive the desire for the free and open society that sustains these necessary positive interactions.
We have entered a period of rapidly-successive mass hysterias (this in itself indicating a deep disturbance in the moral order). We are experiencing a vicious downward spiral into mass pathology. In this context, all of the core values of our civilization—free speech, autonomy, privacy, personal sovereignty—are threatened. Indeed, we see a new culture emerging bearing all the signs of an authoritarian order. And that is something to panic about.
We are, like all mammals, evolved beings. Natural history has made us specially social; engaged and non-stressed interaction with other persons roots deeply in our nervous system. As Gabor Maté tells us, children require attentive and emotionally-available caregivers. Co-presence is insufficient to properly activate our nervous systems. We cannot accomplish this through screens. Children require intimate and physical interaction to develop out more fully their brains, emotions, and minds. The unfolding of the human personality is dialectical; we come with wetware that requires activation and stimulation and programming (socialization). Humans depend on sufficient dopamine production for proper levels of motivation. They need ample oxytocin for love and solidarity. Serotonin for happiness and wellbeing. And all the rest of it. It is engaged and non-stressed social interaction in childhood that builds the normal and healthy adult. Children can feel the stress their parents bring to their interactions. If parents behave as if a terrible monster waits around the corner—even more frighteningly, as if other human beings carry this terrible monster within them—the children will internalize this stress and it will damage them.
I realize that this virus is not harmless. I have said this in many essays. But the fact that we do not respond this way to the annual flu, which kills tens of thousands every year in the United States alone, tells us that the response this virus is irrational. I have written about why the response is different this time, so I won’t repeat those points here. But the rational way to have responded to the appearance of the virus would have been to focus on the vulnerable populations the authorities ignored. More than half of all those who died perished in our long-term care facilities. Only around five percent of the population live in those facilities. Making sure the vulnerable were protected, while the healthy went on with their lives, would have been the rational approach. We could shift to this approach immediately—if cooler heads prevailed. Alas, I fear they won’t.
By conditioning people to perceive disease and death in human relations and intimate interaction, the societal response to this virus is deadening people. Stress produces cortisol, a hormone that affects every system in the body. If the production of this hormone is constant, it compromises every system in the body, producing a damaged person. Like a wolf or a bear in a cage. It’s not the virus that is doing this to us. It’s the societal reaction to the virus that is doing this to us. In light of the actual risks from this disease, objectively, there is no justification for the intensity and duration of the stress response. It is tragic that only some people can see that this is the wrong thing to do in the throes of a pandemic. Maybe one day most people will see it. They usually do. But by then it will be too late. In many ways it’s already is too late. All we can do now is try to mitigate the harm the fearful and the selfish and irrational fear have inflicted upon our nation.
For all those who will take umbrage at what I have written here, know that I have been watching the way you treat other people. Your mocking and hatefulness, your belittling of others with whom you disagree, are signs of the very pathology I am writing about. The offense you take, the anger you feel, are personal reflections on the condition that you have imposed on others in a dynamic of othering. The reflex of projecting lack of empathy exposed you a long time ago. I owe you no apology. Quite the other way around. Start treating people as the human beings they are.
Continuing to push back against weaponized historical revisionism. The prevailing world-historical narrative over slavery and the West is an ideological exercise. This blog does not deny slavery was practiced in the West. Nor does it deny that racism exist or remains a problem. My previous blog Truth in the Face of the 1619 Project: The United States and the West Did Not Establish Slavery—They Abolished It attacks the idea that one can diminish Western civilization and the American republic on grounds that white Europeans made them. I argue that such an assessment of culture and ideas on account of race is a profoundly racist claim in itself. The claim is rooted in the fallacy that culture roots in race. We see the fallacy in the rhetoric of “cultural appropriation.” Leftwing identiarianism is founded upon an untenable essentialism about race (when convenient, it does the same thing with gender). As I will explain in this blog, this error results in part from the shift from class to race in New Left thought, largely the product of a Mao Zedong Third Worldist corruption. The public has no idea how much our culture and politics have been shaped by Mao Zedong thought. You cannot understand what Black Lives Matter is really about until you grasp this history.
Classical Marxists value the Enlightenment and modernity because they understand that these forces have historically detribalized people and reincorporated them as citizens and individuals in national communities based on liberal and secular values. Put another way, modernity liberates people from backwards and traditional structures. (See The Individual, the Nation-State, and Left-Libertarianism;Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism; Capitalist Globalization and the Promise of Democratic-Republicanism.) As a consequence, working people have opportunities to grasp more clearly the primary determinant of their life-chances: social class. They come to recognize themselves as a class-in-itself and make possible thinking as a class-for-itself. This points to the bourgeois necessity of confusing the proletariat with ideology and propaganda.
Classical Marxists do not reduce the Enlightenment to capitalism. Indeed, communism and socialism are themselves products of the Enlightenment. Such liberal values as free speech are not the problem for Marxists. The problem is that the bourgeoisie possesses power and property to such a degree that the possibility of realizing these values in action are unequally distributed and thus constrained for the majority.
The Official Medallion of the British Anti-Slavery Society
More than clearing the ground for class consciousness and opening the possibility for socialism and the expansion and deepening of democracy, the ethics of liberalism and modernity articulate the reasons for abolishing slavery. By recognizing common humanity and emancipating the person from the tribe so as to make the individual, the Enlightenment puts the black man on the same moral plane as the white man. “Am I not a man and a brother?” asked the man in chains in Josiah Wedgwood’s 1787 medallion designed for the British antislavery campaign. This sentiment is made possible by the recognition of species-being. The injustice of involuntary servitude becomes an inescapable fact in the light of modernity; rationalizations of it could only work at times and in places and only for so long. The institution of slavery is marginal in the world because the West spread this sentiment across the planet.
The Enlightenment did not invent colonialism or race prejudice. It pointed a way beyond them. It was revolutionary and universalist. By transcending capitalism, the classical Marxist argues, liberal values can be more fully realized, since the contradiction that restricts access to them would be removed. Until then, the target of resistance is globalism. Karl Marx did not stand against Enlightenment but was a product of it. He did not want to overthrow modernity but universalize it.
It was Mao Zedong thought and the New Left who reframed the political problem in racial terms, shifting the dynamic from class antagonisms and struggle to white Western oppression of nonwhites. Whereas Marx exposed the strategy as “bourgeois nationalism,” Moa embraced it. The “North-South” divide in international political economy, obscuring class antagonisms in the national context, is a product of the reframing. This is Third Worldism. This Worldism is not a class-analytical standpoint, but a race-ideological one, dressed in Marxist jargon. With its rhetoric of “oppressed nations,” Maoism pits workers of some nations against workers of other nations on the basis of race. It sinks this divisiveness down into the national context, antagonizing social relations with the rhetoric of “internal colonialism,” thus making racialized minorities appear as aliens in their own countries. In this way, minorities are alienated from their comrades in the majority. This ideology makes enemies among the people. Divide and rule. The 1983 Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, in arguing that white proletarians lack working class consciousness, and that therefore nonwhite minorities are the organic vanguard of socialist revolution, is a case in point.
The crowd in the street is not a movement for equality and justice. Such a movement would be a multiracial (transracial, really) class-based mass movement against corporate power. An authentic democratic movement would not manifest as a race-identitarian reaction canceling republican institutions and liberal principles. That is an obvious contradiction. A genuine emancipatory movement would extol democratic-republican values of individual rights and responsibilities, for these are the liberating forces that abolished slavery and marginalized racism. Such a movement would not merely eschew the regressive and racist ideology of blood guilt, but would condemn it as authoritarian and retrograde. An authentic movement for equality and justice would not strive to make our most violent neighborhoods less secure by diminishing the institutions of public safety. It would demand that the national government step in to protect citizens where state and local governments fail them. A movement representing working people would focus its rhetoric on the continuing problem of class exploitation and economic inequality. The movement’s character would be populist not progressive. It would be left-realist.
Capitalists have long used race to divide the working people. They’re at it again. What we are seeing is not a democratic movement for equality but an elite-financed elite-organized countermovement to entrench corporate governance and spread neoliberal programming. It’s astroturf.
What makes today’s race project so successful is that many on the political left have adopted the transnationalization agenda of the globalist fraction of bourgeoisie: the managed decline of the West and its institutions. The left has been duped by a deformation of critical thinking that leverages against the people the alienation caused by conditions of which they remain unconscious. As they sit in their high school and college classes listening to their teachers and professors trashing the institutions of the West, they do not hear about the most important determinant of their life-chances: the capitalist mode of production. Instead, they are in training to become functionaries of the very productive modality that exploits their labor.
The progressive deceit turns out popular forces to wage war on comrades not capitalists. The mob thinks it’s working for justice. But it’s working against itself. At least it is working against the proletariat. It’s working for corporate power. The effort is not making a more just society, but undermining the striving to manifest in law and policy the values extolled by rational and fair-minded people, and with these the aspirations, interests, and security of the American working class, including the black and brown Americans for whom the riot does not and cannot speak.
“We wouldn’t have to have Black Lives Matter if we didn’t have 300 years of black lives don’t matter.” —Antiracist Jane Elliott
Slavery has been a fact of human societies across the world dating back to antiquity. Its terms are covered in the Code of Hammurabi and the Jewish Bible. The Greeks and Romans owned slaves. Slavery was widespread under Islam. The practice is not unique in world-historical terms. What is unique about the transAtlantic experience with respect to slavery is this: the West abolished the practice. The United States was a leader in slavery’s abolition from the country’s inception through the modern period, from banning the slave trade to globalizing the effort to abolish slavery everywhere. America remains vigilant (for example, in 2017, the US State Department established the Program to End Modern Slavery).
Arab slave traders under Islamic hegemony
The United States did not establish slavery in North America. Slavery existed long before the United States was a country. Within a decade after establishing the republic in 1787 (the year the Constitution was ratified), Americans outlawed the slave trade. It was a promise kept. When, in 1860, some southern states elected to secede from the Union and put slavery at the center of a new nation, the Union took up arms and put down the insurrection, abolished chattel slavery, and reunited the country under one flag. The struggle saw the sacrifice of three-quarters of a million Americans, mostly white, for the sake of the freedom of black people. Overall, more than a million Americans perished in the conflict. The Confederate flag flies only in the imagination of a recalcitrant few.
The United States government made the former slaves and their descendants citizens and, in time, guaranteed all Americans equal rights—civil, political, and social—regardless of race. When the barrier of de jure segregation was erected in the aftermath of Reconstruction, a racism hardly dissimulated by the fiction of “separate but equal,” the United States government abolished that, too. Discrimination against black people has been illegal throughout the nation for more than half a century. Black people in America now ascend to high positions in the civil and political sectors of American society. Systemic racism has been abolished. Institutional racism is a thing in the past. And very few white people carry racist beliefs in their heads anymore.
The emancipation of humanity from the scourge of slavery was a product of the Enlightenment and of Western civilization. The Enlightenment is a European philosophical and moral movement emphasizing democracy, humanism, individual liberty, liberalism, republicanism, science, and secularism. The Enlightenment is the source of the doctrine of universal human rights, which recognizes the common humanity of our species. These are radical ideas. I do not write this to ennoble white people. At the same time, we should not tear down these ideas because white people authored them. The race of a people does not determine the validity of their ideas.
The founders of the United States reflected this way of thinking. Their Declaration of Independence expresses in inspired tones the humanist principles of inalienable rights and self-governance: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is the American creed. Their Constitution, with its Bill of Rights, embodies Enlightenment ideals and principles. It was in this light that the institution of slavery and the ideology of racism was overthrow. And it is in this light that the fight against slavery and racism continues.
The Libyan slave trade thrived in the wake of the Obama-Biden bombing campaign.
Yet, despite the devotion and success of the United States in shepherding these ideals through to practice, we are hearing, articulated by so-called radicals, the wholesale condemnation of the very civilization that gave rise to abolitionism and the granting of full citizenship to black Americans. Our people are being taught that the United States is a problematic construct because it was founded in a world where slavery was ubiquitous. Our children are being trained to gloss over such monumental facts as these: American revolutionaries overthrew a monarchy and established a secular democratic-republic and freed black people from bondage. The project seeks to move the date from our founding in 1776 to the year 1619 when Dutch slave traders brought twenty or so Africans to the Jamestown settlement in the British colony of Virginia. They mean to recenter world history on the black struggle in order to tell a tale of 400 years of uninterrupted oppression at the hands of white supremacists. This is a delegitimation project.
Today, thanks to a retelling of our common history from the standpoint of oppression, there are crowds in our street burning down government buildings, desecrating monuments and toppling statues, and physically assaulting their fellow citizens. Skirting the reality that it was white men who abolished slavery and ended Jim Crow (white men also guaranteed women the right to vote), the crowds insist that they’re overthrowing systemic racism and a regime of white supremacy. The white majority is portrayed not as a people who strived to form a more perfect union, but as habitually standing in the way of justice for minorities.
There is a fundamental error committed here—a grand ad hominem fallacy. This is the argument: Of the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention, nearly half owned slaves. The nation was stamped from the beginning as a wicked thing because of the identity of its authors. All of them were white men. This is the essentialism of identity politics. But if a ubiquitous white male supremacy constituted government and made laws to preserve particular racial and gendered interests over against the interests of nonwhites and women, then why was it white men who secured equality and freedom for blacks and women? It was not a slave revolt that won freedom for blacks. It was white men advancing the ideals of a nation who freed blacks and made sure they became citizens. Likewise, it was white men who pushed the Nineteenth Amendment through Congress and saw its ratification as part of the ever expanding Bill of Rights. It was moral conscience and patriotism guided by the America creed that moved white men to fight for equality and justice. American history is proof of the righteousness of its institutions, not an indictment of them. The American republic is irreducible to the race and gender of the men who founded it. Identitarianism is a false proposition. Yet it is the prevailing form of racism in the West today.
Of course the enlightenment was not the product of white male thought (whatever that might mean outside of racialist claims) but the product of Western civilization and culture. Civilization and culture are not racial things. Only racists believe this. The Enlightenment was not an ideology constructed to secure the interests of white males over nonwhite people. It is a error of epic proportions to think that the radical ideas of the Enlightenment spring from racial type. Race is not an actual thing. How many times do we have to speak this truth before it sinks in? If one says that we must reject European values because they’re the values of people who are judged to be on account of race a problematic people, then that person is making the same sort of racist argument that white supremacists make when they reject good and beneficial ideas from Africa or Asia on the grounds that those who hail from these continents are problematic. It so happens that the Enlightenment emerged in a region of the world that was majority white. Racists make something of that. But we shouldn’t.
In Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Ibram X. Kendi conflates race and culture in the same way racists do when he argues that, after biological racism was discredited as a scientific theory of racial separation and inequality, appeal to African American attitudes and culture as the explanation for disparities became the new racism. I cite his book because of all the attention it has generated, but Kendi is hardly alone in making this error. It is endemic on the left. For analyses of the problem, see my recent essays The Origin and Character of Antiracist Politics, Smearing Amy Wax and The Fallacy of Cultural Racism, and Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation. (In The New Racism, which I wrote in 2008, you can see the beginning of my questioning of the new racism concept that many of us were taught from childhood. As an academic, this fallacy was reinforced in my training.) The fallacy has become more widespread over time and is now the popular understanding. It is at least the understanding that shapes discourse in popular culture. We see it, for example, in the essentialist rhetoric of “cultural appropriation,” which must assume that culture is rooted in race (see Race-Based Discrimination as a Model for Social Justice for a critique).
