Author: The FAR Platform

From The Guardian, November 22, 2018:

Clinton was one of three heavyweights of the centre-left interviewed by the Guardian to better understand why their brand of politics appears to be failing. All three have seen their countries upended by political events that to some degree can be explained by the success of rightwing populism. The other two interviewees, Tony Blair and Matteo Renzi, agreed that the migration issue had posed significant problems for centrist politics.

Centrist politics created the immigration problem. For this and other reasons centrist politics poses a significant problem for the working class. It’s hard to imagine how the problem of immigration can be solved by a continuation of politics that created the problem. However, those committed to preserving liberal republicanism and, therefore, the political ground for unifying the national proletariat against their respective bourgeoisie, won’t like the way the right deals with the problem for sure. A center-left awakening to the reality of immigration may be the only source of workable collective power. I cringe writing this, I so loathe Clinton.

If Clinton gets the problem of immigration, then this suggests she gets the problem of globalism, that it’s the policies of the transnational capitalist elite that have fueled right-wing populism in Europe and North America. But those are her politics. The left can’t hide from this problem anymore. When a third of the French population votes for Marie Le Pen that signals that the left has failed on a massive scale. Majorities of French say they no longer feel at home in their own country. Smearing them as “racist” and “xenophobes” isn’t going to substitute for returning to working class politics. Large-scale immigration is not in the interests of the proletariat of western countries. Progressives abandon workers to the political right when they fall in line with neoliberal strategies for extracting more value from labor. And if the right is anything, its opportunistic. For Clinton, this awakening may stem from her anger over being derailed by Trump. She surely recognizes that anti-globalist sentiment was a major source of Trump’s strength among the tens of millions of proletarian workers who voted for the man.

Clinton is no leftist. I get it. But that doesn’t make her wrong about everything. As Sam Harris pointed out in the mid-2000s, the far right understands what’s going on, while the left is busy disempowering itself with identity politics, exchanging the struggle for equality for the optics of diversity. Harris’ diagnosis: “the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants.” He noted with appropriate concern the fact that the far right was telling the truth about large-scale immigration from Muslim cultures. “To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement.” Tough pill to swallow, I know. But if it were false, then the last several decades would yield a different story. It won’t do as an explanation to suggest that the working class is a bunch of bigots who don’t share the humanitarianism of the cultural elite. It’s the cultural elite who are fucking over the working class with austerity and privatization while driving down workers wages through globalization, and that includes immigration. The ruling ideas and all that (read your Marx). And while liberalism isn’t good enough, it may have to be for the time being.

Hitchens was right to characterize Harris’ words as raising the alarm. But it wasn’t only the far right Harris references who got it. Along with Harris and Hitchens, Bruce Bauer, Douglas Murray, and Chris Caldwell got it, too. Had Europe maintained its social democracies, there would be no room for the right. Sweden is a good example of the problem. The rise of the populist Sweden Democrats tracks the vacuum the center-left created by opening its country to unsustainable immigration. Now the country suffers from a slit-labor market, a serious crime problem, attacks on women’s rights and women themselves, a government that lies to its people, and millions of good-hearted Swedes paralyzed by collective guilt over colonialism they never practiced. Not everybody is paralyzed. The Sweden Democrats grew from 5% in 2004 to more than 18% this past September. The main source of that growth? Social Democrats.

The neoliberalism Hillary Clinton has long advanced is not the answer. But there may be some strategic value in a center-left after all – if it is serious about getting a handle on this problem. It will have to couple that with a new dedication to social democracy. And stop the warmongering. However, it may be too late to do anything about it. The apocalyptic forces of right-wing populism and Islam have lives of their own now (I guess they always did, really). The course the West is on – towards a century of political and religious conflict – may not be correctable.

In its article, “4 Myths About How Immigrants affect the U.S. economy,” PBS manages to get just about everything wrong about the impact of immigration on the United States. Let’s go through the “myths” one by one and see how they hold up to logic and evidence. 

Myth #1 “Immigrants take more from the US government than they contribute.” The article claims they don’t actually. Yet, a couple of sentences into this section the article admits they actually do: “First-generation immigrants cost the government more than native-born Americans.” How much more? $1600 per legal immigrant per year. As I have pointed out in previous essays on this blog (see “The Immigration Situation“), that’s tens of billions of dollars annually, a tax burden borne by native-born workers to support the immigrants who will compete for their jobs. But don’t worry, the authors of the article write, “second-generation immigrants” contribute more in taxes than nonimmigrants.

But “second-generation immigrants” aren’t actually a thing. The United States inherited from English common law the principle of jus soli. The politicians and pundits call it “birth-right citizenship” (and they’re keen on keeping it). It means that, with very narrow exceptions, if you are born in the United States, then you are a US citizen. You can have second-generation immigrants in Sweden and Norway (and most of the rest of the world) because they have jus sanguinis (citizenship by ancestry), but not in the United States. An accurate calculation of the fiscal burden of immigration would therefore not count a first-generation native-born citizen on the immigrant side of the tax ledger. It would count him on the native-born side of the ledger. This deceitful way of talking about immigration is rampant in immigration apologetics. One might think that the journalistic standard of objectivity would correct such an error. The widespread persistence of dishonest framing supports the propaganda model of the corporate media.

