Bohemian chic is the cultural orientation predominantly held by upwardly mobile, educated white progressives of an urban secular mold, and is characterized by a tension between expressive individualism and egalitarian collectivism: between a desire to be an authentic, unique individual, on the one hand, and for everyone to ultimately be equal, on the other. The term describes the synthesis of Rousseauian Romanticism—bohemian—and bourgeois refinement—chic—the intersection of hippie élan and cultural elitism that Daniel Bell explores in his 1976 book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Although bohemian chic refers to a cultural identity with a specific lineage, it also describes a broader tendency to appropriate the adversarial spirit of the counterculture, at a time when such attitudes have become so commonplace as to be banal.
Sociologist Orlando Patterson has described culture as what we must know, in order to effectively move through our environment: a set of expressed symbols around which we organize to signal and maintain identity. Bohemian chic has its own attitudes, norms, ideas, aesthetics and customs—ranging from a style of dress to vocal affectations and artistic taste—that form a system, which can be reproduced independently of its original context. An identity is invariably formed in reaction to something else: bohemian chic emerged in reaction to Anglo-American traditionalism, its WASP archetype and the puritanism of middle-class life: it is a reaction to whiteness. Although bohemian chic is primarily a social, rather than a political identity, its cosmopolitan ethos and rejection of established hierarchies fit snugly into the social justice narrative of the modern left, particularly its privileging of identity over class. Indeed, bohemian chic is an adaptation to, rather than a renunciation of, modern day capitalism.
But, in addition to providing a sense of identity to many people (including myself), the excesses of bohemian chic contribute to the broader culture war in the US. For some, the valorization of individual expression and social egalitarianism is accompanied by underlying, unacknowledged guilt at their relative social advantages—their unearned privilege—which can manifest as self-flagellating anti-white rhetoric, condescending deference towards minority groups and both bitterness about other people’s privilege and blindness to their own. Instead of considering how such privileges could be expanded, many attack privilege itself. They attempt to exculpate themselves from the historical crimes of white racism by disparaging a retrograde white Other.
But what are the origins of bohemian chic? And what is its larger role in the drama of our charged political moment?
Bohemian chic is an outgrowth of the cultural radicalism that took root in Greenwich Village from 1912–1917, with the anti-WASP ethos of the young intellectuals, the ideological antecedents of modern day multiculturalists and Social Justice leftists. Also known as the lyrical left, these Anglo-American artists and writers rebelled against their protestant backgrounds and sought to liberate society through melding radical politics and modern culture.
Perhaps the most influential was Randolph Bourne, an eccentric, disfigured polemicist whose 1916 essay “Trans-National America” celebrates immigrant ethnicities, while urging his countrymen to become citizens of the world. As Eric Kaufmann puts it, Bourne encourages ethnic minorities to preserve their identities, while the majority dissolves its own, an asymmetry that characterizes today’s notion of cultural appropriation. This is the central paradox of western multiculturalism: it seeks to transcend ethnic categories, while embracing diversity, which requires attachment to group identity and the recognition of difference.
Although the lyrical left disintegrated after the onset of World War I in 1914 and Bourne’s death in 1918, their ideas influenced cultural critics of the 1920s, such as H. L. Mencken, and the “Lost Generation” of bohemian writers, with their anti-majority ethos. In words reminiscent of a modern whiteness studies class, Mencken writes that,
the normal American of the pure-blooded majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed … His political ideas are crude and shallow. He is almost wholly devoid of aesthetic feeling. The most elementary facts about the universe alarm him, and incite him to put them down. He fears ideas almost more cravenly than he fears men.
This tendency to criticize white society, while eulogizing other identities, was further popularized by the Beat generation of the 1950s, through writers like Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer. Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro” calls upon readers to reject classical liberalism and culture of conformity it fosters, in favor of the rebelliousness, violence and sexuality that he associated with black American culture.
These sentiments remained restricted to niche bohemian circles, until the success of the Civil Rights Movement brought the full horrors of white racism and segregation to the forefront of the national conscience. The white population was now forced to repudiate these practices and acknowledge the plight of the oppressed. This cultural shift was quickly followed by a sweep of political reforms—the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968—that altered the moral fabric of the country. In 1944, 52% of whites agreed that “white people should have the first chance at any kind of job.” By 1972, only 3% did. In 1958, only 4% of Americans approved of interracial marriage. By 2013, it was 87%. The left had won the culture war and white supremacy was no longer respectable.