Kendi’s formulation is wrong. Culture and ideas do not belong to any race. They are the products of the brains of a single species: Homo sapiens. It therefore cannot be true that criticizing or praising culture and ideas is racist. For example, analyzing and criticizing the culture of violence and dependency associated black-majority neighborhoods is not a racist endeavor. There are many reasons for the relative degree of poverty that exists in the United States and the racial disparities associated with it, but it is not racist to reject the claim that systemic racism explains these inequalities. Nor can Western civilization be discredited on account of the fact that white people founded it. Western civilization is not a culture of white supremacy. It is the culture responsible for the ideas of democracy, humanism, individual liberty, liberalism, republicanism, science, and secularism that have resulted in the most advance and just societies in history—indeed, the culture in which abolitionism appeared. Defending these ideas does not require any appeal to white racial superiority. The preservation of Western civilization is not a racist project. The claim that it is a project that seeks to cancel Western civilization. Those who take up this project believe they can inoculate themselves from criticism by crying racism. We shouldn’t let them.
* * *
I quoted antiracist Jane Elliott at the start of the essay not because I admire her; on the contrary, her presence in the struggle for justice and equality is toxic. She says on the one hand that there is no such thing as race, then proceeds to frame everything in those terms. The quote—“We wouldn’t have to have Black Lives Matter if we didn’t have 300 years of black lives don’t matter”—is the subject of memes shared across social media. I shared it yesterday on facebook so I could say this snarky thing: “Because abolition of the slave trade, civil war, Emancipation, the Fourteenth Amendment, Reconstruction, Brown v Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, affirmative action, and Barack Obama never happened.” Frankly, I am not sure she actually said this. It’s a meme. But it is something she would say. Race merchants like Elliott say things like this all the time to diminish our accomplishments as a people. The New York Times 1619 Project is an project to deny progress. Kendi’s thesis that racial ideas are constructed to legitimize white supremacist policy and structure rationalizes every advance in race relations as a tactic to keep in place a system that materially benefits white men. “Not-racist” is therefore a manifestation of racism.
According to Robin DiAngelo, denial of white fragility is proof of white fragility. If our legal system worked this way, nobody accused of a crime would ever be acquitted. https://t.co/tgBe9ndlIQ
The New Left racialist project is a massive exercise in gas-lighting. If a white person denies their white privilege that proves they enjoy white privilege (a white person has it anyway by virtue of being born that way). If a white person says he not racist that means he is racist. Kendi tells us that one can either be a racist or an antiracist. There is no between. If you oppose reparations, then you are racist because “the middle ground is racist ground.” Ironic that the offspring of poststructuralism are so eager to establish binaries (when it’s convenient, of course). You are one or the other and essentially so.
“Are you doing something about your racism?” is a variation on “When did you last beat your wife?” Somebody says you are sexist. You deny you are one. That is proof that you are one. You’re in denial. The trick is meant to undermine confidence in your self-judgment by people supremely confident in their own. Those who deny woke doctrine are in particular need of the therapies amateur pop psychologists peddle. The deniers are in need of healing. Or at least in need of acquiring the skills to live with their incurable disease (whites are categorically racist, after all). Racists Anonymous. Is that a thing? “Hi, I’m Bobby Charles and I’m a racist.” It is hard to believe anybody takes this nonsense seriously. But they do. And, no matter how much it’s dressed up in jargon and confused with bad argument and statistical manipulation, it is nonsense. It’s manipulative and arrogant. Woke scolds are insufferable.
Nobody I know claims that history is free of oppression and struggle. Peasants, workers, women, children, gays and lesbians—the story of human freedom is the overcoming of barriers and injustices to ascend to new heights of dignity and liberty. Justice isn’t like flipping on a light-switch. It’s realized in steps and slowed by missteps and resistance. But the claim that black lives didn’t matter for 300 or 400 years—at least in the West—is utterly false. Elliott, along with DiAngelo, Hannah-Jones, Kendi, and the other practitioners of racecraft, erase the history of progress in order to delegitimize the American project. As Glenn Loury put it (I am paraphrasing), the historical revisionists mean to relegate civil war, abolition, and civil rights to footnotes in order to construct a grand narrative of 400 years of white supremacy and racial oppression that depicts the black victim as the pivot of historical turning. From this standpoint, nothing short of dismantling the republic can redeem such a world.
Things have changed. In the past, one could point to the oppression of the day. Today, the cries of oppression have little to justify them. We are a substantively just society in every area of social class. The panic over “microaggressions” tells us that. We have reached this stage in our development because of the Western ideals that guided the struggle of people. We reached these heights not by rejecting our values, but demanding that they be realized in practice. We’re here because our creed is righteous and our devotion to it adamant. We need to put the matter of race behind us and get to the real task at hand: poverty and class inequality.
In the following videos, Glenn Loury, economist as Brown University, and John McWhorter, linguist at Columbia University, show us how to think and talk about our history. They discuss the 1619 Project after receiving numerous emails from viewers of Loury’s vlog at Blogging Heads asking them to address the problem of its regressive and racialist narrative. I want to close with their wisdom.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” —Animal Farm
“In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.”—Donald Trump, July 3, 2020
“There’s this new, weird sort of fascism of people thinking they know what you can say and what you can’t.” —Ricky Gervais
Here’s the awesome thing about free speech: you don’t have to agree with J.K. Rowling or anybody else to support it. Indeed, the whole point of free speech is that you defend speech with which you disagree—you demand the protection of speech that you find offensive. Defending speech with which you agree is a different thing. We call that an endorsement. It must be terribly embarrassing to sign on to a letter in defense of free speech only to find out that you don’t actually believe in free speech.
You’re still following me, Jennifer. Be sure to publicly repent of your association with Goody Rowling before unfollowing and volunteer to operate the ducking stool next time, as penance. https://t.co/SgjGDt1dcF
Jennifer Boylan signed an open letter defending free speech against cancel culture. Many corporate media outlets and cancellers themselves came out against the letter. Boylan, either not knowing Rowling also signed the letter, or regretting having signed a letter the woke crowd didn’t like (worse, that they believe negates their movement and even the existence of some of their comrades), apologized for signing the letter and condemned it.
J.K. Rowling
Rowling responded with the snarky tweet I shared above. The reference is vaguely to Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, which is a metaphor for the persecution Miller and others faced during the Red Scare of the 1940s, which, like the present mass hysteria, or moral panic, if you will, ruined the lives of people who refused to chant the approved slogans of hysterical anticommunism and betray their comrades and colleagues by giving up their names, i.e. doxxing them.
In other words, cancel culture is a witch hunt and Boylan either didn’t realize she wasn’t a witch or is ashamed of having signed a letter that also featured the signature of a well known witch. Rowling, the real witch, is calling out Boylan, a newly self-appointed witch-finder. Boylan embarrassingly realized who stood where after the fact.
In case you haven’t been following all this, this witch Rowling apparently has the magical ability to harm people by noting that persons who menstruate have traditionally been called women. She has been speaking out for a while now about what she perceives as the cancelling of women.
‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?
Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate https://t.co/cVpZxG7gaA
Rowling fails to chant the approved slogan, indeed appears to casts spells against it, because she is worried about the cancelling of women by defining them out of existence. Not just in rhetoric, but in law and policy and even science (according to some scientists). Rowling is not alone in this concern and is with her example producing what we call “mutual knowledge.” Mutual knowledge often spells trouble for counter/movements if it catches on.
Rowling is a powerful witch, i.e. difficult to cancel given her status and success. She uses her position to defend the right of others who do not enjoy her level of success to be free from the cancel mob. In other words, she is the leader of a coven of young and less powerful witches. Since she cannot be canceled by destroying her career, the witch finders are trying to make an example of her in order to silence others who can be destroyed.
That very successful people of high status have produced and signed a letter decrying cancel culture has been seen as a disaster by those who desire to change our understanding and practice of free speech and other basic liberties.
I want to be clear: the letter does not state a position on the transgender or any other issue of substance. It is a letter pointing out that in a free society people are not destroyed over an opinion on any matter. It is shameful that a letter like this even has to appear. But it does.
The West is in a struggle over whether its people shall live in one world where universal rights are recognized and protected by open and free institutions and culture, or multiple worlds where reality is subjectively defined by feelings and imagined communities and the resulting warring factions shame and cancel those with whom they disagree.
The present moment is not unlike the religious wars of yesteryear, only one side of this is secular and the other side is comprised of religious-like zealots. Hence the frenzy over the letter. The mob (financed by fractions of the corporate class—don’t think the woke crowd is marginal) believes it is finally canceling Western civilization and the sense that their efforts could be slipping away from them is heightening the mass hysteria.
Moral panics have their own organic appetites, so I suspect this will get a lot worse before it gets better. Of course, it may kill its host before it’s through.
And speaking of embarrassing, how about this essay by Billy Bragg?
“Outside Broadcasting House in London,” he writes, the BBC has erected a statue to one of its former employees, George Orwell. The author leans forward, hand on hip, as if to make a telling point. Carved into the wall beside him is a quote from the preface of Animal Farm: ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’
“It’s a snappy slogan that fits neatly into a tweet, but whenever I walk past this effigy of the English writer that I most admire, it makes me cringe. Surely the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four would understand that people don’t want to hear that 2+2=5?”
No, Bragg, Orwell would want to make sure that people enjoy the right to not have to repeat the lie that 2+2=5.
Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution.—Nineteen Eight-Four
“Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.” —Mao Zedong
Maoism, a blend of Marxism and classical Chinese philosophy, has caused enormous problems in the West. The Cultural Revolution, coming as it did in 1966 (lasting until Mao Zedong’s death in 1976), in part designed and rolled out to influence the youth of the West, and to encourage the Black Power rebellion, was embraced by western students and black radicals as a model for countercultural and political thought and action. (See Mao’s 1968 A New Storm Against Imperialism.)
In China, Mao called on the youth to “bombard the headquarters,” to target president Liu Shaoqi. Mao, concerned that his hold over China was waning, reassured his followers that rebellion against authority was justified. The youth were encouraged to attack Chinese institutions and traditions, to disorganize the proletariat and any academic and politicians sympathetic to it.
The globalist establishment is today concerned that their hold over the proletariat is waning. They have put forward establishment politician Joseph Biden, the Senator from Delaware who, for decades, has been the figurehead of the managed decline of the American republic, preparing the American working class for full integration with a transnational order, in which the Chinese Communist Party is the shining star (The Denationalization Project and the End of Capitalism).
Bureaucratic collectivism integrated with globalist corporatism—that’s the dream of the Party of Davos. This dream ends in the nightmare of global serfdom. A Biden presidency is exactly what these enemies of the working class want. NeoMaoist forces have been unleashed to storm about in the streets of Western societies to sow chaos and drive a frightened public into the arms of the establishment.
Mao Zedong thought is attractive to those embracing the concept of the subaltern in the post-colonial context. The cultural anthropology it suggests to the Third Worldists is exotic and seductive. It frees minds from the rigors of scientific thinking. Mao justifies deviating from the scientific methods of historical materialism by declaring Marxism to be Eurocentric.
Those wanting to delegitimize the capitalist, to rebel against liberal traditions, find in Mao Zedong thought useful. Mao Zedong thought shapes critiques of the institutions of Western civilization and European Enlightenment. The images of Chinese youth berating bureaucrats and parading intellectuals around in dunce caps appeals to middle class Western youth bent on rebellion in their youthful angst. They pick the same targets. The Old Left was so yesterday. Worker solidarity passé. Has it been half a century already?
Even when the Chinese Communist Party moved on from the Cultural Revolution, condemning its radicalism as an internally destabilizing force, its consequences amounting to a “lost decade,” its influence continued to be felt in leftwing intellectual circles, in the universities and the aesthetics of the West, manifest in the derangements of identity politics, political correctness (antiliberalism), cultural relativism, antiracism, and antihumanism. We see it in accusations of white privilege and in the appearance of diversity programming, what resemble the “struggle sessions” of the Cultural Revolution.
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Less than six months before Nixon made his official visit to China in 1972, Huey P. Newton visited China in late September 1971. He did not experience anti-black prejudice during his ten-day stay in the People’s Republic and walked away impressed. “Everything I saw in China demonstrated that the People’s Republic is a free and liberated territory with a socialist government,” he said. “To see a classless society in operation is unforgettable.”
In China, blacks who had been imported to bolster the CCP’s bona fides as a representative of Third World people—a propaganda campaign to “win hearts and minds”—were soon exposed to virulently anti-black prejudices. See Maoism and the Sinification of Black Political Struggle. Anti-black prejudice continues.
Star Wars' Finn (who happens to be black) and Chewbacca (happens to be Wookiee) get shafted in China. HT @asmunizpic.twitter.com/ATpvcd51L6
Mao Zedong thought not only strategically flattered nonwhite Third Worlders, but smartly appealed to intergenerational tensions. Undermining the wisdom of age, delegitimizing the elder generation, weakening established institutions and the family—all this opens youth to new doctrine and encourages rebellion. It’s the way cults work (A Fact-Proof Screen: Black Lives Matter and Hoffer’s True Believer). It’s the destabilizing capacity of Mao Zedong thought that attracted and continues to attract leftwing antiAmerican and antiwestern sentiment to it.
Maoism thus became an early Chinese export, an ideological weapon taken up by those living in West, constituting nothing short of a spectacular propaganda achievement—the colonization of the minds of the youth. In a conversation with Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s, premier Zhou Enlai responded to a question about the influence of the French Revolution in 1789 which, “It’s too early to say.” At least that’s the story we’ve heard for decades. Profound, if true. However, it appears that he was actually responding to a question about the French riots of 1968. More profound, actually.
Meanwhile, paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China from 1978-1992 Deng Xiaoping’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” blending socialist ideology with market economics, drew the attention of Western corporations. The Western power elite saw in it an opportunity to intensify the war on labor and the left they had rolled out under the progressive presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson. The radical ideas of the 1960s wormed their way ever more deeply into the administrative offices of universities and corporate boardrooms as transnational relations entrenched.
The distortions of reason are many. Under the influence of French radicalism, the developing New Left ideology incorporated postmodernist and poststructuralist ideas, drawing on such thinkers as Michel Foucault, ideas that held an affinity with Maoist thought, as well as Islamic thought. There was the odious murderous philosopher Louis Althusser and his defenders. Latter Frankfurt School Critical Theory, principally the cult of Marcuse, played a significant role. (See The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones.) But the influence of Mao Zedong thought is inescapable.
The foundations of the relationship forged by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split, Western corporations outsourced their factories to take advantage of its cheap labor. Chinese businessmen acquired Western real estate. With the Soviet Union the sole anticommunist fetish, which the Reaganites vanquished to bring about the end of history, China achieved most favored nation status, a relation that in time became permanent. Cheap Chinese commodities pounded Western walls. With its Belt and Road Initiative, a global development strategy leveraging Western capital markets initiated by paramount leader Xi Jinping, China intensified infrastructure development and investments in dozens of countries. China took control of the world’s supply chains. Its influencers colonized international organizations (for example, the World Health Organization).
