In a corporate boardroom somewhere, perhaps in more than one or two, there is a cabal of executives and operatives brainstorming. “How can we make clients and patients of children, teens, and young adults?” “How can we make vulnerable populations lifelong consumers of our commodities and services?” “We must get them while they’re young,” one tells the rest. “We must make them forever dependent on us.” “How do we do this?” “We have to make them feel that there’s something wrong with them,” he says. “They’re sick. We can heal them!” one says. “They’re broken. We can fix them!” says another. Then, in a frank moment, the man at the end of the table says, “But not really. Because, really, we’re going to sicken them. We’re going to break them.”
The corporate boardroom—where plots of mass deception are hatched
Some readers are probably recoiling at my speculations. How could those devoted to the health and wellness of people think in such a fashion? Don’t doctors take an oath? Isn’t one of the core principles of that oath primum non nocere—“first, due no harm?” This is the source of a core principle of bioethics: the principle ofnon-maleficence! Without crossing over into therapeutic nihilism, the essence of the principle is basic. Given the nature of an existing problem, it may be better to avoid some course of action or to take no action at all than to risk causing more harm than good. So how does a profession go from principled to unprincipled practice, to organized action that causes harm with the purpose of making clients and patients rather than finding them?
In the early 1970s, a series of federal laws and policies were enacted that changed the way hospitals and medicine worked in the United States. These changes had a profound impact on the health care system, and led to the emergence of large corporate health care systems. The rise of managed care and health maintenance organizations (HMOs) in the 1970s played a key role. HMOs became the dominant form of health insurance in the 1980s and 1990s and their emergence is associated with the consolidation of health care providers into large corporate health care systems. Large corporate health care systems were able to negotiate discounts with health insurance companies, reduce costs by centralizing services, and provide a wide range of health care services to patients.
The changes in law and policy in the early 1970s thus set the stage for the transformation of the health care system from a fragmented, locally-based system, in which doctors contracted with public hospitals and clinics and patients, and (honest) doctors delivered only the care the patient needed, to a centralized, corporate-dominated system in which doctors became employees subordinated to the dictates of corporate profit, which drives them to make clients and patients.
The very character of the corporation, recognized as a legal person, legally required to behave as a psychopath, lies at the heart of the atrocities of the medical-industrial complex. Shareholders play an important role in the operation of big corporate health care and medical groups. Health care companies are typically structured as for-profit corporations, which means that they are owned by shareholders who expect to receive a return on their investment in the form of dividends or capital appreciation. The primary responsibility of the shareholders of a corporation is to maximize their return on investment. This can be done by increasing the company’s profits, which are generated by expanding health care services—and this requires not only finding more patients, but also creating them.
The drive to maximize profits in big corporate health care and medical groups incentivizes the development of new technologies and procedures, which in turn leads to increased medical intervention and treatments. The financial resources provided by shareholders can be used to fund the research and development of new technologies and therapies. This can lead to new drugs and surgical procedures that may not be supported by strong scientific evidence. It incentivizes the overuse of medical interventions, even when these interventions may not be needed on objective medical grounds—even when these interventions sicken and break people.(See Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds.)
Because health care is an industry in the age of corporate power. The problem of over and unnecessary intervention has eclipsed the problem of therapeutic nihilism. Indeed, a new nihilism has emerged, one that sacrifices truth and caution on the altar of acquisition and avarice. The imperative of profit maximization eclipses everything else. The corporate person is a self-interested entity concerned only with profits for shareholders, a personality developed and codified through various legal and economic theories, at the core of this the shareholder value model. The model is a business philosophy that prioritizes maximizing returns for shareholders above all other concerns. It is based on the premise that the primary purpose of a corporation is to generate profits for its owners through stock value maximization.
Everywhere this thought has occurred (or will occur), knowing the long history of marketing, propaganda, and public relations, namely that business firms can make a thing like this happen by engineering a culture that induces people to believe things that will make those commodities and services obvious to the illusion that makes them necessary (and they know a great many people are vulnerable and will believe a great many things), people are sickened and broken and made dependent on the corporations.
This culture must be one of futility, producing a profound sense of estrangement from the larger social order, its norms and values, its task and purpose, to produce in individuals the nihilism and narcissism that prepares them for reintegration with the corporate logic of consumption, resulting in what President Herbert Hoover long ago called “happiness machines.” The means of manipulating the masses towards these ends is well-tested, developed from the Freudian principles of psychodynamics, refined to be ever more effective, their intent ever more dissimulated by the gathering about the motive the legitimacy of prevailing social institutions, exploiting the deep faith the people have in the authority of health care professionals.
This is why elites have sent up the hue and cry about the crisis of legitimacy in the prevailing social institutions of corporate governance: elites need the sheep to trust the shepherd.
But the shepherd is only interested in eating them, fleecing them, or fucking them.
Have you seen the video shared below yet? If not, check it out (see link below). It was a group discussion about assimilation and diversity organized by Vice. The participants were from different Asian ethnicities. However, the range of viewpoints was rather less diverse. There is so much wrong with this discussion it’ll keep you entertained all the way though. Or maybe it will put you off. There are some real cringe moments for sure.
For what inspires this particular blog, check out the section from 8:46 to around 15:35, where the host asks if assimilation is a good thing or a bad thing. The second speaker in this round, Vince Dao, stuns the group by providing sociological insights into why some groups do better than other groups—reasons that do not depend on the woke progressive narrative of group oppression. Somebody asks who gets to decide to which culture immigrants should assimilate. The majority, Dao says. Those with power, he clarifies. Who has power? A woman with purple hair says it’s white people. of course she does. Dao pushes back. Check it out:
The argument that white people have the power and it is therefore their culture to which immigrants must assimilate is wrong for several reasons. Dao makes a good case (Dao has his own YouTube channel, which can be found here). I want to make some points of my own.
On September 8, 2020, I posted to Freedom and Reason a FAR Podcast episode and the script The Myth of White Culture. You can read there all of the supposed traits of white culture, traits that comprise a system that must be rejected because it was built by white people and therefore projects their whiteness, which is a bad thing.
The suggestion that white people collectively comprise the ruling class and, therefore, the dominant culture associated with a white-majority society represents an ideology of oppression is designed (quite literally, as I document in the podcast cited above) to obscure the fact that the dominant culture is Western culture, born in Enlightenment, and has nothing to do with race. The Enlightenment occurred in Europe not because of white people, but because complex cultural, religious, and social forces and trends converged in that region to create a system emphasizes reason, limited government, and the primacy of the individual, a system marked by humanism, liberalism, and secularism.
Perhaps the most significant characteristic of Western culture is that it liberates the individual from the tribe and reintegrates that individual into a culture where his individuality is prized more than his group membership. A black man, emancipated from the legacy institution of slavery, his liberation thanks to the Enlightenment, now has a chance to become a fully actualized human being. A woman, emancipated from the suffocating strictures of Islam, an option in the West, throwing off the limitations placed on her by a patriarchal ideology that systematically privileges men, now has a chance to determine her own live on her own terms. A gay man is free of the doctrines of the religions that loathe him and marry his lover.
However, for the racist and antiracist alike, culture is a projection of racial type—it must be for the claim that Western culture is white supremacist because it occurs in the context of the trans-Atlantic system that is distinguished in part as having a white majority. It is the equivalent of saying that Japanese culture is racist because that country’s majority is Japanese in the ethnic sense of nation. Japanese culture may be racist, but it is not because Japan is full of Japanese or that Japanese people expect immigrants to abide by the national culture in the broader sense of nationalism.
I find it fascinating that the argument advanced by the progressives in the Vice debate isn’t immediately understood as racist itself, specifically an expression of anti-white bigotry, which is rampant in the West today, especially in America. White people are the only racial group about which anything can be said with impunity—even celebrated (see Is There Systemic Anti-White Racism?). It is not merely acceptable to say that whites today are responsibility for things done in the past by people who look like them; condemning whites with the ancient and backwards doctrine of blood guilt is encouraged (Disney Says, “Slaves Built This Country.” Did They?) and even required (The Bureaucratic Tyranny of DEI). There is even allowed—in the face of the Fourteenth Amendment—a program called affirmative action that discriminates against whites in college admissions and employment. In fact, you risk being called a racist for opposing it.
Saying white people are in power because the average white person has a higher income and is wealthier than, say, the average black, is like saying that Chinese people are in power because they, too, on average, have higher incomes and are wealthier than black people. Rationalizing the fact that Chinese people on average do better than whites by defining Chinese people as “white adjacent” is obnoxious. (For the record, Dao is also right about the racial character of anti-Asian hate and violence. See The Rise in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes. Trump-inspired? Not Quite. That whites as a group are blamed for crimes disproportionately committed by black people is a useful illustration of the anti-white bigotry that has become reflexive in today’s America.)