The article admits it’s hard to measure the fiscal impact of illegal immigrants (to this point, the article has been only about legal immigrants). But consider that using schools, hospitals, and public infrastructure while paying little in property tax (indirectly through rents), little in sales taxes (California, the state with the largest number of immigrants, doesn’t tax food), and no income or payroll taxes cannot possibly be associated with a net increase in revenue. Moreover, the burden would be greater if illegal immigrants weren’t afraid of being detected by authorities and so avoid formally utilizing public services, which puts stress on the system in other ways. Many immigrant advocates argue for distribution of public services without respect to immigration status. Of course there is a moral obligation to provide water, food, shelter, and medicine to those in our country who need it. But this is all the more reason to reform immigration to reduce the flow into the country.

Myth #2: “Immigrants take American jobs.” The article admits that immigrants make up 17 percent of the US labor force. That’s more than 27 million workers. How is it possible that such a large figure would not displace native-born workers? As I have pointed out in essays on this blog (see, e.g. “The Immigration Situation“), immigration not only pushes native-born workers out of low-skilled/low-wage jobs, it also displaces high-tech workers. Firms fire or avoid hiring skilled/high-wage native-born workers in favor of skilled/low-waged immigrant workers. Why? Profits. Value is produced by work, and the cheaper the labor, the more surplus value the capitalist appropriates in the labor process. Immigrant labor puts downward pressure on the wages across industries, harming the standard of living of native-born workers.

The reader need not remind me that immigrants don’t have the power to fire native-born workers. It’s the capitalist who exploits labor for profit. When we control immigration we control the ability of capitalists to use foreign labor as a cudgel against native-born labor. I’m not blaming immigrants for this situation.

The claim the PBS article makes, namely that “immigrant often have jobs that Americans tend not to take,” is a typical business propaganda line. It makes it sounds as if there are jobs lying around with no American workers waiting to fill them. Consider work in which immigrants are overrepresented: construction workers, custodial services, food services, groundskeepers, housekeepers, and taxi drivers – work that is not easily automated. All of these occupations are presently majority native-born. The composition of these occupations is changing not because American workers are lazy, but because capitalists are hiring immigrants over native-born workers. The propaganda line seeks to redefine the displacement of workers in these occupations as unwillingness to work. This is victim blaming.

The fallacious nature of this shopworn line is confirmed when we consider skilled labor occupations. More than a third of software engineers are immigrants. Is software engineering an occupation native-born Americans avoid? Or it is the case that a foreign-born software engineer will earn a lower wage for the same work thus generating greater surplus value of the capitalist? There are native-born software engineers, displaced by outsourcing, who are again screwed by the importation of cheap skilled labor. Take another example: doctors. More than a quarter of physicians in the US are foreign born. Is medicine a field in which native-born citizens are reluctant to enter? There is a perception that there is a physician shortage in the United States, but studies show that this is because of the way health care is organized and utilized not with the actual number of physicians per capita. Foreign-born physicians are highly desirable in a corporate system of medical care.

While the rhetoric is false, it works to create the perception that native-born workers are snobs who find certain occupations beneath them. It makes it easier to displace African-American groundskeepers, for example, by making it sound like they voluntarily leave the occupation to immigrant labor because the work is beneath them. You know, spoiled American workers and all that. Not to mention lazy poor people. On the other hand, memes asking “Who will pick our apples, take our orders, cook our food, bus our tables, clean our toilets?” cast immigrants as necessary for this “dirty work.” Capitalist use immigrant labor to create split-labor markets. 

The claim that we don’t have enough native-born workers to fill these jobs also asks us to ignore decades of state-led strategies to absorb and manage surplus workers. There are 2.3 million people in prison, half of whom are locked away for non-violent property and drug offenses. There are millions more with felony records who reside outside prison walls. They are disproportionately black and brown native-born citizens who, in most cases, had no job or were earning very little money at the time they committed the crime for which they were incarcerated. And a felony conviction makes it hard to work on the other side. Think of all the millions of native-born American workers who are out of work because the government facilitates the importation of foreign labor while leaving the native-born to languish in US prisons and jails and ghettos. It’s not possible to train them for the work now performed by cheap immigrant labor? It’s unfair to the men who want to support their families. Historically, labor shortages inspire prison reform (see Ruche and Kirchheimer’s Punishment and Social Structure). A dependable flow of cheap immigrant labor undermines those efforts.

What prevents Americans from seeing a mass of unemployed labor on one side and a mass of jobs on the other and seeing a solution to the problems of black America? Why do they instead insist that these jobs are for immigrants?

The claim that immigration has not come at the cost of American wages is contradicted by the fact that half a trillion dollars (you read that right: 500 billion dollars) is transferred from the native-born working class to the capitalist class every year because of the wage differential between native-born and foreign-born labor. That’s the point of hiring immigrant workers: to pay them less than native-born workers. Immigrants may increase overall economic output, but what is not being said in this article or generally in the establishment media is that large-scale immigration redistributes the wealth and income in a way that harms native-born workers. Since America was opened up to immigration in the mid-1960s, we have seen wages stagnate, union density plummet, income inequality increase, and a shift in politics from left to right. The proportion of our population that is foreign-born is now approaching late 19^thcentury levels. Are working Americans the better for it? Are economic conditions better today than they were in the 1960s? Is the left stronger today then yesterday?

Myth #3: “The US economy does not need immigrants.” Here, the article makes the oft-heard claim that immigrants offset a falling birth rate. The first question we should ask: Why is a falling birth rate such a bad idea? Because of the aging population? The article tries to scare the reader: “If not for immigrants, the U.S. workforce would be shrinking. Social Security, which is paid for by current workers, would be in even more serious budgetary trouble than it already is.” But Social Security is not in trouble. Social Security is trillions of dollars in the black. And we can raise payroll taxes if there’s ever a problem.