Joe Biden has been a the center of all of this his entire career. He supported the free trade legislation that saw China ascend to the World Trade Organization. As vice-president under Obama, Biden was tasked with getting to know Xi as part of the pivot-to-Asia strategy. In 2018, Biden bragged “I’ve spent more time in private meetings with Xi Jinping than any world leader.” The two met over private dinners for 25 hours between 2011-2012. Biden notoriously said, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man.” “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks,” he added; “They’re not competition for us.” Is that because the pipe dream is to fuse Western corporate power with the bureaucratic collectivism of the Chinese Communist Party?
I’m not advancing a grand conspiracy theory in which China is taking over the world—which is not to say they do not have such ambitions. Rather, there is a convergence between the bureaucratic collectivism of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the bureaucratic collectivism of capitalism with globalist-corporatist characteristics. Occidental state monopoly capitalism is morphing into the state monopoly socialism of the Orient and vice-versa. Liberal democracy has outlived its usefulness in the West for, or is, in any case, being undermined by transnational corporate power. This is an organic development. What I have written here is a description of the situation.
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I am approaching this critique from a Marxist perspective. One can approach the topic from other standpoints. Working from a traditionalist standpoint, Joel Kotkin’s The Coming Age of Neo-Feudalism warns the world of this development in a manner resonate with a classical Marxist interpretation. Kotkin is a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University who writes about demographic, economic, and social economic trends in the world. (Note: I lean on for John Loftus’ summary of the book, A New Book Warns of Our ‘Neo-Feudal’ Future for my points here. I have not read Kotkin’s book.)
Kotkin’s earlier book, The New Class Conflict, usefully notes that the political and cultural bifurcations are no longer left-right or liberal-conservative. Rather, he sees the rise of an oligarchy founded upon the high technological revolution, supported by the corporate state, academia, and media, a force I describe, following critical theory conventions, as the administrative state (Adorno’s take, not Waldo’s) and the culture industry. Kotkin’s view of the ideal society is one in which the cities will be abandoned for the suburbs and more traditional lifestyles.
(Although I am not a traditionalist, I agree that the standard bifurcation points are no longer those that should organize our thinking, albeit those around me still operate with these moribund distinctions in mine—they are useful for controlling the population. Rather than left-right, while identifying myself on the left (I am a socialist), the bifurcation points are democracy-technocracy, libertarian-authoritarian, nationalist-globalist, populist-progressive, and republican-corporatist. I identify myself as lying on the left hand side of each of those divides.)
In The Coming Age of Neo-Feudalism, Kotkin identifies three estates in the new world order. The First Estate is comprised of the oligarchs who have amassed great fortunes, celebrated as “disrupters,” pioneers of a new and glorious future. They are like the robber barons of the Gilded Age who built the great factories and the transnational railroads.
The Second Estate are the bureaucrats, consultants, public intellectuals, scientists, teachers, and other members of the professional-managerial strata—the administrators and cultural managers who support the First Estate. They’re the ones who preach multiculturalism and progressivism, who frame the political and societal narratives. Kotkin writes, “Many of the people in these growing sectors are well positioned to exert a disproportionate influence on public attitudes, and on policy as well—that is, to act as cultural legitimizers.”
For example, they promulgate a rhetoric of “systemic racism” and “white privilege” not to help those the rhetoric claims suffer on account of racism, but to orchestrate hegemonic devotion to the machinations of the First Estate, thus allowing the First Estate to get richer and more power, which, in turn, finances the lifestyles or the Second Estate functionaries. The university system is the mechanism that prepares functionaries for this role.
Here I want to bring in a Marxist voice, that of Adolph Reed, Jr, who argues that identity politics and antiracism are central elements in the corporatist neoliberal project (Zombie Politics: the Corporatist Ideology of Antiracism). Reed tells us in his article Antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left that “antiracism is not a different sort of egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations.” Antiracism is corporatist neoliberal doctrine rationalizing capitalism.
Reed writes that “although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things, antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines.”
Kotkin describes the Third Estate as comprised of those who believe in the liberal values of modernity. Thus we have the progressive attitude, informed by the developments of 1960s radicalism, accepting the legitimacy of corporate governance (“Defining the Corporation, Defining Ourselves” and “Challenging Corporate Law and Lore”) standing in stark contrast to the populist nationalist movement defending Western civilization, the would-be defenders of modernity.
Make no mistake, Kotkin’s Second Estate is a powerful force in the West. The practice of organizing individuals into groups based on skin color and then promoting or punishing people on the basis of identity is the more insidious manifestation of neoliberalism. This thinking has invaded our institutions, public and private, and is now treated as the ground upon which other assumptions are founded. Embracing the neoMaoist Black Lives Matter agenda, universities across the country are set to roll out reeducation camps in the fall for staff and students. Intellectuals are being conscripted into the globalist corporatist project to prepare America for completely incorporation into it.
Corporatism is like the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It means to assimilate you.
3D artist Marc Bell’s model of the Borg cube model, Star Trek: First Contact.
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As I have argued in other blogs, I am for the abolition of any racial classification system that has the force of policy or law. Race should never be used as a method for making decisions about the fate of individuals. Antiracism is the idea that we should consciously pick and choose people on the basis of racial classifications in order to achieve demographic proportionality. This is a racist notion.
Calling it “antiracism” doesn’t change that. But the term (like antifascism) has confused people. For a sophisticated but no less misguided paradigm of the logic of the argument in political science, see University of Chicago’s Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference (I summarize it here: The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones). But it’s the popular treatment of the thesis that is most damaging.
See Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist, where it is asserted: “The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist’.” Kendi is of the DiAngelo ilk (along with such voices as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Eric Dyson, and Nikole Hannah-Jones). You can see DiAngelo and Kendi together in the video below.
Authors Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi on how to become aware of privilege, CBS This Morning
Kendi tell the hosts of the program that there are only two explanations for racial disparities: either there’s something wrong with black people or it’s racism. It is astonishing that somebody who enjoys the level of praise Kendi does could say something like this. It’s the sort of ignorant statement that somebody just approaching this subject would say, a claim that careful researchers such as Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, or Thomas Sowell, to take three black scholars who are often marginalized in these discussions, would correct immediately. This sort of black and white claim bears no relationship to the evidence that is clearly available to any American who cares to look for it. But it is not meant to be taken as an empirical claim. It’s propaganda. That it works so well indicates a deep problem in popular understanding of American society.
Here’s the trick of antiracist rhetoric: It proceeds on the basis of a false premise that disparities automatically indicate inequities. It rebrands tokenism as diversity. It retribalizes society. Following postmodern logic, central to the problem of injustice is grouped power, and the perpetrator, defined as white, especially the white male, becomes the enemy of the people. In its quasi-religious view, all white people are the perpetrator. Identity politics is thus part of the march from liberal capitalism to corporate neofeudalism. This is the ideology of progressivism—the methods of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. It also has roots in Mao Zedong thought.
According to Peggy MacIntosh, white people, whom Mao depicts as the ban of Third World peoples everywhere, outside and inside the imperialist powers, wear an “invisible knapsack” of power and privilege tools they wield as a practical matter throughout their lives. Whites have developed an apparently free and open system in order to perpetuate and entrench their racial power. The facially neutral appearance of the law is facially neutral—the doctrine of equality—is a white supremacist trick. See (Debunking a Sacred Text in the Church of Identitarianism; You are Broken. We Will Fix You.)
The racial system, the system of white supremacy, its culture of whiteness, is global, and the West, sans the colonized subjects internal to it, is the cause of global injustice. So great is this truth that the notorious Jane Elliott is hired to hector and traumatize white students in diversity/sensitivity training sessions–with minority students looking on, encouraged to join in with the cruelty. Those who are successfully changed by the struggle sessions appear on the street eager to wash the feet of a black person or throw themselves prostrate before a group of black people or may or may not be willing to absolve them of the sins.
Jane Elliot- Angry Eye trailer
The latest woke scold to appear on the scene is DiAngelo, noted above, wielding the concept of “white fragility,” pronouncing all white people racist, that all of them enjoy “white privilege,” but that only some of them can admit it. (See The Psychological Wages of Antiracism; Not All White People Are Racist; Dividing Americans by Race to Keep America From Democracy.) The point is that, because of its racism, the West should be compelled to abdicate its right to cultural integrity, its structures of democracy, freedom, and human rights, as defined by the Enlightenment.
John McWhorter puts it this way: “Smart whites have learned that their job is to simply accept everything his type claims, leaving a Kendi so unaccustomed to actual give and take that he’d feel it as racist.” Obviously he means by “smart whites” whites who are either shallow or scared. As a black man, McWhorter has some grace to say these things and not be accused of racism. Of course, he can be an Uncle Tom. A self-loathing black man.
Kendi claims, like every other white privilege/fragility preacher, that there is no such thing as “nonracist” as a nonracist position. Nonracists are racists. You can only either be racist or antiracist from the standpoint of this crowd. They mean to force people into their box, which is to declare all whites racist. Whites can only at best check their privileges and be an ally. The goal of Black Lives Matter is to recenter the “black experience” (as if it’s a monolithic thing) as the pivot on which turns transAtlantic history. They need the myths of 400 years of uninterrupted racial oppression and blood guilt (collective and intergenerational guilt) to sell the politics of it all. It’s leftwing racism. New and improved racism, in fact. It’s why the management of corporations and universities eat up this shit and force teachers, staff, and students to read DiAngelo and Kendi.
People on the left who subscribe to this crap are like people on the right who think Ayn Rand has something deep and metaphysical to say. Its pseudointellectual character betrays superficial thinking in both the producer and his audience.
This is what lies behind Ilhan Omar’s recent rant that had the rightwing media buzzing for days. “We can’t stop at criminal justice reform or policing reform,” Omar said. “We are not merely fighting to tear down the systems of oppression in the criminal justice system. We are fighting to tear down systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in health care, in employment, in the air we breathe.” “As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality,” she continued. “So we cannot stop at criminal justice system. We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.”
This rhetoric is in the style of Mao Zedong thought. “The struggle of the Black people in the United States for emancipation is a component part of the general struggle of all the people of the world against U.S. imperialism, a component part of the contemporary world revolution,” Mao said in 1968. “I call on the workers, peasants, and revolutionary intellectuals of all countries and all who are willing to fight against US imperialism to take action and extend strong support to the struggle of the Black people in the United States! People of the whole world, unite still more closely and launch a sustained and vigorous offensive against our common enemy, U.S. imperialism, and its accomplices! It can be said with certainty that the complete collapse of colonialism, imperialism, and all systems of exploitation, and the complete emancipation of all the oppressed peoples and nations of the world are not far off.”
As I noted in an essay in May of last year (“Committing the Crime it Condemns”), the scenes we are witnessing are reminiscent of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. At talks on university campuses minority students and their allies disrupt events chanting slogans and shaking big-character posters and mobbing speakers. Dunce caps and albatross placards feel only moments away. The struggle sessions are already here. No doubt, some of the mob would put the recalcitrant on Kafka’s Harrow if they could, etching imagined sins upon living bodies via a contrived mechanical device.
The mobilization of Youth across the Western world is directed from the grave in the possession of Ilhan Omar. It is up to classical liberals and orthodox Marxists to exorcise the Maoist demon. Given the depth of corruption in Marxist thought, the classical liberals are our best bet.
* * *
When you say you are a Marxist people get worried. When you add “libertarian” to the tag they become confused. My goal is not to confuse you but to help you sort out things. On this much I am sure liberals and conservatives can agree: state socialism of the sort we saw in the Soviet Union, and especially that which prevails in China, represent the nightmare par excellence. I am also in agreement.
In my attempt to shake people out of the fog, I like to note George Orwell’s fear of totalitarian socialism expressed in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (China fits the description more than the Soviet Union, making Orwell something of a prophet). O’Brien tells Winston, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
I fear the boot stamping on the face of humanity forever as much as any freedom-loving person. Choosing between liberal capitalism and state socialism, I will always go with liberal capitalism. I just believe there is another way, one that will allow us to sustain republicanism, democracy, and liberalism (and here I mean free speech and expression, the freedom of religion, the freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for a redress of grievances) without the exploitation of man by man and machine. But for the sake of human dignity, totalitarianism cannot be an alternative. We have to save the republic for democracy to be possible.
To those who subscribe to New Left ideology, I am not trying to level a charge of disloyalty. My nationalism is civic, not belligerent. You are free to subscribe to any views you wish (you don’t need my position), just as I am free to critique them and try to talk you out of them. I am not trying to cancel anyone. As a free speech absolutist, I encourage people to make known their opinions so they can be discussed openly and critically. I would stand with anybody expressing New Left views against any attempt to suppress their speech by government or corporate entities.
But ideas have origins and consequences and the ideas that have gripped a large portion of the American population, as well as Europeans, threaten to destroy the civilization that gave rise to liberty, democracy, secularism, science, and human rights. My values—and objective fact and analysis—compel me to oppose the New Left narrative of America and the West, to deal with this claim that both are intrinsically colonialist, racist, and patriarchal.
I am, for these reasons, like late British philosopher Roger Scruton and American historian Victor Davis Hanson, both conservatives for the record, at odds with the New Left spirit of 1960s (why they lived through the first time around), not only as it represents Mao Zedong thought, but also because of many other warped thoughts—those of Max Stirner, Frederich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger.
Of course, I disagree with the Scruton and Hanson in their claim that New Left thinkers advance the core tenets of Marxism. In my view, the New Left is post-Marxist thought. There is no Marxist core. I resist referring to these developments as Cultural Marxism (Cultural Marxism: Real Thing or Far-Right Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory?). Rather, I see them as a deviation from a grand tradition. And that’s what makes this direction palatable to corporate power. If it were actually Marxist, CNN would not be pushing the narrative.
Indeed, while Cultural Marxism was at its core concerned with the totalitarian problematic, the New Left narrative is shot through with totalitarian desire, the desire to all see speech and thought subordinated to a particular mode of speech and thought defined by its ideology, which is corporatist, globalist, progressive, and technocratic. Just take look at the response to “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” published in Harper’s Magazine.
(Here’s the awesome thing about free speech: you don’t have to agree with J.K. Rowling or anybody else to support it. Indeed, the whole point of free speech is that you defend speech with which you disagree—you demand the protection of speech that you find offensive. Defending speech with which you agree is a different thing. We call that an endorsement. It must be terribly embarrassing to sign on to a letter in defense of free speech only to find out that you don’t actually believe in free speech.)
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The New Left narrative portrays America as having made no progress at all, as if emancipation and civil rights never happened. The United States was forged in a world where slavery and racism were commonplace. Our country freed itself from the monarchy of the British Empire and abolished the slave trade. The British Empire followed suit. Much of the world did not. In the 1860s, the United States fought a civil war to free people from bondage and preserve democratic-republicanism. Three-quarters of a million American men, the vast majority of them white, died so that black people could have rights. White men killed other white men for the sake of black men. Following WWII, the civil rights movement saw black Americans come into those rights. White people were there every step of the way. America is a story of progress. America led the way for the rest of the world. (See The Endless Relitigating of the Past as a Postmodern Condition; Monument Redux: What the Defacers and the Topplers are Really After.)
