freedom and reason

NBC News ran this headline yesterday: “A Texas teacher faces losing her job after fighting for gay pride symbols in schools.” The first paragraph reads “The school year at MacArthur High in Irving, Texas, began last fall with the administration scraping off rainbow stickers that had been posted on campus, prompting hundreds of students to walk out in protest.” The story goes on to tell of the plight of teachers pushing the LGBTQ agenda at MacArthur.

The controversy was triggered when teachers posted rainbow stickers outside their classrooms to show students that they were LGBTQ allies. In August, the administration told teachers that the stickers would have to come down. The reason? School officials told NBC News that decorations in classrooms, hallways, and offices must be “curriculum driven and neutral in viewpoint” to “ensure that all students feel safe regardless of background or identity.”

To get some perspective on the matter, imagine a heterosexual teacher posting a straight flag on their classroom door to signal to heterosexual students that the teacher was a straight ally. I know there are people who will object to the analogy. Straight pride, like white pride, is bigoted and hateful. “Heterosexuals have not suffered discrimination. Homosexuals have.” However, this is an irrelevant objection. Heterosexuals may suffer discrimination, but that does not entitle a teacher to hang a straight pride flag in a classroom.

Consider Black Lives Matter banners in classrooms. What would be the reaction to the Confederate battle flag hanging in a classroom? I disagree with both BLM and those who fly the Confederate flag. Except for school-related banners and the American and state flags, I wish to see neither banner nor flag in public school buildings. Even if I supported BLM, I would oppose the presentation of a BLM flag in a public school by administrators or teachers. Public schools are not appropriate venues for political advocacy.

I am aware of the problematic character of viewpoint neutrality, as symbols often bear multiple and deeper meanings. For example, symbols indicating the appropriate restrooms on the basis of sex not only guide students in a sex-segregated society, but also indicate the contemporary political controversy surrounding sex segregation. But, if we were to argue instead for viewpoint diversity, then we would have to accept straight pride flags in public school classrooms. A public institution cannot determine which views are acceptable and which are not. If you think removing gay pride stickers is controversial, just imagine teachers hanging straight pride flags in their classrooms.

In January, Education Week ran the headline “Pride Flags and Black Lives Matter Signs in the Classroom: Supportive Symbols or Propaganda?” The article poses the question this way: “Should a teacher be allowed to place a Black Lives Matter sticker on their desk to let students know they oppose racism, or hang a Pride flag from their door to let their LGBTQ students know the classroom is a safe space? Or are those actions another way for teachers to politically influence and divide students?” This is the wrong way to pose the matter. The question should be: “Whose spaces are these? The teacher’s? Or the public’s?”

There is a presumption that, because progressive educators embrace a cause, that it is okay to adorn a classroom in flags and stickers or rehearse slogans with students advocating for that cause. It is often pitched as the teacher’s free speech rights—sometimes even as speech protected by academic freedom. As I noted in a previous blog (The LGBTQ Lobby Sues Florida), teachers do not have the right to impose their political view on students in public schools. Teachers are hired to deliver a curriculum. These spaces are the public’s and are designated for a specific purpose—and that purpose is not to propagandize children. Academic freedom is a right enjoyed by teachers in higher education. It is not a right available to k-12 teachers.

The principle here is actually quite simple and age-old. It is a fundamental element in liberal thought. Review the First Amendment and case law to clarify or refresh your memory. If a teacher wants to wear a cross around his neck, stretch a scarf over her head, or affix a fish patch to a briefcase, fine. That’s a personal right protected by the First Amendment. But teachers cannot hang crosses on the walls, asks students to wear scarfs, or post fish stickers on the windows of public school buildings. This violates the rights of students. The First Amendment protects individuals from compelled speech as much as it protects their right to make speech, and situating captive audiences in a sea of propaganda could possibly only be more compelling if the captives were explicitly punished for resisting ideology. Never underestimate the power of authority and peer pressure in forcing unwelcome opinions upon the impressionable.

K-12 classrooms should not be the domain of a teacher’s politics. But if it is to be that, then be prepared for the presentation of banners, flags, and slogans that you will find offensive and hateful. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, comrades. The free speech right does not depend on whether you think the messages is good or bad. The state can have no position on that in a free and open society. So come one, come all.

It’s either viewpoint neutrality, in which case you can complain to your heart’s content about what’s missing knowing that it doesn’t matter what you want because it’s not your space to do whatever with, or viewpoint diversity, in which case you will have to put up with a lot of things you don’t want your kid to see and hear and read because now it is declared a politicized space open to all opinions without consequences. That means a space where parents can enter and propagate their messages.

Why should it be that administrators, social workers, teachers, and the local Chambers of Commerce should be allowed to propagandize children in those spaces but not parents with contrary views? Are you ready for Confederate flags? Don’t Tread on Me? Straight Pride?

Here’s an idea. If you want your kid to be indoctrinated in religious or other ideologies, then find a private school and put them there. I am sure there are private schools that proudly display Christian, Palestinian, BLM, and Pride flags on their walls. Put your money where your politics are and keep your doctrines out of public schools. That strikes me as the best arrangement for everybody.

Update (April 9, 2022 h/t Christopher Rufo): In January 2014, the GAO published a report, “Federal Agencies Can Better Support State Efforts to Prevent and Respond to Sexual Abuse by School Personnel,” warning about child predators in public schools. The report advised administrators to monitor teachers for grooming behaviors that could lead to sexual misconduct and sexual abuse. Note the signs of grooming behavior. Note also what constitutes misconduct and abuse. Sexually explicit items, pamphlets, books, and videos are among the signs.

That parents are being maligned for their concern about such materials in their children’s classrooms is suggestive to many of them that an organized effort is afoot to misdirect the public in order to preserve the status quo. Christopher Rufo, who has studied this problem in depth, tweets today: “It’s amazing that, in 2014, CNN knew Disney that had a ‘child sex predator’ problem and the GAO knew that public schools had a ‘groomer’ problem—and now we’re supposed to believe that both are ‘QAnon conspiracy theories.’” Then there is this:

In 2017, the Department of Education published a report warning that public school employees "groom" and then commit "adult sexual misconduct" against 10% of all K-12 students.

They define "grooming" as the process of isolating and manipulating a child.https://t.co/fKfVDAcYze pic.twitter.com/XaKjbt8XtT

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 9, 2022

This blog concerns one of the mechanisms used to dismiss parent’s concerns. Readers should not dismiss parent concerns out of hand. Remember the Catholic Church. Why are public school teachers to be presumed any more innocent than priests? Predators know where to find children. The investment in time to work ones way into the position to take advantage of a child is not that great. And in the case of public schools, there are official and organizational-normative rationalizations for the presence of sexually-explicit materials.

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I don’t like having to reassure readers about my intent before writing something. However, because of rigid manichean style of today’s politics, and the apparent need to find offense and outrage, I sometimes feel I have no choice. Nothing I write here should be perceived as indicating any opposition to homosexuality. I have no problem with homosexuality. I do not merely tolerate my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, but embrace them.

This blog concerns the practice of public school administrators and teachers talking to children, especially young children, about sexuality and gender identity—heterosexual or whatever—and the gaslighting of parents who are concerned about it. It’s not the role of teachers to involve themselves in the sex lives of students except where they detect abuse (in which case they should alert the appropriate authorities), and parents have the right to object to such an instruction by a public employee.

I went to public schools most of my life (my parents enrolled me in a private school for kindergarten and ninth grade). I never once encountered an administrator or a teacher who I believe was qualified to talk to children about human sexuality. My fifth grade teacher believed the degrees on a globe marked regional temperature and made me cover the nipples of a mermaid I painted during art period. In high school, a teacher threw away a sculpture (my sculpture) because she believed it represented a phallus. I have put two children through the k-12 system and there were no administrators or teacher there who were qualified to talk to children about human sexuality. I appreciate the work teachers do. I am a supporter of public schools in principle. But administrators and teachers are, as a lot, even if we supposed it was appropriate for them to do so, simply not up to the task of steering the sexuality and gender identity of our children.

I agree with Tulsi Gabbard that parents should raise their kids, not the government. Consult my blog The LGBTQ Lobby Sues Florida to get a sense of the range of things I believe are inappropriate for public school instruction. Even things I believe in are not appropriate for classroom instruction.

When I first heard about Florida’s Parental Rights bill, I was shocked it only protects children K-3. Third grade? How about 12th grade—or not at all. Meanwhile, schools are failing: 1 in 4 graduates are functionally illiterate. Parents should raise their kids, not the government pic.twitter.com/CycF8cKRh3

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) April 4, 2022

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If QAnon is not a construct of the deep state, it certainly functions as if it were one. If a parent is concerned that the desire of teachers to speak with their children about their bodies and their sexuality may signal grooming behavior (why wouldn’t this desire raise suspicions?), they may be reticent to speak up because they risk being linked with an alleged political conspiracy theory positing the existence of a cabal of Satanic cannibalistic sexual predators operating a global child sex trafficking ring. Concern over child sex trafficking is similarly dismissed as QAnon conspiracy theory.

Notwithstanding the horrors of the Catholic Church, where children were groomed by employees of a trusted institution that covered up the abuse for decades, there appears to be a concerted effort by progressive elites to misdirect the public on the question of child sexual abuse by the professional-managerial class by gaslighting and smearing those who are concerned about the safety of children. As with the church, the angle is that there is nothing to see here. The misdirection play is effective. Few people want to be labeled a “conspiracy theorists.” If there were no conspiracy theory to mock, then it would be beneficial to manufacture one.

The Washington Post ran an editorial Tuesday suggesting that US senators who questioned Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson about her leniency in sentencing child predators at her Senate confirmation hearings were employing QAnon “catchphrases.” Indeed, the fact that Republicans didn’t mention a single thing about QAnon during the proceedings was, for author Donald Moynihan, a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, all the evidence one needed to know that the line of questioning pursued by Senators Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, and Joshua Hawley concerning Judge Jackson’s record emanated from that conspiracy theory. High-ranking Republicans are secretly Q was the take away.

“Republican senators questioning Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at her Supreme Court nomination hearing didn’t explicitly mention QAnon or its putative oracle, Q,” writes Moynihan. “They didn’t mention the child sex trafficking ring run by a global cabal of Democratic politicians; financial, media and Hollywood elites; medical establishment professionals; and the satanic pedophile Hillary Clinton. They didn’t mention the Storm, the day these cabalists will be rounded up and executed. And they didn’t mention QAnon’s North Star, former president Donald Trump, who is secretly dismantling the pedophile ring.” “They didn’t have to,” he continues dramatically. “QAnon, a sprawling set of baseless conspiracy claims, is built on nods and winks, which has allowed it to move from the fringes to the center of American politics without toppling the mainstream conservative politicians who are courting its adherents. All Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) had to do to set the stage for the hearing was allege in tweets beforehand that Jackson’s record on sex offender policies ‘endangers our children.’”

Moynihan wraps everything he can in the list of claims associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory—the association of establishment political and entertainment figures in the Jeffrey Epstein affair; the work of doctors pushing cross-sex hormones and gender affirming surgery on children; Disney and other entertainment corporations developing and pushing out programming for children that disrupts organic understandings of gender. Any concern one might have about what he is detecting about the sexual grooming of children may be dismissed by evoking the QAnon conspiracy theory. It follows that concern for the sexually-explicit books on the library shelves of public schools must come from a place of unwarranted paranoia. Etcetera.

Parents are not only concerned about pedophilia. They are concerned about a range of ideas they believe may endanger their children. They worry that the desire of teachers to speak with their children about their bodies and their sexuality may represent not only grooming behavior but also reflect an agenda to disrupt the normal psychological development of children, to confuse them about their gender. A boy may for a day show an interest in feminine activities, clothes, or toys, a fancy he will exchange for pretending to be a dog or a T-rex tomorrow. A woke teacher will take note and encourage the boy to explore his gender identity. Maybe he is really a girl born into the wrong body. Parents hear stories like this and ask questions. They will find their concerns scoffed at, ridiculed: “Don’t you know that ‘endangering children’ is a catchphrase of QAnon?”

We see the same thing happening with concern over antiracist instruction and curricula based on critical race theory. Deploying antiracist programming in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion, teachers tell children that the world is divided between “perpetrators” and “victims.” The white kids learn that they are the perpetrators and that their victims are their black classmates. White children are taught to feel guilty over things their ancestors did, to atone for a sin they did not transgress. The black children are taught that white people—all of them—are privileged because of their skin color, that any advantages they appear to enjoy are ill-gotten. Black children are taught to resent their white peers and their parents.

Parents—black and white—learn about this and complain. They don’t want their kids taught to feel guilty or to resent others on account of race. They are met with gaslighting. These things aren’t really happening, they are told. Critical race theory is not taught in schools, officials and the media insist. It’s a “racist dogwhistle,” a moral panic drummed up by conservative Republicans who pray on the fears of parents for electoral advantage. Likewise, parental concern over instruction in sexuality and gender identity is portrayed as bigotry. Opposition to such teachings are expressions of “homophobia” and “transphobia.” Not only are parents buying into hate, but their complaints further that hate, endangering the lives of LGBTQ children.