The ideas that had once animated a small group of radicals had by, the late twentieth century, penetrated elite institutions. Shelby Steele, an African American who grew up in segregated Chicago, sums up this transition:
In the 1960s, America underwent what can only be described as an archetypal “fall”—a descent from “innocence” into an excruciating and inescapable self-knowledge. This innocence had always been a delusion. It was far more a cultivated ignorance of America’s sins than innocence of them, and this ignorance was helped along by a culturally embedded pattern of rationalizations, bigotries, stereotypes, and lies. But all this came under profound challenge in the 1960s, as one form of American hypocrisy after another—everything from racism and the second class treatment of women to Vietnam and our neglect of the environment—came to light and further cracked the veneer of American innocence.. Thus, the reinvention of America as a country shorn of its past sins became an unspoken, though extremely powerful, mandate in national politics.
This is how a counterculture transformed into a cultural hegemony, setting the bounds of public discourse in the US. Cultural radicalism had become bohemian chic.
The subtle anti-white sentiment that has been normalized in high culture—from New York Times op-eds to Ivy League classrooms and corporate anti-bias workshops—has contributed to the rise of populism and the breakdown of civil discourse. As I’ve written elsewhere, political polarization is occurring in a context of rapid demographic change, as the white share of the population declines through immigration, intermarriage and low fertility. Many whites feels increasingly threatened both by the pace of ethnocultural change and the expansion of anti-racist norms among cultural elites who equate conservatism with racism.
When whites were an overwhelming majority, anti-whiteness could be brushed aside. But, as white populations decline, racialized insults increasingly fuel partisan rancor. The percentage of white Americans who strongly identify with their race has roughly doubled since the 1990s, as immigration rates have skyrocketed and politics has degenerated into mayhem. The result is a perpetual motion machine of racial grievance and political tribalism between anti-racists on the left and populists on the right.
The recent “Hidden Tribes” study by nonpartisan organization More In Common found that the more radical views on both ends of the spectrum are held disproportionately by whites. As Yascha Mounk comments, “progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.” Why?
In his book Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities, Eric Kaufmann outlines the various reactions to the speed of ethno-cultural change and the degradation of white American identity. Some respond by voting for right-wing populists, and calling for restrictions to immigration. Others repress their anxieties and stigmatize all those who do not subscribe to the politically correct view. White progressives and white conservatives are reacting to globalization and its social implications in accordance with their respective dispositions and cultural values. The symbolic pressure on white identity engendered by demographic change and changing attitudes is a major factor underlying what David French has referred to as “the Great White Culture War.” To move beyond this impasse, we will need a more honest conversation about the meaning of white identity in the twenty-first century.
The problems begin with the idea that whiteness is a transcendent force for good or ill. If the social justice movement is a response to the monoculture and horrifying racism of the past, then the idea that being white is uniquely evil—an idea that would be considered racist if applied to any other group—rests on the same assumptions as white supremacy, the same misguided belief in our own innocence. As Thomas Chatterton Williams writes,
Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural. For Mr. [Ta-Nehisi] Coates, whiteness is a “talisman,” an “amulet” of “eldritch energies” that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early twentieth-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a “meta-biological force,” a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that special path.
In reacting against the sins of the past, the cultural left remains trapped in history. The far-right has responded by identifying with a mythological golden age, which they claim as their heritage. But, as the world becomes increasingly complex, neither the shames nor the triumphs of the past can help us solve the problems we face today. Instead, we need a sober understanding of our history, which doesn’t use it to determine identity.
We must recognize whites as an ethnic identity group like any other, and view whiteness neither as a symbol of oppression or a source of entitlement, but a set of collective memories and archetypes to which people feel attached. It is unsustainable to encourage minority groups to celebrate their ethnic identities, while stigmatizing whites from doing the same, in a country in which whites will be a minority in the near future; in which numerous dark-skinned ethnic groups already outearn white Americans; in which is no obvious through line between a strongly white identity and antipathy towards minorities; in which 40% of people living in poverty are non-Hispanic whites; and in which there are enough universal problems that viewing social ills through an exclusively identitarian lens is beginning to look outdated. We need to reject depictions of whites as either uniquely guilty or uniquely innocent, in order to move beyond the racial and partisan enmities that have engulfed modern life.
