Am I Rightwing? Not Even Close

In July 2020, during the COVID19 pandemic, I received a typewritten anonymous letter with a fake return address from another state but actually postmarked as originating in the city I live in. It was somebody near me. I opened it in the backyard with my wife present. The letter was shot through with envy, hostility, and resentment. I have a few suspects in mind, but without a confession I will probably never know for sure. I figure that it had to be a man because there was so much rage in it. Frankly, I find it hard to imagine a woman being motivated to write such a letter whatever its tone.

The thing that bugged me about the letter, in addition to the fact that the contents indicated that it was somebody I had interacted with before, likely somebody I worked with, which is creepy, was that the author was upset because, according to him, I had become a right-winger. I had no way of responding to the charges. I can guess about the things that marked me as having crossed the line. I criticize Islam. For progressives, that makes me “Islamophobic.” I oppose illegal immigration. That makes me “xenophobic.” I’m what they call “gender critical.” So I’m “transphobic.” Black Lives Matter and critical race theory? “Negrophobic” perhaps? (Don’t roll you eyes; that’s an actual term, archaic now, of course—as all these terms will be one day.)

None of these are right wing positions, as I have shown on the pages of Freedom and Reason. Irreligious criticism is central to leftwing thought. The OG of leftism, Karl Marx, spared no religion in his criticism of the painkiller. Christopher Hitchens, the celebrated leftwing essayist, was no less critical of Islam than I am. Hitchens worried as well about immigrants, his predictions prophetic in light of Europe’s current situation. Marx told his comrades that the British capitalist imported Irish labor to undermine the standing of the British proletariat. What Hitchens’ position would have been on gender ideology I can’t say; he died in 2011 before the emergence of that particular mass psychogenic illness. He was, as I am, pro-gay and lesbian, but that is a different matter. Marx’s admiration for Darwin and his notes on Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society (worked up by Frederich Engels after Marx’s passing) make clear he would have had seen gender ideology for what it was: a neo-religion.

As for their views on race, except for his position on reparations assumed for the sake of an Oxford style debate, I detect no differences between Hitchens and myself. My dissertation was a Marxist analysis of the intersection of race and class and its association with patterns punishment over a five hundred year period, so I know something of Marx’s views here. He saw the oppression of racial groups as emergent from capitalist exploitation. Slavery in the United States was driven by economic interests. Colonialism, which involved the subjugation and exploitation of non-Europeans, was a tool of capitalist expansion. Racism was both a product of and a justification for colonial exploitation; racial and ethnic divisions were manipulated to maintain control and economic dominance. He argued—in a letter to Abraham Lincoln, no less—that capitalists used racism to divide workers, thereby preventing them from uniting against their common exploiters. He emphasized the need for workers of all races and nationalities to unite in the struggle against capitalism. I confirmed all of this in my work.

I am a feminist. Some might find Hitchens lacking in that department. Marx saw the oppression of women as intertwined with the capitalist system. Workers were exploited by capitalists, but women were doubly oppressed—both as workers and within the family structure. Marx and Engels commented on this in The Communist Manifest (I wrote the preface to the Clydesdale edition). In his The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, based on Marx’s notes on Morgan, Friedrich Engels theorizes that the patriarchal family structure emerged alongside the rise of private property, linking women’s oppression directly to economic systems. Marx acknowledged the economic contributions of women, both in the workforce and in the domestic sphere. He saw women’s labor in the home as essential to the functioning of capitalism, although it was unpaid and undervalued. Marx supported the idea that women’s liberation was essential for the overall emancipation of humanity. Abolishing private ownership in capital promised to emancipate women from the patriarchal relations that have oppressed them over the centuries.

Since there are many sorts of feminism, let me tell you that I subscribe to what has been in the past called a “difference feminist,” as opposed to a “sameness feminist.” The difference between the genders are such that the pursuit of equality requires equity to ensure women are not disadvantaged in domains where men are stronger and faster. Overlapping distributions not withstanding, if we treat men and women the same, then we can not treat them equally. I am a staunch defender of reproductive freedom; men do not face the same circumstances that women do in this regard. I am opposed to strident gender roles (as the previous paragraphs should have made clear). I am also a gay liberationist, which is not to deny heteronormativity, but rather to say that homosexuals are entitled to the same rights as everybody else, including the right to marry. What do I care is a man loves a man?