If you’re paying attention, you will have likely noted the contradiction: that it’s okay to accuse others of endangering children, if you are a progressive. Progressives truly care about children (that’s why they’re still masking them in Head Start). As progressives, they are obviously rational and in the know; they could not possibly believe in conspiracy theories. Moreover, because they are immune from paranoia, their claims about what conservatives are secretly up to, what the right really means with its “dogwhistles” and what-not, must be true. The progressive worldview is informed, sure, and true. Conservatives are crazy, hateful, and stupid. Why else would public school administrators and teachers have to keep from parents key curricular and pedagogical elements? Because progressivism shapes the nation’s institutions, progressives are able to amplify this portrayal of themselves and their opponents. There is no agenda. Only paranoid mouth-breathers in fly-over states.

The agenda of indoctrinating young children in extremist ideology, in gender theory and critical race theory, has gathered around itself a forcefield of canceling, censorship, mockery, ridicule, and shaming, all aimed at belittling, dismissing, marginalizing, and destroying those parents who raise questions about social studies curricula and the paradigm of social and emotional learning (SEL). Parents read and share such articles as “What are social and emotional learning and culturally responsive and sustaining education—and what do they have to do with critical race theory? A primer” and suspect that SEL is a Trojan horse designed to smuggle into public school curriculum extremist ideas about gender and race.

One must understand these concerns in the context of the culture war that lies at the heart of the transnationalization project. Americans may not comprehend the full context, but they have picked up on its effects and are pushing back. Circumstances have found parents in the vanguard of the resistance. They can see the assault on Western values—of assembly, association, free speech, individualism, privacy, self-determination, transparency in government, the nuclear family and parental rights. There is a need to bring the greater public to the recognition that the culture war is an ideological step in a program to alienate the individual from traditional institutions and reincorporate him in a new world order. The corporate state is replacing the family with government agencies, public schools being the most obvious institution for the immediate and comprehensive cultivation of future consumers and political actors for these purposes. Schools have our children for the better part of the day, a situation imposed by the structure of the working day and the necessity of both parents to work in industrialized society. Medicalizing, racializing, and sexualizing children are key elements of the strategy. COVID-19 exposed the program. The corporate state is desperately trying to put the cat back in the bag. If you know anything about cats, you know they have a real task before them.

The men who allegedly perpetrated the mass shooting in Sacramento that left six dead and many more injured have been arrested. They are Dandrae Martin and Smily Martin. They are bothers. I suspect the character of the coverage of this even will shift now that the race of the suspects is known. We saw this with the disappearance of the Waukesha terrorist, as I predicted (Waukesha is Scheduled to be Memory Holed). (In fact, Google has removed my blog entry on Waukesha from its searchable index.)

There is a lot invested in manufacturing the perception that mass shooting is lone white male phenomenon. In fact, white males are underrepresented in mass shootings. See my April 2021 blog on mass shooting on Freedom and Reason to understand this dynamic (you can still find this one using Google searching): How to Misrepresent the Racial Demographics of Mass Murder. This is a big lie told for political purposes.

Obscuring the demographics of homicide not only conceals the fact that most perpetrators of homicide in the United States are black men, but it also conceals the fact that most homicide victims in the United States are black, as well (mostly black men). In light of the fact that black men make up only 6 percent of the US population and blacks only around 12-13 percent of the US population overall, these are shocking truths.

Black men are no more naturally inclined to murder than white men. Mass murder is a sociocultural phenomenon. I refuse to believe there is nothing society can do to stop black-on-black violence. But until the problem is recognized for what it is, society cannot take the necessary action. Why is so much energy expended to keep the public from recognizing the reality about murder in America or shaming those who do?

Media distortions furthermore obscure the fact that violent crime is largely concentrated in the most impoverished neighborhoods of big cities run by progressive Democratic governments. Therein lies a big part of why the media distorts perceptions of violence. The corporate media is prepared to systematically warp the reality of violent crime—a distortion that perpetuates the large-scale death of mostly young black Americans (thousands killed annually)—not only to maintain a false narrative about guns, but to keep American cities under the thumb of the Democratic Party.

Numerous editorials are out today telling the public that the problem is guns. The Los Angeles Times tells opines that “Gun Violence is America’s way of life—and death.” Until the summer of 2020, homicide in America was at historic lows. It started declining rapidly after the mid-1990s and remained low for decades. Meanwhile, gun ownership was steady. Violence started rising with the depolicing movement pushed by BLM and progressive Democrats. It’s not guns. It’s culture and politics.

April 1, National Public Radio carries the headline: “LGBTQ groups sue Florida over the so-called ’Don’t Say Gay’ law.” At least NPR has enough integrity left to let readers in on the secret that the title of the law is not “Don’t Say Gay,” misinformation that saw a lot of activists and allies obnoxiously repeating “Gay!” on social media and wherever they could find a camera to peer into. On March 28, Governor Ron DeSantis signed House Bill (HB) 1557, its actual title “Parental Rights in Education,” affirming parents’ fundamental rights to make decisions regarding the upbringing of their children. The tag “Don’t Say Gay” was designed to obscure the real title of the bill.

HB 1557 prohibits classroom instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation for children kindergarten through third grade, as well as other instruction that is not age appropriate for students. Recognizing that the family is the basic unit of the social order, the law also requires school districts to adopt procedures for notifying parents if there is a change in services from the school regarding the emotional, mental, or physical health, or well-being of their children. With global corporate power at its back, most notably Disney, which has banished the words “boys” and “girls” and “gentlemen” and “ladies” from its scripts, the LGBTQ lobby has moved to stop the implementation of the law.

Whatever your view on matters of gender identity and sexual orientation (my own, consistent with my left-libertarian beliefs, is to tolerate wide diversity in these domains), the challenge filed in federal court in Tallahassee on behalf of Equality Florida and Family Equality (EFFE) gets the free speech right profoundly wrong. This is crucial, because it is upon this right that the lobby seek redress. In fact, the free speech right actually works against their argument.

The freedom to speak and be heard, as well as to associate with those with whom one wishes, where it does not exclude others from exercising their right to the same, are indeed key pieces of First Amendment protections. Central to fully realizing this right, and without oppressing others, is freedom from compelled speech, as well as freedom from being forced to be part of associations and programs based on doctrines not established in the law. As a free person, I do not have to receive instruction in Islam. Nor do I have to participate in its rituals. I have only to tolerate it where it does not interfere with my freedoms. In other words, public school instruction is to educate children not indoctrinate them.

Children in public schools are captive audiences and hence especially vulnerable to indoctrination. I recognize the desire among progressives to politicize public schools, to develop and implement curricula and pedagogies that advance their political agenda, but this is entirely inappropriate in our public institutions (and should be in most of our private ones as well). The same is true with instruction in critical race theory, an openly political-ideological project to change the way individuals think about race relations and justice in America (see The Fight Against Compelled Speech). As earlier alluded to, there is no substantive difference between instruction in gender theory or critical race theory and religious education.

I am aware of the idea that getting children when they’re young, years five through eight being most crucial, is the most effective way of installing assumptions in them that make thought control easier to accomplish later in the life. The philosophy here is what is sometimes referred to as automatism, its goal to make a way of thinking habitual and reflexive. It works the same way as the civilizing process of imparting manners to the unwashed. However, whereas manners are innocuous customs (interaction rituals) that facilitate social life in a myriad of ways, political ideologies have a very different function. Political ideologies are particularly problematic when they are administered by unelected officials in government agencies.

As I recount in my 2011 blog Junior Achievement—Relevant Bits of the Letter I Wrote the Principal, I opposed the Junior Achievement program “Our Community” being taught to elementary school students. I removed my seven-year-old from class for that period when I failed to stop its implementation. I hesitated taking this action because I did not want him to feel ostracized. But what was I supposed to do? Have him sit there while propagandists from the business class teach him how to maximize profits by rationalizing production and why that was a good thing? I made the best decision I could. But I should never have been put in that position.

I want to be crystal clear about this matter. I don’t care what the ideology in question is. I’m a Marxist (what I wrote a moment ago likely gave that away). If there was curriculum in second grade instructing students about the materialist conception of history, I would oppose it as vigorously as I opposed the presence of corporate propaganda in my son’s classroom. This is not a matter of where you stand on a particular issue. It’s a matter of civil rights.

The EFFE lawsuit states, “This effort to control young minds through state censorship—and to demean LGBTQ lives by denying their reality—is a grave abuse of power.” First off, there is nothing demeaning about not talking to children about gender identity and sexual orientation. There are all sorts of things teachers don’t discuss with children at that age. That line is there to short-circuit reason by appealing to emotion. More substantively, indeed what is really at issue here, the effort to influence young minds through state indoctrination is the actual grave abuse of power. Any instruction concerning sexuality should be reserved for later in life and circumscribed by public health concerns—not the conception of public health corrupted by political ideology (e.g. “systemic racism as a public health concern”), but public health in terms of reproductive awareness add hygiene. (I don’t want anybody getting the idea that I think that teaching safe sex to teenagers is a bad idea. Quite the contrary.)

The EFFE lawsuit goes on to say, “The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that LGBTQ people and their families are at home in our constitutional order.” This is true. It is also true that heterosexual people and their families are at home in our constitutional order. That constitutional order protects all children from compelled speech apart from gender identity and sexual orientation. The US Bill of Rights is for all people.

“The State of Florida has no right to declare them outcasts, or to treat their allies as outlaws, by punishing schools where someone dares to affirm their identity and dignity,” the EFFE lawsuit continues. I have reviewed the law. But maybe I missed something in that review. I would appreciate somebody showing me where in the law the state of Florida is declaring anybody outcasts or outlaws. But I don’t think I missed anything. In fact, I know I didn’t. What is clear in this legal action is an objection to a law asserting two fundamental rights: the right of children to be freed from ideological indoctrination and the right of parents to raise their children in a manner they believe is best for them.

As for this claim that HB 1557 transgresses the freedom of speech of administrators and teachers, public school teachers, university professors excepted, do not enjoy academic freedom. Public school teachers are hired to deliver a curriculum. Administrators are hired to organize and manage teachers for that task. Teachers work for the community they falsely presume the right to shape. It is the parents who are ultimately in charge of their children’s education. I have been a stalwart supporter of public education all my life. However, developments over the last several decades have shaken that support. Frankly, had I to do it all over again, I would likely home school my children. It pains me to say this, as I believe very much in the ideal of public education. But it has become corrupted by political agendas.

Administrators, teachers, and their unions will deny that they are pushing any agenda. They appear oblivious to the character of their practices. You will note that they are almost uniformly progressives. Why does it seem not to occur to progressives that pushing particular theories of gender and race instruction in public schools is indoctrination? Why would administrators and teachers even consider circumventing the wishes of parents by, for example, hiding curricula (the purchase parents gained by being able to see curricula and pedagogy under COVID-19 lockdown conditions is what opened up all of this) or keeping from parents information concerning their children’s emotional, mental, or physical health, or well-being? Understanding this is the deeper matter. The corporate state, the extended state apparatus that includes the culture industry and educational institutions, is trying to get our children.

One must understand that progressives are not liberals. They are neither democrats nor republicans (note the small “d” and “r”). If they were any of these things they would insist public schools impart knowledge that prepares children for a successful life in pursuit of self-actualization with an awareness of their civic responsibilities as citizens of a free republic. They would insist on instruction in logic, math, and science, as well as mastery over the written word, all the while insisting that it is not the role of educators in public institutions to shape community life, but to deliver a service that empowers individuals to develop an independent mind and shape their communities on their terms.

Progressivism is the subjectivity of the professional-managerial strata—the middle class. It is the conscious and practical expression of the corporate state, of government bureaucracy, of the technocratic order that serves the power elite. The same power that drives Junior Achievement into schools is the same power that drives gender theory and critical race theory into that institution. It is not in the interests of the powerful for children to develop independent minds that possess the capacity to analyze situations objectively and in terms of individual situations and class interests. The corporate state desires the indoctrination of children to more completely create and integrate docile bodies with the control structures that make the lives of the proles serve the ends of the party. There is no room in this scheme for civil liberties. Hence the First Amendment can be bent out of shape with apparent oblivion.

Franz Neumann tells us in his landmark 1942 work Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism that, because National Socialist law, in decoupling law from the normative system emergent from organic social relations, eschewed generality, it is difficult to say there is any law at all under totalitarian monopoly capitalism. At least not in Nazi Germany. Rather than reflecting and defending the organic social relations that gave meaning and purpose to it, the law became an instrument of radical social change directed by institutions subservient to a political ideology. But not only in Nazi Germany.

The denial of generality changed the law from a universal system representing the liberty and rights of all individuals to a system of differential protection where, depending on status, privileges, i.e., special rights, stood in the place of civil and human rights. “Absolute denial of the generality of the law,” Neumann writes, “is the central point in National Socialist legal theory.”