What I regard as actual forward-leaning values of mankind—humanism, liberalism, scientific-rationalism, secularism—are dismissed by the postmodern left as the values of the white man. His ideology of individualism denies the primacy of group identity, of identity politics, where abstractions supplant concrete persons. He advances free speech because it gives him the power to control the discourse and diminish others. His scientific-rationalism denies the value of nonwestern ways of knowing and its technology is destructive. His secularism denies the right of “a people” to be defined by religious devotion.
Yet the West enshrines these values, allowing group identity, power to control the discourse, nonwestern ways of knowing, and religious devotion. All this is apparent in one short amendment to the United States Constitution: the First Amendment. Antiracism can appear because the advocate can live in a free society—and because the structures the protestors ought to be criticizing find advantage in their regressive attitudes. Alas, the Constitution is a white man’s document. Progressives, who embrace New Left ideology, declare the United States a failed state because they want the state to fail—and they strive to make the future in the image of their ideology. (The Elite Obsession with Race Reveals a Project to Divide the Working Class and Dismantle the American Republic,)
The antiwestern sentiment of the New Left, despite its schizophrenia, has proven useful to the transnational wing of the capitalist class, to the corporatist who strives to replace citizens in a national republic to consumers in a global capitalist order. New Left ideology thus sits comfortably in Sheldon Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism. It dovetails with the social logic of bureaucratic collectivism. Left and right, the people have to stop this. This is what I mean by “late capitalism” in the tagline of my blog—this is the managed decline of the American republic and the diminishment of Western civilization. The purpose of decline and diminishment is the reordering the world system by the reordering of its history, the dismantling of the Westphalian system and denationalization, and the reincorporation of the people into a global corporate neofeudalist system.
The endpoint is that humans across the planet become serfs in a transnational order run by technocrats for the sake of corporate power and profit. From the globalist corporatist standpoint, China’s apparent struggle with the United States for global predominance is not really a struggle between superpowers, but a welcome advance towards a new order of things. The aim is to submerge the individual in an authoritarian, corporatist, technocratic global order sold under cover of progressivism.
* * *
What is happening in the United States presently—the riots and the delegitimization of an American president—must be understood in these terms. I am really merely describing the winding path that brought us to chaos. These are the ideas and developments that have brought us to the crisis in which we now find ourselves.
The uprising in America is premised on a false narrative with these features, all of which grow out of the derangement of New Left thought, which has permeated our institutions, public and private (see The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones): the United States and the West suffer persist systemic racism; whites are a privileged class that systematically oppresses blacks (all whites are racist); blacks are victims of lethal police force out of proportion with their representation in the population; blacks are disproportionately arrested, convicted, and imprisoned relatively independent of the criminal activity in which they are involved.
The narrative of systemic racism, of which the antipolice sentiment is an expression, is not just a feature of progressive activists and the Democratic Party. It has been taken up by globalists in the Republican Party who are increasing out of favor with the Republican Party under the influence of nationalist populism (The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters).
In a recent issue of USA Today, this headline appears: “‘How do we end systemic racism?’: George W. Bush says George Floyd’s death reveals America’s ‘tragic failures’.” The former president, the man who led the United States into an illegal war and occupation of Iraq and authorized the torture of prisoners of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, is quoted as saying, “It remains a shocking failure that many African Americans, especially young African American men, are harassed and threatened in their own country.”
Using Bush and others as examples, the media points to the bipartisan character of antiracism as proof of its validity. But if we are going to take as evidence for the claim that America suffers from systemic racism, and that this phenomenon is manifest in patterns found in the enforcement of law and order, then the claims of racial bias in the law and order apparatus needs to be specified. Ecumenical proclamations do not substitute for facts and objective analysis. Specifying these finds the thesis wanting of evidence. But when I have raised these studies over against media sensationalism about disparities without context, the pushback I receive from progressive antiracist types always fall back on the sensationalized media stories, as if I am unfamiliar with them—or the science that demolishes them.
I recognize that the facts can be stunning. The public has been told over and over again, for years and years, that protests and riots are justified because police are racist—because America is racist. A recent poll found a majority of Americans agreeing that burning down a Minneapolis police precinct building was a justified response George Floyd’s death. COVID-19 did not scare me at all (read my blogs on this). But a majority of Americans believing that burning down police precincts is justified? That scares the hell out of me. A lot of precinct buildings have detention cells in them. What if people had been in there? What about the evidence rooms? What about the rape kits? It’s not just that people have been fed a false narrative. They have been primed to fail to think rationally.
People have invested so much in the belief that the United States is marked by systemic racism that they cannot deal with reality. But truth has its own integrity. Postmodernists are wrong—truth does not care what you believe. Facts matter and it is a dereliction of duty of any rational and honest person to fail to present the facts upon which policy and action are made and taken when he knows these facts. Black Lives Matter and its white allies do not argue from facts. They operate, in the spirit of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, via bullying, hectoring, mobbing, ostracization, and shaming. This is their mythology. And it’s irrational and dangerous.
The paradox of our time is that a theory that is ostensibly opposed to racism is the major source of racism in the current period. It operates on the same false premise as racism, namely that skin color determines our thought, behavior, and moral worth. In both cases, it is the capitalist class that wields the narrative for its collective self-interests.
The truth is that black people are little more than pawns to progressives, their humanity erased for political advantage, only advantageous voices selected for airing. As Glenn Loury and John McWhorter tell us in the video below, the marginalization of black intellectuals is not a matter of quality of scholarship, but political. Conservative black scholars must make their work perfect to pass the gatekeepers and reviewed. Leftwing scholarship supportive of corporatist goals enjoys an easy path to prominence, despite it shoddy character. Biden, Clinton, Schumer, Pelosi—the political establishment take black people for granted (Democrats Pander While Managing America’s Decline). In the progressive view (the liberal-structuralist view, as Cornel West famously labeled it), the perpetrators of crime are robots driven by the systemic racism of whiteness. Marionettes dancing on strings.
The Unraveling | Glenn Loury & John McWhorter
Inconvenient victims don’t matter because they interfere with the America-bashing and cop-bashing narrative. It doesn’t matter to progressives that children sleep in bathtubs at night so they aren’t struck by stray bullets from gangs. The dozens of people who died in Chicago over the last several weekends aren’t even a footnote in the progressive political playbook. Why? Because they were black people killed by other black people. Because the violence is occurring in cities run by progressives. (Progressives, Poverty, and Police: The Left Blames the Wrong Actors; “If They Cared.” Confronting the Denial of Crime and Violence in American Cities).
That’s one level. At another level, a higher level, progressives are doing the work of the globalist fraction of the capitalist class. They are preparing the republic for failure for corporate takeover. They want the nation to collapse. Not just because they hate America. With America’s collapse, the working class will lose the republican machinery that enables it to curtail the system of corporate control.
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We live in a post-factual society founded on a postmodern epistemology of truth. This is how elites have prepared the collapse. Across the nation, across Europe, university students are indoctrinated in cultural and diversity programming that trash their culture and their persons. Not only undergraduates, but graduate students, teaching assistants, teachers. They go on become high school teachers and so on. They teach the Howard Zinn version of America—not simply that America has never been great, but that American can never be great.
The cultural revolution, an expression of totalitarianism, has permeated the institutions of Western society. It envelopes them. This is why inconvenient facts are unseen or even dismissed as oppressive. All of the studies on crime and punishment I cite, all of the statistics I present—these don’t matter because truth doesn’t matter in the postmodern condition.
At a recent LinkedIn conference “racist comments” were highlighted. The press reported the controversy without questioning whether what was said was actually racist. That these observations and statements of equal justice would be considered racist is astonishing. Frightening, frankly. This attitude explains the enthusiasm among progressives for violence against society’s institutions and Western values—and against persons. Here’s a sampling:
“As a non-minority, all this talk makes me feel like I am supposed to feel guilty of my skin color. I feel like I should let someone less qualified fill my position. Is that ok? It appears that I am a prisoner of my birth. This is not what Martin Luther King Jr. would have wanted for anyone.”
“I believe giving any racial group privilege over others in a zero sum game would not get any support by others. Any thoughts on hurting others while giving privileges with the rosy name called diversity?”
“Blacks kill blacks at 50 times the rate that whites kill blacks. Usually it is the result of gang violence in the inner city. Where is the outcry?”
“This tragic incident that happened to George Floyd happened exactly the same to Tony Timpa (white man) by Dallas cops in 2016, and no one seemed to care then. There were no out cry for justice in his case. Why? Should we not want justice for all?”
This is a major problem confronting us as we struggle to save western civilization and the institutions of the enlightenment from global corporatism: the post-factual culture. We live in a world dominated by manufactured victimhood. We live under the thumb of a grievance industry. We’re expected to admit that we are what they say we are. If we don’t, then we prove them right. They can gaslight us because they have power they deny they have. (See Cult Programming in Seattle.)
Culture study programs are not programs that study culture. They are programs of cultural socialization, of indoctrination. They teach people to hate themselves and then emotionally blackmail them. They tell them they are racist and doubly so if they object. They prepare our youth for a life of work in the bureaucratic collective, to be cogs in a machine fed a virtual life by the culture industry. The establishment has prepared and disseminate what Orwell called “newspeak,” a radical project that shrinks the vocabulary, replacing it with terms and slogans that manufacture a reality. They mean to change the way we think by changing the way we talk.
All this we must refuse and resist. This is what needs rebelling against. These programs teach a story of oppressor-oppressed, perpetrator-victim, racist-antiracist, fascist-antifascist, with the goal of creating resentment and hostility, of ramping up conflicts between the myriad of often imagined divisions that they amplify and manufacture, disrupting the legitimacy of institutions that work for the common man and women, the citizens the corporations wish were subjects—proles—by destroying our faith in them. The mean to undermine our solidarity. Everything is determined by partisan ideology. People dismiss facts and ideas because Breitbart and Bannon and Scruton know them. That’s not thinking for yourself.
The political and cultural right has been right about so much of this because they aren’t in the academic and culture industry bubble. Standing on the outside gives them a good view of the rot. Their politics aren’t correct, of course, but that has nothing to do with the correctness of their interpretation of the forces that are threatening Western civilization. Put another way, while the right does get things wrong, they don’t often get things entirely wrong. They talk about cultural Marxism. And while I don’t, because I appreciate the Frankfurt School, there is definitely something to the argument that neo-Marxism carries the potential for danger in practice. It is, in its own way, illiberal.
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I am taking leftism to task from a Marxist standpoint. If you hear in my arguments rightwing ideology you are not putting any effort into listening to what I am saying. I am a libertarian Marxist, a left-libertarian, a democratic socialist. I am as committed to that standpoint as I have ever been because the trajectory of history confirms its validity.
Marxists are not a monolith bunch. I have long opposed the deformation of Marxian thought by the ideas of the New Left. My regret is in not publicly taking up this position sooner. But if I fail to stand up for the rational side of historical materialism, those who are deforming it will have an easier time of it and we will move further away from enjoying the class solidarity we need to build a broad-based worker movement. We cannot proceed with the socialist struggle if we are fractured by identity politics. Identity politics has a source. Its source is in the corruption of leftist thought. A major part of that source is Mao Zedong thought. We have to root it out.
We are being denationalized for the sake of transnational capitalism and dividing us racially is a key strategy in the globalization project. We are being distracted. It’s time to refocus on the problem of social class and how identitarian politics is being used to perpetuate class power. It’s time to return to a truly emancipatory politics.
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Here I am talking about this dynamic and electoral choice.
There’s a meme circulating that assumes that those who believe masks are stifling also claim that masks don’t prevent the transmission of SARs-CoV-2. It’s one of the myriad of mocking memes designed to shame and marginalize those whom the meme-makers think are conservative and therefore stupid. I am not going to share the meme. I’m sure you have seen it.
I must admit, I don’t see anybody making these claims together or, for that matter, the same person making these claims sequentially. Maybe they do and I miss it. But if they did, would they be wrong?
On the first part, has anybody ever been under a blanket? Felt stifled? I bet you have. (By stifled I mean not being able to breathe properly, not being suffocated.) Ever experienced a roaring headache at a slumber party while hiding from the parents? Ever been performing oral sex and have had to open up a side vent to keep going? Why, even when it’s really cold, do we cover our bodies but keep our heads out from under the blanket?
Answer: to breathe.
On the second part, is it possible for a virus to get us under a blanket? Or through a niqab or burka? Yes. Obviously some air gets in or you would suffocate. If some air gets in, then viruses, which are tiny, can get in.
That’s the other thing the meme assumes—that if a person is stifled then the virus is stifled. Stop and think about that for a second. Are you saying that airflow is either/or? Either the air is flowing full volume or the air is completely choked off? Or is it our experience that airflow can be restricted but not choked off and still stifle the breather?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the whole point of masks is to reduce airflow. What would be the point otherwise? mask scolds readily admit this. I see the photos from these aerosol studies everywhere. What do they demonstrate? Restricted airflow.
Plastic bags tightly tied around one’s neck are probably very effective in preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Why? Because little air gets in. Sleeping bags aren’t body bags. Etc. So we use breathable masks, so we don’t suffocate the user—while restricting the user’s airflow. I suppose we could all wear NASA spacesuits. I think only some students would find that fun. It will terrify and alienate others. But who’s paying for it?
Image from Max Siedentopf’s exhibit How-To Survive A Deadly Global Virus. Readers of magazine Dezeen were highly offended and accused Siedentopf of “spreading misinformation.” Apparently Dezeen readers don’t get satire. Cancel culture has identified humor as dangerous.
Don’t like common sense? Here’s a review of the scientific evidence about masks by physicist Denis G. Rancourt. Despite having published more than 100 articles in scientific journals on physics and environmental science, you have probably never heard of Rancourt. He was dismissed from the University of Ottawa for presuming that academic freedom gave him the right to experiment with grading schemes.
Gatekeepers like suppressing Rancourt’s arguments. This article was banned from ResearchGate on June 3, 2020 after it had reached 400 K reads. That’s why I am having to share the article from this source provided above. Get it while you can. Here’s the letter Jospeh Hickey and Denis Rancourt of the Ontario Civil Liberties Association wrote the WHO about masks.
Where do these desperate shaming memes come from? They come from a pathological desire to force everybody to do something. People who make these arguments have control issues. It’s like the desire to make everybody agree with one’s opinion about systemic racism by getting dissenters in trouble. Only racists would deny systemic racism, right? Cancel them. So if you don’t want to wear a mask you must be a fascist wing nut. Ironic, no?
This psychological need has many sources. Neither common sense nor science are among them.
So there are studies claiming a protective function. I agree: science is important. So what about the studies that do not find this protective function? What about not rigidly determining questions of personal freedom on the basis of selected science?
All the studies show masks work, I am told. Which studies? Which scientists? Whose scientists? The scientists who told us that hydroxychloroquine is ineffective and dangerous?
If you want to wear a mask, then wear a mask. But please stop trying to force everybody to be like you, to live in the world you think you control. At least stop claiming you believe in autonomy and freedom and human dignity if you think it’s appropriate for the government to force people to wear masks (or stay in their house, etc.).
“What would have us do?” That’s a question I get all the time. Thanks for asking. Here’s my recommendation: If you see me without a mask, and that bothers you, stay away from me. Or, if I am forced to wear a sign that indicates disease (like a mask), then stay away from me. Treat me like a disease vector if you want to operate on that level of fear and paranoia. I won’t be offended. I really won’t. I promise. It’s weird, but there are lots of things in life that are weird and I am a tolerant man.