The same thing happens when ethnicity becomes the alleged source of power. The claim that Jews are controlling the West’s dominant institutions is well-understood to be an anti-Semitic trope. What you can say is that Jews on average do better than non-Jews. Treat them as possessing some collective power based on their Jewishness suggests to other than you may be a neo-Nazi (or an Islamist, however that brand of anti-Jewish sentiment tends to be ignored by progressives). But it’s okay to say that whites control the West’s dominant institutions. Whites run society. This has caused some Jews to deny they’re white, often explicitly to get out of being accused of enjoying white privilege (see Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation). But the premise is wrong, not because Jews aren’t white (most are in fact white, as are other Semitic peoples), but because whites are not in power. Whites have enjoyed no systemic power in America since the 1960s.
Conceptualizing power in racial or ethnic terms misidentifies the actual source of power in a capitalist society: class power rooted in economic inequality. Power in a capitalist society emerges from the differential possession of the means of generating income and wealth. The greater one’s possession of these means (land and capital), the greater power one possesses. Put another way, the availability of power depends on one’s position in the class structure not on the color of their skin. The majority of whites possess very little in material resources and thus have very little power. They don’t determine how life happens in America. They have no control over academic institutions, corporate boardrooms, the culture industry, mass media, the legal and political apparatus. They are not in a position to impose white culture on anybody—even if we supposed there were such a thing.
We hear the blood guilt argument in the claim that all whites enjoyed skin-color privilege. But in the United States, individuals regardless of skin color are equal under the law (excepting affirmative action). As noted, there are no laws or institutions in place that systemically privilege white people. These were dismantled decades ago in a series of legal decisions and legislative actions. This means that the argument that whites are in power must depends on fallacious reasoning. The claim is simply asserted as doctrine and everybody is expected to believe or risk being treated as a heretic and called a bigot or a racist.
This is why Dao leaves those around him stunned. They can’t believe somebody is actually saying the things Dao is saying. But reality has its own integrity and truth and honesty require us to speak against the myth that’s being disseminated to justify the managed decline of the America republic (cultural pluralism and anti-white bigotry are tactics used by transnationalists to dismantle the nation-states of the West). And, so, the woman with the purple hair dismisses Dao as a Republican, as a right-winger, as if this invalidates his argument. Indeed, the populist-nationalist style of republicanism Dao advocates owns the progressive left on this issue.
To get technical for a moment, the fallacy that’s being committed by members of the Vice panel is what we call “reification” or the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” This a type of error in reasoning that occurs when an abstract idea or concept is treated as if it were a concrete, physical entity. This error can take several forms, but it essentially involves taking a conceptual, statistical, symbolic, or theoretical representation of a thing and treating it as if it were the real thing. When someone refers to “whites” and “blacks” as if these groups were biological distinct or homogeneous or that each concrete person so identified carries the average of the category, they’re committing the fallacy of reification.
The reality is that there is tremendous variation within racial groups. Moreover, much if not most of the differences between groups is the result of cultural, historical, and environmental factors, not biology or ongoing oppression. Thus when people use race to explain differences in income, education, or other socio-economic outcomes, they’re committing the fallacy of reification. Actual things, such as class, sex, and geographic location, play a much larger role in determining socio-economic outcomes. To the extent that subcultural differences shape the thought and behavior of individuals, which is a piece of Dao’s argument, this is an argument against cultural pluralism and for assimilation.
The demand is not that individuals assimilate to so-called white culture for racist reasons. Indeed, a feature of racist systems is to not promote assimilation, but to compel apartness—the opposite of assimilation. Jim Crow segregation in America and the apartheid system of South Africa did not operate on assimilationist desire but the desire to keep blacks away from and subordinated to whites. Immigrants are encouraged to assimilate because there was a desire to integrate individuals into the national cultural order. Historically, most immigrants to America didn’t have to be convinced to assimilate. When the purple-haired lady asserts that President Roosevelt’s executive order interning Japanese-Americans during WWII is an example of assimilation, and the others around her bobble heads, we are witnessing an Orwellian moment where a thing has becomes its anthesis.
“White” is a demographic category that is based on a racialize construct. It is not analogous to a person’s position in the class structure, which involves an objective association between the individual and his position with respect to the means of production. One’s location in the class structure is an actual thing. Those who claim white people are in power because of their racial identity assume that each person who is identified as white is a concrete personification of the category of “whiteness,” which is an abstraction. This leads people to confuse the average white person, a statistical invention, with actual white persons who could be anything (except not white by definition). People believe whites comprise a group with common cultural, economic, and political commitments. I don’t capitalize the word “white” and “black” because these are not proper names.
Vince Dao interviewed at CPAC 2021, Orlando, Florida
A moment Ago I noted that to the extent that subcultural differences shape the thought and behavior of individuals this is an argument against cultural pluralism and for assimilation. This is another flaw of the argument—that cultural attitudes and values associated with particular ethnic groups do not explain group averages. Culture plays a significant role in shaping group differences because the beliefs, norms, and values of people within a cultural group determines and shapes the conduct of the individuals socialized in those beliefs, norms, and values.
Cultural beliefs and practices influence the way people interact with each other, the way they view themselves and others, and their attitudes towards various social, political, and economic issues. Certain cultural values place a high emphasis on individualism, stress the importance of community and personal responsibility. Other cultures submerge the individual in group identity and socialize them in belief, norms, and values that sabotage their ability to be successful and fully actualized as human beings.
Differing cultural values can lead to differences in how individuals within a group approach decision-making, relationships, and other aspects of life. Cultural beliefs shape the opportunities and resources that are available to different groups. As noted, certain cultural beliefs about gender roles limit the educational and professional opportunities available to women, e.g., as we see in Islam. this is what Dao was saying And he’s correct.
Finally, Dao suggests that, if the United States were truly a white supremacist country, a Vice panel where anti-white bigotry went unchecked would be highly unlikely. He points out that across America, in all the dominant institutions, it’s not white people who are being privileged and promoted, but nonwhites. How does it happen in a white supremacist nation that anti-white bigotry goes unpunished, even celebrated, while non-whites are preferred and advanced? Why would institutions rooted in white supremacy eliminate the allegedly racist qualifications and tests that discriminate against nonwhites?
If a space alien were to visit earth, and if he paid attention to such things, he would wonder why it was that those with darker skin were more likely to be selected for positions over those with lighter skin even when the lighter-skinned applicants were more qualified for the position than the darker-skinned persons. If he was told that this is because the lighter-skinned applicants are the oppressors, he would surely be curious to learn why an oppressive system privileges the oppressed. The answer to that question explains why so many people today are stepping into it.
People’s World is the newspaper of the Communist Party USA. The paper has been around for almost a century (founded as the Daily Worker founded in 1924). For the sake of keeping our feet on the planet’s surface, a proper communist should oppose the corporate state, not glorify it. A communist should know what fascism is—in all its myriad iterations—and help his comrades understand this. Communism at its best is about consciousness raising and speaking truth to power.
Here’s the link to the article, if you want to read the rest.
Is this crop of communists so deluded as to believe the establishment in Washington DC represents Joseph Weydemeyer’s “dictatorship of the proletariat”? I know a lot of right-wingers who believe that, but they’re almost as far off the mark as the communists who wrote this article. For conservatives, it’s a problem of generalizing totalitarianism to everything. Communists are supposed to know better. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” is not among fascism’s manifestations.
The authors of he piece are Mark Gruenberg and John Wojcik. Gruenberg is editor of Press Associates Inc., which I think is People’s World. According to the People’s World profile page, Gruenberg is “holy terror when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.” Really? A union meat cutter (not to be confused with a butcher), Wojcik is editor-in-chief of People’s World. He, too, should know that Matt Gaetz and Anna Paulina Luna aren’t fascists. Wojcik is the author of another recently published People’s World article “House approves revenge panel to settle Trump scores and defend insurrectionists.” I will come to this in a moment.
But, first, what is fascism? Franz Neumann (a Marxist legal scholar) defines fascism as a political ideology and governing strategy characterized by authoritarianism and corporatism that rests atop the structure of totalitarian monopoly capitalism. Fascism is a response by banking and corporate power to capitalist crisis, its operatives establishing an extended state apparatus integrating all aspects of society—culture, economics, education, and politics. Fascism thus represents a new form of political and social organization. Neumann emphasizes the importance of grasping the underlying economic and social factors that give rise to the corporate state, as well as the psychological and cultural factors that make it appealing to certain segments of the population. Like other critical theorists, Neumann emphasizes the role of the media and cultural institutions in shaping public opinion and reinforcing the fascist ideology (which may not own that label).
On the surface, the difference between old and new fascism is the question of nationalism. This has confused many people. To be sure, the old fascists pushed an extreme ethnonationalist line. At the same time, the end sought by national socialists was a new world order. The Nazis were globalists, and, in alliance with fascist Italy and imperial Japan conquered much of the world before the liberal democracies of the West in alliance with the Soviet Union defeated them. The new fascism no longer hides behind the rhetoric of ethnonationalism (it has been replaced by multiculturalism). But the other characteristics are manifest. We find the business sector collaborating with technocracy and the administrative state, and the media and cultural institutions busy shaping public opinion and reinforcing the ideology of the corporate state, namely progressivism, the other ideological projection of corporatism. (See Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow for an in-depth analysis.)