Following millennia of practice, the term “nation” meant for National Socialists something other than nation-state; it meant ethnicity, a people, which Nazis conflated with race. This is how German Jews came to be recognized as something other than German. What Nazis sought was a society in which the law privileged ethnic Germans, the “Germanic race,” believed the dominant national spirit in its territories; Jews and other inferior and subhuman nations were naturally subordinated to the superior races.

This is the meaning of National Socialism. It is “socialist” in the sense that individuals are subordinated to the corporate state, their personal identities disappeared into the collective. This is a specification of socialism unique to its totalitarian form. However, Nazi Germany remained an industrial capitalist society. A major purpose behind the establishment of National Socialism was to respond to the crisis of capitalism during that period, to restore the rate of profit by disciplining labor, undermining the movements for the democratic socialism and communism, which the Nazis portrayed as a Jewish cabal, and expanding the scope of the corporate state, first to Europe, then to the world. The corporate state found useful the Nazi project of replacing class consciousness with identitarian politics.

Configuring society along racial lines is the “national” piece of National Socialism. Under conditions of totalitarianism, individuals are depersonalized, deindividuated. The deindividuated are organized into racial groups, or nations, which already existed as ethnicities since capitalism and the nation in its civic sense (the nation-state) had not yet fully developed and detribalized society. The Nazis promoted the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft, or “people’s community.” What were becoming individuals became personifications of abstractions, hierarchically ordered, rationalized by a scientism that biologized society. Retribalization was (and is) a strategy of control.

The hierarchy of races was an abstraction of nineteenth century racial theory, developed initially by Joseph Arthur De Gobineau, who theorized that there was a natural hierarchy based on skin color and other phenotypic markers. This is the atavistic character of Nazism, its pretense to science not withstanding. Indeed, race science is anti-scientific; it’s ideology. This idealist scheme was applied to the world; Nazis used race science to forge alliances beyond the German territories.

Because of the superficial understanding of the character of German fascism, surprising given how vital it is to grasp the nature of an existential threat to freedom and equality, at least if one is honest about “never again,” the branding of the ideology of that period confuses many people, leading them to falsely equate Nazi Germany with the goals of socialism generally. We see this confusion most often on the political right, but it must also exist on the left; the authoritarian and illiberal character of progressivism goes unrecognized by the rank and file.

Ethnic Germans asserted their right to race privilege in part on a claim that they had been wronged by the Jewish race. Seeing the world through the lens of race, it was not just the Jewish fraction of the capitalist class that had wrong them. Social segmentation was not to be viewed through the lens of social class. That was Marxist trickery, and therefore Jewish. Jews, whether bourgeois or proletariat, were to be dealt with by what was truly common to them: their national identity. That is, their race. Because race was an objective and natural thing, the Jewish identity did not depend on subjectivity. A man was Jewish even when he did not see himself as such.

Nazis used this alleged wrong to institute a program of reparations wherein Jewish property was brought under state control and then appropriated. In the end, dispossessed of property and legal protections, Jews were marched to concentration camps where they lost everything.

A presumption in National Socialism, then, indeed the “ideological technique of the new legal theory,” as Neumann puts it in Behemoth, is that “freedom and equality are cloaks behind which exploitation is hidden.” Freedom and equality are the virtues of liberal capitalism, the political economic system Jews developed and used to amass great stores of wealth at the expense of ethnic German and and other workers of the superior races. The goal of National Socialism was to negate individual liberty and the principle of equality before the law and subsume persons under the total institutional authority of the extended state apparatus—this in order to right the world. For Nazis, this was social justice.

Identity politics was a major ideological component used to accomplish this goal on a mass level. Crucial to its success was working this way of thinking into common sense. Everybody had to think primarily in terms of race. Everything had to be about ancestry. Everything was tribal. This worldview had to be established as what Antonio Gramsci conceptualized as hegemony: those who opposed the new world order had to be canceled; everybody else accepting the worldview as just and virtuous. The Nazis did this by establishing control over the dominant institutions of society—marching their ideology through the universities and colleges, the mass media, etc., demanding its inclusion everywhere in the curriculum, in the reporting, etc.

When you hear rhetoric telling you that “freedom and equality are cloaks behind which exploitation is hidden” it is imperative that understand what lies behind this rhetoric. This is why it is so important to understand the character of National Socialism. This is a lesson from history. The survival of liberties and rights depends on recognizing the problem of identity politics and stopping it in its tracks.

Consider the demand we hear today to replace equality with equity. Equality before the law, the argument goes, leads to unjust outcomes for certain groups because it does not take into account the different circumstances these groups face. This is even true of equality of opportunity, since not everybody is in a position to take advantage of the opportunities out there. Equity, on the other hand, takes account of the different circumstances of individuals and groups and allocates resources in a manner that achieves equal outcomes. It supposes a social injustice that needs repairing. Somebody has something they came by wrongly and they need to make amends.

Marx’s slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (from his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme), often identified as the principle of communism, where each individual has access to capital, goods, and services, is held up as a statement of equity. However, it also a statement of equality, as under communism each person has equal access to capital, goods, and services. Moreover, there is an expectation that each individual will contribute to society to the best of his ability. And, crucially, Marx’s slogan concerns individuals. It does not concern groups—not even social class (under communism there will be no social class). Equality and equity become sharply differentiated when applied to abstract groupings and in a way antithetical to Marxism, as well as liberalism.

The principle in operation at the founding of the American Republic was equality before the law. This is a liberal principle. Equality is central to the logic of Enlightenment, the normative order associated with the development of capitalism in Europe. Even though the law under capitalism reflects the structure and imperative of that mode of production (this is a general principle of the relationship between political economy and the law), normative social relations were such as to demand of the law the same protection of liberties and rights for the proletariat enjoyed by the bourgeoisie. To be sure, this arrangements served to keep the bourgeoisie in power, but it also meant that the individual proletarian was afforded due process and the right to seek redress of grievances through the law.

One may cynically theorize this as a hegemonic move, but the effect is very real. The abolition of race-based chattel slavery, exploitative relations developed during Islamic hegemony in the Mediterranean world-system inherited by European civilization, a legacy of the mercantilist period, was the result of the resolution of the contradiction between freedom and slavery that the principle of equality made possible. In time, the principle of equality—that each individual was to be judged without respect to the color of his skin—resulted in the abolition of segmented systems based on race.

However, for the critical race theorist (CRT), as with the National Socialists, “freedom and equality are cloaks behind which exploitation is hidden.” Both movements (countermovements really) organize their politics around race. Obsessively so. While CRT may not explicitly biologize race in the way National Socialism did, it nonetheless essentializes it in a way that renders it indistinguishable from the Nazi appeal to biology. CRT does differ from National Socialism in its appeal to a second-order simulacrum of Marxism, where it is allegedly held that the freedom and equality promised by bourgeoise legal order is an illusion.

But the communism of Karl Marx and the proletarian movement for which he served as master theoretician was not about destroying freedom and equality, but rather transforming economic relations such that freedom and equality could be fully realized in practice. Marx was a dialectician who sought higher unity in the system of liberal values by abolishing capitalist social relations. The higher unity that required overthrowing the contradiction between the private control over capital (the source of alienation) and all the other rights and liberties promised by the Enlightenment.

Marx never conceptualized individuals as mere personifications of abstract social categories save one: the material system of social class segmentation, not only under capitalism, but under every economic system since the original position of man was overthrown, i.e., primitive communism. Politics based on Marxism, if they are true to premise, do not seek a return to the original position of primitivism, but instead to achieve communism at an advanced stage of technological development, one in which necessary labor is eliminated (inevitable with rationalization—mechanization, automation, and so forth), with distribution of goods and services necessary based on need. Marx would never suppose that individuals are personifications of ideological categories. That would return Marx’s dialectic to Hegel, where it was standing on its head. CRT is antithetical to Marxism.

As I write in Critical Race Theory: A New Racism, “CRT treats individuals, materially concrete entities, flesh-and-blood human beings, members of the same species, as personifications of racial categories, as projections of ideas, an act of reification, i.e., making an idea out to be a real thing, while treating group-level disparities, i.e., statistical abstractions, as the actual circumstances of concrete persons. CRT thus commits two fallacies: (1) the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, i.e., treating abstractions as if they are real things, and (2) the ecological fallacy, i.e., drawing conclusions about individuals from group-level statistics.”

CRT perversely uses these fallacies as “truths” in a project to establish a new system of racism, one where individuals are not judged before law without respect to race or ancestry, but judged precisely on the basis of race and ancestry. Society and its justice system are to be organized on the basis of race.

This is not a future state of affairs. The project has already been substantially imposed. A black individual, regardless of economic standing or other advantages or disadvantages, enjoys the same race privilege in college admissions or consideration for employment over against every individuals who is assigned whiteness. Here, equality and equity are radically different things. In this scheme, whites as a group suffer systemic discrimination on the basis of race.

Blacks as a group are typically referred to as the “black community.” Increasingly, and in many places as a matter of style, the racial designation is capitalized (sometimes only for blacks). Thus we have witnessed emerge over the last several decades, the notion of the Volksgemeinschaft, or “people’s community.” The practice of defining a demographic category as a “community” conveys common interests and values. As a member of a monolithic group, each black individual is supposed to share interests contrary to those of whites.

If, on the other hand, racial ordering is abolished, and all individuals are treated as such, insisting on equity, i.e., equality of outcome, even if imperfectly achieved, would represent an attempt to achieve substantive equality. Not just for this or that group, but for everybody. Failure to achieve substantive equality would not necessarily make the formal equality principle unjust. Shouldering the burden of proof, the person claiming an injustice would be required to demonstrate his claim empirically and without reference to his group identity (with a few exceptions, such as disability).

Generally speaking, an individual is not a stand-in for an abstraction except where his position is physically or materially determined, such as in the cases of disability, sex differences, and societal class. Race is neither physical nor material. Neither is religion.

Surely you have you noticed the fetish rank-and-file progressives make of race in equity discussions while saying little or nothing about social class? Indeed, white proletarians are the subject of scorn by leftwing identitarians. They are the lot of them white supremacists. Have you also noticed how the rights of girls and women, heretofore based on sex differences, which are objectively real and scientifically determinable, are being dismantled and biological males are taking their place? In these cases, material and physical realities are denied and capitalism and patriarchy preserved, even more deeply achieved, while subjective categories that disrupt consciousness of these realities are elevated.

We have seen that the call for more reparations has gone out in America. Even before the program has been formalized, we see reparations in kind perpetrated in cities across America. But the formal system is coming along nicely. A task force in California is divided on which black Americans should be eligible for compensation as atonement for a slave system that officially ended with the Civil War. But there is a task force.

Since no living black person in America (with the exception of some African immigrants) was ever a slave, the choice is arbitrary. Why not run with CRT logic and treat every black person as a personification of a murky abstraction? The more difficult questions are (1) which white people do you make pay for something they could not possibly have done (go with CRT here and blame all white Californians) and (2) how do you separate out the black money from the white money to avoid blacks paying themselves reparations? A more thoroughgoing system of segregation is the solution for (2). We see the signs of resegregation everywhere.

I am not arguing the critical race theory and National Socialism are identical. There are many differences one may catalog if he wishes. I leave that to those who are interested in muddling matters. What I am arguing is that in form and substance the similarities represent two forms of fascist race thinking, both occurring in the context of totalitarian monopoly capitalism. That the present totalitarian order is, as Sheldon Wolin told us, inverted only makes the actual character of our circumstances a bit more difficult to recognize. But not impossible. (Indeed, as I argue in From Inverted to Naked Totalitarianism: The West in Crisis the totalitarian character of the present movement becomes more bold with time.)

The core marker of fascistic racism is a pervasive preoccupation with race and the existence of a corporate state organizing social life around that preoccupation, chiefly accomplished by shifting law from a focus on individual liberties and rights, emphasizing equality before the law, to a focus on group privileges and equity based on primitive notions of collective guilt and punishment. Both National Socialism and CRT seek to overthrow the Enlightenment and the modern nation-state and return human society to its tribal forms in the context of a world neo-feudalism governed by corporate states.

At the time he was penning Behemoth, Neumann could see that “[t]he principles [of the new legal order] are not fully developed. The law is still in a state of flux, the judiciary not yet fully synchronized.” One can see flux happening in real time. But you have to have the correct theory. In 1945, the Allied victory put an end to the transformation of German law into a system that denied the reality of human social relations, that sought to negate freedom and rights for individuals and subordinate them to institutional control.

While Nazi Germany was defeated, the spirit of the corporate state survived and found a new angle. This new angle is what I am calling the New Fascism. We find ourselves at back at essentially the same moment, where freedom and equality, indeed the entire normative order, are cast as the forces of oppression and the law and the judiciary, and this false characterization is being used to realign the political-juridical system with an antithesis that threatens to destroy reason and progress. The West is in an existential crisis.