There are viruses. They kill some people. This is the way it has always been. It is the way it will always be. COVID-19 isn’t novel in that sense. A virus may get you sooner or later. If it makes you feel better to wear a mask, then I have no desire to make you go about your life with a naked face. It may be important for you to project your (quasi) religious identity. I’m a proponent of religious liberty.
If you fear me because I am a man and therefore statistically more likely to commit violence, what can I do about it? I can only point out that this reaction is irrational. But I am not going to lord your fear over you. So don’t lord your fear over me.
It’s not that I don’t care about you when I don’t wear a mask. The problem is that you don’t care about me when you force me to wear one.
After blogging about COVID-19 early on (my first blog on the subject was late March), I, for the most part, moved on to other things because I risked repeating myself and because the Black Lives Matter hysteria seemed a more pressing topic on which to focus. After all, the problems with the societal reaction to SARS-CoV-2 were clear early on. It just took somebody to make others aware of them, I believed. I always hold out hope that people are susceptible to facts and reason. It’s why I write in a scientific fashion, a practice for which I am oddly criticized. I am, above all, an educator. However, several posts on my Facebook newsfeed and continuing establishment news media distortion inspire me to return to the subject. It seems that ignorance of the obvious and resistance to scientific thinking are stubborn things. The facts only strength the argument I have made all along.
First, there is puzzlement—if even acknowledged—that Covid-19 seems to be killing far fewer of the people it infects. If you remember, back in April and May, there were as many as 3,000 deaths per day. This produced a high case fatality rate (CFR), which the media used to scare the public. (I wrote extensively on the moral panic in the spring. (See, for example, Viruses, Agendas, and Moral Panics and When a Virus Goes Viral.) The number of daily deaths is now closer to 600. Yes, there is a rise in hospitalization and deaths in a few states, but by CDC standards, the daily number of deaths looks to be on track to fall below epidemic levels. What explains this?
It may be that the virus is mutating into a less lethal form. While viruses may not technically be alive, they are subject to the principles of natural selection. When copying themselves, virus make errors scientists call mutations. Some mutations make viruses more lethal, while others make viruses less lethal. Evolutionary pressure favors those variations that are less lethal, since the more lethal variations are less successful in spreading and thus reproducing themselves over space and time. To put it simply, the more lethal strains die out. Hence, there are more people with the virus but fewer people dying from it.
Another possibility is that, in the early days, when testing was a far lower levels than it is today, the virus was much more widespread than it is now but authorities were not detecting its actual extent. This is why the infection fatality rate (IFR) is more useful metric than than the CFR (Asking Critical Comparative Questions About the Coronavirus Pandemic; We Should Stop Citing the Case-Lethality Rate for COVID-19—or Start Using it for Influenza). The IFR is determined with extrapolations based on inferential techniques. As we see with other viral patterns, which are far worse in the winter and spring and then drop off with warmer weather, the virus is may be fading, but aggressive testing keeps the number of cases high.
Diagnostic testing for the coronavirus has risen significantly, with more than 600,000 tests administered each day in the United States. In contrast, there were 100,000 tests per day in early spring. This represents a six-fold increase in testing over the course of the pandemic. Despite the media spin that this does not explain the rise in cases, John Hopkins Center for Health Security reports that increased testing is identifying many more infected individuals with mild or no symptoms (as I reported this spring, most of those who are infected have mild to no symptoms). This rise in the number of identified cases drives down the overall proportion of COVID-19 deaths.
Here’s how to think about this. If COVID-19 remains as lethal as before, then it must follow that there were many more cases than authorities were detecting (there still are). The decline in deaths per day is five-fold. That is a significant number. If the number of cases were actually rising, which is the evidence marshaled by the media and the naysayers against reopening the economy and schools, and if COVID-19 were just as lethal as it was in the spring, then the death rate would go up, not down. So either there were far more cases than were detected or the virus is becoming less lethal.
Of course, all of these things can be simultaneously true; they are not mutually exclusive possibilities. It is possible that there were far more cases than were detected early on, cases are on the rise due to reopening the economy, and the virus is less lethal than it was early on. However, all that is good news. It means that the virus was never as lethal as we thought (because there were always many more cases that were detected) and that more people are acquiring antibodies. (See Future Containment of COVID-19: Have Authorities Done the Right Thing?) This is the reason why the media has stopped talking about deaths and focuses instead on the gross number of rising cases.
Not wanting to talk about deaths directly also explains why the media spends very little time telling the public about how earlier intervention and new therapeutics and practices are saving lives. The medical industry is now more familiar with the virus and is doing a better job of treating it. However, if the media isn’t going to talk about declining deaths amid allegedly rising cases, in order to leave the impression that deaths are going up because cases are going up, then they aren’t going to report the medical success story.
The media frame is clearly resistant to presenting any positive news about COVID-19 for the purposes of keeping alive the moral panic they’re using to diminish the president and marginalize populist resistant to authoritarian control, for which the virus is used as a pretext.
Another probable factor in the decline of COVID-19 deaths is that the demographic profile of the virus is changing. It is shifting towards younger people. Because the virus is relatively harmless to healthy adults, a proportional shift towards younger and healthier population groups will to some degree reduce the overall rate of death. This is particularly good news in that it means that healthy Americans are developing immunity to a virus that is likely, as are other viruses, to come back in the fall. It also may signal that authorities are doing a better job in protecting those in longterm care facilities—or, grimly, those most likely to die already have.
Stanford University’s disease prevention chairman, John P. A. Ioannidis reports, “There are already more than 50 studies that have presented results on how many people in different countries and locations have developed antibodies to the virus.” The studies “suggest that about 150-300 million or more people have already been infected around the world, far more than the 10 million documented cases.” That means that actual cases are 15-30 times greater than documented cases. Ioannis also reports, “For people younger than 45, the infection fatality rate is almost 0%. For 45 to 70, it is probably about 0.05%-0.3%.”
With this in mind, why is it even a question as to whether teachers and students go back to school in the fall? I have heard the complaint that a significant proportion of teachers are in the age group imperiled by the virus (we should keep in mind that more than half of all deaths among the elderly have occurred in long-term care facilities, which distorts the actual threat to those active in the teaching profession). Moreover, it is noted that there are others who have immunocompromised systems and other health conditions (such as obesity) that make the virus more lethal for them. However, influenza and others viruses present the same threat to these populations (vaccines, which only cover some strains and are highly variable in their efficacy, at best moderate this effect, not negate it). Indeed, influenza is far more dangerous to children than SARS-CoV-2. Yet the fact that it has never before been the policy concerning other serious biological threats to these populations to move to online instruction or wear masks and shields and practice social distancing rarely occurs to anybody.
In other words, many in the public are reacting to COVID-19 in a way they do not and have not responded to comparable threats. The public is overreacting and the overreaction has harmed the economy and education, and will continue to do so if we continue to operate on fear instead of reason. Tragically, people perceive COVID-19 differently than influenza because the authorities and the establishment media have terrified them with corpses, pushing a frightening narrative that COVID-19 is uniquely deadly while ignoring the IFR that shows that it isn’t. Remember, the authorities and establishment media know better. They are lying about this.
Now that cases are rising mainly because of testing, while deaths are falling both absolutely and relatively, the news media dwell on cases and not deaths. They are substituting cases for deaths because the numbers are larger and scarier. After months of scare mongering, it’s time the American public push back and demand that we return to a normal life.
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The New York Times wrote a nasty piece on Sweden’s experience with COVID-19. It was based on perceptions of Sweden by surrounding Scandinavian countries. An objective examination of the demographics of COVID-19 deaths, as well as the character of institutional integrity, suggests that the problem in Sweden is not their approach to SARS-CoV-2 but other factors, for example an aging population. More than one in twenty Swedes is beyond the standard retirement age of 65, a number higher than in Denmark and much higher than in Norway, and Sweden is a much larger country.
Most COVID-19 deaths have occurred in a very small proportion of the population. Those 70 years of age and older account for 88.9 percent of deaths. Moreover, more than half of them were in long-term care facilities. Of the 5,420 total deaths as of July 3, only 9 people below the age of 30 have died from the virus in Sweden. As the research indicates, most of those who die young have comorbidities, such as a compromised immune system. They are at risk from other viruses, as well. The case fatality rate of those under the age of 70 is less than 1 percent in Sweden. Applying a bottom end factor of 15, the infection fatality rate is 0.05% for those under the age of 70. For all age groups, a conservative estimate of infection fatality race is half of 1 percent.
This virus is comparable to influenza in its lethality. No country stops society on account of the flu. While death is tragic (albeit inevitable), the statistics do not suggest the more restrictive approach other countries have taken would have been markedly better. Sweden has performed better than Great Britain and Spain, to take two notable examples of countries with restrictive policies. Moreover, Sweden’s approach is likely the only viable long-term approach to SARS-CoV-2 if societies want to avoid economic calamity and its consequences, for example diminishment of the material capability of supporting the health care sector.
Beyond the demographics of age, two factors stand out:
First, Sweden’s neoliberal approach to health and welfare has been more aggressive than other countries. High quality healthcare is increasingly difficult to come by in Sweden. The system is rationed, with restrictive access and long waiting times. There is a tradition in Sweden of stalling until patients are quite sick. There are chronic shortages of medical personnel. As a result, a large proportion of those who died from COVID-19 died outside ICU. The effects of neoliberalism are particularly felt in long-term care facilities. While most elderly care is funded taxes and government grants, an increasing number of municipalities are privatizing elderly care. Shortfalls in care in private long-term care facilities is well-known in Sweden.
Second, Sweden’s health and welfare systems have been severely strained by a large immigrant population heavily dependent on government resources. Other Scandinavian countries have not been nearly as generous to immigrants as has Sweden. The Swedish government has responded by reducing immigration, but the damage done to its systems of health and welfare systems (as well as public safety) will be felt for a long time.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue [has been toppled] and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” —Nineteen Eighty-Four
Unfettered “engagement” with China is not preparing China for democracy and liberty. It is appeasement of the Chinese Communist Party (leveraging here the phraseology of Bill Gertz, author of the 2019 Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy) for the purposes of accelerating the convergence of the bureaucratic collectivism that marks socialism with Chinese characteristics with the globalist-corporatist statism of the West, manifest in the transnationalization of the social logic inhering in the overdevelopment of bureaucratic monopoly capitalism, the corporate governance model that the Democratic Party shepherds under the cover of progressivism (see Richard Grossman’s “Defining the Corporation, Defining Ourselves” and “Challenging Corporate Law and Lore”).
With totalitarian control over politics and culture and the Belt and Road Initiative, enabled by the Democratic Party’s Pivot-to-Asia doctrine (see Obama, Clinton, and Biden), the agenda of the People’s Republic of China dovetails with the designs of the capitalist globalizers. This convergence means the transformation—effectively, the cancellation—of Western civilization, erasing its accomplishments and overthrowing democratic-republicanism in spirit and in practice. Both liberal capitalism and democratic socialism, each depending on the dynamics of the national state principles of modernity and Westphalian-style international arrangements, each carrying the antagonisms that produce workable policy options among competing class interests, are becoming impossible.
Americans and Europeans (and peoples outside the West) must grasp these developments as the issue of the epoch. The full realization of Orwell’s nightmare is nearing. Acquiescence to the situation is tacit obedience to authoritarian desire. Happenings on the streets of America and Europe, and in their education systems, have in back of them corporate globalization and anti-Western ideology. Globalization is the process by which the political and material world is transformed into a single borderless economy, with unfettered flows of capital, goods, money, people, and services, under the control of a handful of transnational corporations (TNCs). (See David Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World and Bill Robinson’s Promoting Polyarchy.)
Today’s essay connects developments in transnational political economy to the intellectual and cultural apparatuses that have installed the bureaucratic collectivist program on the wetware of Western youth. Corporate power is well aware of organic opposition to globalization, so it requires an ideology deceiving the popular forces into supporting corporatist-globalist ambition. It also requires the ineffectual selves that I write about in A Fact-Proof Screen: Black Lives Matter and Hoffer’s True Believer. The alienating conditions of late capitalism generate an oversupply of such persons. The ideological program and the identity of those who manufacture and disseminate it are vital to grasp.
The rebellion against modernity reflects the maturation of an intergenerational and multinational project, the culmination of work of cultural managers in the administrative state, and the culture industry that emerged from mature progressivism in the post-WWII period (see Adorno, Horkheimer), ramping up in the 1960s with the Democratic Party’s opening up the country to global investment and mass immigration, soon followed by counterculture politics, ideologically organized by the New Left, with elements of Frankfurt school style Critical Theory (Marcuse), Mao Zedong thought, and French postmodernism/poststructuralism (Lyotard; Derrida; Foucault), all to the advantage of the globalist wing of the capitalist class in enabling its denationalization projects. As none of it really represents a radical critique of anything, it has proven useful for its class disorganizing power.
“Radicals” insinuated themselves into the university system as professors and administrators, creating an array of culture studies, ethnic studies, women and gender studies departments, and a myriad of other programs in the humanities and social sciences, establishing a vast arsenal of specialty journals with eager gate-keeper to legitimize propaganda, a gospel of cultural and moral relativism, identity politics, and standpoint epistemology, with intellectual roots tracing back to the progressivism and technocratic professionalism organized by urban cosmopolitan elites in the suites of the trans-Atlantic bourgeois network, bankrolled by transnational wing of industrial capitalism, in the late 19th and early 20th century, manufacturing the deceits of cultural pluralism and moral relativism. This has been a long march through our institutions.
It is via this apparatus that our cultural managers have trained up an army of foot soldiers recruited from the ambitious offspring of the managerial-professional middle class, groomed for functional roles in the bureaucratic-corporate structure of governance. It is this development that lies behind the shift in the language of justice from the equality of individuals before the law and the equality of opportunity, ideals that have produced the fairest and most prosperous societies in history (the common law model leading the way) to social justice, with demands for equity, a construct that in these hands defines any disparity or inequality as prima facia evidence of unfairness and injustice, assertions from which follow the claim that injustice can be remedied by achieving proportional representation of ethnic, racial, and gender groups in business firms and public institutions. As such, it does not advocate a redistribution of economic power, but rather a redistribution of the symbolic power that it imagines exists and explains demographic facts.
This is the basis of identity politics, where the principle of tokenism (diversity) replaces the ethics of individual achievement (autonomy and self-actualization), producing bureaucratic actors functionalized to corporate arrangements, arrangements antithetical to democracy and liberty. As Max Weber long ago argued (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), in the midst of the emergence of progressivism, such arrangements suppress individually differentiated conduct (freedom), charisma (personality), animality, and spirituality, transforming humans into steel-encased machine cogs. (Antonio Gramsci made a similar point from his prison cell in Fascist Italy.)
Identity politics is the popular cultural adjunct to neoliberalism. The shift from justice to social justice is achieved through compelled speech and practice in bureaucratic rules, professional aspirations, and peer pressure hailing as virtuous the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion. President Trump captured this development in his July 3 speech at the foot of Mount Rushmore: “In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.” The logic of left-authoritarianism (I prefer not to use the term “fascism,” but it is not inaccurate in spirit) supplants the defenders of individual liberty and rights with social justice warriors who advocate collective rights and the retribalization of society.