Like Marx and Hitchens, I am an atheist and a secularist. I advocate freedom of conscience. People are free to believe what they will. People are free not to believe what they will. I believe in freedom of the press and speech. We are free to write and speak our thoughts and opinions. We are free to express our emotions. We are also free from having to write and speak and feel the way others wish us to. In the 1840s, Marx wrote several articles criticizing the Prussian government’s censorship policies (see his series of articles On the Freedom of the Press, published in 1842 in the Rheinische Zeitung. In these articles, Marx argued that freedom of the press was a necessary condition for political freedom and that censorship was inherently reactionary and counterproductive. Censorship, he argued, is a tool of the ruling class to maintain control and stifle dissent. Marx believed that free speech is essential for exposing injustices and for the development of a critical, informed public. Influenced by Enlightenment thinkers and early liberal ideas, Marx’s arguments for free speech are rooted in his broader philosophical beliefs about human freedom and the role of the state.

I am a strong proponent of freedom of association and assembly. People must be free to be with whom they wish and avoid those with whom they wish not to. They must be free to meet together to share ideas and challenge power. All these rights—and the right to conscience—are found together in a single article in the US Bill of Rights, the first one, and echoed in international covenants, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. These are indeed human rights. They are functional to other rights. Secularism requires the exercise of speech critical of religious and religious-like ideology—and even of scientific claims. Marx held that free discourse is crucial for challenging and transforming oppressive social and economic structures by enabling those working from a materialist conception of history to announce their discoveries in the same way Darwin announced his. This is all purposeful, aligning with Marx’s emphasis on the importance of class consciousness and the need for workers to be able to discuss and critique their conditions openly.

I oppose concentrated power, whether it is corporate power or state power or religious power, and this is why we must have the freedom to speak freely and to criticize our betters. I dread the administered life, and being compelled to act in bad faith. Just as I am committed to a public life, I am committed to the individual’s right to privacy, to be left alone in his self and in his possessions, to be unmolested by the police without probable cause to suspect wrongdoing, to receive a fair trial, and to have means to defend himself in a court of law. To remain silent. I believe also in his right to self defense, and the defense of his home and innocents, and in the right to means to effect these ends.

None of these positions is rightwing even if some right-wingers advocate some of them. As I have always understood it, rightwing means believing that there is a natural hierarchical order to things natural and social. A right-winger believes some men are destined to rule over others, that there are betters and lessers. In his heart, he is an elitist. He believes in the patriarchy, the natural order of things gender-related where women are to dutifully assume their subordinate and natural role in society. He believes this also about those whose skin color differs from his. For him, human nature is aggressive and avaricious—but also lazy and in need of discipline. He is a romantic; deep down he pines for the days when kings and noblemen took their place on their thrones and estates, and those beneath them knew theirs. He sees in the captain of industry the sovereign’s analog. He likes war. And the penalty of death. He believes in God and devils. He wishes his worldview was everybody’s, so he doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state. He doesn’t believe in sexual freedom, either; homosexuality is unnatural, a perversion, contradicting God’s plan. He likes tradition. And obedience.

What we see in the progressive tendency is a lot of these rightwing characteristics, albeit often in sublimated form. The world progressives represent is the world of corporate statism, administrative rule, and technocratic control. They are the cleric for the corporate state. The rank-and-file reside in the professional-managerial class as academics, bureaucrats, cultural managers, and propagandists. Their roles are functional to capitalist power and profit; they have internalized neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Critical race and queer theories are embraced throughout the corporate structure and the institutions that perpetuate that structure, not because these are leftwing ideas, but because they are not. As Marx told us, they divide the working class. Identitarianism and its coding as diversity, equity, and inclusion is the new rightwing expression. As with the old racists, in opposition to individualism, or to class solidarity, progressives tribalize society and establish rules regulating human interaction—rules everybody is required to follow despite having never participated in their creation or consented to them. A myriad of oppressions not merely eclipse the class struggle, they undermine it.