As obvious as the situation is, Gruenberg and Wojcik don’t get it. Only a couple of weeks before this latest article, they penned an article in People’s World carrying the title, “Big business is behind extreme right takeover of the House.” Partisan devotion is so thick here that Gruenberg and Wojcik can only see the hand of big business when it elects Republican candidates. For them, the Democratic Party is a priori not fascist, therefore the hand of big business in that party’s affairs become an invisible one. That’s the way logic works in their world
To be charitable, the inability to see reality does not come about because the role of big business in the Democratic Party is minimal but because capitalist accumulation is paramount and the relations complex. For more than a century, the Democratic Party has performed the structural role of steering mechanism, shepherding the capitalist system through its inevitable cycles of crises. Its more structural and less obvious instrumental features may make its political-economic character harder to detect, but it is not difficult to figure it out. Performing the structural role has involved integrating organized labor into the party structure, giving the appearance of solidarity with the people. In contrast, the Republican Party is seen as being more pro-business—and is portrayed as such by the propaganda system. However, the Democratic Party is bankrolled by corporate and financial industries. Banking and big corporate donors, along with the technology and entertainment sectors, are among the largest contributors to the Democratic Party and its candidates. Overall, Democrats raise and spend more money than the Republicans.
We may also be charitable and say that cognitive dissonance plays a major role in producing the blindness. As most readers know, cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon marked by mental discomfort or stress that results from simultaneously holding two or more conflicting beliefs, ideas, or values. Intrapsychic conflict may become acute when an individual encounters new information that challenges his existing beliefs or when he makes choices based on beliefs that are inconsistent with his values. When the individual who expresses beliefs he thinks align with the platform of a particular party learns that the real politics and policies of the party are in conflict with those beliefs, especially when they strike at his ethical sensibilities, he will experience cognitive dissonance. To resolve the discomfort, the person may change his political beliefs to align with his moral beliefs. Or, he may rationalize the inconsistency by “finding” reasons to support the policy—or by adjusting his ethical sensibilities.
For example, the person may believe that it is wrong as a matter of principle for the FBI to run counterintelligence programs on American citizens and their political organizations. This individual may recognize this as an expression of fascism and say so when the surveillance apparatus and harassment campaign are aimed at the organizations and movements with which he associates. But when the party he supports defends such programs—and not only that but is actually directly involved initiating them and enabling them—the individual must rationalize the situation or completely change his political loyalties. The discomfort caused by cognitive dissonance in this case is powerful enough to cause individuals to ignore or reject information that contradicts their existing beliefs and committments.
This is how we find supporters of the Democratic Party defending the national security state’s assault on the fundamental liberties and rights that lie at the heart of the American Republic as a defense of democracy, while those endeavoring to get to the bottom of the causal forces behind the deep state war on democracy as those “threatening democracy.” Remember the Orwellian slogans “Freedom is slavery!” We might add to Orwell’s list the slogan “Technocracy is Democracy!” The FBI colludes with media companies to suppress the First Amendment rights of American citizens and that’s not fascism, but the Freedom Caucus that forces the House to create the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government is? And I thought the CPUSA was down with popular front politics and tactics.
The FBI conducted extensive surveillance of the CPUSA throughout the 20th century as part of that agency’s broader efforts to counteract perceived threats to national security and the government. The FBI used a variety of tactics to gather information on the CPUSA and its members, including infiltrating the organization with agents and informers, wiretapping, and intercepting and reading correspondence. The FBI also conducted surveillance of individuals who were associated with the CPUSA or suspected of being members, including political activists, labor leaders, and intellectuals. The FBI’s harassment of CPUSA violated the constitutional rights of American citizens. But it was rationalized as a “defense of democracy,” even though it was the opposite of that. It was an assault on democracy.
Did the CPUSA oppose the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s that exposed FBI’s excesses against its organization and allies? No. Quite the opposite. In response to the Church Committee revelations (and the CPUSA knew the FBI was surveilling it and disrupting its operations), the CPUSA and its supporters criticized the FBI’s actions as a violation of their constitutional rights and an abuse of government power. They argued that the FBI’s efforts to monitor and disrupt their activities were politically motivated and aimed at suppressing political dissent and free speech. Even before the Church Committee revelations, the CPUSA took legal action to challenge the FBI’s surveillance tactics. In the Communist Party of the United States v. Subversive Activities Control Board (1967), while the Supreme Court upheld the government’s power to surveil the CPUSA, its judges confirmed that the First Amendment protected the CPUSA’s right to advocate for its political views.
In the end, the FBI’s harassment campaign took a toll on the CPUSA and contributed to a sharp decline in its membership and influence. Perhaps this is what the CPUSA is hoping will happen with the populist figures and organizations its leaders and members smear as fascists. If so, then they don’t stand on the principles that undergirded their criticism of the FBI’s harassment of them. So what good is the organization? Cynically, the liberal principles that finally put an end to government suppression of the CPUSA are to them only instruments to be taken up when advance the organization’s own politics.
This is the ACLU new stance. In the past, the ACLU defended the rights of all individuals regardless of their political beliefs or ideologies. In 1978, the ACLU defended the First Amendment rights of neo-Nazis who planned to march in Skokie, Illinois, a predominantly Jewish community with a large number of Holocaust survivors. The ACLU argued that the right to free speech, even if it was offensive or unpopular, was protected under the Constitution. In the face of criticism that the ACLU was giving a platform to hate speech, the ACLU stood fast in upholding its commitment to free speech and the position that defending the rights of the neo-Nazis was necessary to protect the rights of all individuals.
Today, the ACLU has turned its attention inward to root out what is describes as systemic racism within its own organization. To remedy the problem of white supremacy among its ranks, it has deployed the hammer of inclusion against its leadership and staff. At one time the ACLU defended the right of people to hold and express contrary views on race matters. Today, the whiff of opinion that diverges from the woke doctrine will get you censored and expelled. (I didn’t wait for the ACLU to expel me. I resigned in protest last year.)
Gus Hall, the long-time chairman of the CPUSA, must be rolling in his grave. In his 1987 Working class USA: the power and the movement, he advocated a “bill of rights socialism.” (I have a copy on my book shelf signed by Gus.) Hall was a strong advocate for free speech and believed that all individuals should have the right to express their views, regardless of whether they were popular or controversial. He saw the right to free speech as essential to a democratic society. He argued that restrictions on speech, whether by the government or by the private sector, were a threat to the rights of individuals. To be sure, Hall found himself at odds with those who sought to restrict speech on the grounds that it was harmful or dangerous. But he believed, as I believe, as all people who care about freedom believe, that the best way to counter harmful speech is through more speech, and that censorship and restrictions on speech only serve to drive harmful ideas underground and make them more difficult to challenge.
I will confess to publishing a few op-eds in the People’s World back in the first decade of the 21st century. (See The victims of capitalism and Texas execution could end death penalty, if we act. I stand by those writings.) Since then, the editors have become divorced from reality. I mean, come on: “the now-revered Nancy Pelosi”? I’m sure Pelosi is revered by some, but by communists? Yeah, I guess these communists. But in what communist tradition do liberalism, populism, and republicanism constitute “fascism”? The CPUSA no longer represents anything communist. The organization is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party. As such, the CPUSA cannot represent the interests of the proletariat.
On the eve of civil war, in 1860, the population of the United States was approximately 31 million people. Around 12 million, or roughly a third of the population lived in the South. There were approximately 4 million blacks in the United States at that time, 3.5 million of them slaves. Blacks thus comprised around 13 percent of the US population in total. Around 90 percent of blacks lived in the South. The proportion of the population in the Southern states that were slaves varied by state, but on average it was around 30 percent for the region. Of the majority white population, three quarters were engaged in agriculture in some capacity. Most others were self-employed in some trade or other endeavor. There was a growing proletariat, a small professional stratum, and an even smaller capitalist class.
The claim in the Disney cartoon that this country was built on slavery is false. The United States was founded on the capitalist mode of production. The majority of slave labor was used on plantations, primarily producing cotton and other agricultural crops. These commodities were sold to markets in Europe and in the US North. Cotton was in high demand for the production of textiles, and the South was able to produce large quantities of the crop. The profits from the sale of these goods helped to fuel the trans-Atlantic economy, and the southern aristocracy was dependent on the labor of enslaved people to sustain its way of life. In this sense slavery contributed to the economic development of the United States. However, as a primary commodity, most of the value added occurred at later stages of production (and mostly overseas), and thus the South remained an underdeveloped region in the capitalist world economy. The Civil War occurred in part for this reason.
Since the United States was more than 85 percent white, and because the majority was involved in agricultural production and a signifiant and growing proportion earning wages in industrial production, the Untied States was built in large measure by white labor. To be sure, black slaves contributed some to past development, but they comparatively made a much smaller contribution than did white labor. To be sure, slaves suffered from the conditions of their situation. But so did whites. Just as we must never forget the suffering of slaves, we must never forget the fact that capitalists built their wealth by exploiting the labor power of white proletarians, accumulating the value produced by their blood, sweat, and tears. To deny this is to deny the reality that lies at the core of the capitalist mode of production, the logic that makes capitalism what it is: the exploitation of wage labor. Slavery has been peripheral to the logic of capitalism since its emergence 800 years ago.
