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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

In my last blog posting I talked about experience at the Green Bay Area Public School board. There, I spoke about our nation’s fundamental law and its ideals of individual liberty, equality before the law and government, or equal treatment, and religious neutrality. That argument should have carried the day. But it didn’t. The school board voted to continue a policy that does serious violence to the free speech rights of students, as well as allow building administrators the discretion to continue a conditional ban on head coverings. The policy did get one thing right, namely ending sex discrimination in attire, but it got everything else wrong. By failing to take the matter of head coverings out of the hands of administrators, the school board gave administrators permission to violate the civil rights of students. In other words, the board did not protect the rights of individuals.

My sons’ mother is Swedish. She was raised in Sweden and moved to the United States in adulthood. Both of my sons are proud of their Scandinavian heritage. All members of my family wear a Mjölnir pendant, which is the Norse god Thor’s stylized hammer. We also own a seax, or Viking dagger, which was universally carried by Scandinavian males. I could not bring my seax to show board members because knives are not allowed in public buildings. I agree with this policy, which I will explain in a moment. But I want to first emphasize that, although we are a family of secular humanists, we find Scandinavian culture and Norse mythology important to our family’s cultural heritage and we observe many Scandinavian traditions and frequently return to my wife’s motherland to imbibe in those rich traditions. 

My son would not be allowed to bring his seax, a dagger, to school. I do not think he or any other boy should be allowed to bring a dagger to school because we cannot know in advance who may suffer from an antisocial personality disorder or impulse control problems, may be prone to fits of jealous rage, or perceive a need to use a weapon in self-defense or in retaliation to some offense. Because we cannot know this, and because the consequences of a boy using a dagger to harm other students is so great, the school exercises prior restraint in the same way that TSA does not allow knives on airplanes. Instead of waiting until someone uses a weapon on someone else, we recognize the possibility of such an occurrence, and act in a general way to reduce the risk to public safety. This is reasonable. Since we have no way of rationally determining who is safe with a knife, we treat everybody the same. As such, this policy is nondiscriminatory.

There is a way to rationalize differential control by appeal to aggregate statistics. For example, an institution might note group differences in the rates of violence. For example, white males, compared to black males, have a significantly lower rate of violence. Moreover, white males have cultural experiences with knives that differ from the cultural experiences of black males. However, it would be discriminatory to create a policy that forbade the carrying of knives by black students while allowing white students to carry them. I hope the reason why is obvious to you, but to make sure, it is discriminatory because the institution is prejudging concrete individuals based on patterns identified in statistical aggregates. As impressive as numbers can be, the presentation of statistical information does not change the reality that making judgments about individuals based on a characteristics such as skin color is stereotyping.

In October of 2014, administrators at a Washington state school district decided to let a Sikh boy carry a kirpan on school property. A kirpan is a dagger, similar to my son’s seax. Both are impressive and serious weapons. Sikhs have five articles of faith, the five Ks and the kirpan is one of them. All baptized male Sikhs are expected to carry one. But knives are dangerous weapons. We do not allow them on airplanes. We do not allow students to carry them in school. So why is this school district allowing the Sikh boy to carry a dagger? Because it is an article of faith, a religious accommodation must be made. But according to the foundational law of the American republic, government is obliged to remain neutral on questions of religion. It cannot discriminate on this basis, which means it can neither grant privileges nor restrict freedom based on religious reasons. Reasons for limiting freedom must be based on rational secular grounds.

The decision to ban the carrying of knives in public school buildings is based on a concern for student safety, which is a rational justification. An exemption from the rule for Sikhs is based on not on rational secular grounds, but on the grounds of religious identity. This is irrational, since the claim is that, on the basis of religious identity, we assume that all the reasons knives represent a public safety hazard do not apply to Sikhs. Without any evidence, Sikhs are assumed to not suffer from antisocial personality disorder or impulse control problems, are not prone to fits of jealous rage, never perceive a need to use a weapon in self-defense or in retaliation to some offense—or if they do have a reason to defend themselves are allowed to use an effective weapon in that defense, whereas other boys are left only to use their fists or their words. On what rational basis can administrators know that Sikh boys are immune from all the things non-Sikh boys are assumed to be capable of? Administrators are prejudging an entire group of people based on their religious identity. Administrators are saying to my son that he cannot be trusted with a dagger based on his identity. Because is not Sikh he cannot be cleared of the possibility that he may suffer from antisocial personality disorder or any of these others things. 

My son would not be allowed to carry a knife in school because of his identity. It would be exactly the same as saying that my son cannot carry a dagger to school because of his race. Of course, race and religion are different. Race doesn’t carry an ideology. Religion is an ideology. One can tell nothing about an individual’s motives and behavioral proclivities on the basis of skin color. Religion is a source of motives and habits. But from a civil rights standpoint, the government is obliged to treat members of different races and different religions in a neutral manner. The government cannot discriminate on the basis of race or religion or national origin. Either everybody can carry knife or nobody can. My son’s liberty is violated because he is not regarded equally before the law. Rather his group membership is judged to make him unworthy of access to a freedom or resource that another boy is allowed access to on the basis of his membership. This is discrimination.

On October 21, 2019, I rose in the open forum at the Green Bay Area Public Schools (GBAPS) board meeting to address an agenda item of concern to those who love liberty and wish to preserve the secular arrangements of our democratic republic: the district’s revision of its dress code. Dress and speech codes are not side issues. They’re not a trivial matter. Controlling people by limiting their manner of presentation of self and restricting their freedom of expression strikes at the heart of the open society.

The dress code as it stood included selective restrictions on messages on clothing and a conditional ban on head coverings, limiting, without rational justification, the freedom of speech, as well as the violating separation of church and state. At the end of the day, the board voted to preserve bans on speech in code and effectively preserve the ban on head coverings, with a religious exception, by deferring to the discretion of school administrators. The policy can be found here: “443.1: Student Dress.” The next day school administrators declared their unanimous support for existing policy in an email to parents.

In this blog, I share with readers my testimony (the full video and text). Fox News covered the meeting and included in their report a video clip of me calling out the District on the problem of policing student dress and expression (“Green Bay School Board alters policy on hats and hoodies in classrooms”). I want readers to have context. Moreover, the board allows speakers only five minutes for testimony in the open forum, so I will elaborate my argument here. I also want to make some observations about the arguments of other speakers and the discussion that ensued, as well as the decision that was reached.