There’s a lot more to the New Fascism than CRT. I invite you to spend some time on Freedom and Reason to learn more about what confronts us (see, for example, Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow). One of the most striking things I will mention here is that in both National Socialism and progressivism generally is the fact of rank-and-file support found in the middle class, the professional-managerial strata; key elements of the voting base common to both are engineers, government officials, journalists, physicians, school teachers, scientists, and students.

As a college professor, I am a member of the professional-managerial class. I chose my line of work because it’s interesting to me. Teaching was a calling. Although unintended, it puts me on the inside where I hear what elites really think about working people. For these elites, those in the heartland constitute a bunch of mouth-breathing neanderthals. They see them as an inferior breed. But I do not identify politically with that class or the class it supports, namely the corporate class. My choice of comrades is the working class. I’ve been there. I have dirtied my hands. And not just in my flower garden. That choice and experience, in addition to knowing the fate that awaits us if we do not act, guide my politics.

Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscar’s last night. Rock, well-known for his acerbic wit, was preparing to present the nominees for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. The camera focused on Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith just as Rock quipped, “Jada, love you. GI Jane 2, can’t wait to see it.” The reference was to the 1997 film starring Demi Moore, her role as special forces requiring her to shave her head. Pinkett Smith suffers from alopecia, am autoimmune condition that causes hair loss. Pinkett Smith rolled her eyes at the joke. Her husband laughed. Then, realizing what he (Smith) had done, he walked up to Rock and assaulted him.

Did this really happen? Or was it a simulation? It looked real enough. Planned or not, the strike was genuine. If it was staged, what was the point? I can see none. Neither Smith nor Rock had anything to gain from the stunt. It tarnishes Smith’s image. If he comes out later and claims it was a ruse, which requires Rock either admitting the same or lying for Smith (thus tarnishing his image, as well), it will appear either as a factitious act without purpose (it’s not as if Smith needed to Jussie Smollett his career) or an attempt to dissimulate the reality of unjustified violence. How could this not be real?

Let’s proceed as if it were real. Despite having violently assaulted Rock, Smith was not arrested. Those who justified his actions claimed that he was defending his wife’s honor. (Odd to see those first in line to condemn the patriarchy find Smith’s actions chivalrous.) Does speech ever justify violence? No. If you disagree with the words that come out of a person’s mouth or hand (pen, gesture), and the situation permits open debate and dissent, then you may engage the speaker in kind—i.e. with words. Otherwise, you may either sit quietly and listen or leave the presence of the speaker and the audience. Speech is never a justification for violence.

Violence is justifiable only under three conditions: (1) defense of self against on-going or imminent physical assault; (2) defense of innocents (those who cannot defend themselves) against on-going or imminent physical assault; (3) abolition of tyranny, i.e. situation of illegitimate oppression or violence. These conditions obtain at individual and collective levels. Had Rock met Smith’s violent actions with physical force, this would likely have been justified action. Rock could not be sure Smith only had in mind a single blow. But Smith’s action has no justification legally or morally. Rock has declined to press charges. He should.

I know people are already sick of this. Two privileged entertainers living lives working people can only imagine. Why waste time blogging about it? Because the moment is an instantiation of the pathology of wokeness. It signals an erosion of liberal values of free speech and the ethic of non-violence in dispute resolution. Only last year, when asked about the possibility of a political career, Smith ranted about “systemic racism,” a central notion in the ideology that inspired rampant violence during the summer and fall months of 2020 and continues to motivate and justify violent behavior. Physically assaulting others over their speech acts—a comedian, no less—is no longer the sole expression of rightwing reactionary impulse (if it ever was). In today’s political climate, the progressive is all to eager to commit violence against others for some offense or another. Taking offense is the spirit of woke progressivism.

“Sticks and stones may break bones, but words can never hurt you.” Remember that slogan from our childhood? There is a reason why we were taught to say that. First, it builds resilience. The world is a place were people say things to get a reaction. The child who is prepared to take in stride offensive speech grows into a well-adjusted and reasonable adult; cognitive health depends on honing one’s skills to resist the impulses of the id. Second, the slogan articulates a principle foundational to a free, open, and tolerant society. Words apart from action don’t inflict injury. Words don’t work that way. As Frank Zappa insisted, they are words. Check your anger and jealousy and keep your hands to yourself. But Biden threatens to take people out behind the shed. And Robert De Niro wants to punch them in the face.

What about “fighting words”? In successive decisions, the Supreme Court has sharply curtailed Chaplinsky v New Hampshire (1942) to the point of effectively overturning it (Chaplinsky was a ridiculous decision given the circumstances.) Brandenburg v Ohio (1969), four rulings in 1972 (Gooding v Wilson, Rosenfeld v New Jersey, Lewis v New Orleans, and Brown v Oklahoma), and Collin v Smith (1978) narrowed fighting words to “a direct personal insult or an invitation to exchange fisticuffs,” as articulated in Texas v Johnson (1989). Smith, attempting to save face after laughing at a joke about his wife’s medical condition, can hardly claim to have been the subject of a direct personal insult. Rock’s utterance was clearly a joke. Rock is an insult comic. This is the essence of his routine. On the other hand, Rock could reasonably interpret Smith’s actions and works as an invitation to exchange fisticuffs. To his credit, Rock showed remarkable restraint. And poise. After a moment of dismay, he continued with his assigned duties.

Comedians are given special leeway in a free society—even in societies that are not so free (recall the court jester)—to say the things that others are thinking but too afraid to say. Humor is a way to acknowledge the inner thoughts of the audience, to create mutual knowledge, and to release tension. Comedy makes a society honest. Indeed, we are so entertained by comedians is because they safely function as a release for notions we keep bottled up. So we have collectively agreed to let them say the uncomfortable things for us. They occupy a ceremonial or liminal space that serves to reduce the anxieties aroused by social interaction and uncomfortable thoughts. Comedians are, in an anthropological sense, the universal shaman, independent of this or that doctrine. As we have seen, the woke are joy eaters. For them humor is not what makes people laugh—everybody laughed at Rock’s joke because it was funny—but rather what produces clapter. And clapter is just another manifestation of virtue signaling.

One last thing. Folks are qualifying their criticism of Smith by criticizing Rock’s joke. The hedge typically takes this form: “Smith’s wrong doesn’t make Rock right. Both things can be true.” But if Chris Rock was wrong, then Will Smith wouldn’t have laughed. Just because a joke is personal doesn’t make it unfunny. Both of those things can be true.

“Now is a time when things are shifting. We’re going to—there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it. And we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.” President Joe Biden addressing the Business Roundtable’s CEO Quarterly Meeting.

Citizen journalist and popular podcaster Tim Pool had it exactly right several weeks ago when he noted that, if you advance the interests of working class and individual freedom, then you risk being called a fascist and a racist. This is certainly the case with Steve Bannon, the populist Republican strategist who stands with working people against corporate power and transnationalism—a right-wing Catholic who calls for, among other things, nationalizing Big Pharma and Big Tech and turning them into public utilities. Accused of being a “conspiracy theorist,” Bannon delivers his arguments six days a week sitting before a placard that reads: “There are no conspiracies, but there are no coincidences.”

Sick in bed from what may very have been my first go around with SARS-CoV-2, I started listening to Steve Bannon’s War Room in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Let’s see what all this is about,” I said to my lovely wife. At first, Bannon offered two hours of programming six days a week on various outlets. He then added an evening hour. With the 2022 election season ramping up, he’s now added a fourth hour. I listen to his program live (on America’s Voice at Pluto TV) or via Apple podcast. It was finding the podcast that introduced me to the podcast universe, where I found Triggernometry and The Glenn Loury Show, among others. (I first write about Bannon in May 2020 in The Economic Nationalism of Steven K. Bannon. There I note some of the things I do not agree with Bannon on. Those points of disagreement haven’t changed.) With COVID mass hysteria at peak madness, the War Room became a rock.

It didn’t take long before before it became obvious that those who had tried to warn me away from Bannon were either ignorant or lying about the man’s political-ideological standpoint. To be sure, rank-and-file Democrats (and this includes academics) don’t really know anything about the man except that he was the mastermind behind Donald Trump’s trouncing of Hillary Clinton in 2016. For them, that made him bad enough. If they didn’t believe Clinton was owed White House residency, they were sure that she was the lesser of the two evils. Political and media elites, on the other hand, deployed the standard propaganda tactic of sowing mass prejudice (this piece in Mother Jones is typical). Beyond ignorance, accusations of fascism and racism are rarely meant to be truthful; they are designed to confuse, deceive, and marginalize. The corporate state understands that it has to keep people away from Bannon and, for those who might give him a listen, instill trepidation of reputational costs if they ever post a positive review.

But Bannon is neither the fascist nor racist progressive portray him to be (and I am not longer afraid of reputational costs). I’ve been listening to the War Room hardcore for two years now and I have yet to detect even a whiff of fascism or racism in Bannon’s speech or that of those around him. I have to tell the truth about this. A major element in the deception is to distract the public from the actual fascism that is controlling them—the fascism of the transnationalizing corporate state. It’s not as if I am confused about the content and form of fascism and racism. A professional political sociologist, I’ve been lecturing in college classrooms, giving talks at academic conferences, and publishing in scholarly outlets about these subjects for decades. Numerous essays on fascism and racism appear here on Freedom and Reason if you care to know what I think about these problems.

Bannon has been warning populists, in a sentiment echoed (likely unknowingly and perhaps regretfully if known) by linguist and public intellectual John McWhorter during a recent conversation with Loury, to paraphrase: if you’re going to tell the truth about the world, the progressives are going to call you a racist for it. You’re just going to have get over being called names, says McWhorter. Bannon has put the matter more dramatically. “Let them call you racist,” he told a gathering of French populists (far rightwingers in establishment media accounts) in March of 2018. “Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists.” He continued, “Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker.” Why xenophobes and nativists? Because nationalists believe in borders (as does every progressive when it comes to the integrity of Ukraine) and understand that people are culture bearers. Why racists? Because populists are nationalists of the wrong sort, i.e., they defend the integrity of the West.

In elaborating his comment to Loury, McWhorter observed that, as racists, the heretics of today are the equivalents of witches of yesteryear, which is to say that, just as there were no witches, there are no racists—at least not those who are accused as such. The basis of the accusation is supernatural in either case (and, at least in the case of racism, so is the category upon which it supposedly based). Karen and Barbara Field’s observations in Racecraft are useful here. They argue that the practice rationalizes inequality. McWhorter pursues the analogy in his recent book Woke Racism. Both works condemn a politics founded upon reification. But here I will excuse the Fields and McWhorter from my full argument, as I believe they would feel I have extended the point too far (for sure, McWhorter would); for the woke, globalist in orientation, nationalists are by definition racist because patriotism and nationalism form the anti-Christ in globalist theology. This is why progressives loathe those who made the American Republic with such zeal: the founders were nationalists. But the campaign to portray nationalism as a bad thing exposes globalist ambition; the accusation of fascism is projection: transnationalism is the New Fascism (Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow).

Nationalism is the basis of modern western civilization and the Westphalian arrangement that produce modern international law and state relations. Democracy, liberalism, and secularism are possible, at least in the concrete historical record, only in the context of nation-states and republican forms of government. The nation-state and its philosophy carries over the power of the sovereign to bring corporate power to heel. Nationalism is the basis of universal human rights, which reflects the secular ethical system of humanism. Nationalism—and we are here talking about civic nationalism not ethnonationalism (or race nationalism)—is the context in which the individual, not the group or the elite, becomes the focus of government. The values of autonomy and liberty and human rights flow from the humanist ethic of individualism. (See The Individual, the Nation-State, and Left-Libertarianism and Populism and Nationalism.)

Transnationalism, in contrast, allows for, indeed encourages, the flourishing of ethnic, racial, and other identify group formation and politics. This explains a paradox my dissertation advisor Asafa Jalata used to point out in his hallway debates in McClung Tower at the University of Tennessee with William Robinson (now at UC-Santa Barbara): the paradox of ethnic antagonisms, or balkanization, amid the economic homogenization produced by capitalist arrangements. Why was it that the more deeply the transnational capitalists sank their hooks into world intercourse, the more homogeneous economic relations and market pulls become, the more fractured the world becomes politically? It seems the dismantling of the political and juridical structure of modern nation states releases latent hatreds, nations in the old sense of that word desiring to wrap around themselves their own state, with transnational power licking its chops at sight of weaker prey. This is ethnonationalism. We are witnessing the dynamic play out in eastern Europe right now. It’s why Nazis play such a central role in the present Ukrainian resistance to Russian invasion. Crucially, identitarianism gives this fracturing conscious purpose. That’s why the CIA trained Ukrainian Nazis to provoke Russian intervention. (See History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War and The US is Not Provoking Russia—And Other Tall Tales. )

I told readers of Freedom and Reason years ago that the struggle for democracy and liberty is no longer left versus right. The ascendency of corporate power negates that continuum by dressing its authoritarianism in leftwing ideals. The so-called left, that which claims the principles of progressivism as its lights, has become destructive to the ends the left originally emerged to defend and extend. Originally, the left represented radicals against aristocracy and top-down administration, the latter represented by the right. The right was conservative in the absolutist sense, pining for the Ancien Régime, the political system that existed before the French Revolution. Real leftwing thought and practice is humanist, liberal, rationalist, scientific, and secularist. While progressives say this is what they’re up to, big government interventions have resulted in ever greater corporate power and concentration of capital and wealth in fewer hands. Indeed, the present order is more rightwing in this sense than that of the Ancien Régime where at least the king had the power to call the corporation to answer before it.