On what basis, then, are the descendants of slaves owed reparations? We are told it is because the wealth accumulated via their exploitation during the period of slavery created the modern day structures of economic inequality. But this is as true of the situation for whites in history. And even if you cite the exploitation of black labor since slavery, then so, too, has white labor been exploited in the same period and in the same way. Wealth inequality exists within the white demographic just as it does in the black demographic. There are black workers and there are black capitalists. There are a handful of wealthy white families and tens of millions of working class whites whose life chances are the result of capitalist exploitation of their ancestors, as well as the ongoing exploitation intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production.
Why aren’t the descendants of the white farmers and proletarians who have made up the majority of the population throughout the history of the United States owed reparations for the value that was appropriated from their toil? I am not arguing that they should be. The premise of reparations is irrational. But if we were to accept an irrational premise, why are blacks entitled to reparations and not whites? Does the irrationality also extend into the racist notion that whites should be denied the accumulated wealth extracted from the labor of their ancestors? We can put the matter this way: are reparations also a racist scheme?
Why do I say that reparations is an irrational premise? Because no person alive today is responsible for the choices men made in the distant past. Indeed, no person is responsible for the actions of another person. And certainly the white majority who comprises the substantial body of exploited labor is not the oppressor of the black minority who suffers the same fate. White workers are not capitalists. Moreover, to determine collective responsibility on the basis of race means to blame each individual member on the basis of skin color, which is racist.
I write this today because the reparations talk is once against building. We don’t know how reparations will appear finally, and it may vary from state to state, but it’s coming. It’s a deeply immoral course of action. And it’s dishonest. It’s hard to imagine it will be anything more than a neoliberal scheme to confiscate and redistribute the wealth of the working class upward into the hands of elites, who would then determine the distribution of some of those monies to various NGOs, who would then administer some of those monies to some of those determined to be the descendants of alleged victims of past discrimination. (It will work the same way globally (see Reparations and Open Borders; Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow).
One can imagine other monies going to city governments run by progressives, who would then make meager investments in disadvantaged neighborhoods that would reinforce the custodial apparatus that currently idles the millions of black Americans disemployed by mass immigration, offshoring, and the rationalization of production.
None of this will fix the situation of blacks as the cause of the situation is not merely misspecified but is the work of the very people who pretend to care about the situation of black people. This is to say that the misspecification is strategic. It’s yet another money grab in late capitalism.
The unlawful use of violence and intimidation against civilians in the pursuit of political aims is the standard, or at least the most common definition of terrorism. Domestic terrorism may then be understood as the commission of terroristic acts in the perpetrator’s own country against his fellow citizens.
However, there’s no such thing as domestic terrorism in federal statute. As my fellow criminologists and criminal law experts will agree, if there’s no statute, then there’s no crime. We even have a fancy latin phrase for this: nullum crimen sine lege—translation: “no crime without law.” We live in a democratic republic with the rule of law, not a Kafkaesque dystopia where Democrats invent criminal law categories on the fly.
On the substantive question, participants in the January 6 riots did not direct their hostilities at civilians, but rather the situation at points devolved into violent alterations with police officers. Indeed, at several points, actions by police appeared themselves riotous. There was destruction of property, as well, albeit property destruction is not universally included in definitions of terrorism.
However, using the typical definition of terrorism, Antifa and Black Lives matter violence occurring over the summer and into the fall of 2020 would likely constitute domestic terrorism if such a statue existed. The unlawful use of violence and intimidation by Antifa/BLM targeted civilians. Scores of citizens were killed, injured, and intimidated. If one wants to include property destruction in the definition, there was plenty of that, too.
Do I have to remind readers that Democrats celebrated the BLM riots? Or was the reverence for BLM and apologetics for Antifa by party members the result of violence and intimidation by those parties?
The Judiciary Committee subcommittee on the weaponization of government, chaired by Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, hearings has so far been highly revealing. It’s obvious that Democrats are all in with Big Tech and the deep state suppression of information on social media platforms.
When New York’s Hakeem Jeffries, minority leader of the House, condemns the hearings are not dealing with any of the issues Americans find important, he is admitting that Democrats do not find the First Amendment to have any relevance to the concerns of the citizens they feign to represent. Democrats on the committee apparently didn’t even know that Schenck v. US (1919)was effectively overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969).
The love affair between the Democratic Party and the FBI and other security agencies expressed in the dismissive tone of their questions only served to further reinforce the point of the hearings: to make obvious the role of the administrative state in advancing the political interests of the Democratic Party, which align with those of corporate America. One might think that these lawmakers would dissimulate their loyalties with the world watching. But they’re telegraphing to corporate power that they are ready, willing, and able to continue serving their interests.
Yesterday’s hearings also produce memorable exchanges. I liked this one in particular:
Twitter exec explains the medical training that qualified her to censor Harvard + Stanford MDs who questioned the official COVID narrative. pic.twitter.com/AiBoJx4JBM
In what WBAY (our local TV station here in Green Bay) characterizes as “disturbing” in the article, “Most University of Wisconsin students are afraid to share their opinions in class,” the survey progressive faculty and administrators in the Wisconsin system suppressed for months because they feared it would find that a majority of students hold their tongue because they’re afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t is finally out (the full report can be found here).
The survey, a joint effort by UW-Stout’s Menard Center for the Study of Institutions and Innovation and the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service, interviewed more than 10,000 University of Wisconsin System undergraduate students. Question covered such topics as the First Amendment, whether speech considered harmful should be reported, and whether speakers that some find offensive should be disinvited by campuses. The survey was originally scheduled to be administered in April 2022 but was delayed for months over opposition by administrators and faculty. UW-Whitewater interim chancellor Jim Henderson resigned in protest over the survey.
What did the survey find? Exactly what progressive teachers and administrators feared it would. “Fifty-seven percent reported they wanted to express views about contentious topics in class but opted to remain quiet out of fear of angering their peers or their instructor and getting a bad grade.”
If that wasn’t bad enough, there’s this: “A third said they felt pressured by an instructor to agree with a particular viewpoint.” You can see in the above chart that large majority of conservative students report feeling pressured to align their opinions with the ideology of the instructor. Compelled speech is antithetical not only to the foundation of free and open societies, but it’s contrary to the mission of higher education, which is to foster cognitive freedom and development, and maximize viewpoint diversity.
The breakdown by political leaning is very telling, as well as the use of the term “very liberal” to describe attitudes conveying the most authoritarian stance on the question. The second chart shared above indicates that, whereas conservative students expressed the most liberal attitudes, with only around seven percent of very conservative students saying that university administrators should ban the expression of views they feel cause harm, 40 percent of those identifying as very liberal said that administrators should ban the expression of speech. Overall, only around 53 percent said that should not happen—“only” because that number should be close to 100 percent in a free and open society.
Troubling as well is that roughly one-third of students overall expressed the view that offensive speakers should be disinvited from campus. Among students identifying as very liberal, 58 percent supported deplatforming speakers they believed were offensive. That nearly sixty percent of very liberal students in the Wisconsin system believe that they know what their peers should see and hear is very troubling. How did American youth come to desire the role of commissar of an authoritarian order where speech is censored and speakers cancelled based on their political ideology? This is a profound expression of authoritarianism.
On the question of whether students should Stasi-style report instructors to university administrators who say things they feel causes harm, the breakdown by various groups and persuasions confirms what I have been saying for years now: belief in the oppression hierarchy feeds censorious desire. Those who identify as humanity majors, gay, liberal, non-white, and transgender respond to this question in a highly illiberal and intolerant way. Almost half of students majoring in the field in which I teach, the social sciences, think students should report a teacher to school administers who say things they believe cause others harm.
Given that students with authoritarian attitudes are more likely to major in the humanities and the social sciences, the survey finds that illiberalism and intolerance is concentrated in disciplines one might expect to be the most open and tolerant. Teaching such subjects and race and ethnic relations or sex and gender without dressing these matters up in social justice jargon risks being reported to authorities who may very well put the offending teachers through struggle sessions known as sensitivity training.
And it’s not just the students who demand faculty align their speech with the jargon. Faculty in the humanities and social sciences are just as woke as the students. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) trainings are often required of faculty before complaints are raised. The purpose to create consistency in messaging. This tells us that the humanities and social sciences are no longer interested in education but in indoctrination.
In this blog, I explain what’s happening by connecting these patterns to the changing structure of social control in late capitalism under the corporate state. Since I will be relying on the survey results of mainstream polling organizations, it will be necessary to spend some time decoding the terminology used to describe political attitudes. That students identifying as conservative are the most tolerant and open minded students (this is my first-hand experience, as well), while those identifying as very liberal are the most intolerant and illiberal of the students surveyed (again, reflecting my experiences in the university and on social media), tells us that the terms we use to accurately convey political attitudes have been corrupted.
The illiberal machinations of progressives in higher education is a very serious problem, especially in the humanities and social sciences, where most faculty see their role in the university not as enlightening students by encouraging the widest degree of viewpoint diversity but as indoctrinating the youth of America in corporate state ideology composed of crackpot theories dressed in the jargon of postmodern and deconstructionist critique.