Another claim elites make is that the workforce would be shrinking but for immigrants. What would be shrinking is a low-wage labor force for capitalist to exploit for mega-profit. What happens to wages when there is greater demand for workers? Wages go up. Few workers mean fewer people waiting to take your job for less money. That means more money for you. Better jobs with better pay and better conditions. But that won’t happen if businesses can always depend on cheap immigrant labor. Workers are not just competing with cheap labor overseas. That cheap labor is being brought here. Who can blame immigrants for wanting to come over and take advantage of that? I don’t. This is capitalism. But I am a socialist and I am not interested in helping capitalists undermine the living standards of the American worker.

More people is not environmentally sustainable. The United States has 326 million people. We are the third largest country in the world. Only China and India are bigger. We don’t need more people. According to naturalist Karen Shragg, writing for Free Inquiry, the United States should have 150 million people to be sustainable.

When the public discourse focuses on individual behavior change, we hear a statistic such as this: on average, every adult in the United States is responsible for giving off 19.8 metric tons of carbon per year. This compares to only 4.6 metric tons per average Chinese citizen. This is a statistic that shows our excess. But why, then, does China contribute more emissions than the United States? Because its total population is so much larger. China’s nearly 1.5 billion people are responsible for 29.51 percent of the world’s total annual carbon emissions (2015), and the United States with its relatively smaller 324 million accounts for 14.34 percent of the world’s annual carbon emissions (2015). 

Karen Shragg (2017)

More people means more consumption of resources, more pollution of land, sea, and air, more habitat destruction, more noise, more traffic. What was the point of promoting family planning and birth control in the first place? To reduce poverty and reduce our ecological footprint? Or to create a need for foreign-born workers to do the dirty work of capitalism? Proponents of growth like to characterize those of us who worry about population as something akin to eugenicists. But does the environment matter or not? Economic growth and consumption are priorities for capitalism. We’re facing overshoot and collapse. We cannot maintain a modern standard of living, be environmentally responsible, and continue to add people to our population.  

Myth #4: “It would be better for the economy if immigrants’ children were not citizens.” The debate over jus soli and jus sanguinis seems impossible to have in the current political climate without those who see the problem with birth-right citizenship being accused of the worst of motives. So let’s leave that matter to one side. I will suggest you look at what most of the world does. Here, I will just want to draw attention to this absurd argument: “A Migration Policy Institute analysis estimates the number of unauthorized immigrants would increase from 11 million to 16 million by 2050 if birthright citizenship were repealed.” A tautology as an argument seems appropriate for this mess of an article.  

* * *

The establishment media – in this case PBS – is not interested in covering the immigration issue in an objective manner. What I am reading on an almost daily basis now is corporate propaganda designed to justify current levels of immigration and, furthermore, weaken support for rational immigration reform. PBS is the paradigm. Because the experience of Americans tells them that the claims made in the context of immigration apologetics are incredible, rather than winning the argument for immigration, intensifying nativist sentiment seems the more likely effect. If the corporate media is going to push immigration for their corporate sponsors, they would do better by immigrants, the native born, and naturalized citizens alike to try their best to be accurate and truthful in reporting and analyses.

Globalization has led to great economic losses for the national proletariats, as well as political disorganization. Several European states have watched their union densities decline, including in the most powerful nation-states (Germany, France, and the UK), as well as in the United States, and the march towards socialism halted. After falling substantially between 1930 and 1970, income inequality has sharply risen in both Europe and the United States. The reversal of fortune for working families begins a decade later in Europe, and is not quite as severe, but its effect is acutely felt for a people who have, thanks to social democracy, enjoyed a high standard of living.

At the same time it has hammered the working class, globalization has led to a vast accumulation of wealth for a small number of families. This is especially true for the United States, but since 1980, Europe has see growing concentration of wealth among the very rich, even in Scandinavian countries. In fact, the share of wealth held by the superrich in Scandinavia is above the European average.

Growing consciousness of how globalization has affected the working class has led to a backlash against globalist ambitions and invigorated nationalist sentiment. The reaction has been exacerbated by immigration. In the United States, the foreign-born proportion of the population has grown from less than 5% in the mid-1960s to over 13% today. In Europe, the 2015 migrant crisis punctuated the problems immigration was already presenting to the proletariats of Europe. Moreover, large-scale Muslim immigration threatens the secularism that is largely responsible for the high standard of living and progressive social attitudes of the West; Islam seeks to subordinate all things to the recorded hallucinations of its prophet, an illiterate warlord named Muhammad. The left has failed to defend secularism against the regressive forces of religious medievalism, and so working men and women of Europe are turning to those who are willing to talk about this threat.

Frightened by the populist turn, transnational elites have embarked on a propaganda plan to sell the public a patriotism disconnected from national sentiments; more than this, in fact, often condemning nationalism as contrary to patriotism. The attitude they wish to convert is that working people should not feel patriotic about their nation, but rather they should feel patriotic about the values of globalism and multiculturalism, ideas that just happen to benefit the capitalist class. Thus we have arrived at a legitimation crisis where the ideology of globalism is not longer working to conceal the decadent affairs of the rich, the lavish parties at Davos and elsewhere to which working people are persona non grata.

Recently, in the context of the West’s commemoration of the horrors of WWI (the one hundredth anniversary of “the war to end all wars”), French president Emmanuel Macron, with world leaders in this audience, declared, “Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism.” He warned Europe about “old demons coming back to wreak chaos and death.” He portrayed nationalism as the selfishness of a petulant child: “Our interest first! Who cares about others?” When we do this, he admonished, “we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what gives it grace and what is essential: its moral values.” The moral values of the bourgeoisie!