The problem with the conditional ban on head coverings can be put simply: if some students are free to cover their heads in public school buildings on religious grounds, while others students are punished for covering theirs because they have no religious excuse, then administrators are privileging believers while discriminating against nonbelievers. This is a violating of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The board’s decision is not only troubling in its violence to the First Amendment. Language in the policy may be interpreted to permit females to cover their faces for religious reasons. 443.1 reads: “Clothing must not cover a student’s face to the extent the student is not identifiable (except clothing worn for religious or medical purposes)” (emphasis mine). Elsewhere it repeats the policy: “Headwear must allow the face and ears to be visible and not interfere with the line of sight to any student or staff (except clothing/headwear worn for religious or medical purposes)” (again, emphasis mine).

Obviously, the policy is focused on accommodating Muslims, adherents to a doctrine that views girls and women as sexual objects obliged to control the male gaze by hiding their female bodies. The policy thus simultaneously discriminates against those who do not subscribe to the Islamic faith, while allowing Muslims to attend school in extreme modesty dress, including burqas and niqabs. Why can Muslim students be non-identifiable but non-Muslim students must be identifiable?

The email sent to all parents states that “school administrators have determined that they will implement the new headwear policy by maintaining their schools’ current practices in regard to hats and hoods. These current practices reflect their schools’ core values, the individual needs of their schools, and their mission to engage students in learning.” We have to ask, is facilitating the oppression of girls by allowing their identity to be erased really consistent with the values of our public schools? Is hampering the ability to engage Muslim girls in learning by hiding their faces from teachers consistent with the educational goals of our public schools? Do administrators, teachers, and staff in the Green Bay public school system, as well as the school board, really care more about not offending the sensibilities of those who subscribe to oppressive religious beliefs than defending individual rights and personal liberty?

In its decision, the school board abdicated its responsibility to uphold the separation of church and state that lies at the heart of American democracy by granting administrators the authority to violate the religious liberty of their students. My son attends Green Bay public schools. Do we not care about his rights because he is not a member of a recognized minority group? No rational justification was provided for why (some) students should not be allowed to wear head coverings in the school building. Indeed, by exempting religious students from the ban on head coverings, the district has admitted that it has no real justification for banning head coverings. The school board failed to protect the right of individuals to express themselves in ways that do no violence to those around them.

* * *

My Testimony Before the Board

I come to you today to argue against the district’s dress code. I have four arguments: two based on the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution and related legislative and judicial actions; two others based on the problems of stereotyping and stigmatization. I won’t have time to get to them all, so I urge the board to read my longer statement. I am happy to speak with board members about these arguments in greater depth. In the time I have, I take up the question of head coverings, in particular hoodies. District policy states that head coverings are “not permitted in the school building during the school day” with an exception: “Students may wear head coverings for religious reasons.”

This policy is problematic from a constitutional standpoint. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment obliges public institutions to remain neutral on questions of religion. If a freedom is curtailed or expanded, it must be for secular reasons and the restriction must equally apply and the freedom open to all. Accommodations must not privilege some students while limiting others. As I will show, there is no rational reason for restricting head gear, but rather an irrational one, and the religious accommodation indicts the policy. 

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws discrimination based on race, religion, and other categories. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) determined that the doctrine of “separate but equal” is inconsistent with constitutional principles. It is inherently unequal to separate, limit, or privilege students on the basis of race. Would the district ever consider instituting a policy that permitted white students access to head coverings, hoodies, for example, but forbade these to black students? Of course not. Such a policy would violate the spirit of civil rights because it treats individuals differently on the basis of race. Yet the district enforces a policy that treats people differently on the basis of religion. This is a pernicious double standard.

What is more, this double standard rests on implicit stereotypes, one indicating virtue, the other indicating disrepute. The assumption is that religious students who wear head coverings are not dangerous or violent or are not using head coverings to hide headphones or weapons or concealing their identity or that the head coverings are not distracting—all reasons given for why hoodies should be banned in school. If any of these reasons were legitimate, then religious head coverings should not be exempted, since all the possibilities identified apply in those cases, as well. Yet other students, in particular minority youth, especially males, are assumed likely to be using head covering for these illicit reasons. It sees them as unsafe.

Without determining on an individual basis whether students are using a head covering for illicit purposes, a ban with group-based exceptions means concrete individuals are treated as personifications of abstract categories about which, for some, bad intentions are given, while others’ motives are deemed good-intentioned. This is why, in May of this year, Students at Uplift Community High School in Chicago overturned a rule that banned hoodie on their campus. Students at Uplift argued that the ban fed into harmful misconceptions about hoodies being associated with criminal activities, misconceptions based on racial stereotypes. Individual freedom means individuals are treated as such, not judged on the basis of abstract groupings.

Finally, the policy could consider all the exemptions that would allow students with alopecia, cancer, disfigurements, and other stigmatizing problems that for them necessitate head coverings. Presumably, such accommodations are within the principal’s discretionary power. However, just as the policy implies head coverings are disreputable for certain classes of people, exceptions for non-religious reasons spotlights what affected students likely wishes to conceal.

I urge the district to retire this policy and allow students to dress and express themselves in the manner they and their parents see fit. If attire and grooming are found to meet the exceptions identified in the Tinker Standard established by the Supreme Court in 1965 (which I am happy to explain further), then this can be determined on a case-by-case basis, as it should be in a society of individuals who are to be treated as such before the law, not reduced to representatives of abstract impositions and subject to prior restraint.

It is not the place of the district to police student’s clothing and messaging, especially in a manner than grants privileges to some while discriminating against others. No student should enjoy preferential treatment on the basis of race, religion, nationality, or other categories identified in our laws, but should enjoy equal treatment before the law, which should move in the direction of expanding personal liberty, not limiting it.

* * *

What Followed My Testimony

The board asked no follow up questions of me. A citizen who followed me expressed the typical authoritarian claptrap about how hoodies are a reflection of kids these days and their lack of respect for their elders. It was “hike up your pants” cliche. A high school teacher (from West High School) followed him and began by noting the substance of Tinker standard—that it requires any prohibition on expression to show substantial disruption to the learning environment—as if it were evidence for the disruptive nature of hats and hoodies. He leaned on his “thirty years of experience” to insist that hats and hoodies undermine school climate and learning. He presented no other evidence. He claimed that what he is seeing in the classroom is that hats and hoodies allow some students to disengage from the learning process. One cannot tell whether the student wearing a hoodie is listening to music through earbuds. Moreover, hats with brims can be pulled down so that the teacher cannot make eye contact with the student.