There’s a great deal of effort devoted to obscuring the preaching of these theories and especially how these theories are put into the heads of graduates of education programs to spread the corruption to 4k-12. But it isn’t hard to also find the propaganda of critical race theory and queer theory in the curriculum and pedagogical strategies deployed in public schools. (See the work of Christopher Rufo here if you want examples.)
It is vital to cut through the fog of ideological distortion; as a society, we must collectively resist and combat the warped claims woke progressives make about conservatives, feminists, and other groups whose beliefs are barriers to the rising authoritarian order. We need to make clear that the propaganda asserting that free speech is a means of publicly expressing bigotry, which progressives characterize as hate speech and violent speech, that speech and silence are forms of violence, and so on, i.e., that free speech is rightwing speech, are not merely fallacious but the thinking of a reactionary countermovement mobilized against the Enlightenment. The public needs to know that progressive students acquire their authoritarian personality from their progressive teachers—and that the indoctrination is initiated well before they come to college. Tens of millions of Americans (and Europeans, as well, where the corruption also exists) know this. But many don’t know others know this. Our work here is to create mutual knowledge.
I have had long conversations with conservative and liberal students who tell me they are terrified to speak up in class because of the climate of woke intimidation. The chilling effect has in recent years moved me to include in all my syllabi the following language: “I do not assess discussions or writings on ideology or politics, so all views are welcome. However, rational discourse requires reason, facts, and respect for others. Opinions must be informed opinions, and these must be relevant to the topic. Engage your fellow students in the spirit of open mindedness and tolerance.”
This is followed by a second paragraph: “For discussion, I have in mind Jürgen Habermas’ notion of the ‘ideal speech situation,’ in which interactions between individuals are governed by rational rules of discourse where participants evaluate each other’s claims and opinions based on evidence and reason in an environment free of social coercion. In an ideal speech situation, discussants are motivated by the desire to achieve a common understanding.” Nowhere in all the trainings that faculty are compelled to complete is there any discussion of such a model of free and open discourse.
Reflecting on all this the past few days, it occurred to me to encourage readers of Freedom and Reason to ask themselves how it came to pass that the smallest identifiable prominent political-ideological group in America, namely progressives, could play such an outsized role in academia, culture, mass media, and politics. The vast majority of the American population does not identify with progressives nor accept as reasonable the various crackpot theories they espouse.
According to Pew research, those openly identifying as “progressive left,” the woke crowd, comprise only around six percent of the US population. They’d have you believe that they dominate the humanities and social sciences, the administrative and student services offices, prominent positions in the media and culture industry, because they’re the smartest and most talented people in society and, moreover, their beliefs give them special insight into the truth of the world—what in truth is systematic denial of reality in favor of an ideological worldview. Like the elect of God, they believe they’ve been chosen to lead the people to Promise Land.
It’s no exaggeration to say university faculty and administrators see themselves as clergy in what has emerged as the Woke Church. Social justice is a religion to them. And they have been able to count on the classroom pews to fill with true believers. Those who deviate from doctrine are heretics. Deviant thoughts and attitudes are subject to public shaming, disciplinary action, and even dismissal. An inquisitorial atmosphere has taken hold over the last decade or so.
I came through graduate school in the 1990s and have been a professor throughout the 2000s. I’ve had a front row seat to the transition of the university from an institution of higher learning to a factory cranking out woke widgets.
“A few years ago, ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) was another bureaucratic and academic buzzword,” a recent National Association of Scholars (NAS) study of DEI programs at UT Austin (Comprehensive Restructuring) notes. “Today it is found everywhere, between boardrooms and classrooms.” A few passages from the NAS report are worth sharing:
“To many, the term ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ might sound like a benign commitment to fairness—DEI offices often encourage this perception, couching their work in bureaucratic language that obscures any substantive or controversial elements. This creates the impression that no reasonable person would disagree with the edicts of a DEI office.” Indeed, DEI training assumes as proven that which requires proving, even that which enjoys no evidence or is contradicted by the facts. This is how rhetoric such as “systemic racism” becomes the automatic explanation for the overrepresentation of blacks in lethal police encounters or prisons without any need to explain demographic disparities. It’s how the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (reification) can be taught in courses advertised to the public as scientific. Indeed, sharing with one’s colleagues and students the substantial body of evidence that definitively refutes the claim, if not upsetting to the recipient, goes unacknowledged thanks to the tenacity of religious-like belief.
“The DEI initiatives at UT Austin, however, frequently espouse controversial political and social views, whether through mandatory training sessions, book groups and administrator-endorsed reading lists, or curriculum guidelines. Consistently, these initiatives prove to amplify, spread, and inculcate controversial claims about race, gender, oppression, and privilege.” I wish the report wasn’t so charitable. Much of the content of the trainings is not controversial from an objective standpoint. Critical race theory and queer theory are the equivalents of creationism and geocentrism, impositions on developing minds designed to produce a false view of the world. The report does recognize this late on: “Various university-sanctioned DEI training sessions embrace and disseminate highly contested political concepts. The university’s Council on Racial and Ethnic Equity and Diversity (CREED), for example, trained faculty and students in ‘critical race theory.’ Other training sessions encouraged participants to identify ‘microaggressions,’ ‘implicit bias,’ ‘systemic racism,’ and so-called ‘anti-racism.’”
In light of this, when, during discussions during the event in which the findings were presented, Franciska Coleman, a Harvard-trained UW-Madison assistant law professor with a focus on critical discourse analysis, which portrays language not as a means of accurately describing reality but as a tool for changing perceptions of reality, said that universities can do a better job of incorporating free speech principles into DEI training to teach students the effects of harmful speech while also clarifying that universities cannot ban it, my thought was, “I have a better idea: get rid of DEI training altogether.” DEI is inherently illiberal (see The Bureaucratic Tyranny of DEI). Teaching free speech principles in the context of DEI training can only produce an understanding of free speech that is its diametric opposite.
The real reason progressives are in a position to push crackpot ideas on students and facility is not because they’re the smartest or most creative people in the room (they’re not) or because they have the inside track on the truth (they don’t). It’s because they’re the organic intellectuals of the corporate state. As I will stress throughout the remainder of this blog, woke progressivism is not an exogenous force imposed on academia, business firms, the entertainment industry, and government. This is not, as conservatives would have it, the long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions. Wokism is an indigenous development in the evolution of social control associated with the rise of the corporate state.
Let me dig into this a bit, because to accurately convey the political dynamics in play I need to critique while citing the survey research on the matter. I rely here mainly on Pew’s typology (“Beyond Red vs. Blue”), which identifies among Democrats two groups of what Pew calls “liberal Democrats,” namely the aforementioned “progressive left” and “establishment liberals.” The progressive left would be the very liberal student in the UW survey.
To be clear, the Pew survey covers all Americans, not just students. The university and other institutions concentrate the corruption of progressive ideas on our society at large. The vast majority of the population does not subscribe to these ideas, but is forced to live under them. This is why organized resistance and confrontation is so important to revitalizing the American republic and western civilization.
The progressive left is the only majority white, non-Hispanic group of Democrats (presumably the group from where terms such as “Latinx” and “authentic self” originated). The progressive left have what Pew describes as “very liberal views on virtually every issue and support far-reaching changes to address racial injustice and expand the social safety net.” The desire expressed is the expansion and deepening of the custodial state where the lives of alleged victims of racial injustice are administered and managed.
Pew finds that establishment liberals are just as liberal in many ways as the progressive left but are less inclined to express the need for sweeping change. Putting this another way, what Pew is conceptualizing as establishment liberalism is a species of progressivism highly supportive of preserving the status quo—a status quo that is the result of more than a century of progressive restructuring of America to prepare its people for integration with the transnational system of corporate domination. As the progressive left pushes the system towards the authoritarian ends it seeks, the establishment liberals defend each successful stage of development.
Even the group Pew calls the “democratic mainstays,” the largest Democratic-oriented group, are depicted in the data as “unshakeable Democratic loyalists” who have a “moderate tilt on some issues,” which, again, means support for the established progressive order of things. But this is still a minority political standpoint in American society—and is declining. A recent Morning Consultpoll found that the share of the electorate identifying as “very liberal,” “liberal” or “somewhat liberal,” designations that encompass majorities of the groups Pew identifies, has dropped drastically over the past five years, from 34 percent to 27 percent.
(In light of the fact that progressives—woke or otherwise—have at best only represented around a third of the electorate for years now, how is it possible that Democrats have enjoyed so much success in federal elections? We’re told it couldn’t possibly be that our elections are rigged. So what explains it? Apathy?)
I want to stress that the survey findings are enlightening even though the persuasions in political-ideological typology are mislabeled. For example. greater intensities of progressivism are characterized as ever more strident “liberal” commitments. In point of fact, liberalism and progressivism are not synonymous but oppositional, with the former denoting commitment to the values as cognitive liberty, free speech and expression, freedom of assembly and association, and so on (today more characteristics of moderate and conservative thought), and the latter, representing one of the more authoritarian and illiberal forms of ideology in history, hostile to each and every one of these values.