Nationalism in a republic founded on secular values of rule of law, free speech, religious liberty, political equality, and democratic participation is the progressive belief that the people are sovereign and that the political-legal machinery of the nation-state serves the collective interests, not just the narrow interests of elites. To be sure, this is not historically what the rich see as the real purpose of the modern national republic. As Marx and Engels note in context of the nakedness of mid-ninetieth century industrial capitalism:

In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. 

The idea of nationalism for the bourgeoisie has always been about a legal framework for the realization of profit, a means of labor control that emancipates property and business activities from the state. Emancipating humanity from property and business activities is the next step, the revolutionary step socialism must make. But without the developed machinery of the bourgeoisie state, not just the coercive pieces, but the means to secure the legitimacy of the workers state through education, the proletariats lack the governmental tools to transform society. Moreover, fighting for democracy means establishing the conditions that make liberal ideals socialist reality not abolishing them. 

The threat of socialism and pressure from various social movements has led capitalists to improve the bleak conditions described in The Communist Manifesto, in some cases even by adopting bits of its platform. It also causes the United States and European states to sharply reduce immigration, which led to a sharp increase in the standards of living. At the same time, assimilation strengthened working class solidarity, erasing ethnic differences and focusing consciousness on economic conditions. This and the crisis of late capitalism forced capitalists to make war on labor and the left and devolve the welfare state in order to sustain the bourgeoise life of luxury. 

Explicitly, Macron was rebuking Trump. At a political rally in October 22, Trump had said, “A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring about our country so much, and you know what, we can’t have that.” He went on to say: “I’m a nationalist.” But Trump is wrong, as well. A globalist is not a person who wants the globe to do well. A globalist is a person who wants the transnationalism capitalist elite to do well. That may involve improving the condition of some of the world’s population in order to manufacture consent around the globalist agenda, but in the end it leaves hundreds of millions to economic uncertainty.

In an op-ed piece on Fox News, Steve Hilton argued that Trump was right and Macron was wrong, writing, “Macron’s attack on President Trump was highly revealing. It lays bare the astonishing arrogance of the globalist ruling class who think it’s their moral duty to ignore democracy and instead run the world according to whatever makes life easier for the rootless and heartless global corporations that Macron and his gang of Davos elitists cravenly serve.” It is a sad day for the left when the plain truths its supposed to emphasize are instead noted by a British conservative pundit who used to advise Tory leader David Cameron. It would be nice if it went without saying at all that the leaders of a democratic republic should put the interests of their population first. But the struggle is two-fold: the nation-state must be preserved in order to make it about the interests of the working class. 

After announcing that she converted to Islam, and changing her name to Shuhada Davitt, Sinead O’Connor told her Twitter followers that she never wants to spend time with white people ever again: “I’m terribly sorry,” she said. “What I’m about to say is something so racist I never thought my soul could ever feel it. But truly I never wanna spend time with white people again (if that’s what non-muslims are called). Not for one moment, for any reason. They are disgusting.”

It was disappointing to read O’Connor words in light of the wonderful thing she did in 1992 calling out the Catholic Church on Saturday Night Live by condemning child abuse and ripping up a picture of the Pope. She was way ahead of the curve in condemning that global child sexual abuse ring and I was angered by how much grief she got for being brave and truthful. This courageous act in defense of children almost feels negated by an act of not merely rationalizing of a patriarchal and misogynistic ideology in Islam, but converting to it. In 2013, O’Connor said to Miley Cyrus, “Women are to be valued for so much more than their sexuality. We aren’t merely objects of desire.” Now she is a hijab-wearing Muslim.

Then there is this business of conflating religion and race. For one thing, in the West, most Muslims are white. For another, not wanting to be around non-Muslims is no more racist than not wanting to be around Muslims. Islam is a religion, a hateful and backwards ideology. Not wanting to be around Islam isn’t the same as not wanting to be around people of difference races. Indeed, not wanting to be around Muslims is analogous to not wanting to be around racists; no matter how well they are behaving, you know what they are thinking and what the world would look like if they were in charge. Let’s put it this way: a Muslim is not analogous to a race; Islam is analogous to racism. 

There is an important historical parallel here. Rational Protestants were suspicious of Catholics not because Protestants were racist, but because Catholics were papists who threatened secularism and liberalism. To be sure, there has been, as with the Islamophobia project, a successful effort to present anti-Catholic sentiment as a form of bigotry analogous to ethnic or race bias, typically called “nativism,” a charge Catholics have used to secure powerful positions in the nation-state apparatus (they now control the Supreme Court, for example), but this conflation is entirely fallacious. Opposition to Catholic immigration was out of concern for preserving the superior values of the republic’s founding, not out of something analogous to racial hatred.

Likewise, later opposition to southern and eastern European immigration was about the impact of boatloads of low skilled, uneducated workers pouring into American cities and only peripherally about worries that could be described as ethicist or racism. There were eugenicists who made fine distinctions about sub-populations, but that wasn’t the masses. These groups were considered white. A myth has grown up about that, but the truth was that the conflict was over nationality not race—about different languages, traditions, etc. Moreover, the American working class was opposed to the importation of cheap labor to undermine wages, disorganize politics, and destabilize the republic. Once immigration was restricted, the country enjoyed a cultural homogenization that led to great victories in civil, human, political, and social rights.