Of course, the teacher was compelled by the obvious to stress that only some students use hats and hoodies to disengage. This qualification—which he used to feign reasonableness—speaks to a point I make later about whether it is proper to control some students on the account of other students. Moreover, is it hats and hoodies causing the disengagement in those cases?

He claimed that the problem of using hats and hoodies to disengage is becoming more prevalent, increasing year by year, the phenomenon starting around five years ago. This is an interesting observation, given the growing diversity of Brown Country has, over the last five years, reached the threshold of majority-minority area status. Mexican families have settled and their kids are now coming through the school system. Moreover, the African-American population has grow substantially just within the last few years. It seems there are race and ethnic anxieties underpinning the growing moral panic about hats and hoodies.

Putting this to one side for the moment, how is the ban on hats and hoodies addressing the problem of disengagement if an increasing number of students are using hats and hoodies to disengage? Shouldn’t officials attempt to understand the actual source of disengagement? The teachers claim that, because hats and hoodies are worn by people from all racial and ethnic groups, this is not a discriminatory policy, seems to give the same away. Not wanting to appear to discriminate, a general rule is passed justified by the assumption that all are potentially guilty of violating rules, which people don’t really believe. What they believe is that some students will violate the rules. Which students. Now we can bring back in the question of race and ethnic anxieties.

Later in the meeting, during the forum associated with the agenda item, another high school teacher (this one from East High School) appeared and rehearsed Cosby-esque rhetoric about respectability and career-readiness (had she been a white lady her comments would have been reactionary). She testified about how students routinely flout the dress code, dwelling on an anecdote about a kid who came to class every day, pulled his hoodie around his head, put his face on the desk, and slept the whole period. On one occasion he did not hear the bell at the end of class. From this case she drew the conclusion that the ban on hats and hoodies is necessary.

When asked by a board member why the District should keep a policy students so easily disregard, she imagined aloud how much worse the situation would be if students were allowed to wear hat and hoodies. Under further questioning, and in light of student testimony about the psychological aspects of head coverings (one spoke about anxiety, another about anger), she admitted the personal need to feel secure, but insisted that the classroom was not the place for it. “Students should go to student services for that,” she said. (I guess because that’s where students with emotional and psychological problems get their education.)

As various Board members spoke, one pointed to the district’s survey of administrators, staff, teachers, parents, and SROs (School Resource Officers, i.e. the police) on the matter and suggest we listen to them. After all, why have a survey if we aren’t going to heed the majority? What a stupid opinion crossed my minds. If we’re going to heed the majority opinion expressed in unscientific surveys, then why have the board take up the issue at all? Why have a board at all? Why not just rubber-stamp survey findings? Is that what democracy looks like? Tyranny of the majority?

Throughout all of this, I was hoping the board would ask me for clarification. I could have easily batted down each point. The ignorance of basic civil and human rights displayed by most everybody involved in the discussion, as well as responses to various surveys, was astounding—and distressing (this is why majoritarianism is a recipe for disaster). Seeing the personal freedom of persons the government forces to spend at least a third of their day (half of the time they are conscious) learning stuff the power elite believes will make them “career-ready” (i.e. docile bodies) treated in such a disrespectful and cavalier matter infuriated me. Is the popular desire to keep young people under authority’s thumb perverse sublimation of the memory pains of its own adolescence? Is this all about repressing humiliation by giving back? Did Sigmund Freud have a name for this odious defense mechanism?

Seeing how things were going to go, I left the board meeting. The outcome was predictable. But I have more to say about this.

* * *

The Principles of American and Human Freedom

At the start of the meeting, the audience was asked to rise with the officials and recite the Pledge of Alliance. “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” As an atheist, the “under God” part has always irked me (although it is interesting that it does not say “under gods”). That aside, the Pledge contains words we’re supposed to pay attention to. The flag represents the American Republic, which is founded upon core values of individual rights and liberties. Contrary to the multiculturalism that attempts to supersede it, the Pledge tells us that the nation is one nation. It doubles down here: this nation is indivisible. It demands equal treatment of individuals before the law—all are entitled to liberty and justice. Yet, after repeating the Pledge, board members and those who testified failed to connect the meaning of these words to my testimony. I guess the Pledge is just ceremonial. Like the Preamble to the Constitution. Nothing to consider here.

The United States Bill of Rights, ratified on December 15, 1791, lays the basis for ethical conduct with respect to individual liberty and rights. The First Amendment protects personal liberty in the expression of religious and other opinions. Courts have pushed the free speech rights down into every level of government. The Court has recognized that freedom of speech includes personal expression in art, music, and fashion. The First Amendment obligates the government to remain neutral on religious questions. Government can pass no law or policy respecting the establishment of religion. Supreme Court decisions have expanded the Establishment Clause to cover law and policy and incorporated this principle in every state and locality, including public schools. Freedom of (and necessarily freedom from) religion and freedom of speech and expression are landmarks in the progress of man. The Fourteenth Amendment clarifies that every person dwelling or traveling within the jurisdiction of the United States enjoys the protection of the Bill of Rights; the government cannot deny to any individual due process or equal protection under the law. Treating people differently for reasons of nationality, race, or religion is a harmful or unjust manner constitutes discrimination.

In light of this established body of law and the values they represent, the district’s dress code policy does violence to justice. It denies the agency of our young people—the people who will carry forward our democratic republic in our absence. What is the civics lesson here? The policy flies in the face of the Supreme Court ruling that the First Amendment protects student speech. Regardless of political viewpoint, students are allowed to speak, write, and otherwise express thoughts without fear of censorship on the basis of the content of their speech. This precedent is known as the Tinker Standard, established in a 1965 Supreme Court ruling. At issue was the wearing of black armbands by three siblings (the Tinkers) to signal opposition to the Vietnam War.

In the limited time the board gives speakers, I could only mention the standard (hoping I would be asked for clarification). In that ruling, the court held: “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression at the schoolhouse gate.” The Supreme Court allowed for two exceptions, both of which require officials to provide sufficient evidence to show that the expression in question could result in “substantial disruption of the school environment” or represent “an invasion of the rights of others.” Obviously, neither exception applied to the Tinkers’ expression. The high school teacher who thought he was rebutting my testimony offered no evidence that hats or hoodies triggered the exceptions identified in the Tinker Standard. And, as we will see, his failure to object to a religious exception negates his argument that such a ban was necessary to the learning environment.