Liberalism emphasizes personal liberty and equality, focusing on the protection of individual rights and the rule of law. This is the foundation of western-style justice. Progressivism inverts this, advocating groups rights and equity (redistribution of resources, which is actually cover for new modes of wealth appropriation), and subordinating individual rights to countermovements that decouple the rule of law from organically emergent normative structures (which progressives deny have any actual nature) and using the power of the state to restructure the social order according to the designs of corporate governance.
This is why, when progressives decry legislation passed in Ron DeSantis’ Florida constraining the indoctrination of school children, they appear so righteous: justice in their lexicon, socialized in dictionaries and encyclopedia, means indoctrinating children with critical theory and crowding out other viewpoints, as well as banning other viewpoints as racist and transphobic.
The propaganda work of conflating opposites to one side for the moment, we can understand what Pew means by the increasing intensity of liberal views when they find the following in the data: “Very liberal, highly educated and majority White [sic]; most say U.S. institutions need to be completely rebuilt because of racial bias.” We need only switch out the term liberal for progressive so we don’t miss the truth here: these are the zealots who dominate humanities and social science departments across the nation, as well as run the academic journals (hence the reason I don’t bother submitting articles anymore but instead bring my work directly here to you unfiltered by the rat race racking up of jargon-laden publications).
Crucially, Pew finds that nearly all of the progressive left, 98 percent in fact, either identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party. I didn’t need Pew to tell me this. Those around me are deeply involved in Democratic Party politics. If you doubt that the so-called progressive left does not carry in its heart the greatest love of the Democratic Party of all the persuasions in Pew’s typology (maybe because they feign speaking truth to power), consider this finding from the survey: “Although they are one of the smallest political typology groups, Progressive Left are the most politically engaged group in the Democratic coalition. No other group turned out to vote at a higher rate in the 2020 general election, and those who did nearly unanimously voted for Joe Biden. They donated money to campaigns in 2020 at a higher rate than any other Democratic-oriented group.” And this: “This group is also one of the most politically engaged typology groups: 86% of eligible Progressive Left voted in the 2020 election. Among typology groups, that is only rivaled by Faith and Flag Conservatives.”
Let’s make this very clear: Joe Biden is a pro-corporate state warmonger and devoted globalist with deep personal and financial ties to entities in the most authoritarian governments in the world (including China and Ukraine). All this was known before the 2020 election and the diehards in this survey are the most educated people in the United States. They know who they’re voting for—Biden is their candidate because Biden and his ilk personify the ideology that animates progressive politics.
When I say Biden is the personification of woke progressivism do I mean he actually believes the things he says, such as the science denialism necessary for an uncritical stance towards the medical-industrial complex? Maybe. For sure he doesn’t believe in America and its creed. No Democrats do. If they did, they wouldn’t be such stalwart defenders of the corporate state and the transnationalist agenda.
To be sure, the progressive left preferred Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 primaries. But once the Democrats had finished engineering Biden’s nomination (with nary a peep from the congregation this time), the hardcore progressives went all in for the former vice-president and senator from Delaware.
All the Black Lives Matter rhetoric couldn’t stop them from voting for the politician who led the drive in the US Senate to push through President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Biden was one of the lead sponsors of the bill in the Senate and worked tirelessly to garner support for its provisions, which included a large increase in funding for law enforcement, the expansion of the death penalty, and the creation of new mandatory minimum sentences for certain crimes.
Progressives voted for Biden not just to stop Trump (hatred of populist-nationalism was certainly a driver given the threat it poses to the globalist project); the survey finds that a large majority of this group approves of Biden’s job performance and majorities express confidence in his handling of issues.
The illiberal character of woke progressivism is indicated by many opinions expressed by those who identify as such. Pew finds that the so-called progressive left are the only typology group in which a majority says that success in life is largely outside of an individual’s control. Progressives believe this because they at the same time believe their special insight into the truth means that they’re the only people who can—and therefore should—manage the lives of the masses who in their worldview lack human agency. They thus steer society towards a self-fulling prophecy based on their belief that the masses are simple not smart enough for self-governance.
This is how technocratic and administrative state actors justify their positions and actions: if the people have no agency, then they cannot be expected to govern themselves, and therefore those who have special insight into the truth must organize their lives for them. But in reality the politics and policies of these elites disorganize the communities of those they claim to speak for (evidenced by the obscene rates of fatherless households and criminal violence in the neighborhoods under progressive direction).
Related to the statistic indicating the belief that the masses have little to no agency is the finding that three-quarters of progressives say there are other countries better than the United States, the highest share among typology groups. It’s not too hard to imagine which countries they have in mind—all of which are less free than America. They’re thinking about the social democracies of Europe, where children are born in systems with from the cradle to the grave they are embedded in extensive systems of social control, systems progressives mistakenly believe are socialist in character. Indeed, Pew finds that a majority of the progressive left “express positive views of political leaders who describe themselves as democratic socialists.”
The jargon here reflects the way the propaganda system twists terms to create mass confusion. There is nothing about progressive left ideology that’s socialist. The political philosophy is actually corporatist. Corporatism is type of capitalism where businesses and unions are in cahoots, working together with the government to establish policies purported to benefit the entire nation but are actually functional to advance the material interests of the corporate state. The progressive elite are globalist (hence the rhetoric of humanitarianism and multiculturalism) and so is contemporary corporatism. This is true for both the United States and European countries. Thus corporations, government, and unions work together to develop and implement policies that benefit the transnational corporate class and the professional-managerial strata—including university administrative, faculty, and staff—that serve it.
To elaborate the point, the purpose of cooperation between government, corporations, and labor unions is to supplant the inherent competition between capitalist and worker in the capitalist mode of production. Indeed, corporatism is an elite arrangement designed to derail the politics of class conflict by incorporating unions and other interest groups of civil society into the decision-making process to advance the mode of production over their objections by obscuring the character of material reality. By folding these groups into the logic of the system, they’re made allies rather than opponents—and the threat of class struggle is effectively neutralized. Under these arrangements, the government, captured by corporate power, mediates conflicts between different groups for the benefit of the rich and powerful.
The corporatist system can thus be contrasted with liberal capitalism, where individual economic interests and free market exchanges are given priority over policies that purport to be for the benefit of society as a whole. Progressivism is the religion of the corporatist system. The progressive academic is the organic intellectual of the corporate-captured university. Neoliberal arrangements function to replace the traditional intellectual with the organic intellectual (I discuss Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual in this recent blog).
If you did not understand this before, now that you do, can you now also understand why public employee unions are tied to the hip of the corporate state and private sector unions have all but disappeared after having been brought into the orbit of corporate governance?
Briefly, as of recently, the percentage of private sector workers who are unionized in the US is around six percent, falling from its mid-twenty century high of around one-third. In comparison, public sector unions enjoy a much higher rate of unionization, with around one-third percent of public sector workers being unionized as of recently.
The decline of private sector labor unions in the latter part of the twentieth century was driven by a number of factors, including globalization, technological changes that reduced the need for unskilled labor (automation, mechanization, scientific management), and a shift in public attitudes towards unions cultivated by corporate state propaganda. A big part of the war on labor was the fall in the rate of profit (for a detailed account of this, see my blog The Denationalization Project and the End of Capitalism).
Many industries adopted an anti-union stance and right-to-work laws in several states made it difficult for unions to organize and maintain their membership. The opposite trend was seen in public sector unions. A number of factors have driven the growth of public sector unions, including a favorable legal and political environment. Since the public sector is difficult to globalize, the need to pull public employees into the orbit of corporatist arrangements remains.
The political party mainly representing the transition of the United States from a democratic republic to a corporate state with neo-feudalist characteristics (more on this in a moment) has been the Democratic Party. As the party of the antebellum slavocracy, the Democratic Party is well suited to represents the corporate state where the proletariat is more akin serfs than wage workers. It is no accident, then, that progressivism is associated with the Democratic Party mainly, where as populism was the foundation of the Republican Party before it was swept up into the postbellum historic concentration of the means of production in the hands of a network of monopolies (as Marx and Engels predicted).
The establishment principally administered by the Democratic Party also includes many Republican Party officials also subservient to corporate power. This explains why establishment Republicans have done so little to combat progressivism in government and even worked (albeit tediously) to stymie the resurgence of population in the Republican Party.
The term democratic socialist as used by the progressive left, that is, as an Orwellian euphemism for corporatism, is a corruption of the term social democracy, itself cover for the governing logic of corporate governance described above. For what does democratic socialism actually mean? Democratic socialism is a politics that seeks to establish a political-economic system in which power and resources are shared among all members of society, rather than being concentrated in the hands of corporations or oligarchs. It uses democratic means to achieve socialist ends, such as through community ownership of key industries and worker-led cooperatives. But those in the Democratic Party who identify as democratic socialist are the same folks who want Big Tech oligarchs to control political discourse in America, who defend Big Pharma oligarchs and the medical-industrial complex, who advocate for a global order run by transnational corporations all dressed up in the wonders of globalism.
Even if we accept that this is social democracy, a politics purporting to create a more just society by providing for the basic needs of citizens, such as access to health care, government-provided social services, and public education, all without replacing capitalism with socialism, the question remains: Whose interests are served by such a politics? Isn’t this what we already have? Didn’t corporate elites dream up the idea of social democracy to counter socialism? Indeed. By covering some of the material needs of the masses without putting them in charge of history making, corporate elites and their academic mouthpiece obscure the reality of the class-based system of economic exploitation.