Sinead O’Connor’s babble is emblematic of the anti-proletarian dreck of identity politics. Whiteness studies is an ideological hammer elites use to pound down working class politics and this is the rot that has colonized O’Connor’s worldview. It opens up an avenue for anti-secular and illiberal Islam to present itself as antiracist and opposition to it as racism. Muslims were quick to condemn O’Connor’s tweet, to frame it as a stumble, because O’Connor’s naïveté revealed the truth of the project to bring westerners to Islam—to drive a wedge between working people and secular government. This is what explains the Islamophilia of O’Connor and many other  is about. And, sure, she may be damaged, but I know a lot of women who sound like her. I don’t assume they’re all damaged.

As Variety points out: “Mortensen spoke about cyclical and generational use of hate speech…. He used the N-word specifically as an example of speech that’s no longer common in conversation.” It was on a panel discussing interracial progress surrounding his work in a movie about slavery, Green Book, that Mortensen used the word. “I have no right to even imagine the hurt that is caused by hearing that word in any context,” Mortensen’s apology read, “especially from a white man.”

He should not have apologized, nor should anybody have pressured him to. He did not use the word in a derogatory or directed way. He has nothing to apologize for. The cultural intimidation that is compelling people to self-censor when it comes to frank discussion about the history of race relations has reached alarming levels. This is the same force pushing Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird and Mark Twin’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn off the shelves of school libraries and excessively beeping out words in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles. 

Only a few years ago this word could be used the way Mortensen used it (and many other ways). What changed? The character of the civil right struggle. The struggle has shifted away from fighting racism to advancing a racial economy of identity, in which the common project to dismantle oppressive structures and systems has given group to work that reifies racial categories as essential types with exclusive entitlements (typically excluding whites on the basis of a rhetoric of power). Blacks are “taking that word back,” Ice Cube told Bill Marr on his long-running HBO show Real Time after Marr use the word in playful conversation.

In the era of identity politics, a lot of energy is expended in manufacturing sacral words that only members identified with some groups can use. Self-appointed leaders—typically academicians and celebrities—determine the boundaries and usages. It’s a form of social control—in this case,  control based on skin color designation—by claiming racially and ethnically exclusive entitlement to words and shaming those from other groups who use those words in unapproved ways. Or at all, as we see in the Mortensen and Marr cases. White people are given permission to say “the N-word,” but not “nigger,” infantilizing those designated as white, a sort of payback for historic paternalism?

Where it is not about controlling people through language, it’s a problem of the accuser not grasping the difference between using a word as a slur intended to hurt a person’s feelings and using a word in a discussion about words. (We saw this in reflections of discussions in the Asian community about “yellow fever.” Whites commenting on the discussion were told that under no circumstance were they to use that term.)

This racial economy has progressed so far that it is problematic to even discuss what’s going on here—we’re not allowed to bracket for the sake of discussion. There are layers to analytical disempowerment. But racially-selective political correctness is (to a large extent probably unconsciously, I believe) a strategy to limit participation of some people in conversations about the cultural and social reality of which they are also a part (but for which they are not responsible merely) on the basis of their skin color in order to flip power rather than achieve equality. What is more, it’s a way of recruiting white people, in the absence of racist motive/action, in the project to affirm the claim that all white people are racist by default. This is why it was so important for Mortensen’s statement to read: “especially from a white man.” That confession is ritual truth is as true today as it was in medieval  times—and just as religious-like—and so Mortensen participates in the act of admitting and thereby assigning collective guilt.

The authors of this project are moral entrepreneurs within a demographic who presume to speak for all other members of that demographic, thus assigning to themselves exclusive intragroup permission to wield linguistic power in particular ways. It’s not unlike the Muslims who think they can forbid the publishing of depictions of Muhammad, forcing their aniconism on everybody else. Are they really the authorities here? To be sure, if they can bring consequences, then there’s power present. But is it legitimate power? No. It is illiberal and censorious.

Some will object that there is no law that can punish Mortensen for what he said and so my objection is overblown. Mortensen is just a sensitive and charitable guy who stepped up to be an ally. But informal social control can be as powerful as formal control, especially when careers can be made to suffer (Roseanne Barr losing the TV show she created for a Twitter comment is a case in point). It forced Mortensen to perform a rational calculation: How much will asserting my human right to think out loud cost me in the long run? Knowing the knee-jerk forces arrayed against free thought in contemporary western society, Mortensen did what a lot many celebrities do: beg forgiveness. And there is law in Europe that can bring a person before a court for using words—yes, the return of blasphemy to the realm of enlightenment—and given the flagging support for free speech in the US, as well as growing proprietary control over everything under capitalism, one wonders how long before blasphemy laws come here? 

I don’t need to be told that words are offensive to people. But there is a massive difference between using a slur intended to hurt a person’s feelings and using a word during a discussion about the history and uses of words—in a conversation about interracial progress. Indeed, being told that we cannot use that word in that context is indicative of how ineffectual identity politics has been in overcoming racism (if that’s even its goal). Instead, it has produced a generation of people who can’t tolerate adult conversation.

Last night, Facebook censored a work of art I shared on the social media site in the context of a political argument. I may be leaving Facebook on account of this; it is bad enough that I allow the platform to use my data for profit, but censoring political speech is very troubling for a service that functions more like a public utility than a private corporation. I am in the process of curating my profile. It will be difficult to leave, if I decide to, given the importance of Facebook as a virtual town square, and the fact that nearly everybody with whom I would care to interact is on it. Moreover, I am administrator to several pages and groups of importance and popularity. However, my personal experience with censorship is relevant to our ongoing struggle against censorship.