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Just a few more observations on Samuel Kronen’s most interesting and thought-provoking January 28, 2010 AREO essay “Bohemian Chic and the Origins of the Cultural Left”::
First of all, I feel rather strongly that we should definitely relate to so-called “Bohemian Chic” or “Cultural Left” people AS INDIVIDUALS and NOT simply as stereotyped members of a group that we may regard as silly, misguided, or obnoxious! As one commentator on Kronen’s piece wrote the other day, “trying to relate to individuals” has after all been “a settled consensus for fifty years in our society.” We should no more stereotype Kronen’s “upwardly mobile, educated white progressives of an urban secular mold” or Yascha Mount’s “rich, highly educated–and white” progressive activists than we should stereotype Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, WASP’s, “hillbillies,” women, gays, or Hillary Clinton’s white working-class “deplorables”! We may strongly dislike and criticize “politically correct,” “woke,” “regressive leftist” political behavior and “intersectionalist,” “postmodern” jargon (as I myself most certainly do), but we should therefore hate or despise all individual members of the social strata and demographic categories from which most practitioners of that politics and that jargon seem to come! Not ALL individuals from those social and demographic backgrounds by any means support or practice the particular sorts of political attitudes and behavior that most of us here on AREO find so objectionable!
Samuel Kronen himself concluded his essay by declaring that “[w]e must recognize whites as an ethnic identity group like any other, and view whiteness neither as a symbol of oppression or a source of entitlement, but a set of collective memories and archetypes to which people feel attached,” adding that it is “unsustainable to encourage minority groups to celebrate their ethnic identities, while stigmatizing whites from doing the same.” Well, I’d just add in a similar vein that we must likewise recognize upwardly mobile white progressives as a quasi-ethnic (if ancestrally perhaps a bit heterogeneous) identity group like any other, and view educated progressivism as neither a symbol of special virtue nor a badge of special viciousness, as marked neither by special brilliant wisdom nor by special abysmal stupidity!
When I first read Kronen’s essay last week, I was a bit surprised that, in his overview of historic precursors of today’s cultural left like Randolph Bourne, H.L. Mencken, the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac, and Norman Mailer, he didn’t also mention Russell Lynes’ February 1953 “Harper’s Magazine” essay “The Upper Bohemians,” later reprinted in 1956 his essay collection on mid 20th century American culture and manners “A Surfeit of Honey.” Art historian and informal middlebrow cultural commentator Russell Lynes (1910-1991), managing editor of “Harper’s Magazine” from 1947 to 1967, applied the term “Upper Bohemians” to what he saw as a substantial stratum of the mid-20th century professional, academic, and arts & communications world educated upper-middle classes. Lynes portrayed his “Upper Bohemians” as living as “a somewhat ornamental and by no means inconsequential group” in “a twilight zone in our society, neither below the aristocracy nor above the middle class,” flaunting a disdain for “mere” money-making and stuffy “up-tight” social convention.
Basically well-educated upper-middle-class people whose rebellion consisted of “slightly odd” tastes, Russell Lynes’ “Upper Bohemians” typically exhibited a “relaxed attitude toward convention,” a lack of zeal for “middle-class moralities,” an “open-minded” attitude toward sex, a “suspicious and scornful” view of “dogma,” and a studied indifference to “wealth or position or any of the cushions of life that we now group under the unromantic heading of Security.” The “Upper Bohemian,” Lynes found, generally “inclines” to “take the side of the labor aristocracy against the business aristocracy,” to “the Freudian interpretation of behavior,” to “the Keynesian interpretation of economics,” and to “a free-thought interpretation of religion,” though he “goes overboard about none of these” as he is “not a faddist.” He was typically “ a publisher, though he might as easily be a lawyer, or writer, or an architect, or an editor, or, but less likely, a business man,” in “advertising or some other form of communications” In his “professional life,” he “usually moves in and out of the arts and near them… and is alive to their latest alarums and excursions.” All this, we should recall, typically marked that stratum as it looked like to Lynes in 1953-1956.