With regards to free expression, policy 443.1 identifies the following as forbidden: “Any clothing, jewelry or personal items identifying an antisocial association or organization referred to in Board policy.” The board, an extension of the government, is censoring speech based on content. The policy bans the following: “Any clothing, jewelry or personal items that use or depict hate speech or targeting groups based on sex; age; race; religion; color; national origin; ancestry; creed; pregnancy; marital status; parental status; homelessness; sexual orientation; gender identity; gender expression; gender non-conformity; physical, mental, emotional or learning disability/handicap; or any other legally-protected status or classification.” The policy also censors speech based on content: “Any clothing, jewelry or personal items that contain pictures and/or writing referring to alcohol, tobacco products, nicotine, sexual references, nudity, profanity, obscenity, unlawful use of weapons, and/or controlled or illegal drugs.”

The district’s dress code is the result of a time machine thrown into reverse. When I was in high school in the 1970s, we wore shifts with messages of all sorts, net shirts, halter and tube tops, short-shorts, mini-skirts, bandanas, pot leaf belt buckles that doubled as paraphernalia, hats—whatever. The district’s policy by comparison is regressive. For example, the policy prohibiting students from wearing clothing with drug references. Based on experience with the district, I know anti-drug messages conveyed by students and teachers are tolerated, even encouraged. D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Network) is a fixture in the district. Why aren’t pro-drug messages allowed? The Supreme Court has found that the government cannot discriminate against viewpoint advocacy. With very few exceptions (obscenity is an example), the government’s ability to restrict speech on the basis of content is sharply limited. To allow censorship is to tolerate thought control by the state and its agents.

We allow free thought and expression in the United States not only because it is a fundamental right in a free society, but also because it is necessary for robust discourse about the issues that concern citizens. Just as the Tinker siblings had a constitutional right to express opposition to the Vietnam War, students have a constitutional right to express opposition to the drug war. The result of current drug prohibition policy is the incarceration of tens of thousands of persons, ruining lives and resulting in family separation and community disorganization. In Guiles v. Marineau (2006), the Court affirmed the right of a student to wear a shirt mocking President George W. Bush that included references to alcohol and drug use. The Court found that censoring the shirt diluted the student’s message and the message did not satisfy Tinker’s “substantial disruption test.”

While I recognize that there are time and place restrictions on speech, I also recognize the obvious, namely that speech on clothing is not disruptive in the same way verbal speech can be. Those who do not wish to receive messages on clothing may disregard them. If a message on a t-shirt is offensive, the least restrictive solution is to not look at it. Therefore, even if speech is restricted on the basis of a significant governmental interest, such as pursuit of a specific goal disrupted by verbal speech, those restricting the speech must allow for alternative channels for communicating the information. It would seem messages on clothing (or expressed in jewelry) is the least problematic alternative for such communications.

Furthermore, the “substantial disruption” test must be applied on a case-by-case basis. This is the opposite of blanket restrictions that require exceptions, a practice that gets the state’s burden wrong. Prior restraint must show that discipline after-the-fact is insufficient to remedy the problem created by said speech. It is unclear what problem pro-drug messages cause, let alone that case-based discipline would be insufficient to remedy any problem that should arise. The same is true for hats and hoodies. Yet the West High School teacher I noted earlier speaks for many when he expresses the desire to control the many for the sake of a few.

As for disruption, even here administrative action may run afoul of the spirit of free speech, since political statements are intended to draw attention to an issue. The right to speak freely is at the same time the right to freely receive speech, to have access to information and opinion. In the case of political messaging, others may become members of the audience if they wish. Expressions aren’t disallowed because an administrator disagrees with their sentiments. Indeed, the measure of the free speech right is the extent to which it protects disagreeable speech. It is not the business of the government to determine what groups or sentiments are “antisocial” in order to censor content. Imagine an organization that distributes with messages warning the public of the peril of sharia—Islamic doctrine that judges women inferior and encourages persecution of homosexuals—being deemed by the school board “anti-social,” specifically “Islamophobic,” and censors the messages on this basis. It’s not hard to imagine this if you try. The policy mentions “hate speech” and “targeting groups” in conjunction with “religion” and “creed.” Protecting administration-sanctioned speech is easy. It hardly needs protection. It’s offensive speech that requires protection. Yet the school board seeks to sanitize student clothing.

As a concrete example, just this year, Fayetteville High School (Arkansas) students who showed up at school in clothing bearing the Confederate flag were sent home. The school principal told the media, “We’re not trying to trample on their First Amendment right. We’re just trying to have a safe and orderly school environment.” “Safe and orderly” are typical excuses for limiting constitutional freedoms. In May of last years, a student in Montana was suspended for wearing a Confederate flag sweatshirt. The student, Mitchell Ballas of Missoula, got it: “The school is in the wrong for saying they can dictate me wearing this sweatshirt. They’re saying it’s offending kids and it’s derogatory and all that, but it’s not. It’s my First Amendment right.” Even if it offensive and derogatory, it is indeed Ballas’ First Amendment right. Students are even demanding the suppression of their own speech. In my adopted state of Wisconsin, Tomah High School students joined with administrators, staff, and teachers to call for the prohibition of Confederate flag items after a student wore clothing featuring the flag of Dixie.

Even when the Supreme Court has tolerated speech restriction, leading lights on the court have dissented in a manner consistent with constitutional principle. In Morse v. Frederick (2007), a ruling that upheld the disciplining of a student, Joseph Frederick, who was wearing a T-shirt that said “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” at a school sponsored event, Justice John Paul Stevens, in a dissent joined by Justice Souter and Justice Ginsburg, argued that “the Court does serious violence to the First Amendment in upholding—indeed, lauding—a school’s decision to punish Frederick for expressing a view with which it disagreed.” Stevens emphasized that “carving out pro-drug speech for uniquely harsh treatment finds no support in our case law and is inimical to the values protected by the First Amendment.” (Note also that the t-shirt could be said to disparage members of a religious group.)

The American Civil Liberties Union (for the record, I sit on the Northeast Wisconsin Board of the ACLU) participated in this case on the side of Frederick, as did the Center for Individual Rights and the National Coalition Against Censorship. Students for Sensible Drug Policy posted concern that banning drug-related speech would—if the principle of viewpoint neutrality was properly observed—undermine their ability to form chapters in public schools. Even conservative groups such as the American Center for Law and Justice and the Rutherford Institute worried that religious opinions could be censored if Frederick’s rights were trammeled.