With progressives, diversity is not diversity in belief and opinion, but to be found in the multiplicity of tribes, with some tribes more equal than others. Equity is not the equity of the difference feminism I described earlier, but the doctrine of equality of outcomes based on tribal averages, with some tribes more equal than others. Being inclusive is not tolerating difference, but excluding difference of opinion, censoring unauthorized thought—the very condition Marx condemned as manipulative and oppressive. Restricted thought is pressed into the brains of children. Education becomes indoctrination. In the progressive space, men are held to rightfully claim the personage of women, trespass upon their spaces, take advantage of their opportunities, and bathe in the accolades mean for them. In this space, safeguarding children becomes bigotry. The classical liberal values of the Enlightenment embraced by Marx and Hitchens are replaced by their opposite: postmodernist and technocratic reworkings of premodern mythologies and tyrannies. Progressivism is its opposite: regressive, its rituals atavistic—inquisitions, witch-finders, and all the rest of it.

Beneath the corporation and the professional-managerial class is the vast majority, the masses who build the structures, grow the food, deliver the goods, serve the customer, and fight the wars. To return to my political and moral commitments—they are to these people. This is my choice of comrades: The construction worker. The farmer. The factory worker. The day laborer. The shopkeeper. How are these commitments rightwing? I am committed to the pursuit of scientific truth. The truth cannot be bigoted. Why must I believe a lie for the sake of the true believer? Treating individuals as concrete personifications of abstract categories is fallacious. To say so is not racist. It’s the opposite. To say a white man is bad because he is white—that’s racist.

And what about nationalism? A republic is a political-juridical system that represents the interests of the citizen. The citizen is sovereign in a republic, not the monarch or an installed president teetering atop an unelected and unaccountable technocratic apparatus. A republic requires national integrity and a shared culture to serve a common purpose. It must define and secure its borders for the sake of the citizenry that has given its consent to be governed according to democratic and rational processes. This is called nationalism, and it’s not rightwing. Ask the colonized about their nationalist struggles. Find out what they believed. I’m confident that it wasn’t for the most part rightwing.

The leftwing standpoint presents with political and moral beliefs, opinions, and practices that generally advocate for substantive equality, individual justice, and the reduction of social hierarchies. Left-wingers advocate for measures that reduce economic disparities and improve the conditions of people, such as higher wages, safe working conditions, the right to unionize, and social security. Left-wingers argue for public ownership or regulation of key industries providing necessary goods and services (energy, sanitation, etc.). Education, housing, and access to food and medicine are major issues for the left. Left-winger advocate for civil rights, including the protection of minorities. This encompasses efforts to combat racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. Left-wingers emphasize the importance of environmental protection, prohibitions on habitat destruction, resource conservation, and sustainability. Left-wingers embrace liberal values, such as free speech, individual rights, and personal freedoms (if they don’t then they aren’t really leftwing). This includes a commitment to upholding democratic principles and protecting the rights of individuals to express their views openly without fear of repression. Left-wingers are committed to secularism and embrace a scientific worldview.

Those political and moral beliefs, opinions, and practices define me. I am not rightwing. And those who accuse me of this have either never learned or have forgotten what it means to be leftwing. Which is why they appear more like right-wingers than what they claim to be in their virtue signaling. You see it in the attacks on those who dissent from the woke progressive line. As readers of my blog know, a group of students on the campus where I teach circulated a petition this spring in which they sought signatures to affirm their demand that the university fire me. Many of these students portray themselves as leftwing. Many of them even claim to be Marxists. But this is impossible. One of the reasons they desire to see me terminated is because my views on gender are rooted in scientific materialism. They even reject the scientific view of gender in favor of the postmodernist tactic that reduces gender to a tautological definition to depathologize boundary transgressions. With this definition they advocate for men to trespass upon women’s spaces. How can such misogyny be leftwing? It can’t.