As I intimated in my first essay on Bannon, as someone who specializes in international political economy (speaking of myself here), Bannon’s breadth of knowledge about global corporate capitalism is an oasis in a desert of otherwise impoverished popular and faux-expert pundit understandings. Bannon knowledge of history is quite impressive. And he gets the importance of grasping political economy as the motor force of history. Bannon’s worldview is compelling. (It’s part of the reason instinctive liberals like Tim Pool, Naomi Wolff, Tulsi Gabbard, and dozens of others are leaving the progressive side and gravitating towards the populist movement. Wolf now regularly appears on Bannon’s War Room.) Bannon is a dialectical thinker, a rare animal these days. There are others who still deploy this critical methodology. The Marxist geographer David Harvey is one. But there are not many more. And our numbers have been dwindling. I mustn’t let it pass that only a few weeks ago we commemorated the ten-year anniversary of the death of an exemplary practitioner of the method, the brilliant essayist and orator Christopher Hitchens. Bannon’s presence is resurrecting the method. To be sure, it’s of a Hegelian tack, but crucially one in opposition to the leftwing Hegelianism one sees among the woke and racist progressivism manifest in critical race theory.

Indeed, against the populist dialectic is a religious consciousness that threatens the foundations of the Enlightenment. Wokeness is a religion for the leftwing professional-managerial strata, the administrative class, and the cultural manager—moral entrepreneurs looking down on the working man and woman, whom they see as infidels. Gas lighting the masses with successive moral panics, the rank and file having internalized corporate loathing for the “proles,” and wicked in the ways of psychological warfare, the progressive blows up the traditions of the West in a project to reorganize the world as a vast network of corporate estates. Progressives control the institutions of society. This is why, if your wondering, the ideology of intersectionality is about everything but social class, even if some of their shock troops portray themselves as “trained Marxists,” handsomely rewarded for their efforts with prime real estate.

In dialectical fashion, the great realignment occurring in the West comes with resistance. The thesis (the Enlightenment) is pitched as reactionary by advocates of its antithesis (the corporate state), but it is not so. The antithesis is totalitarian. In plain language, the world is dividing into two warring factions: the globalist and the nationalist. Just as the globalist faction incorporates left and rightwing elements, so does the nationalist faction. The power elite cannot vanquish a thinker like Steve Bannon merely on the basis of his rightwing identity (largely nominal albeit with definite traits present). The moral dimension of the struggle is punctuated by elite disdain for ordinary Americans in the heartland, the people Hillary Clinton smeared as the “deplorables,” a smear that, at Bannon’s insistence, has become a badge of honor for America’s heartland. The path forward for those on the left who stand with working people is to forge a coalition with populists on the right and unite against transnational capitalist power. We cannot expect the professional-managerial class to join us in this struggle.

Jamelle Bouie writes for The New York Times. Bouie was praised by David Uberti in the Columbia Journalism Review as “one of the defining commentators on politics and race in the Trump era.” So it is a bit surprising that, in a November 2021 op-ed for the Times, “What ‘Structural Racism’ Really Means,” Bouie leverages his misunderstandings of the work of Oliver C. Cox to imply that racism is endemic to capitalism, and therefore structural, and thus cannot be exorcised from American society without confronting the problem of capitalism. Bouie is not alone in making this argument. In a September 2019 appearance on Democracy Now! Ibram X Kendi characterized capitalism and racism as “conjoined twins” and asserted that “the life of capitalism cannot be separated from the life of racism.”

Bouie is not exactly clear about what all is involved in the confrontation he suggests but I assume, if he is following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s opposition to the capitalist mode of production, and the great civil rights leader is where Bouie winds up in his essay, that means getting rid of it. Bouie appears to believe that Oliver C. Cox work will lend his argument oomph. His essay is a paradigm of a journalist dropping an obscure name to give an argument gravity. He could not have picked a more opaque thinker than Cox. Perhaps that was the idea.

Cox is widely regarded as one of the most important theorists of race relations in the United States. Yet, despite authoring half a dozen scholarly books and more than forty scholarly articles, Cox remains an enigma. A Chicago School graduate, which is usually indicative of a particular style and approach, Cox’s work departed substantially from that of his institutional alums working in the same field, such as E. Franklin Frazier and Charles S. Johnson. Often classified as a Marxist scholar, Cox resisted the label, and rightly so, as not much of Marx’s materialist conception of history appears in his work. To his credit, Cox encouraged scholars to ignore the political pressure that pushes Marxist thinking to the periphery of mainstream thought and to engage historical materialist arguments. One might say that Cox was “Marx adjacent.”

Cox founded his scholarship on race relations on the premise that an adequate account of racism in the United States requires a firm grasp of social class and capitalist economics. I agree with the premise. I would find it trivial but for the great number of writers who proceed as if this is not axiomatic. Can we understand any large-scale phenomena without a firm grasp of class and economics? Yet, Cox’s portrayal of black radicals and solutions for overcoming racial inequality often aligned more with popular progressive opinion than it did with the radical cause suggested by his scholarly analysis. This is to say that his solutions tended to take a rather classist and elitist tack.

One of a cohort of notable Trinidad-born social thinkers—C. L. R James, George Padmore, and, albeit a decade younger than the others, Eric Williams—Cox was born at the dawn of the twentieth century in the Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, to an affluent middle-class family. The intersections of biography and history are apparent throughout Cox’s life. I don’t want to get in the weeds on the biographical piece, but I think it’s important to make a few points about it where it determines his scholarship and politics. Crucially, Cox’s early socialization in colonial society shaped his thinking about the correlation between agency and structure; the personal experience of seeing colonial subjects striving to enhance their life chances by modeling white middle class status arrangements and behaviors predisposed him to assume the merits of assimilationist values, for which he became a strident lifelong advocate. It may already be apparent to readers that Bouie has picked the wrong sociologist to give his argument the heft he thinks it deserves.

During the latter 1930s and early 1940s Cox developed the argument for which he is best known: his brief against the caste school of race relations. Cox’s first major treatment of the subject of social caste is an essay published in Social Forces in 1942. He follows this with two essays in 1944 in which he endeavors to clarify the distinction between caste and class. He criticizes the prevailing scholarly view of race advanced by luminaries Ruth Benedict and Robert Park (under whom he had studied), accusing them of unduly abstracting ethnocentrism and racism from historical context and treating these as transhistorical proclivities. Not a bad critique as it goes. Over the next few years, he published numerous essays clarifying his views on race relations. In 1948, Cox collected his arguments in his first and most well-known book, Caste, Class, and Race. Bouie cites this (and only this) book as the basis of his argument.

Caste, Class, and Race was the first major analysis of US race relations since Gunnar Myrdal published his An American Dilemma in 1944. With most published reviews negative, the book rarely cited, the Cold War political environment inhospitable to left-wing scholarship, Doubleday let the book go out of print. Monthly Review Press, a well-known leftwing publishing house, picked up the book in 1959. It is with this later edition that Cox’s argument generated renewed interest. It became useful in the context of a civil rights movement that was pivoting to a more radical tack. To those members of the Old Left sensing radicalism in the air and unsure of what form that would take, Cox seemed to be speaking in a radical register they recognized.

Caste, Class, and Race represented Cox’s desire to refute the core premise of the caste school of race relations, a theory Cox had characterized in Social Forces as both “fad” and “old wine in new bottles” that lacked a “sociological tradition.” The theory was advanced by a prominent group of scholars that included Gunnar Myrdal, Lloyd Warner, and John Dollars. This put Cox in the position of challenging the academic establishment. He did not shrink from the challenge, even if he was at the time largely ignored. For Cox, the caste school noted significant differences between structures of racial caste and those of social class, especially in the comparative degrees of social mobility, which suggested a relative independence of the two categories. In this way of thinking, race relations does not reduce to social class and economics. Cox believed it did.

Cox’s theory, decidedly reductionistic, conceptualized racial antagonisms as an ideological strategy used by capitalist elites to maintain populations for exploitation, one that was intrinsic to the system. Cox charged the caste school with having wrongly appropriated the concept of social hierarchy from the Indian caste system. Boule notes that “Cox was writing at a time when mainstream analysis of race in the United States made liberal use of an analogy to the Indian caste system in order to illustrate the vast gulf of experience that lay between Black and white Americans. His book was a rebuttal to this idea as well as an original argument in its own right.” Unlike the Indian system, which Cox characterizes as substantially rooted in shared values, the US system of racial oppression was founded and maintained through coercion. Yet the concept of caste remains just as applicable to racialized systems of control established during colonization and afterwards and Cox provides no compelling reason to abandon this usage. Moreover, Cox ignores the role of law in reinforcing the hierarchy of the Indian caste system (for example, under the British Raj).

It is of some interest that the idea of caste has been resurrected by Isabel Wilkerson in her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which imagines caste relations in a society that abolished such relations more than half a century ago. As do many trying (it feels desperately to me) to keep alive a social construct that no longer exists in the law, Wilkerson divines an “invisible scaffolding, a caste system with ancient rules and assumptions.” She sees this in the death of George Floyd (see her piece in The New York Times Magazine, America’s Enduring Caste System, and read my critique of it here). Even if we agree that describing race relations in US history as a caste system is valid, no scientific sociological understanding of that theoretical construct could use it to explain race relations in contemporary United States society. Blacks do not constitute a caste anywhere in the West. That does not mean they did not at some point and for a considerable period of time constitute a caste.

Proponents of Cox’s arguments applaud his critique of those methods that abstracted race from the context of class dynamics and history (assuming that this is an error). At the same time, there was considerable opposition to Cox’s arguments. My own critique concerns what amounts to rationalization of history in order to stake out a contrary position. The term “caste,” from the Portuguese casta, meaning “lineage,” was originally used to describe social segmentation based on heredity, a conceptualization that did indeed capture aspects of the racial system. Whereas one could, with some difficulty, escape one’s social class status, it was much more difficult, if not practically impossible, to escape one’s racial status. A leading sociologist, Kingsley Davis, argued that race serves as a basis for caste because the traits that mark one racially are inherited and do not change during a person’s lifetime.

Reviews of Caste, Class, and Race by such prominent scholars as Williston Lofton and Henry Fairchild accused Cox of misrepresenting the Indian caste system and using self-serving definitions. Govind Ghurye, a leading expert on the Indian caste system at the time, characterized Cox’s analysis as “one-sided and inadequate.” Cox’s use of the Indian system was curious given that he recognized the long-standing caste relations in the western hemisphere, while stating at the outset that he would not examine those, and then subsequently suggested that there were no caste relations beyond the Indian system. The assumption that social stratification of the sort described as caste in the Indian system rested on consensuses among the different castes seemed particularly problematic, especially for a scholar who explicitly described his approach as materialist.

At the heart of Cox’s critique was a desire to advance a positive theory of race relations that explained his economic-historical account of the origins of racial antagonisms, a force he denied existed prior to the emergence of the European world system. Advancing a historically situated account of racism, the central proposition in Cox’s argument was that “racial exploitation and race prejudice developed among Europeans with the rise of capitalism and nationalism, and that because of the world-wide ramifications of capitalism, all racial antagonisms can be traced to the policies and attitudes of the leading capitalist people, the white people of Europe and North America.”

For Cox, the economic function of racism was obvious and this explained its existence and character. “Race prejudice in the United States is the socio-attitudinal matrix supporting a calculated and determined effort of a white ruling class to keep some people or peoples of color and their resources exploitable,” he writes. White elites had constructed the matrix deliberately, using it to legitimize a legal infrastructure and social arrangements designed to secure capitalist property relations and advance the accumulation of capital. In Cox’s theory, the materiality of the racial system is denied and racism is reduced to an ideological justification for class segmentation and the exploitation of proletarian labor.

Cox’s conclusion that “racial exploitation is merely one aspect of the problem of the proletarianization of labor, regardless of the color of the laborer” (which is consonant with Marx’s observations) stands uncomfortably alongside the emphasis on the machinations of the “white ruling class” to keep exploitable “peoples of color.” As noted in the previous paragraph, Cox argues that “all racial antagonisms can be traced to the policies and attitudes of the leading capitalist people, the white people of Europe and North America.” Thus the reasoning appears circular: racial antagonisms do not exist prior to the emergence of the capitalist system, yet the capitalist system is created by white people for white people, an intrinsically race-antagonistic system. Put another way, capitalism is a system designed to perpetuate race privilege. That sounds like caste to me.