* * *

Religious Liberty and the Establishment Clause

As I noted in my testimony before the board, district policy states that head coverings are not permitted in the school building during the school day with some exceptions, one for them concerns head coverings worn for religious reasons. However the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment obliges public institutions to remain neutral on questions of religion. If a freedom is curtailed or expanded, it must be for secular reasons (it cannot be for religious reasons, since then the government is no longer neutral) and the restriction must equally apply or the corresponding freedom must be open to all. Put another way, accommodations must not privilege some students while limiting the freedom of others. This should be obvious in light of the logic of civil rights in our nation’s long struggle to achieve equality before the law.

It is contrary to religious liberty to allow believers to engage in activities that authorities have determined inimical to safety and learning. The free exercise of religion is not absolute. It is limited by the Establishment Clause, as well as rational restrictions. First, as noted, the school cannot endorse a religion by privileging its adherents through preferential treatment. Second, if an action is harmful to others, it is properly restricted for the sake of safety. Are Sikh boys allowed to wear the kirpan—a ceremonial dagger—at school? All baptized male Sikhs are expected to carry one. Daggers are dangerous, threatening, and distracting. Head coverings aren’t daggers. But if they are claimed to be dangerous, threatening, and distracting (which school administrators have judged them to be), then there should be no religious exception for them since a purportedly rational reason exists for forbidding them. By allowing Muslims to don head coverings, the district is either saying that Muslims are allowed to engage in a practice that is dangerous, threatening, and distracting or that head coverings are not actually dangerous, threatening, or distracting. If the first claim is true, then no one should be allowed to cover their heads. All students are entitled to learn in a safe and distraction-free environment. If the second is true, then everybody should be free to choose where they will cover their heads, since clearly headgear is not the problem it is purported to be.

I have made the kirpan analogy many times since the school board meeting not conceiving that it may in fact be allowed in some school districts. So I checked to see and was shocked to discover that, in October of 2014, administrators at a Washington state school district decided to let a Sikh boy carry a kirpan on school property. The school district in announcing the decision stated that they were merely confirming standard practice: Sikhs had always carried kirpan’s at school. Robby Soave wondered aloud in article in Reason magazine: “If Sikh Kids Can Bring Knives to School, Why Can’t Everyone Else?” Soave writes, “I find it irksome, however, that school administrators are willing to recognize a faith-based exception to zero tolerance weapons policies while vigorously enforcing them in every other respect, even when other students have equally valid reasons to carry knives.” He cites the case of Atiya Haynes, a 17-year-old Detroit girl who was expelled from school after her principal, in a random search of students’ personal property, discovered a pocketknife (a gift from her grandfather). Soave asks, “Do the Atiyas of the world really deserve fewer freedoms than Sikh students?” Not if the law is correctly followed.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws discrimination based on race, religion, and other categories. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) determined that the doctrine of “separate but equal” is inconsistent with constitutional principles. It is inherently unequal to separate, limit, or privilege students on the basis of race. That the district would never consider instituting a policy that permits white students access to head coverings, hoodies but forbids these to black students but enforce a policy that treats people differently on the basis of religion tells us how deep the Islamophila runs. It will not do to say that in the one case race it at issue but in the other it is religion. Government is not allowed to discriminate on the basis of either. 

This is a pernicious double standard. Religious liberty means that law and policy cannot grant differential access to freedoms and resources on the basis of religion. Prohibiting my son, who is a secular humanist, from wearing a head covering on the grounds that he does not have a religious reason to do so violates his religious liberty. The same can be said if, when Muslims are permitted time to pray, my son were denied the same amount of time to contemplate his “sincerely-held moral or ethical beliefs,” which the district recognizes as the same status as religion. Or if my son were denied access to publicly-funded menu based on religiously-restricted food items. All Americans have a right to eat halal and kosher foods. The government cannot restrict some individuals from engaging in a practice it allows others to freely engage in for religious reasons.

This double standard rests on implicit stereotypes, one indicating virtue, the other indicating disrepute. The district’s policy states: “Student dress or grooming should not affect the health or safety of students or disrupt the learning process within the classroom or school.” Some districts around the country even consult with the police, who recommend schools pay attention to what youth in high crime areas wear—areas that are disproportionately poor and African American and Latino. As a school board member confided to a person close to me, staff are terrified of their own students. The assumption is that religious students who wear head coverings are not dangerous or violent or are not using head coverings to hide headphones or weapons or concealing their identity or that the head coverings are not distracting—all reasons given for why hoodies should be banned in school. Other students, in particular minority youth, especially males, are assumed likely to be using head covering for these illicit reasons.

Those who spoke at the school board meeting, including members of the board, even after I exposed the double standard, kept dwelling on the reasons why hoodies should be banned. Even after I explained that if any of these reasons were legitimate, then religious head coverings should not be exempted, since all the possibilities identified apply in those cases, as well. Otherwise, why are hijab-wearing Muslim girls presumed to be immune from all the temptations undermining Christian boys who wear hoodies? By granting a religious exemption for head coverings the district has admitted that the reasons for disallowing head coverings are not of pressing concern. Otherwise, as I noted earlier, it would be reckless to put students at risk by allowing some students to engage in a problematic practice.

We have heard the objections: “They have earbuds under those hoodies!” But earbuds are worn beneath the hijab, too. “They partially conceal their identity!” True also of the hijab. And so on. If the reasons for banning the hoodie were really legitimate, and of such pressing concern, then no exceptions would be allowed, even religious ones. Again, no school has to accommodate all religious observances, especially if they interfere with the educational process and represent a threat to school safety. If a public institution cannot decide who gets head coverings on the basis of race, then how can it decide who gets to wear head coverings on the basis of religion? The policy is discriminatory.

As I said in my testimony, without determining on an individual basis whether students are using a head covering for illicit purposes, a ban with exceptions means concrete individuals are treated as personifications of abstract groups about which, for some, bad intentions are assumed, while others’ motives deemed good intentioned. Individual freedom means individuals are treated as such, not judged on the basis of abstract groupings. I am concerned that school board members did not understand this part of my argument. I grant that it is, especially in the era of group rights and identity policies, hard to grasp the meaning of liberty and justice for all. We mean it at the concrete individual level. Individuals are actually-existing entities. Race and religion are imagined communities. They are observer-relative things for which there is no necessary organic association. An individual is a member of a race or a religion in a way very different that he is a member of the species. Race and religion are social constructs. Religion is an ideological system. You cannot reduce a concrete person to a social construct or an ideological system. Indeed, the attempt to do this results in known repressions. One must ask oneself, What is racism? Are its categories the basis of organizing rights and privileges? Or have we abandoned the ideal of individual equality before the law?