Here are the circumstances: I shared Al Brandtner’s “Patriot Act” in an attempt to defend political art. When I first saw Brandtner’s piece, it struck me as a visual manifestation of the dilemma conjured by horror writer Stephen King in The Dead Zone, where the main character, Johnny Smith, clairvoyant with the power of precognition by accident, shakes the hand of Greg Stillson, a local politician with an impulse problem and a penchant for violence and treachery, and sees an awful future wherein Stillson, now president, launches global thermonuclear war. The central question becomes: if you could go back in time and kill Hitler and save lives, would you? Smith answers yes and plots to assassinate Stillson. I won’t spoil the ending of the story; the premise should suffice to convey the connection I am making here and the point of the Brandtner’s piece. 

Ironically, it was the other side in the Facebook argument (I am leaving all the participants unnamed, as it is the principle I am interested in here, not the particulars) who first shared a controversial image, that of comedian Kathy Griffin with a mock-up of Trump’s severed head. Griffin was aggressively assailed by conservatives for her performance piece and, in response, she lost work. Under siege, she made a tearful apology, which she later retracted when she saw, as many of us did, the way she was being used by the forces of reaction to silence dissent on the left. The person sharing the image in the Facebook argument compared her piece to the work of ISIS, the Muslim terrorist organization known for the dramatic staging of beheadings as a threat to the West. As if Griffin represented a threat to Donald Trump and his family… 

The Griffin image flew on Facebook no problem, although the point of why the image was used was lost on the room, except for what appeared to be three brothers, some or all of whom were marines. A band of brothers sort of affair it seemed. Not that I had to go to any lengths to find out their military status (or cared to); rightwing marine types let you know upfront they’re marines because they believe it makes their arguments right and true however wrong or irrelevant are their arguments. At any rate, they knew what was going on. One of the brothers claimed to have shared an image depicting a horrible image allegedly threatening to the other side that was censored because, while Facebook allows the horrific Griffin image to appear, any image where an Obama or Clinton is the graphic target of heinous political attack is censored. Implication: Facebook, like the rest of the corporate media, has a liberal bias.

Yet Facebook censored my Brandtner contribution almost immediately and kicked me off the platform. It made for a fine point about how Facebook works to defend the establishment regardless of party (the Bush family is well liked by establishment power); there is no double standard. However, without the audience knowing what the image was, and some among them unable to piece together what should have been obvious in the unfolding context, I was left to explain it (I was still cleaning that up this morning). That is, after I was allowed to return to Facebook. I first had to verify my account. Then I was subjected to a lecture from the social media platform about “community standards.” Maybe I just didn’t know the rules, they charitably excused my first offense. Then they wanted me to tell them how much I enjoyed the experience of being censored and ejected. So I did. 

Some background: Brandtner’s work is from the 2005 exhibit “Axis of Evil: The Secret History of Sin.” It features mock stamps designed by several dozen artists addressing such issues as the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal, racism, and the Iraq War (all contemporary issues). Back in 2005, the exhibit was on a college tour and the Secret Service (alerted by a patriotic citizen) started harassing artists and venues. They even got to the chancellor of my institution, Bruce Shepard, and persuaded him to censor the piece in question when it came to the Lawton Gallery. His pathetic compromise to civil libertarians was to allow the book version collection to be on display in a corner of the exhibition. I was part of the protest against this act of censorship. The protest included a panel at the exhibit in which one of our art professors openly wept while speaking about the assault on free speech and expression censorship represents. I was deeply moved by this expression of love for freedom.

(The protest was personally difficult for me because it came not long after a lengthy period of harassment to which I was subjected by right-wing goons over my opposition to the Iraq War. The campaign was a clear attempt to deny me tenure by smearing me as un-American. Chancellor Shepard piled on and it wasn’t until the faculty rallied around me that I had hope I would pull through it with my career intact. But this is another story that perhaps I will tell one day.)

The 2005 episode portended a troubling and renewed tendency in America to censor political speech and expression, building on the political correctness movement that had emerged the previous decade. My first academic publication was a book review of John K. Wilson’s The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education, published in Nature, Society, and Thought, in 1996. In that work, Wilson’s documents the aggressive suppression of speech and expression critical of rightwing politics and ideology. Since then, political correctness has spread to cover the left and the right, suppressing speech critical of identity politics. The movement represents the return of the norms of a value-free education and an alleged necessity for political centrism, with those engaged in critical and politically conscious speech on either side of the spectrum forced to the margins, the effect of which is to legitimize establishment politics (which explains why the campaigns of the recent midterm elections had so little to say about the fact and the costs of perpetual war).

Facebook reflects this trend, cowing to the censors for fear of being regulated, bringing on board the Atlantic Council to ferret out objectionable political opinion and expression. I recently wrote about this for Project Censored: “Defending the Digital Commons.” The political censorship is not really a left-right thing, but runs in favor of establishment politics. That this happened to me when I used the very image of the 2005 controversy, with all that history and emotion, plus the chest thumping of marines—it all combined to really piss me off.  

There are few things I loathe more than censorship and jingoistic reflex. Last night was like spending time with Juan “Johnny” Rico and Mobile Infantry gang in Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. One of the brothers actually said to me, “You didn’t have to tell us you didn’t serve.” You know: You’re not a citizen ’cause you never suited up. I’m just a civilian. Virtual spaces can feel quite real. For the record, patriots of secular republicanism defend freedom. And most of them don’t wear uniforms.

Many cultures around the world are patriarchal. In these cultures, women suffer sexist oppression. If multiculturalism represents the demand to accept, even promote multiple cultural traditions within a single jurisdiction, then enshrining multiculturalism in law and policy will almost always in some way limit the freedom of women (and others). In this way, multiculturalism runs counter to the humanist values of democracy, individual liberty, and personal sovereignty.