Cox’s conceptualization of racism as a strategy constructed and wielded by the while capitalist class implies that the proletariat cannot be racist. In his landmark The Wages of Whiteness, David Roediger remarked upon Cox’s famous characterizations of racism as “the socio-attitudinal concomitant of the racially exploitative practice of a ruling class in a capitalistic society.” By reducing racism to an ideology furthering the accumulation of capital, Roediger contended, Cox rendered inorganic any link between the agency of the working class and the culture of white supremacy. “The workers, in this view, largely receive and occasionally resist racist ideas and practices but have no role in creating those practices.” But is Cox really doing this? Why did he say “racially exploitative practice” instead of a construction indicating class exploitation?

The failure of the worker movement to leverage the crisis of capitalism during the Great Depression motivated Cox to expand the scope of his study to the world economic system. Cox published several books on the subject, including The Foundations of Capitalism (1959) and Capitalism as a System (1964). These efforts mark Cox as an early proponent of what would become recognized as world-systems theory. He challenged arguments theorizing the origins of capitalism in the reorganization of agriculture, revolutionary changes in the mode of domestic production, and the eventual rise of industrialism in Western Europe, and theorized that capitalism began in the medieval city-states of the Mediterranean world-system, resulting from the slave trade, transformations in commercial markets, and facilitating technologies, principally shipbuilding. This is Cox’s best work in my estimation.

Cox theory that capitalism upsets theories of indigenous capitalist development rooted in the reorganization of agriculture and the rise of industrialism in Western Europe, theories often accused of Eurocentrism. Cox theorized that the structural foundation of capitalism was not the domestic European economy but colonialism and imperialism. In this view, commercial and political transregional reorganization of domestic producers into a system based on profit established the essence of capitalism. Merchant capital is not antediluvian, as Marxist had suggested. Cox argued that merchant capital was capitalism’s original form. On the basis of this view, Cox dates capitalism’s origins to the early thirteenth century. Anticipating arguments advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein and other world-system theorists, Cox dated capitalism’s origins to the early thirteenth century.

(Cox is not the only scholar to locate capitalism this early. Michael Tigar’s 1978 book Law and the Rise of Capitalism also describes an eight century trajectory. However, Tigar, working from a critical legal studies standpoint that casts the bourgeoisie as an insurgent force, develops a theory of jurisprudence and legal development that centers the role of lawyers in advocating for the interests of the European bourgeoisie. Tigar’s work also contradicts Max Weber’s thesis of the pivotal role of the Protestant Reformation in the emergence and elaboration of the capitalist mode of production. I have been roughing out a synopsis of Tigar’s arguments for a blog essay, so stay tuned. It is this work that inspires me to make this note.)

In other work, Cox addressed more directly the matter of politics. Capitalism and American Leadership (1962), a polemic on the racialized capitalist exploitation that underpinned domestic production system and the imperialist attitude that marked US foreign policy, is representative of his style of scholarship in this arena. His Race Relations (1976) is perhaps most revealing of his political thinking. There, he assails the Black Power movement and speaks of the lumpenproletariat in terms reminiscent of the attitudes of Marx and Engels. He argues that black ghetto culture perpetuates the legacy of slave culture, reflected in such allegedly pathological features as deviance and irresponsibility. Instead of rebelling against the conditions, Cox argued, inner-city blacks should aspire to join the American middle class. Here, his early socialization is perhaps most apparent.

Bouie would have benefitted from Christopher McAuley’s The Mind of Oliver C. Cox, published in 2004 McAuley’s objectivity is commendable given his open admiration of Cox’s scholarship. McAuley portrays Cox as an unyielding ideologue who frequently sacrificed the search for truth to a deeply held conservatism. McAuley doesn’t miss much, and I recommend the book not only to Bouie but to any one who wishes to reach for Cox’s reputation to argue his case. What McAuley does overlook, namely the depth of Cox’s problematical conceptualization of racism, is conspicuous in its absence.

To his credit, McAuley notes the criticisms of Cox’s inattention to working class racism, voiced by Roediger, among others. McAuley is correct in stating that, according to Cox’s definition of racism, the proletariat cannot be such. There is no explanation why, whatever the function of racism, members of the working class cannot abide in it. Here we find another element of Cox’s thinking that exposes Bouie’ superficial interpretation.

It is McAuley critique of Cox’s politics that is most useful here. He focuses on Cox’s response to the black power movement in the 1960s, a phenomenon that Cox’s thinking about colonialism and race played a major role in shaping. Far from embracing the movement, Cox returned to his middle-class cultural conservatism and assailed the Black Nationalism and dumped on the lumpenproletariat. In Race Relations, Cox contends that black ghetto culture issues from the unfortunate retention of key elements of slave culture, including irrationality, irresponsibility, and deviance. Cox felt that blacks should instead strive to assimilate with middle-class America. In the end, Cox had come full circle to his colonial socialization, a conservatism wrapped in socialist pretense. 

Such attitudes undermine Bouie’s argument. Indeed, Cox often reads like Glenn Loury and other liberal black intellectuals who challenge the progressive assumptions of critical race theory. Contrary to Bouie’s argument, Cox winds up arguing that the situation of blacks is cultural. One would never know this just by relying on the image of Cox conveyed by radicals. Cox’s appeal to culture to explain inequality and his embrace of bourgeois values as a way out of the ghetto is an odd praxis for those groups seeking to mobilize the working class. Why would black radicals cite Cox as one of their lights? Frankly, I don’t think many radicals have bothered to read Cox. He is an icon whose work has been effectively locked away in a vault. Cox has become a simulacrum of a radical black thinker useful to black activists who proceed by appeal to authority.

I argued in a 2010 review of McAuley’s book that his analysis fails to link his critique to Cox’s ideological attack on the caste school of race relations where Cox’s procedure was to examine in needless and tedious detail the caste system in India and, predictably, finding the racial situation in the United States different than the religiously legitimated system of stratification in India, conclude that caste is a useless analytical category for understanding the racial situation in the United States. This is a big thing to miss. Arguably, no social scientist ever misunderstood a concept more than Cox misunderstands the problem of racial caste in Caste, Class, and Race. It is not the case that the caste school was applying a scheme borrowed from the Indian case. Cox for the most part simply asserts this, thus constructing a straw man, one that he uses strategically, as noted above, to overemphasize the extent to which the Indian system is based on consensus in order to overemphasize the degree to which caste in America was based on coercion. 

Contrary to Cox’s critique, the generally understood social scientific definition of caste is an accurate empirical description of racism in the capitalist world. According to Max Weber, in Economy and Society, “caste structure transforms the horizontal and unconnected coexistences of ethnically segregated groups into a vertical social system of super- and subordination.” Moreover, as noted above, the Portuguese word casta was originally applied to racial groupings during the colonial period. It is ironic that Cox himself was exposed to the reality of caste in his home country of Trinidad and his adopted one of the United States yet pursued a strident critique of the ground-breaking theoretical framework developed to explain this reality.

Uncritical acceptance of Cox’s attack on the caste school, and his conception of race prejudice as the sin qua non of racism proper, pushes to the periphery the advance in thinking the caste school brought to social science, namely the focus on institutional and structural discrimination rather than reliance on attitudinal models of racism. It is therefore unfortunate that McAuley perpetuates a myth about Cox scholarship namely that his critique of the caste school was substantive and successful. Moreover, it follows from McAuley’s own analysis that Cox’s conservatism and reductionism prevented him from accepting a definition of caste that describes material and cultural conditions relatively independent of class exploitation.

After telling readers that he spent much of the weekend rereading Cox’s Caste, Class, and Race, Bouie writes, “If there is a reason to revisit this specific book at this particular moment, it is to remind oneself that the challenge of racism is primarily structural and material, not cultural and linguistic, and that a disproportionate focus on the latter can too often obscure the former.” This is a remarkable thing to say in light of the fact that Cox does not argue that racism is structural or material. To say that racism is structural is to argue that it is caste-like. On the contrary, Cox argues that racism is ideological but with a curious twist—this ideology is an imperative for a system without a functional alternative.

Barbara Fields is right, racism is not a material phenomenon but an ideological one. But it is not a necessary one. Nor is it structural. Not any more, at least. And when it was, the structure was organized by the logic of a legal system that privileged race. That system was dismantled more than half a century ago and discrimination against blacks on the basis of race was banned (and discrimination against whites was rationalized as “social justice”). So, while it is true that that system produced a subjectivity, that subjectivity could not survive the smashing of its foundation (Marx would have predicted that). Racism is indeed cultural and linguistic, but only in the sense that race is a social construct, a construct activists keep alive linguistically, what Fields calls “racecraft.”

All this is an odd argument for Bouie to make, since, as noted, Cox conceptualized racial antagonisms as an ideological strategy used by capitalist elites to maintain populations for exploitation. Yet Bouie uses Cox to support his claim that racism is material and structural.

Bouie is impressed by Cox’s observation that racial antagonism, to quote Cox (and Bouie quotes this very passage), “is part and parcel of this class struggle, because it developed within the capitalist system as one of its fundamental traits.” This is half true. Racism did develop within the capitalist system. As I explain in my essay “Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation,” the term “race” first occurs in the late sixteenth century and refers to breeding stocks of animals and plants. At its inception it referred to biology and was increasingly applied to people with the development of scientific rationalism. By the seventeenth century, race was used to refer to physical or phenotypical traits, as well as associated capacities and proclivities, as a core concept in the developing science of evolutionary biology. The terms racism and racialism appear in the early twentieth century and they center biology in their meanings (which are the same—they are synonyms). Race is thus a product of the practical science of animal husbandry caught up in the context of the modern scientific revolution and used by bourgeois elites to fracture the proletariat for economic and political advantage.

Once race was debunked by population genetics research that should have been the end of it. Science is always overcoming its own errors, and to describe racism as a trait is to suggest a permanence that does not exist. Bouie puts the matter in a way that only punctuates the error of this style of thinking: “to the extent that Cox had a single problem with the caste analysis of American racism, it was that it abstracted racial conflict away from its origins in the development of American capitalism. The effect was to treat racism as a timeless force, outside the logic of history.” Would Bouie claim that describing the social arrangement in India as a caste system abstracts intergroup conflict away from its origins in the development of Hinduism and effectively treats that ideology as a timeless force that lies outside the logic of history? (And what is the “logic of history”? Is Bouie a vulgar Hegelian.) Indians never referred to the system as a “caste system.” That term was taken from the language of Western racial relations and reimposed on the Indian system.

This the thing that everybody misses: Cox got it exactly backwards. The caste school wasn’t borrowing a term from the Indian experience. Sociologists borrowed the concept of caste from Western race relations and used it to conceptualized the Indian system. The one thing Wilkerson has going for her work is that her use of the term enjoys some historical and sociological accuracy, whether the thing the word describes is still in force. (It’s not, for the record.)

Bouie selects a quote that works against Cox’s argument. “We may reiterate that the caste school of race relations is laboring under the illusion of a simple but vicious truism,” Cox writes in criticizing Myrdal’s famous study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. “One man is white, another is black; the cultural opportunities of these two men may be the same, but since the black man cannot become white, there will always be a white caste and a black caste.” But this is self-evidently true as long as race is treated as a thing that survives its debunking in science and dismantling in the law. What could explain such a thing? Wilkerson tells us that it is “invisible scaffolding” built and operated “with ancient rules and assumptions.” Wilkerson calls this scaffolding “caste.”

Bouie writes, “In Cox’s reading of Myrdal, caste exists as an independent force, directing the energies and activities of Black and white people alike.” Wilkerson would agree with Myrdal. “The solution to the ‘race problem,’ in this vision,” writes Bouie, “is to shake whites from their psychological commitment to the caste system.” (Again, this was accomplished more than half a century ago.) Bouie quotes Cox: “If the ‘race problem’ in the United States is pre-eminently a moral question, it must naturally be resolved by moral means.” He notes that, for Cox, this is nonsense. “We cannot defeat race prejudice by proving that it is wrong,” Cox contends. “The reason for this is that race prejudice is only a symptom of a materialistic social fact.” What is that social fact? Capitalism. “Race prejudice,” Cox writes, “developed gradually in Western society as capitalism and nationalism developed. It is a divisive attitude seeking to alienate dominant group sympathy from an ‘inferior’ race, a whole people, for the purpose of facilitating its exploitation.” Here we have Cox apparently proposing the forceful overthrow of capitalism, or at least suggesting that such a collective act is the only thing that will eliminate racism: “Race prejudice is supported by a peculiar socioeconomic need which guarantees force in its protection; and, as a consequence, it is likely that at its centers of initiation force alone will defeat it.”

This is not an aside. It is quite revealing that Bouie capitalizes the word “black” but not “white.” Capitalizing both would indicate that what was heretofore a description of phenotypic traits associated with or at least so assumed is to be treated as a national or religious identity, or a political party. Capitalize one and not the other is a symbolic act of status elevation for blacks which at the same time represents a degradation of status for whites. If your choice of comrades is the proletariat (or just a concern for objective reality) capitalizing both or one and not the other is class-disruptive action of bourgeois elites taking a historic term and falsely raising it to the status of partisan political party-like construct when no such attribution can be made. By formalizing the term, the bourgeoisie means to socialize a false and racist assumption that all blacks have the same interests and share the same values. They don’t. To claim they do is to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

“Although Cox was writing in an era very different from our own—Jim Crow ruled the American South, and the dismantling of colonial empires was only just beginning—his insights still matter,” writes Bouie. “We must remember that the problem of racism—of the denial of personhood and of the differential exposure to exploitation and death—will not be resolved by saying the right words or thinking the right thoughts. That’s because racism does not survive, in the main, because of personal belief and prejudice. It survives because it is inscribed and reinscribed by the relationships and dynamics that structure our society, from segregation and exclusion to inequality and the degradation of labor.”