* * *

The School Board Fails to Uphold American Values

When I was a young teacher, I was frustrated by some students using their laptops for purposes other than taking notes. I made a rule that forbade all students from using laptops in my classes. Most students where doing what they should be doing on their laptops, taking notes and checking claims I was making in class. Others were playing games, chatting on social media, and so on. But rather than disciplining only those who were deviating from classroom expectations, I disciplined students irrespective of their actual behavior. This practice was wrong and, as soon as I realized it, I retired the rule.

In announcing the reasoning for approving the policy, the opinion of so-called School Resource Officers was cited. One hundred percent of them oppose hats and hoodies in school buildings. SROs are police officers. Let’s call them that. They are police officers in our schools. Aas a criminologist, I might ask what evidence the police have that could lead anybody to think that hats and hoodies are a threat to school safety? The only thing I can figure out is the pairing of hoodies with the “thug.” However, as a civil libertarian, I have ask how people who are not wearing hoodies in order to do any of the bad things people claim people with hoodies do should have their freedom restricted on account of a handful of people who may be involved in illicit activities? How is it fair to control the many for the actions of the few? Justice means disciplining those who break the rules, not assuming everybody will break the rules and then denying those who follow the rules the liberty due them.

Popular opinion should not bear on this matter. It doesn’t matter whether a majority of teachers and staff want this. What matters is showing that head coverings represent a threat so great that it necessitates banning them. And it must apply the ban across the board. The fear of hoodies is rooted in a cognitive stereotype about the threat of minority youth and the class enemy. There is a desire to cast upon others disrepute and to demand they prove themselves innocent and safe. I am not saying administrators, teachers, staff, and parents in Green Bay are overtly classist and racist. I am saying, however, that they need to take some time to critically reflect on why they feel this way. The Green Bay school board should have done the right thing and retired this discriminatory rule.

In the end, the school board voted to allow principals to decide whether our students may wear hats and hoodies inside schools. Do we let police officers decide what is illegal or is that what elected officials are for? Elected officials determine what is illegal and police officers enforce the law. So why would we let principals, teachers, and staff determine what clothes students wear? Shouldn’t that be the responsibility of the school board, an elected body of community members whose job it is to determine such matters?

Finally, I noted the common argument that we need to get hats and hoodies away from students in order to build upright proletarians for the workforce. Do teachers and parents really believe that the real world is a world devoid of head coverings? Do they really think they are preparing students to interact with real people in the adult world banning hats and hoodies at school? What this talk really represents is a twin fetish for authority and respectability with prejudicial class, race, and ethnic underpinnings. It reveals a politics that sees young people not as their own agents but as objects to be molded according to a disciplinarian ethic and about which suspicions are warranted. It’s unfair, and I urge others to take up this cause. They are revisiting the matter in June of 2020. Show up and voice your concern.

* * *

I delivered this talk at the Wisconsin Sociological Association Meetings, held in Kenosha, Wisconsin, October 25, 2019.

I am conducting a crossnational comparative study of the character and efficacy of various correctional approaches in the reduction of criminal recidivism for a range of purposes: providing scholars and practitioners with detailed and focused knowledge on advancements in penology; developing programs for students studying and preparing for careers in the fields of criminology and criminal justice administration; making available to the public sound information and methods appropriate to the development and implementation of policies conducive to building inclusive, safe, and just communities.

The project arose in an examination of comparative statistics in corrections and recidivism for the United States, Sweden, and Norway. Presently, the US incarcerates more persons than any other country and has the highest incarceration rate in the world. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the total adult correctional population of the United States is nearly seven million persons, with approximately 2.3 million persons in state and federal prisons, jails, and juvenile correctional facilities. The incarceration rate is 698 per 100,000 residents. The US carceral system is also notable for significant class, ethnic, and racial disparities. 

The United States has a poor record of rehabilitating those it incarcerates. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, recent data show that 68 percent of those released from prison were rearrested within three years of their release. This measure of recidivism is a rough but useful indicator of the problem of reoffending after leaving custodial supervision. The United States is well-known among advanced democracies for its punitive approach to corrections, policies guided by deterrence theory. The typical punishment regime in the United States emphasizes harsh and degrading conditions. These conditions in part explain the United States’ high rate of recidivism. 

During approximately the same period, according to the Institute for Criminal Policy Research, inmates in Swedish correctional facilities in 2016 numbered around 5,979 in 46 prisons and 33 jails. Recidivism rates, at around 40 percent within three years, are lower in Sweden than in the United States. Prison population in Norway in 2017 stood at 3,373 in 64 prisons. Evidence presented by the Norwegian government indicates that only 20 percent prisoners in Norway are recidivists. 

As with the United States, with the emergence of globalization, changing labor market needs, and migration pressures, Europe has been growing more diverse over the last several decades. Norway and Sweden have managed to retain comparatively lower recidivism rates despite these changes. These facts are noteworthy given the insecurity migrants face in their host countries and criminogenic pressures inherent in their situation (emergent ethnic enclaves, housing shortages, language deficiencies, low labor force attachment, low wages, neighborhood overcrowding, concentrated poverty and indigency). 

US observers can thus learn a lot from the way in which Scandinavian societies have addressed the problem of rapid social change while at the same time keeping faith with the compassionate and progressive values that lie behind the popular appreciation for comprehensive rehabilitative strategies. A detailed cross-national comparison of correctional statistics and penal models elaborates knowledge of the relative impacts of punitive versus rehabilitative correctional approaches and brings this understanding to students and practitioners in Northeast Wisconsin and beyond. Other states have taken an interest in the model. In October 2015, a delegation from North Dakota and Hawaii, comprised of state officials, conducted a tour of the prison system in Norway. In September 2017, Alaskan officials organized a similar tour of Norway’s facilities. 

The Summer 2018 Research Trip

I traveled to Sweden and Norway in the summer of 2018 to meet with law enforcement officials and determine the feasibility of the project I am discussing and toured facilities and interviewed officials. During my trip, I gained access to educational and correctional institutions in their largest cities of Stockholm and Oslo. My summer trip to Stockholm involved meetings with researchers at the Swedish Prison and Probation Service (SPPS), or Kriminalvården, in Liljeholmen, a district in the Stockholm archipelago. My principle contact was Gustav Tallving, policy officer for the European Organization of Prisons and Correctional Services. In Norway, I traveled to the University College of Norwegian Correctional Service (KRUS), or Kriminalomsorgen, in Lillestrøm, outside of Oslo. My principle contact there was Tore Rokkan, Associate Professor in the Department of Research.