Resistance to left-authoritarian thought and practice is depicted in academic journals as both an expression of privilege and a psychiatric condition. It is no longer a question as to whether any of this is good news for working people. The corporatist order has decided that for us. Just fall in line or risk being identified as a racist, sexist, and xenophobe, or be pathologized. There is quite a literature on this in the academic journals and HR department handbooks and memos and it’s terrifying. Do a Google search of resistance to diversity training, what the Red Guard called “struggle sessions” during the Cultural Revolution. For those of you unfamiliar with this history, the Red Guard was a mass-based youth-led militant social movement mobilized in the second half of the 1960s to attack the traditional institutions in China. Google that, too, and the parallels between then and now will strike you immediately. The programs administered in academic institutions are connected to the actions being carried out in the streets. Together they strive to finally do away with the American Revolution, fallaciously condemning great documents because they were written by white men. The character of the prevailing cultural hegemonic reflects the entrenchment and scope of bureaucratic-corporate power. Never forget that corporate bureaucracy is the opposite of democratic republicanism.
The ideology animating so-called radical progressive politics (they would only truly be radical if they got to the root of things) is sociological realism, useful as a methodology for developing understandings, but theological in character when its epistemology is ontologized, producing a quasi religious system where people are struggling not against real structures, as the Abolitionists and the Civil Rights activists did, but against things that don’t really exist, for example, the apparitions of the post-Civil Rights mythology of systemic racism (Stokley Carmichael’s institutional racism). I am a sociologist, so it pains me to report this out to you. Inside the bubble, it has not always been so easy to see the role I played in legitimizing and perpetuating this ideology. The events of the last several years have been revealing, to say the least. For me, it’s been a change in paradigm.
This faux-theology had to, of course, like any religious cult, grow over time, while working itself into the dominant institutions of Western civilization in order to become the prevailing narrative. That’s why we see the street protests—toppling statues, revising historical, spitting on cops, and all the rest of it—over alleged racial injustice emerging now, at a moment where racism has largely disappeared. It took a couple of generations for this idea to become mainstreamed enough to become ordinary social logic, a logic conducive to the expansion and entrenchment of corporate governance. We see so much investment in New Left ideology by corporations (the rebellion enjoys big money financing), the Democratic Party, and establishment media, extolling the virtues of destruction and violence—we see a Republican Party nearly completely cowed by it—because it is useful to the ruling class. This explains how the progressive and liberal Christian churches, even the Vicar of Christ, can be about sanctifying chaos. Liberation theology has come of age.
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Believe Anything by Barbara Kruger at Hirshhorn, Washington, DC.
The big hegemonic project today is obviously transforming race relations, i.e. #BlackLivesMatter (#MeToo briefly intervened, but it didn’t have the class disrupting power of racial divisioning, so the old hashtag is back). If there’s one thing capitalists have learned, it’s that race is a potent weapon. Democrats are notable fans. The retribalizing of the West is a wedge used to divide the proletariat into imagined communities in order to disrupt class consciousness. For this reason, I propose that we avoid presupposing that Civil Rights and The New Civil Rights Movement (NCRM) are analogous. Indeed, the ambitions of Civil Rights and the NCRM are the opposite of one another. One of them is racist, disguising it politics with the label “antiracist.” (I recognize that the NCRM refers to other things, but I will use this tag for the time being.)
Adolph Reed, Jr. puts this well in a 2018 issue of Dialectical Anthropology, “I have since come to understand that those who make such claims experience no sense of contradiction because the contention that nothing has changed is intended actually as an assertion that racism persists as the most consequential force impeding black Americans’ aspirations, that no matter how successful or financially secure individual black people become, they remain similarly subject to victimization by racism. That assertion is not to be taken literally as an empirical claim, even though many advancing it seem earnestly convinced that it is; it is rhetorical.” As the title of his essay makes clear, Reed grasps the implications: “Antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left.” Indeed, what we are seeing today is not a movement for racial justice. It’s a cultural revolution that exploits what Karen Fields and Barbara Fields call “racecraft” to change the structure of power in favor of corporate governance. That means not only delegitimizing the American Republic, but undermining the institutions of Western civilization.
The present cultural revolution does not challenge power, but embraces the rule of its logic. This cannot therefore be an actual Marxist projects the political right is claiming, for no self-respecting Marxist would embrace the social logic of corporate power. BLM is a neo-Marxist perversion. Of course antiracism has no real power in itself. Those under its spell believe they are winning because they are losing. At least they are losing it for the people. Striving for social justice can only strengthen the hegemony of those who pull the strings of power by giving it popular legitimacy. (see Race-Based Discrimination as a Model for Social Justice.) If BLM was actually a revolutionary proletarian movement, corporations would not bankroll it. (See Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it; What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter; Dividing Americans by Race to Keep America From Democracy).
The NCRM is part of the secret power of corporate domination because it operates according to theological trick of self-deception. Like the Abolitionists, Civil Rights activists struggled against concrete institutional arrangements, legal authority and formal enforcement mechanisms, that reproduced racialized social relations. Jim Crow (or de jure) segregation was an actual set of institutions that oppressed black people while privileging white people regardless of their class position. Jim Crow constituted a formal caste system. Like chattel slavery, Jim Crow was a real structure. It did not depend on subjective perception or an elaborate theoretical and theological apparatus, however much pseudoscience and religion were used to justify it.
The reality of the structure justified tactics used to dismantle it. Civil disobedience against such institutional structures is rational when those in positions of authority, with popular support behind them, resist abolishing unjust institutional arrangements. Challenging this authority was about bringing into question its legitimacy to expose the culture-ideology of racial power and changing popular opinion. It could even come from the church (Martin Luther King, Jr.) because, whatever the rhetoric from the activists, it was aimed at real structures of oppression.
I would have been on the front lines of this struggle. Indeed, although I was just a little kid in the 1960s, I am proud to have suffered along with my parents the consequences of taking that stand. I don’t remember the first time white supremacists drove my family from my father’s first ministry in Roger Springs, Tennessee (my father is a theologian and Church of Christ minister). I was a baby. But I remember the second time, during my father’s ministry in Sharpsville very well. I was old enough to never forget. My family was not alone. A lot of white people paid a heavy price for standing up to racist bullies. (Read more of my biography and experience with Christianity here: Zoroastrianism in Second Temple Judaism and the Christian Satan.)
The NCRM is not struggling against concrete institutional arrangements but instead against imaginary “structures” constructed by self-professed critical sociological theory, its definitions conceptualizing institutions not as concrete legal relations and formal enforcement mechanisms but as abstract social relations defining individuals in demographic terms and conceptualized systems of informal social control. It is not opposed to racist ideology, but in fact hypostatizes race in an ideological system that exists in the absence of institutional mechanisms requiring or justifying it, as well as in law and policy taking the form of affirmative action, etc. It commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and is thus an illegitimate thing, not just conceptually, but empirically. The ideology is even justifying formal racial segregation on our college campuses.
The institutions oppressing blacks under Jim Crow were not theoretical. They were concrete and actual. In contrast, the forces supposed to be oppressing blacks under conditions of de facto segregation, or what folks are calling systemic racism or institutional racism, are imaginary. These are not an actual things. Alleged race relations and oppression are not concrete; they’re abstract. Therefore, there is no concrete or actual thing to struggle against. There is nothing to overcome, no barriers to remove, no common enemy—at least not the realm of racial oppression. This makes the “struggle” feel eternal. There is no final goal to achieve since whites will always been racist. This is “permanent revolution.” Of course, there is an objective to all this: the entrenchment of corporate power. And what is resulting from this agenda is the institution of actual racist systems.
The NCRM becomes a method for producing an infinite myriad of grievances, some of which can be put to empirical tests, such as the claim that demographic disparities in lethal officer-civilian encounters and, more broadly, the criminal justice system as a whole, indicate racial bias. As I have shown (see The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters), empirical study finds no support for the claim of systemic racism in lethal police-civilian encounters. Moreover, scientific studies find no empirical support for the claim of systemic racism in the criminal justice system as a whole. The claims that bring protesters to the streets—and I am not talking about rioters (riotous action absent genuine class struggle are always illegitimate)—are not legitimate. Yet academia, the media, and politicians are obsessed with pushing these claims as sound. When I present the facts to social justice warriors either that do not hear them or they work around them. It’s like trying to reason with a religious zealot. No, not like. That is what it is.
For a paradigm of the logic of the argument in political science, see University of Chicago’s Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference, published in 1990, by Princeton University Press, where an appeal is made for group representation in democratic publics and for group-differentiated policies. This follows the logic of deep multiculturalism. Young writes, “Critical theoretical accounts of instrumental reason, postmodernist critiques of humanism and of the Cartesian subject, and feminist critiques of the disembodied coldness of modern reason all converge on a similar project of puncturing the authority of modern scientific reasoning.”
The general principle in operation—this is the logic of social justice—is profoundly irrational and regressive. By assuming the Western structure of justice is but a projection of white European male power, inequalities are inequities, expressions of a particular constellation of oppressions. Science and justice are white male norms of reason and respectability, not universal ideas (there goes human rights). Their objectivity is not demonstrable in pragmatic success, but merely provide intellectual and moral cover for exploitation. “The modernist canon itself is revealed as patriarchal and racist, dominated by white heterosexual men. As a result, one of the most common themes addressed within postmodernism relates to cultural identity” (The Conversation). Affluence, equality, and freedom can only deepen the structure of oppressive power. All this despite the obvious reality that one could not and would not be allowed to even suppose but for the Enlightenment.
Extraordinary claims are licensed by such recklessness in reasoning and the overgrowth of grand theoretical construction. For example, critical race theory, to quote Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the architects of this ideology aims to “understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America.” Despite having dismantled systemic racism in the form of de jure segregation more than half a century ago, despite having made discrimination based on race illegal with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, despite having embarked on an extensive program of reparations, the United States is under the control of “a regime of white supremacy.” Crenshaw and her comrades are claiming that people of color are subordinated to whites in contemporary America. (see The Origin and Character of Antiracist Politics.)
Having established the “truth” of the claim, Crenshaw argues that the problem is “treating the exercise of racial power as rare and aberrational rather than as systemic and ingrained.” The way the matter is put suggests that there is the evidence of systemic and ingrained racism is abundant. But police interact with civilians hundreds of millions of times each year. There are 42 million black people in the United States, approximately half of them male. The number of unarmed black men killed by the police in all of 2019? At most around a dozen. In other words, instances of police officers killing unarmed black men is rare and aberrational.
In detailing the treatment of the exercise of racial power, CRT theorists call out what they call the “perpetrators perspective.” This rhetoric is used to frame standard legal reasoning and procedure as a doctrine of oppression. Crenshaw insists, as if this were a bad thing, that the burden of proof rests on those who make accusations of discrimination. You may recognize this method as the method by which normal science operates. It is the standard in the courtroom—innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet, if I subscribe to reason, then I am a “perpetrator.”
The second treatment of “the exercise of racial power,” what is supposed to be the “critical” view, is the “victims perspective.” This perspective presumes the accusation is true until disproven. Racial disparity is itself evidence of racial bias. You will recognize this method as the method by which religious faith is sustained. This method accepts as true that which requires demonstration. No offense to my religious family members and friends, but we can pursue no policy on the basis of religious-like faith. This is a secular society.
This strange alchemy is ideology. By shirking its burden, the victim’s perspective, besides making people victims against their will, eschews consideration of explanations for disparity since the question has already been satisfactorily answered. The fact of persistent racial disparity becomes proof of systemic racism. The method is thus circular and fallacious. (For more on CRT, see Committing the Crime it Condemns; Race and Democracy.) Moreover, it is insulting to a person’s intelligence to assume that he should accept as rational the claim that people who have never committed a racist action in their lives should be considered automatically racist because of the color of their skin. To insist that people believe this nonsense is a deeply authoritarian impulse. It is the mark of zealotry. We might ignore it but for its grip on our institutions.
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If you ask me whether I think there is race prejudice I will of course admit that there is. If you ask me whether there are still people who believe that there are different races, I will agree with that, too. Race identiarianism is alive and well. And it is thriving among progressives and in the Democratic Party. But racism as a system is no longer with us. At least the old system of racism. We abolished that system more than half a century ago. Discrimination against nonwhites has literally been illegal for decades. Redefining the faux pas as a “microaggression” doesn’t make racism any more real. This is all about is leveraging “social facts” (see Durkheim) sustained by the Critical Theoretical maneuver of ontologizing an elaborate epistemological structure that treats abstract concepts as actual constituents of the world in order to reify an imagined hierarchy and then invert it in actual practice.
Corporations would not support any of this if it were genuinely revolutionary. They would not pressure social media to crack down on hate speech if the ruling class was actually racially oppressive toward black people. The protests persists because the ineffectual, the narcissist, and the self-loathing are useful idiots for the globalist-corporatists who are dismantling the American republic. Like all anti-democratic countermovements, the mob is the street-level manifestation of managed decline. The elite are striving to return the globalism to power and continue with the project preparing the nation for full integration with the transnational capitalist order (see Joel Kotkin’s The Coming Age of Neo-Feudalism). Trump’s critique of China is heresy in the New World Order. The New Civil Rights Movement is a neoliberal trick to sheepdog those whose psychology is disrupted by the alienation bureaucratic corporatism systematically generates. The ruling class is using the dysfunction it creates to its own advantage. There’s nothing new about that.
“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents…. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”—Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951)
Remember the Satanic panic of the 1980s and 1990s? It remains one of the most notorious manifestations of mass hysteria in American history. Pushers of the panic asserted without evidence the existence of a terrifying phenomenon: “Satanic ritual abuse.” Scores of people suffered on the account of the hysteria, not from actual ritual abuse. At least not from Satanists. Like the Salem witch hysteria before it, claims of transcendent evil triggered a moral panic. Millions of people believed Satanic ritual abuse was real. Some still do.
CBC’s teaser for their series covering the Satanic panic
The systemic racism panic, really a continuation of the panic that began in 2013 interrupted by #MeToo, and then COVID-19, occurs not SARS-CoV-2’s wake but its context, giving rise to a bizarre doublethink, where exorcising the scourge of racism works as a magical prophylaxis against the virus. These panics eclipse the Satanic panic in extent and intensity. They signal a deep disturbance in the Durkheimian moral order.
I teach students about the Satanic panic and other hysterias in my college course Freedom and Social Control. I use it and other examples to illustrate the power of ideology and worldview and social processes in shaping perception and behavior. The same lecture series also covers the phenomena of faith healing, mass hypnosis, scapegoating, and mental illness.
The work of Thomas Szasz (The Myth of Mental Illness and The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement), Erving Goffman (Asylums and Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity), Kai Erickson (Wayward Puritan: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance), and Michel Foucault (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason) figure prominently here. These are not just sociologically interesting materials; they presage what we are going through right now.
In these lectures, I focus on the phenomenon of “moral panic. A moral panic is widespread fear in a segment or segments of a population that a great evil is threatening their persons and their community. The societal reaction is often organized by moral entrepreneurs and amplified through dominant institutions (churches, media, etc.), this evil is sometimes perceived not just social problem but as an existential threat. Irrational fear creates potentially dangerous situations.