It sounds like Bouie is describing a caste system. Why, then, the appeal to Cox? But, also, why close with MLK Jr.’s solution, what King called a “revolution of values” that will “look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth” and see that “an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring”? “If democracy is to have breadth of meaning,” King declared, “it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.” King acknowledges the moral imperative. He also recognizes that race thinking is “archaic thinking.” Why are we still thinking this way? And why are we not talking about the revolution of values with respect to the injustices of social class. Achieving a colorblind society does not eliminate “the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.” It only means that blacks are able to exploit whites and other blacks alongside their white capitalist counterparts.

Here’s how to hide a dark and terrible truth. Get a news outlet to publish a story with a headline that tells readers that the Biden White House was thinking about training Ukrainians in guerrilla warfare but decided not to for fear that it would provoke Russia. Don’t tell readers is that, under the Obama White House, the CIA trained Ukrainians in guerrilla warfare to provoke Russia. Don’t remind readers that Biden, neck deep in the swamp of Ukrainian corruption, was Obama’s point man on Ukraine. Here’s an instantiation of the tactic from Fox News: “White House axed plan to train Ukrainians in guerrilla warfare fearing it may provoke Russia.” According to the reporting, when questioned, the White House, adding a pinch of confusion to the mix, denied any such plans were ever presented to the White House or the National Security Council.

The way the story is being told is designed to hide the significant piece of the truth by drawing attention to an irrelevant fact. This is what disinformation looks like. In History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War, I tell you about the reporting of Branko Marcetic, writing for Jacobin, revealing that the CIA began working with far right elements in 2015 as part of the campaign of Western belligerence towards Russia. Is the CIA still there? Of course they are (the CIA is everywhere). But it doesn’t matter. Once trained, leadership of the proxy army, as well as irregulars, trains new recruits. In Ukraine, this has included thousands of Nazis, especially prized by the deep state for their pathological hatred of ethnic Russians. The deep state has been working with Eastern European Nazis at least since the end of WWII, when the Truman White House established the CIA and the NSA. It is a well documented fact that organizations recruited Nazis for the Cold War.

Why provoke Russia now? For the same reason the CIA trained Afghanis in guerrilla warfare in the late 1970s and 1980s to provoke the Soviet Union into sending troops to Afghanistan: regime change. (See Sowing the Seeds of Terrorism? Capitalist Intrigue and Adventurism in Afghanistan.) The aim of the Ukraine project is to undermine Putin’s government. Why do this? Transnationalists seek to establish hegemony across the Eurasian landmass. This is part of the quest to establish a New World Order based on transnational corporate power. As I have written about on Freedom and Reason, the New World Order will transition the world population from the international system of nation-states where they are citizens to a global neofeudalism where they will become serfs.

Without big picture understanding, it might puzzle one to hear somebody of the stature of Michael McFaul, appearing the other night on the Rachel Maddow show, say, “One difference between Putin and Hitler is that Hitler didn’t kill ethnic Germans, German-speaking people. Putin slaughters the very people he said he has come to liberate.” (His comment prompted Tablet Magazine’s Noam Blum to tweet “’Ethnic Germans’ is a really weird way to get around the wholesale murder of German Jews.”) McFaul is a professor in international studies in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He is also the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, as well as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. More than this, he served as ambassador to Moscow under the Obama administration. A man like McFaul doesn’t get history this wrong accidentally. Nor does somebody like McFaul intend to rehabilitate Hitler by denying that German speaking people living in Europe during Hitler’s reign of terror were not among his victims (not just German Jews, but German homosexuals, German communists, and a myriad of others). His over-the-top rhetoric was designed to promote regime change by painting Putin as a threat worse than Hitler.

McFaul is aligning his rhetoric with that of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Such hyperbole is warmongering. When Zelensky tells the West that, if he falls then we all fall, he is attempting to mislead the peoples of the West by distorting Putin’s motives—indeed, by making them appear as Hitler’s desire for world conquest. But Putin’s Russia is not Nazi Germany. Putin’s actions are not animated by any Hitlerian motive. Zelensky is trying to draw the West into war. My sons owe Ukraine nothing.

Biden in 1997 saying that the only thing that could provoke a "vigorous and hostile" Russian response would be if NATO expanded as far as the Baltic states

pic.twitter.com/D0xG5uITwE

— Alexei Arora (@AlexeiArora) March 7, 2022

In a recent Facebook post, Peter Philips, author of Giants: The Global Power Elite, provided a succinct analysis of the current situation: “The Atlantic Council (NATO’s Elite Policy Group) called for regime change in Russia 5 years ago. They engineered (using billions US $) the 2014 coup that put a pro-West government in Ukraine. The resulting pro-west government in Ukraine has been militarily engaged with pro-Russian separatist forces in low level warfare for the past five years. The CIA knew that Russia would never give up the warm water ports on the Black Sea and this would lead to an inevitable conflict between Ukraine and Russia, especially as right wing neo-nazi elements in Ukraine accepted NATO weapons and military advisors (Blackwater) taking increasingly stronger actions challenging the pro-Russians elements in Eastern Ukraine. Putin realizes that the West’s goal was to eliminate him and open Russia to capital investments from the Global Power elite. In order to prevent this threatened western takeover of all the Black Sea ports Putin moved on Ukraine seeking to reinstate a Russia friendly government.”

One can quibble with some of this (substituting CIA for Blackwater aligns with the reporting, and Putin’s motives may be a bit misspecified), but in the main it’s an accurate depiction of the situation. Philips goes on to write, “The entire situation is exactly what the US/CIA/NATO forces wanted to happen. Using the corporate media as an anti-Putin propaganda machine many folks now see Putin as a crazy new Hitler. The US/NATO strategy is the creation of an increasingly dangerous war (expensive for Russia and profitable for western military weapons producers) that undermines the Russian economy resulting in civilian challenges to Putin’s government. The danger of course is the inevitable use of tactical nukes by Russia and or the US that could lead to human extinction.” No quibbling with this. It’s spot on.

One of the more horrifying developments in the unfolding Russo-Ukrainian saga is the discovery of US-funded biological laboratories in Ukraine located near the Russian border. According to the International Business Times, Russia discovered anthrax, tularemia, and other lethal agents there (see also this article). In light of US-funded gains-of-function research in Wuhan, China, one must wonder where else in the world has the United States established biological laboratories. While the urge to say the Russians are lying about this is palpable, a high-ranking official for the Biden administration recently revealed in testimony before the US Senate that there are indeed US-funded bio labs in Ukraine.

In responding to a question by senator Marco Rubio, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland contradicted two weeks of corporate state disinformation concerning the labs (disinformation depicting the claim as “conspiracy theory”). Rubio and Nuland engaged in a colloquy to preemptively portray any biological weapons attack as certainly perpetrated by Putin, but the cat was out of the bag.

I hasten to note here that Nuland is Robert Kagan’s wife. This is not to diminish Nuland; she is a force on her own. It is rather to simply note that these two constitute a power couple associated with the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) crowd. PNAC staffed the Bush-Cheney regime. Now PNAC is a Biden Administration thing. If that doesn’t tell you something about the permanent ruling class in Washington DC, then I don’t know what does. (If you want to learn more about PNAC, a version of my essay “War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Middle East Policy,” first published in English in 2005 in Devastating Society: The Neo-Conservative Assault on Democracy and Justice by Pluto Press and the University of Michigan Press, is available here.)

I also hasten to remind readers about the relationships between Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and Ukrainian government officials and oligarchs. Recall the quid pro quo between the Obama regime and the Ukrainian government brokered by Biden, admitted to during a speech to the Council of Foreign Relations, to fire a prospector the US government didn’t like. Consider why the Democrats were so eager to remove Trump from office for asking questions about Biden’s activities in Ukraine. They impeached him over it. What did they not want Americans to see? (See The Conspiracy to Overthrow an American President.)

I want to close with an observation about the ramifications of all of this for Americans. War in Ukraine can seem so remote, even while the media is trying to make Zelensky an every-man. But as the situation in the Ukraine is a part of a grand project that affects the world, Americans are necessarily impacted. In addition to dismantling nation-states and integrating working people into a transnational system of capitalist exploitation, a major element of the New World Order is the desire to bring military sensibilities to the domestic front—to regiment the would-be-serf according to the disciplinary style of the military. This is characteristic of the New Fascism.

In the above speech (and in other speeches), President GHW Bush tells the nation about the plan of the power elite. We saw the plan unfolding with the militarization of the police in the 1990s, followed by a vast surveillance network established in the first decade of the 2000s. With COVID-19, we saw another leap forward in the New World Order: citizens obeying the irrational dictates of the state. Indeed, the domestic plan unfolds in the service of the larger goal of globalization of corporate capitalism—not just capitalism as a planetary system (this was achieved in the twentieth century), but the deepening of the social logic of bureaucratic collectivism everywhere.

We are transitioning to global neofeudalism. In this New World Order you will be serfs. This is the slogan of the World Economic Forum: “You will own nothing and be happy.” (See If We Allow This, We are Over.)

“All the great dictatorial movements of our times were (and are) based on irrational authority. Its driving forces were the submissive individual’s feeling of powerlessness, fear, and admiration for the ‘leader.’ All the great and fruitful cultures are founded on the existence of rational authority: on people, who are able to muster the given functions intellectually and socially and have therefore no need to appeal to irrational desires.”—Erich Fromm, “The Authoritarian Personality” (1957)

The COVID-19 pandemic feels over. Kind of. States and countries are suspending vaccine mandates. The masks are coming off. Not everywhere. But in a lot of places. Most places, it seems. And confessions are starting to appear. On Thursday, in St. Louis, Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, acknowledged that the agency showed “too little caution and too much optimism” concerning vaccine efficacy. She admitted that nobody was asking whether the immunity the vaccine was claimed to produce would wear off or whether it could work in the face of new variants. And she acknowledged what some of us knew over a year ago: “We’ll have a coronavirus that will lead to death in every season, that we will tolerate in some way.”

The pandemic may not be over, of course. A pandemic is largely a definition of a situation. When cases were lower than they are today and for a longer period of time, back in the late fall and early summer of 2021, officials did not call off the pandemic. There is no reason to believe that coronavirus won’t return in the fall of 2022. Will the vaccine mandates return? Perhaps Pfizer and Moderna will have engineered a vaccine with the next variation of the spike protein by then. Maybe, as has been suggested, it will be combined with the seasonal flu vaccine. Will mask mandates return? Will postal voting? Hundreds of millions across the world have been successfully conditioned to accept these demands if and when they are made again. Many millions of them didn’t need to be conditioned. These were the progressives. They were eager for masks and vaccines. And they were eager for others to be eager, as well. They still are both these things.

I am not the only one who has observed the uncritical attitude of the progressives towards government mandates and, more specifically, vaccines. Dr. Richard Moskowitz, a practitioner of family medicine since 1967, writes in his review of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci, “During my 53 years of practice as a family doctor, I came to know and care for large numbers of vaccine-injured children, an experience that obliged me to re-examine the basic sciences that I’d been taught, and to write and speak out against vaccinating people without their consent since the early 1980s.” He then makes this observation: “After two years of the global pandemic, with no end in sight, despite vaccines and boosters being foisted on everyone willing to take them, or afraid not to, I still find it hard to believe that the vast majority of my friends and allies on the left, though well aware of the criminal wrongdoing of the drug industry, nevertheless buy into its insistence that vaccines are our only safe and effective response to the virus.”

I urge readers to read his review, which is a highly detailed summary of Kennedy’s book. I urge readers to buy Kennedy’s book, as well. In this blog, I want to take up Dr. Moskowitz’s implied question about why the left aggressively pushes vaccines. There is an explanation for why progressives fell in line with mandatory vaccination—more than this, enthusiastically called for it: progressives have come to profess a faith, the faith of scientism, an ideological expression of technocratic desire that apes the norms of science. Science proper requires constant challenging and vigorous debate of claims made. Scientism, cloaking its religious-like character in such earnest-sounding pursuits as correcting “misinformation” and combating “disinformation,” resists challenges to authority and stifles debate about its claims.

Such scientistic pretense is a marker of authoritarianism. As a mentality, then, scientism closely aligns with traits associated with the authoritarian personality identified by Erich Fromm. At the core of the authoritarian personality is a tendency, or trait, if you will, present in many people right and left, to fear freedom and risk, and to seek control over others—and to be controlled themselves. The authoritarian personality projects its anxieties onto the population and expects the masses to conform to the ritual adaptations it has made to escape or minimize its insecurities. Fromm presents his analysis of these traits in various works. The two I take up here are his 1957 essay “The Authoritarian Personality,” published in Deutsche Universitätszeitung, and his landmark Escape from Freedom (alternatively titled The Fear of Freedom), published in 1941.