It is one thing to appreciate the food, music, art, and literature of other cultures. Indeed, life in a cultural plural society through which different tradition streams flow is highly desirable. Diversity can enrich our collective experiences. But freedom and democracy cannot thrive in a society segmented by religion and ethnicity; when the state permits cultural traditions to determine law and policy, then the state is sacrificing the individual on the altar of multiculturalism. This is unacceptable in a free society based on human rights and personal sovereignty.

Ted Rall, a fine cartoonist, and usually a pretty perceptive guy, can’t understand why immigration is the most important issue for Republican voters. Why not the economy? he wondered in a recent Facebook post. Here’s what Rall doesn’t understand: immigration is fundamentally about economics. Rall is not alone in his ignorance of these basic facts: Most people coming to or seeking to come to the United States are not persecuted. They’re not refugees. They’re economic migrants who want to make money. And the effect of their presence in the United States is substantially economic and harmful to the working class.

There is the popular desire for immigration – the humanitarian impulse and the need to virtue signal. Then there is the profit motive. This is the fundamental motive. Like the immigrant, the capitalist seeks to make money. He invites immigrant labor to the United States because it is cheaper, cheapens the labor of non-immigrants, and politically disorganizes the laboring masses.

Long ago, Karl Marx observed, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production.” It is only by developing an alternative intellectual force that labor can fight back against the design of the capitalist class. A good rule of thumb is this: if capitalists insist on it, it is probably not in labor’s interest. That may not always be true. But it’s always worth looking into. 

Those in the working class who have been convinced that immigrants are refugees fleeing group persecution are unwittingly doing the bidding of forces that aim to undermine the living standards and the political power of the working class. When progressives, such as Jeremy Scahill (as he did on a recent and otherwise quite informative Intercept podcast about Donald Trump’s authoritarianism), claim that workers who oppose immigration are not actually victims – that fascism works because it is able to convince winners that they are really losers – they are denying the fact that nonimmigrants are in fact harmed by immigration. Nonimmigrants see lower wages, compromised social services, greater relative tax burden, and residential overcrowding and neighborhood disorder. Characterizing their pain as racism and xenophobia only drives them into the arms of those who purport to feel their pain. And those are not the arms of their salvation.

That conservatives are far more likely to support corporal punishment and other forms of violent and coercive control is a fact borne out in the scholarly literature (See Ellison, Hoffman et al., Conservative Protestantism and attitudes toward corporal punishment, 1986-2014, Social Science Research, March 2017). The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey find that 80% of evangelical Christians support physical punishment. We know this to be true from experience. How many memes do we have to see from that conservative friend extolling the values of his violent upbringing? It did him good, he insists. Well, obviously it did something…

Why conservatives are more likely to beat their children is also well understood: coercive control and interpersonal violence issues from the hierarchical and authoritarian worldview that underpins conservative thought and practice. Erich Fromm, in his landmark 1941 work Escape from Freedom, identifies authoritarianism, conformity, and destructiveness as traits emerging from Protestantism, an ideology that calls on people to constantly prove their value and worth to God through disciplined labor. Fromm’s essay “The Authoritarian Personality,” published in Deutsche Universitätszeitung, Band 12 (Nr. 9, 1957), identifies a type of person who is unable to endure freedom and thus seeks control over others. Because of this person’s belief in submission to authority, he himself submits to authority. In 1950, Theodor Adorno and associates operationalized the authoritarian personality in The Authoritarian Personality. The authoritarian loathes intellectual and artistic pursuits, instead focusing on domestic virtue and practical matters; homosexuality is seen as deviant and worthy of suppression; human nature is violence-prone and thus necessarily coercively controlled; masculinity is properly expressed without showing any signs of weakness, which means women are weak and emotional; insults to honor should never go unpunished. These are also traits of conservatism. 

Since ideology motivates and shapes action, attitude and belief have consequences; they explain behavior. The research is unambiguous on this point: routine physical punishment damages children. After reviewing decades of research, Gershoff published the Report on Physical Punishment in the United States: What Research Tells Us About Its Effects on Children, published in 2008, calling on parents and caregivers to avoid physical punishment and calls for the banning of physical discipline in all US schools (something European countries have done). The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and numerous other professional associations have endorsed the report.

In family relations, conservatism instinctively appeals to the principle of pater familias, or “father of the family,” which rests on patria postestas, or intrinsic “father power,” a system of beliefs that (to their mind) legitimates physical control over those believed to be under the command of the dominus (or master). Conservatives seek obedience and see others as objects on which to manifest their control fantasies and take out their frustrations. This principle extends not only to animals under their control, but to workers; before workplace rules forbade the beating of workers, businessmen used physical violence to extract from workers submission and surplus value. 

This same attitude makes conservatives more likely to despise and discriminate those they perceive as different from themselves. Conservatives have little tolerance for beliefs and practices they do not understand or share, and they are unwilling to tolerate deviation—what they define as disobedience—from what they assert is correct behavior. Deep down, many conservatives they could beat every “deviant” in the same way they beats their own children. When they demand respect, they do so not as a human being, but as an authority figure.

This set of attitudes and beliefs is the source of the contradiction apparent in the rhetoric opposing big government yet obsessed with police and prisons and the military state apparatus. The conservative woman crosses the airport concourse to thank a uniformed solider for his sacrifice because his image arouses in her the authoritarian desire. She also apologizes for the misogynistic locker room talk of the men in her life. Conservatives hate government programs that assist and nurture those in need, those whom they view as inferior and immoral. They love government action that excludes, controls, and punishes. They excuse bullying, police brutality, and war crimes. They seek to control the womb.