The field refers to the Scandinavian approach as the “Nordic model.” The model is focused on preparing inmates for successful reintegration with society after release by focusing on individual variability—or within-subject change—and the needs of people in the greater society. Norway is especially known for an emphasis on restorative justice, an approach that seeks to repair the harm caused by the offense rather than punish the perpetrator. Restorative justice puts victims, offenders, and community members in charge of determining harm done, the needs of those involved, and ways the damage may be repaired. Both Norway and Sweden stress the importance of avoiding isolating prisoners in order to prevent the phenomenon of prisonization, a type of institutionalization that makes it difficult for ex-convicts to transition to life outside of custodial care. 

My summer trip yielded several results. At the Mid-South Sociological Association meetings in Birmingham, Alabama, in October 2018, I presented a working paper, “Approaching the Rehabilitative Ideal: The Structure of Crime Control in Sweden and Norway,” in which I discussed the history of the Nordic model with respect to crime and punishment and recidivism rates. At the Midwest Sociological Society meetings in Chicago, Illinois, this past April, I presented a paper titled “Foreign Bodies and the Queue: Shifting Priorities in the Norwegian Correctional System,” that analyzes changes in that system in light of shifts in political hegemony and mass migration. 

In November 2018, I was invited by Mark Elam, professor in the Department of Sociology and Work Science, to come to the University of Göteborg for my sabbatical semester. They will host my visit and provide me with office space. I received assurances that, when an exchange is worked out with the International Center, the sociology department will support an exchange agreement. In June 2019, I was awarded a sabbatical for fall 2020 to travel to Sweden and Norway to continue my research research. 

Theory, Practice, and Education

My interests in this topic are theoretical, practical, and pedagogical. On the theoretical front, I am evaluating the empirical soundness of the social support thesis with respect to rehabilitation and recidivism. Social support is an approach developed by Mark Colvin and associates. The differences between the Nordic and US approaches to punishment and rehabilitation provide a useful test of this thesis. 

I graduated from the University of Tennessee with a Ph.D. in Sociology in 2000, with emphases in Criminology and Political Economy. My dissertation was a comprehensive study of the history of crime and punishment in the United States titled, Caste, Class, and Justice: Segregation, Accumulation, and Criminalization in the United States. I have published articles on the subject of crime and punishment in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, Journal of Poverty, Journal of Black Studies,Crime, Law, & Social Change, the Encyclopedia of US Prisons and Correctional Facilities, and the Encyclopedia of Social Deviance, as well as presented papers at numerous conferences and symposia. The Nordic project is a continuation of my varied work in this broad area.

On the practical front, I am endeavoring to provide policymakers with alternative correctional approaches that utilize social supports to reduce recidivism. This interest bears on the situation in the state of Wisconsin. Its prison population tripling since 1990, Wisconsin is studying ways to curb prison overcrowding. Wisconsin’s prisons were built to hold approximately 16,000 inmates but hold around 23,000. Wisconsin is on track to hold a record number of inmates by 2019. A chief driver of the large prison population is the high rate of recidivism. One approach to the problem is changing parole violation restrictions and expanding the state’s earned release program. Addressing the problem of crimeless revocation is an essential piece of this. Vital to the success of such reforms is a correctional approach that lessens the coercive character of prison life and provides social supports to prisoners that increase successful reintegration with life beyond prison. 

On the teaching front, this project promises to generate knowledge and foster programming that will benefit students studying and preparing for careers in the fields of criminology and criminal justice administration. It will inform several of the classes I teach. Insights into life-course analysis and within-subject change metrics will introduce students to cutting edge methodologies. Partnership with other programs and with the community in rehabilitative and treatment strategies will provide opportunities for new internship positions.

I am on the faculty of Democracy and Justice Studies, a problem-focused interdisciplinary program that brings humanistic and social scientific approaches to bear on the social promises and problems that shape the history and trajectory of the United States and the world. Faculty are drawn from the disciplines of history, political science, and sociology, several of them with expertise in matters of criminal justice and legal studies. Our program offers courses in law and society, constitutional law, gender and the law, law and inequality, criminology, and criminal justice administration. My association with the Social Work program, particularly Dr. Doreen Higgins, and that program’s developing relationship with the University of Gothenburg under Higgins’ direction, promise collaboration in research and curricular development across colleges.

Finally, a travel course to Scandinavia, which I am developing with Higgins, will strengthen not only the Democracy and Justice Studies program in criminal justice, but also its relationship with Northeastern Wisconsin Technical College, as well as student exchanges and combined degree options in the fields of criminology and criminal justice. The travel course will take students to Scandinavia to experience these systems and practices firsthand. Hands-on experience is something I have found to be invaluable.

What first strikes me about Todd Phillip’s Joker is Joaquin Phoenix’s performance. It’s extraordinary. His movements are graceful, while his form is grotesque. His body deformed. His dancing demented. His facial grimaces terrifying. His scary countenance is that of a serial killer. Not a movie serial killer. A real one. Even the way he runs is mesmerizing. Fluid and panicked. His condition demands our empathy—if we can muster it. One hates with him those who mock him.

What next strikes me is the technique of ultra violence shot as a graphic novel leaping to life. The blood spurts and spatters. On the subway train, one can see the panels unfolding. Same with the apartment scene. And the Murray Franklin show. Gritty realism with the right amount of surreality.

Albeit not bloody, and its visual messiness at the end aside, another film that captures the spirit of the graphic novel in this way is Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk. Moreover, like Phillips, Lee plumbs the depths of the human psyche. Unlike Joker, which is drawing moviegoers in droves, Hulk did not take the box office by storm. Rotten Tomatoes summarized the general opinion of Lee’s Hulk as “ultimately too much talking and not enough smashing.” As I was leaving that film with my son, I heard a man complaining to his son that it took 25 minutes for Hulk to appear.

Joker leaves one mentally exhausted and emotionally drained. The meaning of the film unfolds over the course of two hours. In the end, it’s an account of societal failure to protect children and address the trauma of mass society. Phillips deserves praise for his artistry. The screenplay, by Phillips and Scott Silver, exudes sympathy for those whom society has thrown away.

While this is no ordinary adaptation from the world of comic book heroes and villains, I appreciate the decision to locate the movie in the Batman universe. Gotham is the city. Arkham State Hospital contains many of its secrets. I wanted to imagine how Arthur Fleck would play as Bruce Wayne’s arch-nemesis. We see Bruce as a boy. We see a thug murder his parents. It’s the origin story, but better than previous accounts. There is no vat of chemicals transforming Fleck into the man with green hair, white skin, and that terrible rictus (an image inspired by German impressionist Paul Leni’s 1929 film The Man Who Laughs, based on Victor Hugo’s novel of the same name). In Joker we get a realistic villain. Complex and clinically insane.