It it important to note at the outset that it takes certain social conditions to organize and elaborate tendency into type and to align a type common to many around a collective endeavor. At present, the corporate state sets social conditions such that those who self-identify politically as “on the left” are susceptible to the elaboration of the authoritarian tendency and find common cause with like minds. This tendency is mixed with those exhibiting signs of cluster-B personality types, marked by anxious, fearful thinking and behavior, and particularly associated with dependent personality disorder. The pandemic was (at least functionally) an exercise in rapid organization of the authoritarian and other types around corporate state objectives. (I explore cluster B types for the first time in my essay “Living at the Borderline—You are Free to Repeat After Me.”)

In his essay “The Authoritarian Personality,” Erich Fromm writes, “We usually see a clear difference between the individual who wants to rule, control, or restrain others and the individual who tends to submit, obey, or to be humiliated.” The initial approximation, then, identifies two types or forms of persons. But it’s more complicated than this. “As natural as the difference between the ruling and the ruled might—in many ways—be, we also have to admit that these two types, or as we can also say, these two forms of authoritarian personality, are actually tightly bound together.” He characterizes this situation as “the symbiotic tendency.” It is also often, indeed to some degree always the case that these two types reside in the same person and are differentially expressed across variable circumstances. Fromm notes the man who is a tyrant to his family at home but become a submissive at work.

It should be emphasized that in fully developed systems of managed democracy, what Sheldon Wolin in Democracy, Inc. characterizes as “inverted totalitarianism,” the leader need not be a personal figure, such as a Hitler and a Stalin. The leader can be the state apparatus itself—or even an abstract idea (although such a situation urges us to reveal the power that behind the abstraction). Indeed, with respect to the state, totalitarianism is more effectively and efficiently obtained when the locus of power is dissimulated by a comprehensive juridical-political apparatus that simulates democracy. This is not a departure from Fromm but a specification of his thesis. Fromm himself notes that the object to which one desires self-submission may be a person but may also be a system or an abstraction. (For discussions concerning the fascist state, see From Inverted to Naked Totalitarianism: The West in Crisis; Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.)

In the current situation facing the United States, the leader appears as all three, with Dr. Anthony Fauci representing the personal figure of the authoritarian, the corporate state representing the fascist order of things, and scientism as the abstraction, a new religion for a secular society. The elevation of Fauci’s expertise to a status of oracle justifying the administration of people at the expense of personal liberty and civil and human rights is paradigmatic of an authoritarian leader. It must be emphasized here that the authoritarian situation need not be total in character to substantially impact human freedom. Moreover, whatever the manifest degree of coercive control over the population, the reality remains that a significant proportion of the population is prepared to submit to that authority—and wants the rest of us to, as well. And with the quieting of the pandemic hysteria, the authoritarian desire of the progressive may lie latent in the population. But it is not gone.

The authoritarian personality simultaneously desires control over others, this from a desire to impose order on the world, while at the same time wishes to submit the self to authority. For Fromm, then, the authoritarian personality contains both sadistic and masochistic elements. In other words, the “active-authoritarian” and the “passive-authoritarian.” “When I speak of sadism as the active side of the authoritarian personality, many people may be surprised because sadism is usually understood as the tendency to torment and to cause pain,” writes Fromm. “But actually, this is not the point of sadism. The different forms of sadism which we can observe have their root in a striving, which is to master and control another individual, to make him a helpless object of one’s will, to become his ruler, to dispose over him as one sees fit and without limitations. Humiliation and enslavement are just means to this purpose, and the most radical means to this is to make him suffer; as there is no greater power over a person than to make him suffer, to force him to endure pains without resistance.” The passive-authoritarian enjoys the suffering vicariously and rationalizes the pain of his own “sacrifices” as virtue.

In Escape from Freedom, penned in the context of fascistic terror and total war, Fromm explains that the desire to control others is associated with destructiveness in that not everybody accedes to the demands of the authoritarian and this motivates the authoritarian to remove from awareness any force resisting control. For this reason, destructiveness is not quite the sadistic tendency described above; the sadist seeks control, and thus searches out the masochist; the destructive desire is aroused by those who refuse to take on the masochist role—even in the face of pain—since he is resisting authority. One sees this tendency playing out in cancel culture and the politics of personal and reputational destruction, seen, for example, in efforts, successful in numerous cases, to bring physicians before tribunals on disciplinary charges for “spreading vaccine misinformation.” Revoking a doctor’s license to practice medicine on the grounds that he pursues courses of treatments that stand at odds with those established by corporate-captured medical boards and regulatory agencies is a manifestation of destructiveness.

Finally, conformity to rules articulated by authority, that is obedience to prevailing normative expectations, which, in capitalist society, are established through socialization in institutional arrangements under the command of money-power, affords the masochist the opportunity to avoid the anxiety of having to think for himself. “The opposite of the authoritarian character is the mature person: a person who does not need to cling to others because he actively embraces and grasps the world, the people, and the things around him,” Fromm explains. “Children could not exist without the mother’s help. However, they grow and develop. They learn to walk, to talk, and find their way around the world which becomes their world.” Some children grow up. Others are the victims of arrested development.

Fromm identifies two skills vital to the emergence of an autonomous and potentially self-actualized person, namely love and reason, that, while inherent to the individual, are developed through proper maturation. “Love is the bond and the feeling of being one with the world while keeping one’s own independence and integrity,” Fromm writes. “The loving individual is connected with the world. He is not frightened since the world is his home. He can lose himself because he is certain of himself.” By “reason” Fromm means something different than intelligence. Intelligence is using the mind to reach certain goals (sometimes referred to as instrumental rationality). Authoritarians may be highly intelligent (albeit some are stupid). “Reason is something else,” Fromm explains. “Reason is the activity of the mind which attempts to get through the surface to reach the core of things, to grasp what really lies behind these things, what the forces and drives are that—themselves invisible—operate and determine the manifestations.” Authoritarians are unreasonable however intelligent they are.

“I have given this description of the mature, i.e. the loving and reasoning individual to better define the essence of the authoritarian personality,” Fromm writes. “The authoritarian character has not reached maturity; he can neither love nor make use of reason. As a result, he is extremely alone which means that he is gripped by a deeply rooted fear. He needs to feel a bond, which requires neither love nor reason—and he finds it in the symbiotic relationship, in feeling one with others; not by reserving his own identity, but rather by fusing, by destroying his own identity. The authoritarian character needs another person to fuse with because he cannot endure his own aloneness and fear.” He continues, “The paradox of this passive form of the authoritarian character is: the individual belittles himself so that he can—as part of something greater—become great himself.”

This action is manifest in what we today call “virtue signaling.” Virtual signally is symbolic indications of action or support for the actions of others. During the pandemic, this was manifest in badges and banners, images of mask wearing, presentation of vaccine cards, and other items shared on social media. Some actions did involve coercion, such as parents posting on social media images and video of them vaccinating their children. In these instances, the aim of the action was to signal submission to authority. There were even memes projecting subconscious recognition of self-belittling by asserting—and thus trying to skit the paradox of—healthy skepticism of power while also boasting of ones vaccinated status. “The individual wants to receive commands, so that he does not have the necessity to make decisions and carry responsibility,” Fromm writes. “This masochistic individual looking for dependency is in his depth frightened—often only subconsciously—a feeling of inferiority, powerlessness, aloneness.” What responsibility is the virtue signaler trying to avoid carrying? The responsibility to stand up to power in defense of autonomy, democracy, and liberty.

The subconscious character of the phenomenon is crucial to note, as those who follow orders perceive their own actions as virtuous. Hence the obnoxious virtue signaling. The authoritarian is not submitting to power, but acting out of solidarity, as part of a supposed organic whole. “Subconsciously, he feels his own powerlessness and needs the leader to control this feeling,” writes Fromm. “This masochistic and submissive individual, who fears freedom and escapes into idolatry, is the person on which the authoritarian systems—Nazism and Stalinism—rest.” (Remember when Fromm was writing. Again, the essay was published in 1957 and Escape from Freedom in 1941. As with all useful theories, update with examples as needed.)

What Fromm sees in the followers, he sees also in the leader: “To his followers he seems self-confident and powerful but yet he is as frightened and alone as the masochistic character. While the masochist feels strong because he is a small part of something greater, the sadist feels strong because he has incorporated others—if possible many others; he has devoured them, so to speak. The sadistic-authoritarian character is as dependent on the ruled as the masochistic-authoritarian character on the ruler. However the image is misleading. As long as he holds power, the leader appears—to himself and to others—strong and powerful. His powerlessness becomes only apparent when he has lost his power, when he can no longer devour others, when he is on his own.”

Over the last quarter century, I have watched my progressive friends become ever more strident in their commitment to the administrative state and the technocratic apparatus—that is, to Big Government. So when the pandemic hit they reflexively turned to Big Government to protect them. It was at this point that progressives finally left me and many others alone to practice what Max Weber usefully referred to “individually differentiated conduct.” Put another way, left libertarianism and leftwing progressive ideology no longer reside in the same world. This situation was prepared a long time ago. The pandemic clarified the matter once and for all.

It is not that humanity had never before confronted pandemics. In past episodes of the man versus nature story, progressives took the hits in stride. But because of the depth of the transformation of their collective consciousness amid the elaboration of transnational capitalist power, progressives came to see a virus as a novel problem. Their panic when the virus appeared was so intense that they reflexively sought the protection of a father, which, in the progressive worldview, is the corporate state. The pandemic was the moment that revealed that the consciousness of rank-and-file progressives had already been organized and elaborated in manner described above. This is the character of New Fascism—promethean faith in the technocratic arrangements that organize the authoritarian personality.

Cautioning the reader against really all of this as pathology, Fromm distinguishes between rational authority and irrational authority. “Rational authority is the recognition of authority based on critical evaluation of competences. When a student recognizes the teacher’s authority to know more than him, then this a reasonable evaluation of his competence,” writes Fromm. “Rational authority is not based on excluding my reason and critique but rather assumes it as a prerequisite. This does not make me small and the authority great but allows authority to be superior where and as long it possesses competence.” Irrational authority has a different character. “It is based on emotional submission of my person to another person: I believe in him being right, not because he is, objectively speaking, competent nor because I rationally recognize his competence. In the bonds to the irrational authority, there exists a masochistic submission by making myself small and the authority great. I have to make it great, so that I can—as one of its particles—also become great.”

As this point in the essay, Fromm has a remarkable insight: “The rational authority tends to negate itself, because the more I understand the smaller the distance to the authority becomes. The irrational authority tends to deepen and to prolong itself. The longer and the more dependent I am the weaker I will become and the more I will need to cling to the irrational authority and submit.” The negation of authority is triggering for authorities with weak egos. He sees it as an opportunity but as a threat. Rather than engaging with those who competence is growing in a given area, which he should desire if his motive were rational and democratic, the insecure authority seeks instead to discredit, exclude, marginalize, or minimize challenges to his authority—as do his devotees.

In The Unpleasantness of Viruses versus the Tyranny of Technocracy, I write that one common feature of authoritarianism irrespective of its ideological stripe is acquiescence of the rank-and-file citizens that enables governments and organizations to implement policies that violate democratic freedoms and human rights. Authoritarianism is not just a character flaw of the elites who would oppress a population, I argue, but those who seek such oppression and moreover desire that this oppression to be visited upon others. This is why, in We are Standing at the Gates of Authoritarian Hell, I argue that the authoritarian personality is not only the possession of the tyrant. The authoritarian personality is the possession of all those who assent to tyranny. Why they assent is crucial to understand if we wish to save democracy from the authoritarian tendency organized by the corporate state. Tyranny is steeled by the popular support of those who fail at love and reason—who fail at autonomy, who lack the ability to rely on self, to be independent, or, as Fromm put it, “to endure freedom.” We have to find a way to get them to put on the armor of love and reason.

In concluding his 1957 essay, Fromm writes that he does “not want to close without emphasizing that the individual’s goal must be to become his own authority; i.e. to have a consciousness in moral issues, conviction in questions of intellect, and fidelity in emotional matters. However, the individual can only have such an inner authority if he has matured enough to understand the world with reason and love. The development of these characteristics is the basis for one’s own authority and therefore the basis for political democracy.”

Fromm provides a piece of the road map for the journey before us. But without negating or substantially altering the social situation that organizes those with authoritarian tendencies into a political force, we will continue to see the waves of panics and hysterias that mark the present landscape and threaten to push us into a postmodern condition. In my essay The Future of a Delusion: Mass Formation Psychosis and the Fetish of Corporate Statism I discuss the myriad social forces that are driving the problem by focusing on its most extreme manifestation, namely the phenomenon of mass formation psychosis. I invite you read that essay if you haven’t and explore my other writings on this topic. Until next time.