The obsession with authority and conformity is what lies at the core of conservative family values. It legitimates physical violence in the family, coded as discipline. But it legitimizes much more than that. The authoritarian impulse sets up conservatives to be fellow travelers to fascistic movements. We all know this to be true, as well.

Note: Support for physical punishment is also very high among African Americans—higher even than among evangelical Christians. Studies show that that African American child rearing practices tend to favor authoritarian and disciplinarian approaches. Moreover, the prevalence of child abuse and maltreatment are higher in this demographic. The African American demographic is disproportionately associated with violence crime—aggravated assault, robbery, and homicide, particularly among young male. Domestic violence is also greater among blacks, with violence resulting from death a particular problem. Poverty associated with inequality is a strong predictor of physical coercion and violence. Given the overrepresentation of blacks among the poor, it is likely that inequality is one of the more powerful predictors of these phenomena. However, it is also true that African Americans are strongly Protestant. I will revisit this issue in a later essay, but it will suffice to say that the link between violence against children is likely one of the main reason for much higher rates of violence among black Americans. Why blacks do not lean politically authoritarian is because of the disadvantaged social location they find themselves in and the need of a strong social welfare system, which is supported by liberal Democrats.

The US population as of October 23, 2018 is 328,863,150 persons. This is probably not an exact number, but it’s close enough. Based on the percentage of adults in 2014, a figure I assume has not changed that much, there are 256,513,257 adults in the US. For the week ending October 28, 2018, the Gallup survey Trump’s weekly job approval found that 40% of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing. The tracking polls is based on interviews of approximately 1,500 national adults (±3% error margin). Extrapolating from this poll, this means that 102,605,303 adults in the United States approve of Trump’s job performance as president. That’s a lot of people. 

Going after Trump with anger and ridicule, however cathartic one finds such activities (I confess to having a go at him quite a bit), is not going to fix the problem of more than 100 million Americans who, in some sense, want a president like Trump—especially a president who would do the things Donald Trump does. Indeed, I suspect that there well more than 100 million Americans who would support a politician pushing Trump’s agenda who wasn’t himself Donald Trump.

A recent poll finds that 6 percent of US adults describe their politics as “far right,” which translates to approximately 15,390,795 adults. That’s not a small number of hardcore nationalists who spill racist and xenophobic ideas into Trump’s base, which are then taken up by popular activists and mainstreamed. Many million more are sympathetic to far right ideas even if they don’t explicitly identify with them in polls.

Because rightwing sentiment is a mass phenomenon and thus not easily marginalized, careful thought needs to be put into the images and messages projected from the side that seeks to defends the values of a free, open, and democratic society—that is, the values of secularism, liberalism, humanism, and feminism.

It will not do to counter Islamophobia with Islamophilia. There are good reasons to fear the Islamization of the West, the spread of an ideology that weakens the values that support the traditions of secularism, feminism, homosexual rights, and myriad of other things that are important to a free people. When leftwingers show up at airports and cheer arriving Muslims or don the hijab out of “solidarity” with Muslim women or hypocritically elevate individuals like Linda Sarsour, they alienate working Americas who are concerned about the future of the West, not out of racism, but out of rational devotion to western culture.

The notion of “Islamophobia” is very troubling to people who know that criticism of their religion would never be characterized as something like “racism” with a term like “Christophobia.” As if defense of western values is “crazy” in the first place. It will not do to counter nativism, which is a very real problem, with rhetoric suggesting open borders.

Denying support for open borders while decrying every move to control immigration as “nativist,” “racist,” and “xenophobic” looks a lot like giving the game away. There are good reasons to support immigration rules and controls that have nothing to do with nativism, racism, and xenophobia. It will not do to reduce all nationalism to ethnic nationalism and frame patriotism as “chauvinism” and “bigotry.” The foundation of western society is civic nationalism and republican forms of government that operate in the context of a nation-state.

The reasons so many US adults approve of Trump’s job performance are many, but certainly a common piece is the frustration working class Americans feel with their falling living standard and the deteriorating social situation. Stagnant wages, shrinking benefits, disappearing retirement, overcrowded housing conditions, neighborhood disorganization—all of these are felt most acutely by working Americas.

Their frustration is exacerbated by what feels like a constant attack on American culture, its values depicted as racist, sexist, and xenophobic. White men especially are portrayed as the source of the world’s problems. For example, the left counterposes to the very real problem of Islamic terrorism the alleged problem of white male violence—not ultranationist or racist violence, which is the problem, but white violence, as if demographic categories express political and religious fanaticism.

Instead of a politics that speaks to their concerns, working class Americans see immigrants and corporate human resource strategies of diversity pushing them out of work; they see everywhere the politics of identity,  multiculturalism, and political correctness. They see their concerns for the preservation of their values and their culture depicted as racist, nativist, and xenophobic. They don’t feel at home in their own country (polls show that this is the experience of many native-born Europeans). They don’t feel that the institutions that ask for their support represent their interests. So when somebody like Trump comes alone, they have a vehicle through which to express their frustration. Trump is their catharsis. 

Until the left returns to defending and advancing the interests of the working class, I fear ultranationalism will continue to gain ground. We see the rise of rightwing politics not only in the United States, but throughout the West. The left would therefore do well by the working masses—who come in all races and religions—to abandon identity politics and return to class politics.

Class is the material reality we share independent of all social constructions. The left must cease reifying the categories that divide the working class, that fractures socialist consciousness, and forge a politics that brings working class Americans together around the two things they share: their common humanity and their exploitation at the hands of the capitalist class and its functionaries.