Phoenix’s Joker is not the psychopathic anarchist brilliantly performed by Heath Ledger in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 The Dark Knight. This Joker is a spat-upon nihilist—driven to his philosophical position by a merciless society. “I don’t believe in anything,” he says. Phoenix’s Fleck just wants to confirm his existence. The joy we derive from his murderous ambitions flows from a different part of us. It is not the desire for vicarious mass killing, the thrill of seeing the Id unleashed, but the hurt part that wants to take revenge on our tormentors.

Some observers were struck by Joker’s similarities with two other movies, Martin Scorsese’s 1976 Taxi Driver and his 1983 The King of Comedy, both starring Robert De Niro (as Vietnam war veteran Travis Bickle and failed comedian Rupert Pupkin respectively). De Niro plays a role in Joker, as well, as the late night talk show host Murray Franklin. He channels Jerry Lewis’ performance as the (fictional) late night TV host Jerry Langford in The King of Comedy.

While I understand the comparisons, beyond Phillips’ acknowledgment of Scorsese’s work as his inspiration, it is arguably superficial. It’s not uncommon for people to sit in their rooms and engage in imaginative rehearsal (just as it’s not uncommon for people to fantasize about killing people they don’t like). Scorsese being clever enough to put these near-universal experiences on screen shouldn’t leave other filmmakers worrying the accusation of derivation.

The movie is controversial. Forty years ago it was conservatives who fussed about movie themes and content. Now it’s progressives who take offense. Whereas conservatives virtue signal about modesty, progressives glorify victimhood—just not the Arthur Fleck kind.

Some are finding the weight loss central to the physicality of Phoenix’s performance—52 lbs—triggering. The way he has described the bliss of self-control is, in their estimation, insensitive at best to those with eating disorders. Others find Phillips’ use of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll” not merely insensitive but enabling of sexual predation.

Others do not appreciate on-screen portrayals of mental illness associated with violent ends. The plot runs counter to the narrative that mass violence is due not to mental illness but to movies and video games or to whiteness and masculinity. Indeed, many, portraying the movie as a shout-out to the Incel crowd, are predicting that the movie would inspire white male mass violence. (Philipps could not generate the same level of empathy he does by locating the film in the madness of social media.)

The movie is set in the early 1980s. Some of my older readers will recall the 1984 New York subway shooting in which Bernhard Goetz, fed up with being terrorized by young men on the 2 train in Manhattan, shot and wounded four people. The “Subway Vigilante” symbolized popular frustration with the extraordinarily high crime rates in the 1980s, which were met with increasing coercive state action, as well as a self-defense movement, upon which the NRA capitalized. Many saw Goetz as a hero. Goetz was ultimately charged with four counts of murder, four counts of aggravated assault, four counts of reckless endangerment, as well as criminal possession of a gun. His justification was self-defense and he was acquitted on all charges except one count of carrying an unlicensed firearm (he served less than a year in prison). Significantly, Phillips changes the number of victims from four to three, their race from black to white, and their class standing from lumpenproletariat to affluent, and their provocation from robbery to aggravated assault.

What most observers miss about Joker is Phillips’ critique of the mob. Joker invites identitarian reactions to mock and trivialize them with the much greater suffering of Fleck and the citizens of Gotham, those who dwell at the bottom of capitalist society, while at the same time critique the morality and usefulness of mob violence. Which is to say that it is, while not pointless, futile. The mob constitutes the subjective milieu of Gotham, always lurking in the background.

But, of course, the mob lurks in the foreground. For Fleck is its personification, lumpenproletarian in the way Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels portray those at the bottom of society, the dangerous class, the social scum. Fleck is suffering from austerity’s cruelty, an early warning of neoliberal rot in the decay of the Great Society, capitalism removing its human mask.

Engels describes the actions of the mob as “primitive rebellion,” a reaction to class oppression with no theory, with no politics—except to concretize the disorder of the capitalist mode of production. The mob builds nothing. They’re not Schumpeter’s “gales of creative destruction.” They’re just destruction, glamouring to eat the rich for no purpose beyond expressing their well-earned resentment. No theory, no plan, they’re fodder for reactionary intrigue.

Bruce Wayne’s father, Thomas, the personification of the one percent, calls the rabble “clowns.” Dangerous but not serious. Fleck is the leader of the clowns. Claiming to stand for nothing, he represents not anarchy but chaos. Wayne and Fleck meet face-to-face in the men’s room of a posh theater with predictable results: the one percent punches down. The story is ultimately about how society fashions madness, not about how the people transcend it.

To draw out the problem in relief, Phillips has, in Marxian fashion, reduced the critique to the futility of disorganized class resentment while keeping the audience sympathy to the plight of capitalism’s victims. He avoids a direct attack on social media and cancel culture by removing the story to the early 1980s, but the critique is also about today’s mob, the ones who drove Phillips from comedy into an exploration of the madness of the crowd (it is a confluence of understandings that finds Douglas Murray’s exploration of the derangement of identity politics—The Madness of Crowds—hit the market in September).

A faux social justice movement, the offspring of the New Left are clowns, too. However, their trauma pales in the light of Fleck’s trials. Fleck is no snowflake. His suffering is exquisite. His reaction to his abuse, shorn of politics and purpose, is meant to make more sense than the politics of the woke scolds, whom Phillips, frustrated that people have missed his point, explicitly calls out (see “Woke Scolds and Twitter Mobs”).

The historic setting of Joker is ideal for conveying today’s societal mood, like science fiction in reverse, throwing us not into the future to behold the problems of today (à la Twilight Zone or Black Mirror), but sending us back in time, to when crime and disorder were making urban life unbearable for the proletariat, a crisis that moved the masses not towards revolutionary action, but drove them to support authoritarian measures to stem the disorder, to identify with the bourgeoisie because the dangerous class was out of control and something had to be done to restore order and safety: “Broken Windows.” Similar conditions, albeit manifesting differently as they do in every age, have returned to many America’s cities. Not just in homelessness and piles of needles and body counts. The police are standing down on the orders of progressive mayors for the new chaos without a purpose.

Whether intentional or not, Phillips’ movie is a work of left realism. Many of Joker’s critics were poked by it.

[Note: This essay was revised 4.11.19 after a second viewing of the film.]