Through managed democracy, the elite steer the people while at the same time letting them feel as if they are actually participating in the system. In the end, this makes serfs of the proletariat. The public education system under these arrangements is organized to prepare our youth for a life in corporate bureaucracies.
The “New Liberalism” of the twentieth did this work, as well. Intellectuals realized that the brutality of industrial capitalism wasn’t going to work itself out—that immiseration was not a bug but a feature—and that an intellectual system in which alternatives to the status quo could be openly discussed and the proletariat potentially organized politically threatened capitalist accumulation.
The elite set out to, in their words, “reform liberalism” in the face of these economic and political challenges, advocating for a more active role for the state in addressing issues such as industrialization, inequality, and poverty through government intervention and regulation.
This idea was socialized alongside the development of mass propaganda and managed democracy, pioneered by progressive politicians, such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, and intellectuals, chief among them Horace Kallen, Edward Bernays, and Walter Lippmann (in Great Britain, the great spokesman for New Liberalism was the sociologist T. H. Marshal). The rhetoric of New Liberalism allowed elites to collapse in the public mind liberalism and progressivism. Once accomplished the New Liberalism label was discontinued.
Today, progressivism and liberalism are treated not only as synonyms, but progressives the terminal point of liberalism—precisely the point at which is become liberalism’s diametric opposite. The misuse of terms like “democratic” and “socialism” is thus designed to make technocrats appear as if they speak for the common man when in fact they are functionaries of corporate rule. To describe progressivism and all its euphemisms as a left wing form of thought really becomes impossible when you study what it actually is and what interests it serves. Progressives are neither liberal nor socialist.
Given this, how are progressives properly located on the left? What animates the left is emancipating individuals from the traditional and bureaucratic structures that constrain human agency and freedom. Classical liberalism and actual democratic socialism are only really at odds on the question of who should own and control the means of production. Liberalism holds up the individual freedom side, emphasizing equality and representative democracy. Its ideals are limited government, the rule of law, and individual rights, including freedom of speech, religion, and the press. In a liberal society, the role of government is to ensure these individual rights are protected and to provide a level playing field for competition in the market.
Democratic socialism only differs in advocacy of putting ownership and control of the means of production and distribution of goods and services in the hands of the people, with the goal of ensuring equal access to wealth and opportunities for all citizens. The ideas that resources and wealth should be distributed in a way that benefits everyone, rather than just a small group of people, concerns the fair distribution of the major means of production. Socialist arrangements under these terms expands the liberal freedoms.
For example, the concentration of the means of intellectual production and monopoly control over communication technology in a few hands is why the cultural and knowledge production projects the worldview of the capitalist and falsely conveys the exclusive interests of his class as the interests of society at large. By putting the means of communication in the hands of the people, the people are able to more freely communicate their ideas.
Consider a social media system where the governance of the system were not determined by the oligarchs who own it but open to everybody to access and express their opinions and share their arguments with others who were interested in engaging those arguments. By expanding democracy in this manner, such an arrangement would enhance the liberal values expressed in the First Amendment.
Progressivism is the antithesis of either side of that economic debate. So is fascism, which is why progressivism and fascism are both expressions of corporatism—and are becoming fused in the neofascist politics of the neo-feudal world order. To distract you from this fact, because of elite control over the means of communication, the democratic-republicanism driving the national-populist movements across the West is characterized as fascism, while black-clad street thugs assaulting citizens, burning police cars, and vandalizing churches are called the antifascists.
The inversion of reality is made possible by progressive control over the education system and mass media. All this reinforces the point that to accurately grasp what is happening one must operate from the standpoint of historical materialism and conceptually root power in the hands of the actual ruling class, namely the capitalist class. You must conceptually locate power there because is where power is.
The UW System survey offers us a glimmer of hope. If knowledge is power, and if mutual knowledge can help citizens organize for their interests, then a survey showing them that the system of higher education has been remade as the propaganda apparatus of the corporate state, and if they understand that this development is tied to a much greater development in world history, and furthermore that this is a bad thing, since it will make serfs of them, then we have at our disposal a tool (and there are many others) to begin to take our country and our world back from the elites. But we have to share this knowledge and organize politically around it. So push out the contents of the survey.
If you have ever been to a Democratic Party rally (I have been to several), then this is typically what you will see. Party members obtain tickets and are vetted at the entrance. The vetters confiscate any signs supporters might bring. Ushers hand out pre-approved signs and direct attendees to where they need them to stand. If attendees are non-white or wear a hijab or are festooned in rainbow gear or have pink or blue hair, then they will likely be moved up front and often up on stage to stand behind and to the sides of the candidate with their pre-approved sign. To fill up the space event planners strategically arrange potted trees and various structures and maybe bus in a high school marching band—preferably from a black-majority school named after a progressive leader—and lots of American flags (or one great big one).
A Biden campaign rally in 2020
The media, which I don’t have to tell readers are in the tank for the Party, position their camera to get shots that make the crowd look large. But every once in a while, some video gets out that reveals bits of the propagandistic contrivances. Or someone like me, who isn’t going to lie for the sake of my loyal Democrat friends, tells you about the experience.
I’m not writing this only because of my loathing of the corporatist, globalist, war mongering Democratic Party. To be sure, as if this weren’t already clear, that loathing is fierce. The Party is the public face of the managed decline of the American republic. And I’m a patriotic dude. What’s not to loathe? I am also writing this because, as a sociologist, and a massive fan of the brilliant theorist Erving Goffman, there is a sociological lesson to be had in how to seek out and honestly see the back regions of performances. Goffman called this “impression management.” Moreover, since my sociology is tied to political action, creating mutual knowledge helps raise consciousness about the deceptions of the corporate state. The emperor truly has no clothes—and I am that boy who can’t civilly inattend.
There are exceptions. Sanders drew large crowds. Obama’s crowds were even larger. Both Sanders and Obama, more authentically with the former than with the latter, used populist-nationalist rhetoric during their respective campaigns. Sanders has since betrayed his rhetoric. Obama never believed his. Closely aligned with the national security state and a probably CIA operative (as was his mother and other family members), Obama was a Manchurian candidate—only the enemy that pulled his strings was not a foreign power but the globalist elite. (See Jeremy Kuzmarov’s excellent Monthly Review article “A Company Family: The untold history of Obama and the CIA.” Kuzmarov is managing editor of Covert Action.) And not every Biden rally is
But their crowds were never routinely or spontaneously as big and enthusiastic as the crowds the authentically populist candidate Donald Trump drew—and he was (allegedly) the losing man! Trump would invite the cameras to scan the room to show the enormity and enthusiasm of his crowds. It makes you wonder how Trump lost against a candidate who hid in his basement because his handlers knew that he couldn’t draw crowds (and were unsure of whether he could actually get through a campaign speech). It certainly makes me wonder. (We saw the same thing with the recent Arizona gubernatorial contest between Kare Lake and Katie Hobbes.)
An average crowd at a Trump campaign rally
Trump draws tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people on January 6, 2021
It’s rigged, folks. The corporate state runs the mass media apparatus and you see what they want you to see if your eyes stay trained on the screen. They engineer the polls to manipulate public perception. They work language in a way that manufactures a false understanding of reality. But not if you go around the filter and develop the critical tools to decode the propaganda. It is possible to see what’s happening. It’s only hidden in plain sight.
Increasingly, you don’t have to work that hard. The filter is falling from the lens, as Harvard’s Louis Menand laments in the pages of the New Yorker in his essay “When American Lost Faith in the News.” The headline carries the teaser: “Half a century ago, most of the public said they trusted the news media. Today, most say they don’t. What happened to the power of the press?”
“Trump waged war on the press, and he won, or nearly won,” Menand writes. “He persuaded millions of Americans not to believe anything they saw or heard in the non-Trumpified media, including, ultimately, the results of the 2020 Presidential election.” It’s not “Trumpified media.” But if what he says is true, this is arguably the Orange Man’s greatest accomplishment.
However, the emergence of the Internet and the ability of the public to get around the corporate media filter prepared the crisis of delegitimization of mass media. It’s not just the populist right that’s shaking the foundations of the mind control system. It’s the populist left, as well. Conservatives and liberals are coming together to mount a challenge to the progressive establishment. And much of it is organized.
This is not to say that there are no good points in this essay. But I can say this without taking Menand’s essay apart: the establishment media has had it too good for too long. The oligopoly established control not only over television and print media, but publishing broadly, control that extended even over the culture industry. And it’s still a powerful force, especially among progressive types who believe anything the media tells them as long as it comes at them wrapped in their worldview—which is generally all the time. Recall how the most well-educated swallowed all the corporate state lines cast into their pond: Russia-gate, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine situation. But half or more of the population has been able over the last several years to access alternative media that exposes not only the lies of the legacy media, but reveals the reality that legacy media has been lying to them all these years. And with the social media no longer able to effectively impose the woke progressive agenda on the public, the thing is coming apart. Not soon enough to save a lot of people. But better late than never.