Criminologist Stanley Cohen, a scholar of emotional management and the author of the 1972 Folk Devils and Moral Panic, defined a moral panic as occurring when “a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.” Through a dynamic called “deviance amplification,” moral panics, while containing little truth content, can, in form and dynamics, threaten the stability and even the continuation of society. (See my essays Viruses, Agendas, and Moral Panics and Death by Suicide in the Era of Black Lives Matter: The Beginning of a Moral Panic?)
Guiding my analysis is the Thomas theorem, advanced in 1928 by W.I. Thomas and D.S. Thomas. The Thomas theorem, also known as the “definition of a situation,” goes like this: “If men define situations as real, then they are real in their consequences.” The theorem is a reminder of the importance of reckoning belief in understanding what motivates behavior. There’s more to it than that, of course. We have also to reckon character, mood, and personality. I will come to these factors in a moment.
But on this belief business, in a world where tens of millions of people believe that the devil is real, that there are such things as demons, that sin is an infectious agent, a good number of people will become convinced that Satanism represents a genuine threat. They will see in a prank, for example a pentagram drawn in rabbit’s blood on the wall of an abandoned building, contagion; they’ll see in it incontrovertible evidence of the “reality” scripture and demagogues and experts weave, as proof that there is such a thing as transcendent evil. The formula for spiraling into evil from here is this: evil warrants evil.
The righteous get mad at you when you say this, calling you a bigot—or, worse, a racist. Even the level-headed secularist, still too often moved by the ecumenical spirit, is likely to call you out for calling out chicanery these days. But the righteous are the worse. They’re special. They can see a truth beyond the reality. The unseeable architect of the seen. Isn’t the greatest trick the devil ever played convincing you that the devil isn’t real? At the very least, the tolerant secularist admonishes, you should allow such hubris to go unchallenged, for it is polite to do so.
But the devil isn’t real. One has to construct an elaborate abstract system of imaginary structures and entities in order to present the devil as such. Evil is defined into existence. And personified. That is systemic racism.
Such myths persist not just on account of failure to correct errors. We can thank the discipline of sociology for constructing an ideology, a theology really, that works the magic behind the perception of institutional racism. It took a fews generations to raise up a priesthood, to mainstream the notions, organize the cells that preach them, and recruit congregants to receive the gospel. But the investment is paying off. Zealots have taken to the streets. The true believer is on the move.
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“Discontent by itself does not invariably create a desire for change. Other factors have to be present before discontent turns into disaffection. One of these is a sense of power.” —Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951)
This brings me to Eric Hoffer’s brilliant The True Believer, first published in 1951. Mass movements claiming revolutionary goals parallel religious movements, Hoffer begins. Both are “conspicuous vehicles of charge.” They can do some good, for example, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s benevolent dictatorship modernized Turkey, transforming a Muslim-majority backwater of the world capitalist system into a secular industrial nation (I’m not vouching for the permanence of reason), or, earlier, as Christianity did as “a civilizing and modernizing influence among the savage tribes of Europe.” (On this last example, see A Humanist Take on Marx’s Irreligious Criticism.) But mass movements can also have destructive consequences, such as the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s.
The first edition of Eric Hoffer’s landmark work, The True Believer
The True Believer is a short, tightly argued book, so I urge you to read it in your spare time. You can pick up a copy fairly cheaply on the Internet. If you look around long enough you may even find a free PDF of it online. But I want to summarize the book here, identify some of its key points and share a few standout passages, because this book affords the public a key to understanding the insanity now gripping the Western world. I don’t want time-pressed folks to miss out on keen insight.
Hoffer is interested to understand the types of persons who fall prey to mass movements. He does not suggest a monolithic personality type, such as that supposed by Theodor Adorno and associates in The Authoritarian Personality, a comprehensive empirical work from the year previous. Hoffer instead identifies several characterological types that share defects that draw them to the same hysteria. There’s no shortage of people with these traits. They’re waiting for conditions and cues to stir them to action. Their motives are not rational, which explains why the mask scolds and the self-quarantiners of the COVID-19 hysteria believe that checking racial privilege confers upon them risk-free social interaction with crowds engaged in heavy chanting, sweating, hugging, and handholding.
One hallmark of mass movements is the subsumption of the individual into a collective identity that demands commitment to movement goals. Mass movements do this by seducing individuals with the promise of empowerment, love, and transcendence. These movements promise to change the world. But Hoffer insists that the emotionally and psychologically vulnerable (or challenged) are prone to join mass movements not because of movement goals, but because of their need for belonging and, often, to rectify a pathological self-loathing. That is, a desire to shed current identities for new ones, to effect a metamorphosis, drives them towards transcendent claims.
Mass movements, like cults and religious sects, take advantage of those who suffer from weak internal locus of control. For whatever reason, people feel frustrated and impotent. Their perceived misery is somebody else’s fault. The individuality mass movements strip away is specified self-loathing. With a bit of persuasion, their felt inadequacies are easily ascertained as a loss of faith in the institutions of their society. Coercion comes later, when rigid dedication to doctrine really matters and after the movement gathers some power to itself. Hoffer writes, “Fanatical orthodoxy is in all movements a late development. It comes when the movement is in full possession of power and can impose its faith by force as well as by persuasion.”
There is, therefore, in the targets of mass movements at least a latent impulse for change—explicitly to be the change they want to see in the world. Faith-shaken, such persons await the opportunity to throw off the present conditions altogether. The old personality they associate with the degraded present should, if all goes well, disappear along with the old order of things. The passion is mutually reinforcing. Hoffer writes of “appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.”
Believing they have sloughed off their old identity, the self-loathing lose themselves in the new identity where they find a purpose they could not find for themselves. In focusing the self-loathing of those they seek to control, the organizers of the movement (activists, preachers, teachers) identify a need to repent or awaken, in order to find love, while redirecting self-hatred on those who do not share the self-loathing, especially those who reject the new identity the movement has fashioned for them.
Resisters are cast as the pathological element. They are sick. In denial. Fragile. The more stubborn and abnormal their resistance can be portrayed, the more powerful the enemy can be made to appear, the less human the enemy will appear, and the more unity-power will be generated. Those who stand outside the charmed circle are a threat to the group. They are dehumanized. They are not merely disagreeable but evil. Perhaps nothing illustrates the potential consequences of this style of thinking more than the Maoist horrors of Jonestown. Solidarity around violent possibility is generated in in-group/out-group dynamics.
There is a need to exaggerate the resistance—fragility that functions as confession—and the enemy’s capacities to thwart the movement in order to see the enemy in all those who deny that power. Thus the magic power movement leaders wield is the charisma and talent to impose upon the self-loathing meaning with apparent novel doctrine about the obstacles to paradise. It’s the Satan of the Old Testament, the obstacle thrown in the path of the righteous to test their faith and strengthen them through overcoming. It’s a nostrum for confused and lost souls.
These are, in some sense, echoes of an old argument. “Religion is,” as Karl Marx notes in the introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again.” Marx continues, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” But while Marx argues from his materialist standpoint that religious suffering is “the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering,” Hoffer suggests that the perception of suffering may not reflect real suffering. Or, rather, the suffering is real, but not the result of actual oppressive conditions; it is instead born in the failure of the true believer to take responsibility for his failures. It is the suffering of a failed or failing life.
Creative people, Hoffer notes, rarely succumb to mass movements (albeit the opportunistic shape and lead them). Creative people have a strong internal locus of control. They know they are not subject to fate. They are not easily frustrated. They’re content with individual freedom and confident in their ability to succeed—at least take responsibility for their failures. Rather, the stooge of the mass movement is the resentful, the misfit, the criminal, those who blame others for their problems and their shortcomings.
Hoffer writes, “It sometimes seems that mass movements are custom made to the needs of the criminal—not only for the catharsis of his soul but also for the exercise of his inclinations and talents. The technique of a proselytizing mass movement aims to evoke in the faithful the mood and frame of mind of a repentant criminal.” “Self-surrender,” he writes, “the source of a mass movement’s unity and vigor, is a sacrifice, an act of atonement, and clearly no atonement is called for unless there is a poignant sense of sin. Here, as elsewhere, the technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.”
The truly marginalized, Hoffman argues, are too busy trying to survive to get involved in mass movements. It is those who feel alienated from mainstream culture—the adolescent, the unemployed college student, the new immigrant, the lazy, the outcast—who are swept up in mass movements. There are, of course, those out for kicks, the bored, the troublemaker, the vandal. But the lumpenproletariat make terrible recruits in the long run. Also present are the ambitious and the selfish. Meaninglessness and worthlessness come under the command of conmen and hucksters.
Make no mistake, Hoffer does not see the free man standing alone. He does not dismiss the role of collective organization. “There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization,” he writes. “The practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement, and its appeal is mainly to self-interest.” This is the domain of the creative person, the person in control of himself and his destiny. In contrasty, “a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self.” He continues, “A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.”
In Hoffer’s view, it is crucial not to be deceived by the mere presence of a doctrine. The doctrine is not irrelevant, but the emotional and psychological pull the movement has on the vulnerable is more at issue. Hoffer writes, “A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence.” The pains of existence may be created by the conditions, and is moreover frequently found in the rationalization of one’s own failures, but it is also manufactured by those seeking to manipulate the vulnerable towards some end. The point is, however frustrations come about, the mass movement “cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves—and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.”
I will say something about the conditions in a moment, but on the manufacture of grievances, we can clearly see this work in the way the myth of systemic racism has been constructed by academics, clergy, and pundits. Read “What We Believe” at the Black Lives Matter website. It is the postmodernist discourse established by the leftwing intelligentsia over the last several decades. It provides the disaffected with ready-made philosophy honed to prey upon their insecurities.
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Mass movements may find followers in the exploited and oppressed or in those who have been groomed to believe they are exploited and oppressed. In the former, conditions that are advantageous to the latter, Erich Fromm, in his 1941 Escape from Freedom, identifies the source of vulnerability, or the external locus of control, in conditions that emphasize individual striving but do not adequately provide the means to achieve the goals individuals are expected to set for themselves. These came about as the old order of things fell away as capitalism rose to prominence.
Fromm differentiates between “freedom from” and “freedom to.” These are often posited as negative versus positive freedom (this was Isiah Berlin’s later formulation). Freedom from is distinguished by human action liberated from traditional constraints, such a tribal and religious systems. Freedom to concerns conditions facilitating self-actualization, where creative action is not only possible but promoted. The former type of freedom can be destructive without the latter type effectively present as individuals freed from authority can find themselves without purpose, which sets them up to be absorbed in authoritarian structures that provide purpose for them. They no longer have to think for themselves. They only have to be obedient. They only have to follow the leader. Fearful of freedom, they escape into unfreedom. Hoffer writes, “The total surrender of a distinct self is a prerequisite for the attainment of both unity and self-sacrifice; and there is probably no more direct way of realizing this surrender than by inculcating and extolling the habit of blind obedience.”
In mass movements, facts don’t matter. The main thrust of Black Lives Matter is to get justice for black men killed by the police. The claim is that black men are more likely to be killed by the police. A broader claim is that the criminal justice system represents a “new Jim Crow.” But the evidence doesn’t support the claims at all (see The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters). The rejection of the facts in this area is hardly new. In challenging William Wilbanks’ findings in his 1987 The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System, Coramae Richey Mann, in Unequal Justice: A Question of Color argues that that those who reject the claim of systemic racism place too much weight on empirical evidence.
One sees this in the complaint of the losing side in a debate that they did not know facts would be presented. In the following exchange (see video clip below) one side does not know how to deal in an objective way with the evidence presented by Heather Mac Donald that completely contradicts their intuition. They resort to anecdotes and asking the audience to go with their biased understandings about race. The response is very revealing of what is involved in movement understanding. These are the voices they cite to defend their passion—voices that presume that an audience is a wicked as a hand of them think they are. It’s why somebody as shallow and obnoxious as Robin DiAngelo can appear as an oracle.
“All active mass movements strive,” Hoffer writes, “to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. They do this by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it. The facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions must not be derived from his experience or observation but from holy writ.” Hence Mann’s insistence that we look at the “qualitative data,” i.e. “the lived experience.” Hence Marq Claxto asking a predominantly white audience to rely upon what he assumes is their racially biased implicit threat perception about black men. While Gloria Browne-Marshall is reduced to ad hominem and exposing her own lack of preparation—revealing that she doesn’t actually know how to prepare, spoiled perhaps by the good will of her surroundings. “The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and righteousness of his holy cause,” Hoffer writes. “His passionate attachment is more vital than the quality of the cause to which he is attached.”
“The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude,” Hoffer argues. “No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth. It must be the one word from which all things are and all things speak. Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.” He continues: “If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable.” When there is some intelligence there, this quality of mind will fill in the gaps. “When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning.” So we see hyperbolic claims of “fascism” and “racism” from people who never bother to know what those words mean.
Hoffer sees as significant the elation, even ecstasy, that marks participation in mass movements. “That the deprecating attitude of a mass movement toward the present seconds the inclinations of the frustrated is obvious. What surprises one, when listening to the frustrated as they decry the present and all its works, is the enormous joy they derive from doing so. Such delight cannot come from the mere venting of a grievance. There must be something more—and there is. By expatiating upon the incurable baseness and vileness of the times, the frustrated soften their feeling of failure and isolation.” He writes that the true believer “longs for certitude, camaraderie, freedom from individual responsibility, and a vision of something altogether different from the competitive free society around him—and he finds all this in the brotherhood and the revivalist atmosphere of a rising movement.”
“The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources—out of his rejected self—but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace. This passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity, and he sees in it the source of all virtue and strength. Though his single-minded dedication is a holding on for dear life, he easily sees himself as the supporter and defender of the holy cause to which he clings. And he is ready to sacrice his life to demonstrate to himself and others that such indeed is his role. He sacrifices his life to prove his worth.”
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“The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness and holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold on to. Often, indeed, it is his need for passionate attachment which turns every cause he embraces into a holy cause.” —Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951)
I said at the outset that I would share a few standout passages from Hoffer’s book. Rereading his book I am struck by the power of his observations and the way in which he put them that I had trouble not quoting him. The phenomenon of Black Lives Matter leaps off of almost every page. True believers are becoming the norm, not the exception. They’re all around me. And not just on social media (where the conditions of which are becoming nearly intolerable).
I teach at a public university and the administration and faculty are consumed by wokeness. I’m on sabbatical and my wishful part hopes all this goes away before I make my return to campus. The realist in me is dreading my return. I am hardly alone. Across college campuses faculty and students are subjected to a myriad of pledges and causes and seminars they’re are expected to swear allegiance to, take up, and participate in. They don’t like it, but they are scared to say so in public. They read my writings or engage me in conversation and I get messages of appreciation. But until they speak up we won’t produce the mutual knowledge we need to counter the hysteria. It’s like the Red Scare, when academics had to pledge that they were not and had never been a member of the communist party—except that with antiracism you are a member of the communist party because of what it says on your birth certificate. You were joined up at birth. You skin color implicates you in racism.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a popular oracle for those who are fully on board. No doubt my colleagues across the nation have also been subjected to pledges that call upon his scriptures. In, “Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion,” John McWhorter writes, Opposition to racism used to be a political stance. Now it has every marking of a religion.” He continues, “Coates is ‘revered,’ as New York magazine aptly puts it, as someone gifted at phrasing, repeating, and crafting artful variations upon points that are considered crucial—that is, scripture. Specifically, Coates is celebrated as the writer who most aptly expresses the scripture that America’s past was built on racism and that racism still permeates the national fabric.” McWhorter writes, “The very fact that white America today cherishes this religion is evidence that Coates’s particular pessimism about America and race is excessive. This became especially clear last year with the rapturous reception of Coates’s essay, ‘The Case for Reparations.’ It was beautifully written, of course, but the almost tearfully ardent praise the piece received was about more than composition. The idea was that the piece was important, weighty, big news.” “Its audience sought not counsel, but proclamation. Coates does not write with this formal intention, but for his readers, he is a preacher.” “Antiracism — it seriously merits capitalization at this point — is now what any naïve, unbiased anthropologist would describe as a new and increasingly dominant religion.” (See For the Good of Your Soul: Tribal Stigma and the God of Reparations.)
The new religion of antiracism is ubiquitous. People are convinced that racism is systemic. They see the rare and aberrant occurrence as confirmation of the truth of the doctrine. The one time the spell works is proof the spell works. They elevate the anecdote over the evidence. The put feeling over fact. You probably know this error as confirmation bias. It is also a type of magical thinking. There are witches in the village. That’s why we feel uneasy, the crowd says. White people fall prostrate on the ground before black people and beg forgiveness for a sin they could not possibly have committed. They make a fetish of skin color and organize around it. They self-loathe on account of it. They wash the feet of those with different color skin. As if color is supposed to matter. They’re congregants in The Church of Woke. The people who are supposed to know better join the mobs in the streets who see the demons (i.e. the racists and the fascists) everywhere. The mob exorcises them by arson, pillage, and plunder. Toppling the idols of the enemy tribe. I can find no refuge from the insanity even in the ostensibly rational institutions of modernity.
This is a moral panic. People have to start resisting and refusing it. Where is our Joseph Nye Welch? I am not in a position to be that man. I will have no high profile moment. But enough is enough. We cannot get to the problems we need to solve as a nation—crumbling infrastructure, joblessness, resource depletion and environmental degradation, war and peace—if we’re going to operate via mythology and waste our time and energy in ritual exercises that do nothing but heighten and entrench alienation and antagonism.
Consider my work here to be a modest contribution in the vein of Carroll Soner and Jo Anne Parke’s 1977 All Gods Children: The Cult Experience—Salvation Or Slavery? An important book in the deprogramming movement. The subtitle is, of course, a false choice. They mean that these are the same. And they are right. Freedom and dignity reside beyond both. Cults don’t provide purpose. Our purpose is already given: be a good citizen, a moral person, and a responsible individual. That’s for everybody. Cults enslave you with identity instead and make you do bad things. They tell you who you are and control you with your new self-definition.
Beware of mass movements. They’re like cults—that is, abusive relationships. The activists tell you they love you while they degrade and humiliate you. They especially thrilled when you degrade and humiliate yourself. You are broken and sick, not because of anything you have done or anything that has been done to others, but because of who you are—and because of who they are. It’s a cosmic story. They are the authors. The arc and all the rest of it. It’s fate. You are only a personification of doctrine. You don’t have the luxury of being an individual. You have a debt to pay that you did not incur. It was imposed upon you by virtue of your being.
That’s the code. Don’t question it. By the authority of the code, you cannot question the code. You fall short of the esteem, the glory, the salvation you’re told you must seek. Your defect has crippled you. If not correctable (and it isn’t), you must at least continually acknowledge it. Assume the position. Stay in your lane. Go to the back of the room. You weren’t asked your opinion. You’re muzzled by virtue of the tribal stigma, your skin color, maybe, or perhaps on account of your genitalia. Or maybe both. If you deny your guilt, then you prove it. Your appearance heralds your own condemnation. You are a demon and an oracle. You’re fragile and dangerous. Seeking unity is divisive. Seeking equality is oppressive. You don’t get it. You look ridiculous. That’s why you’re abused. You must respect that and love your abuser. Give into his demands. Or you are a racist.
There is no future in what the mob seeks. They aren’t really seeking a future. They see in the countermovement a chance to belong to somebody because they don’t belong to themselves. It’s why people become religious fanatics. Or fascists. Or antifascists. Or social justice warriors.
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Note (July 27, 2020):
For many in Antifa, like the neo-Nazis, they’re organisms forming part of an aggregate on account of the same personality disorders: histrionic, narcissism, paranoia, schizotypal, and sociopathy. The “cause” for them is secondary. Gear and uniforms and flags and symbols—those are really awesome eye candy because they make the user feel important and special. So they get woke upon suiting up. Working up a psych profile for these people is easy; the phenomenon isn’t a symptom of anything but their own disorders which they publicly self-diagnose. Watch the videos of their activities in Portland—termites working with saws and blowtorches to dismantle a fence they were too weak to topple by sheer force of numbers in Portland (their saws and blowtorches failed, as well (the cops looking on, despite being obscured by gas-masks, obviously found the scene ridiculous—those who weren’t blinded by lasers, of course). Both sets of miscreants—neo-Nazis and Antifa—are as Travis Hirshi described them: birds of a feather.
However, unlike neo-Nazis, who are rare birds those days, Antifa is a larger aggregate, peopled and promoted beyond the clinical types by adherents to Mao Zedong and other illiberal lefty thoughts (near-crazies, of course), with a lot of fellow travelers, and so Antifa represents a rather larger rot—that of self-loathing and vacuous white people looking for a religious-like experience to fill the void of meaning and the absence of accomplishment in their alienated lives. These parasites latch on to other movements, some of which may have some degree of worthiness (antiglobalization), but others that don’t (BLM). Since they operate without humanist principle while fetishizing technique, they are easily used by those who operate with rather more grand designs in mind. It’s hit and miss for the termites because they aren’t very good at higher-level cognitive functioning. If there’s street action, though, they’re there. They can figure out how to navigate city streets and tunnels. Those who egg them on are the problem—the academics, the media, the corporations. They’re the termite whisperers.
There is a concerted effort to poison the American mind with a false narrative about its people’s history and a primitive ideology of blood guilt and intergenerational obligation with the arrow of responsibility in the latter running in the wrong direction. The poison has been weaponized in popular culture the delegitimize the American republic, to justify dismantling and fundamentally altering its institutions, to prepare it for a fuller integration with the global order steered by corporate power. The defamation of America is designed to render the working class impotent through a process of denationalization, a popular weakening working at cultural and institutional levels. New Left anti-Americanism polished and pushed by cultural managers in America’s academic, media, and political institutions is increasingly reflected in the ordinary consciousness of the American public.
One manifestation of the campaign of defamation is the deeply flawed 1619 Project, pursued by The New York Times, organized by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. It’s many errors and disregard for its own fact checkers to the side, the 1619 Project is ideological work, moving America’s founding marker from July 4, 1776, when in fact the American colonists declared their independence from the British Empire, to 1619, the year a handful of Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia. For the record, African slaves were present in North America almost a hundred years before they landed in Jamestown. And the English did not bring them.
The ideological goal is to construct an account of history where the chief antagonism in the dynamic of America has always been about race, to portray America’s founding as a slave society, and to defame those of English descent and others defined as white. We see this claim in the pages of The Washington Post on the eve of Independence Day, where historian Elizabeth Kolsky writes, “The nation’s democracy was founded as a slave society.” Repeating the superstitious nonsense of living persons owning centuries-long experiences that is so fashionable in Western universities, Kolsky writes, “The knee to [George] Floyd’s neck has provided black and indigenous peoples with a metaphor to express their own centuries-long experiences of and struggles against systemic racism. These protests are not only expressions of solidarity with black Americans—they represent a collective reckoning with a past that is not past.”
But the chief antagonism in America’s story has always been primarily about class exploitation and struggle, of which slavery is but a part. Thus, the false narrative functions to stifle the conversation about class exploitation. Functional language is too charitable. This is its intent. The narrative seeks to erase from historical consciousness the fact that North American colonies were established the produce value for the emerging world capitalist market and that the slave mode of exploitation was one among many methods—and not the primary one—and that exploitation continues under corporate rule. Our is a capitalist society. But you won’t find a New York Times project condemning the systemic exploitation of human under conditions of wage-labor. Establishment media like The Washington Post are organs of capitalist propaganda. Their role is to reinforce the ruling ideas of the age, which, as Karl Marx pointed out, are the ideas of the ruling class.
The English arriving in North America at what would become Jamestown
Given the intent to stuff history down a hole, I want to briefly reclaim that history in this blog. Time and space permit only a historical sketch. But that is really all that is needed to shatter the myth being peddled by Establishment propagandists.
Before Africans arrived in the colonies in large numbers (the Royal African Company was not reincorporation until 1663), English settlers were the primary sources of exploited labor, and many of them could hardly be said to be free. Most owned no productive capital. At best, some owned their labor-power. But labor was always controlled by the company. Living arrangements were typically dreadful. Labor was housed in cramped barracks, worked in gangs, suffered corporal punishment or the threat of it, and were poorly fed. Their health and well-being were sacrificed for the greater objective of profit. The goal of the Virginia Company was to pay the lowest possible wages—if any wages were paid at all—and maximize labor productivity through the extreme disciplinary regimes. The early colonies were effectively penal colonies.
The great transformation that had become by the end of the long 16th century a world capitalist market had produced by the 17th century all the basic constituents of the capitalist class: the agrarian, banking, commercial, industrial, and mining bourgeoisie. Along with the capitalist class, although often in a contradictory location in relation to wealth and power, were various petty bourgeoisie, owners of small business and artisan industries in the urban areas, and tenant farmers in the rural areas. On the other side of the production relation were those who owned no capital, the various proletariat, farm and industrial workers. The English brought with them to North America the practice of hierarchically organizing society.
One of the rationales for English colonization of North America was the transfer of surplus population from England to North American colonies. The dissolution of the feudal retainers in the 15th century, the Reformation in the 16th century, and the rationalization of production created a surplus of people in the urban areas in England. The London Company stated as its colonial objective: “The removing of the surcharge of necessitous people, the matter of fuel of dangerous insurrections, and thereby leaving the greater plenty to sustain those remaining within the Land.” Thus, as the colonial economy grew, demand for workers coincided with the needs of the English elite to maintain social stability on their island nation.
Much of the European labor came as convicts and voluntary indentured servants (which is not say there was no coercion involved). The convict class were drawn from of the “lumpenproletariat,” i.e., vagabonds and paupers. There were also orphans and state-dependent children sent to be servants to the colonial elites. These unfortunate souls, criminalized by a host of discriminatory laws against the poor and unemployed, were rounded up by the thousands by traffickers in human beings and the government. An indentured servant was a debt bondsman who received no wages. He or she (typically he) was obligated for a term of service of four to seven years (though the range was at times larger) to the planters who secured their fare across the Atlantic. Convicts were also sent to the colonies. They often had longer term contracts.
The colonial system of indenture represented a unique condition for labor; there was no real equivalent in England. For example, a bondsman’s obligation to his/her employer was governed by criminal law. In contrast, a servant in England was usually a wage-laborer with a term of contract of one year. The English servant’s contract was voluntary and mediated by civil law. The conditions of an indentured servant were poor and they were often mistreated by their employers. Ill treatment of indentured servants reflected the growing belief in English culture that the idle poor were inherently inferior human types and/or members of the dangerous classes. These beliefs were part of an ideology that had emerged in the sixteenth century, largely the result of developing capitalist attitudes and the Protestant worldview. On the basis of this ideology, the poor enjoyed diminished rights and deserved to be treated with less respect than would be afforded decent members of English society. English inhumanity mirrored the acquisitive society its bourgeoisie built.
The tendency towards brutal repression of labor was there from the birth of the colonial experience in North America. In 1610, in Virginia, a dictatorship was imposed on the colony. In contrast to the opulence of the elite, a population of freeholders, tenants, indentured servants, and, in time, a small number of black slaves, lived a largely agrarian and impoverished existence where excessive rents and taxes and low incomes guaranteed a life of impoverishment.
If we are going to move the date of the founding of America to capture the moment of the principle antagonism and the original mode of exploitation, we had better move it to before 1619. Beginning the timeline from 1619 is an arbitrary and ideological starting point, one that telegraphs a dual motive: put race and slavery central to the American story while skirting the truth of the dynamic of class struggle. Because class exploitation continues. The capitalist system the academy, the media, and political elites in both major parties defend is built upon and depends on the exploitation of human labor. Dwell on a long-abolished mode of exploitation, the cultural managers tell the masses. Make that the master explanation for why inequality persists. Do not think about the actually existing mode of exploitation that makes it possible for those who defame America and belittle the worker to live a life of comfort and leisure. Don’t think about such as facts as this: there are three times more poor white Americans than there are poor black Americans. Think about this instead: all whites are privileged and racist. Don’t read Karl Marx. Read Robin DiAngelo.
But why move the date at all? The colonies in the 17th century were English colonies. We are not British. We haven’t been British for more that 230 years. We’re Americans. And the nation we established established the values that has produced the greatest nation in world history. And one of its greatest achievements was abolishing slavery.
To be sure, slavery was part of the US system in its early years. But slavery was not established by America’s founding. Slavery is a very old institution. One finds slaves in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The monuments and statues of these empires and civilizations are protected from defacement and toppling where the rule of law prevails. Africans were kept and sold as slaves throughout the Muslim world. Slaves appear in Europe, apart from the Mediterranean, at least as early as 1000 year ago. The Atlantic slave trade began more than 500 years ago. The Portuguese brought African slaves to Europe in the 15th century. Less than a hundred years later, the Spanish brought African slaves to the Americas. Yes, even North America—before 1619. The Cherokee held African slaves (and sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War to protect their investment). Indeed, slavery was practiced by the American Indian before Europeans came to these shores. We are told to demolish Mount Rushmore because those are the likenesses of slaveowners and racists and Indian killers that desecrate sacred Indian lands—the sacred lands of peoples who themselves owned slaves and killed Indians.
The truth is that establishment of the United States does not establish slavery. That is a false claim. Some will push back and say it is a bad inference. But it is wrong to support any account of history that makes it likely that people will falsely infer such a thing. American civilization emerges from a long history of slavery, from a world where slavery was a common part of material production of economic life. Slavery is now illegal in the United States. It has been for more than 150 years. Moreover, the struggle against slavery in the United States was there from its founding.
In 1775, Pennsylvanian Quakers established the first abolitionist society. Betsy Ross, who sewed early American flags, was a Quaker and an abolitionist. Within the decade, Massachusetts abolished slavery in its constitution. In 1787, the US Congress outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territories. The United States Constitution (Article One, Section 9) set a date certain for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. It followed through in 1807—before the British and the Spanish (the Spanish did not abolish the slave trade until 1888). President Jefferson signed the law prohibiting the importation of slaves into any ports or place within the jurisdiction of the United States. The British abolished slavery through the Empire in 1834. France followed suit in 1847. The United States followed in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.
So maybe we should stop talking falsely about how the United States established slavery and start telling the truth: The United States led the way in abolishing slavery worldwide. And, while we are at it, we should step back a bit more and remind the world that abolitionist sentiment did not emerge in other places, such as in the Islamic world. The abolitionist sentiment emerged in the Christian world, in Western civilization, from the Enlightenment, the very civilization and movement that the cultural managers and political and economic elites are, with the help of the mob in the streets, tearing down.
freedom and reason 