When there were only a handful of private (corporate) and public (state-run) television and radio channels, the corporate state media could in the past run programming that opposed to the opinions the corporate state wished to socialize confederates who would do enough to give the appearance that matters had been discussed and thus satisfy a substantial proportion of audiences, who would then do the popular work of socializing the masses. But the strategy of managed opposition and the manufacture of consent became increasingly difficult with the emergence of the Internet. Even when cable television became widespread and public access channels were hijacked by the occasional oppositional voice, the bandwidth was narrow enough, and those who controlled the stations savvy enough, to effectively relegate to the margins and suppress alternative voices who, in any case, appeared marginal in the face of the engineered mainstream opinion. But the open character of the Internet (a feature not a bug that the ruling class surely regrets) allowed alternative voices and opinions to get around the corporate media filter and reach audiences directly, exposing them to content of which they were unaware.
The corporate state media lost control over the situation and could no longer present “both sides” in a propagandistic way. Both sides—indeed many sides—were now out there is an uncontrolled way. The managed opposition looked fake in light of real opposition. It has become obvious that the trick had been putting up straw men for mainstream journalists and pundits to pummel. And the public was not in the mood of suspend its disbelief. So elites turned to more crude methods of information suppression. The rhetoric of disinformation and misinformation became common parlance. At least they still had the power to “fact check” and surveil the opposition. However, in the new context, the suppression of alternative content by censoring inconvenient facts and opinion and deplatforming dissident voices only functioned to reinforce the growing awareness that corporate state control over information was a means to control the public mind to align mass opinion with the goals of the ruling class. If elites had nothing to hide, if they weren’t afraid of open debate, then why would work so hard to suppress dissident voices? Why would they fear opposition? Because elites have a lot to hide and a lot to fear.
Don’t fret. The relegation of the cathedral* to a building where services are no longer held is a good thing. You’re not supposed to have faith in anybody who tells you what to think and how to think about it anyway. A rational man thinks for himself. And thinking for yourself is knowing that the structure of knowledge production in a capitalist society is controlled by the ruling class—and what is projected by that structure is a worldview that serves the material interests of an elite minority, interests diametrically opposed to those of the working man and woman.
* The term “cathedral” to refer to mass media was first used by Neil Postman in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In that book, Postman critiques the impact of television on American culture and politics, arguing that television, by shifting the consumption of information from a typographic to an electronic mode of transmission, has fundamentally altered the way people communicate and understand the world by producing a culture prioritizing entertainment over information and reducing the public’s capacity to think critically. As Guy Debord argued decades earlier, in this situation, political discourse has been reduced to soundbite and spectacle. (A similar argument was advanced by Wesley Carr, an Anglican priest and former dean of Westminster, who either failed to cite or was unaware of Postman’s work. It was Carr’s contention that the media cathedral performed the same role as the medieval church in organizing hegemonic knowledge.)
Postman was inspired by Aldous Huxley’s early-1930s novel Brave New World,wherein Huxley envisioned a future where people are controlled through distraction and entertainment. Postman sees mass media as analogous to Huxley’s drug “soma,” which kept people subdued by happiness in Huxley’s dystopia.
I have a couple of book recommendations for you that may help you anticipate some things that are coming down the pike. With the medical-industrial complex gaining such popular purchase, the intersection of these interests with the national security apparatus portends frightening potentialities.
Edwin Black is known for his work on the association between corporations and the German state during the period of national socialism, the history of eugenics, and the use of technology for enslavement and mass extermination.
In this book, IBM and the Holocaust, Black investigates the role of IBM in facilitating and profiting from genocide. IBM supplied the technology, including the Hollerith punched card system, all of which had to be managed by IBM (there was no off the shelf software in those days), that the Nazis used to manage and track the Jewish population and other minority groups.
In his War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, Black explores the history of eugenics in the United States and how it influenced similar programs in other countries, including Nazi Germany. For example, the Nuremberg laws were based on the California sterilization laws.
Corporations, especially those in big finance, industry, and technology, saw eugenics as a way to improve the genetic quality of the population. They funded eugenics research, financed eugenics organizations, and used the ideology behind eugenics to justify their business practices.
The medical-industrial complex, which includes biotech companies, has grown even more powerful in the interim. With mRNA, CRISPR, and other gene modifying technology, along with cybernetics and the development and implementation of bio-surveillance systems, humanity is at the threshold of eugenics 2.0.
Radical transformation of the human body and cognitive faculty are being socialized and normalized—and theories have been and are being contrived to rationalize what promises to yield hug profits.
All this, coupled with the accelerated evolution of AI technology, rationalized by trans-humanism, is far outpacing any ethical discussions of the potential for widespread societal harm that may result from the advancements.
Fascism, with futurism at the core of its impulses, has always sought to produce a new type of man, to fuse machine and man, to transcend the perceived weakness inherent in natural history through the application of science and technology to the human body.
I will have more recommendations for you and a lot more to say about this the months ahead. We have to start talking about in a serious way.
On January 18, 2016, in the hallway of the hotel where he was staying, Daniel Shaver, a white man, was fatally shot by Arizona police. Philip Mitchell Brailsford, the officer who killed Shaver, was acquitted of murder charges on December 7, 2017. The video is supplied by the Los Angeles Times. But if the media reported it at all, the story was soon sent down the memory hole.
Most people don’t know about the execution of this young man because his whiteness doesn’t fit the narrative. Even if they were in the room when it was reported, the lack of moral panic rendered the story mundane. But the truth is that far more white men are shot by the police than men any other race or ethnic group—including black men. For every black man killed by the police, cops kill two white men.
Have white cops internalized white self-loathing and this is what motivates violence against white civilians? Sounds absurd, I know. But progressives are arguing that the five police officers who killed black man Tyre Nichols, despite all being black themselves, are implicated in an act of white supremacy because they internalized black self-hatred.
Daniel Shaver was fatally shot by Arizona police in 2016.
Narratives are important. Progressives are shaming Tucker Carlson, who was expecting what everybody else was expecting, for the muted response. Imagine if five white cops had beat Nichols that way. Cities across the nation—maybe even in Europe—would be on fire. But even if five white cops had beaten Nichols, we’d still need evidence to show that racism was the motive. Empirical claims require empirical evidence.
Rev. Al Sharpton at Tyre Nichols’ funeral: “If that man had been white, you wouldn’t have beaten him like that on that night.”
Kelly Thomas died five days after being severely beaten by six members of the Fullerton Police Department on July 5, 2011. Kelly Thomas was white.
Woke progressivism doesn’t care about evidence because it is a religion. Its scriptures are certain in themselves because they are revealed truths. The supposed causal forces are non-falsifiable in the same way angels are. This is to say that it’s faith-based. And that’s why facts don’t matter. No matter how many times I show people the facts about lethal police shootings, they keep right on believing the myth.
See my latest podcast: “The Fallacy of Systemic Racism.”
Conservatives tell us that Marxists have colonized our institutions, especially the cultural and educational systems. As a Marxist, I confess that I know a handful of other Marxists in the university system, but there are very few (I believe I am the only one on my campus) and their ideas are fading.
It’s frustrating. Marx’s materialist conception of history should be the foundation of anthropology and sociology in the same way Darwin’s materialist conception of natural history is the foundation of life sciences. But it’s not. And so the social sciences remain pre paradigmatic in the Kuhnian sense.
What I do see a lot of in the university, their crackpot ideas pressed into 4k-12 curricula and pedagogy, are postmodernists and social constructionists. Remember that wonderful passage in Matthew? “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.” The attack on the republic and its creed represent the fruit of anarchist politics not Marxist. Marxism is not useful to the bourgeoisie. Marxism empowers workers. Anarchism disorganizes them.
Anarchism and the nihilism as its beating heart is a political and cultural tool to weaken the normative systems that sustain the nation’s institutional framework and values that legitimize its key institutions. Supranational forces are stepping up the project to dismantle democratic-republicanism. They’re portraying the Enlightenment as a projection of white supremacy. Science-denialism is rampant. Crackpot theories (critical race theory, queer theory, etc.) are ubiquitous. Public life is disordered by manufactured chaos and controversy.
Marx and Engels understood the threat anarchism posed to the establishment of a more free and just society; if the universities were indeed colonized by Marxist ideas, all the nonsense one encounters there would be missing. Instead, students would attend classes where they learned to do class analysis, critique the corporate state, and prepare to go out into the world and organize the organic interests of the proletariat. The 4k-12 teachers produced by a Marxist-run university system would stand as a bulwark against the crackpot theories embraced by the bourgeoisie.
The same absurd notions that prevail in our educational and cultural systems circulate in the boardrooms of corporations and in employee training sessions, where managers and professionals are instructed to take them up and use them to check others. That what appears as leftwing thought in our major institutions appears at all tells you that these are not the ideas of the left, but rather the ideas of the neoliberal order of things.
Sometimes I am astonished that this is not immediately apparent. Then I stop and remind myself of what I just said here: there are very few and increasingly fewer Marxists in the education system. Without the insights of Marxism, and instead the crush of bourgeois ideas, how will the youth of the West ever know what to look for, let alone recognize the truth of it when they see it?
freedom and reason 