Kronen opened his essay last week by defining “Bohemian chic” as “the cultural orientation predominantly held by upwardly mobile, educated white progressives of an urban secular mold,”
marked by “a tension between expressive individualism and egalitarian collectivism.” The vitally key words here, I think, are “upwardly mobile and “educated”–though Yascha Mounk accompanied his “highly educated” description of those people with the somewhat cruder label “rich” (or more precisely, “rich–and white”). As someone (I now forget just who) once observed that educated “cultural elite” liberals in the press, media, and academia originally “came from somewhere,” I think it’s important to recall that while perhaps most progressive journalists, academics, or media folk probably came from fairly affluent upper-middle-class families, many others have started, not necessarily poor, but nevertheless still as bright, talented, ambitious kids from working-class or lower-middle-class families who were fortunate enough to receive a good education–though these admittedly may well be outnumbered by silver-spoon sons and daughters. At least some of our upwardly-mobile progressives probably began as what sociologists David Riesman and Nathan Glazer described over half a century ago as the “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture” from intellectually and culturally deprived backgrounds–and a University of Virginia English major friend of mine once described as following a “Stephen Dedalus archetype.”
In their 1955 article on “The Intellectuals and the Discontented Classes,” originally appearing in the Winter 1955 “Partisan Review” and then soon reprinted in Daniel Bell’s 1955 collection on “The New American Right,” Riesman and Glazer attempted to analyze the social and political bases of support for Senator Joseph McCarthy and his demagogic ostensibly “anti-Communist” crusade in the early and mid 1950’s. Riesman and Glazer, along with most of the other contributors to “The New American Right” (e.g., sociologists Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, historians Richard Hofstadter and Peter Viereck, etc.) interpreted “McCarthyism”as largely expressing status anxiety and resentment among groups in American society anxiously and insecurely either rising or declining in social status, whether upward-mobile but feeling still not accepted enough by their “betters,” or else losing their formerly high or at least respectable status as newer groups rose in wealth or status to displace them. Such status-resentful groups, according to Bell, Riesman & Glazer, Hofstadter, Viereck, Lipset, and their “The New American Right” colleagues, included above all second- and third-generation immigrants (especially Irish Catholics and Germans) feeling not quite accepted or respected enough by WASP’s, “nouveaux riches” businessmen (e.g., Texas oil millionaires) snubbed or ignored by “Old Money” types, “Yankee” patricians jealous of the rising status of immigrant ethnic groups, and rural & small-town religious fundamentalists alienated by an increasingly secular and cosmopolitan 20th century America.
Riesman and Glazer, like their fellow-contributors, saw McCarthyism largely as reflecting populist distrust of intellectuals, sophisticates, and cosmopolitans. The anti-intellectualism of the status-resentful “discontented classes” susceptible to “McCarthyism,” they noted, also had a generational aspect. Many of the formerly poor or working-class “newly prosperous,” they observed, rejected the “traditional cultural and educational leadership of the enlightened upper and upper-middle classes.” They had “sent their children to college as one way of maintaining the family’s social and occupational mobility.” Some of these children had “become eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture, rejecting the values now held by the discontented classes.” However, “many of those who have swamped the colleges” had “acquired there, and helped their families learn, a half-educated resentment for the traditional intellectual values some of their teachers and schoolmates represented.” While “their humbler parents” might have “maintained in many cases a certain reverence for education,” their children had “gained enough familiarity to feel contempt.” They thus to some extent anticipated our own time’s frequent conservative complaints about the plight of conservative students on liberal campuses.
Riesman and Glazer concluded their paper by wondering whether “the intellectuals, rather than their enemies,” could “have a share in providing new interpretations and in dissipating, through creative leadership, some of the resentment of the discontented classes?” Unfortunately, they found “one obstacle to any rapprochement between the discontented classes and the intellectuals” in “the fact that many of the latter are themselves of lower-middle-class origin, and detest the values they have left behind,” so that “the dislike is not just one way.” They “espouse[d]” a “snobbery of topic which makes the interests of the semi-educated wholly alien to them–more alien than the interests of the lower classes.” Only “in the great new melting pot of the Army,” they suggested, might there “appear to be instances where intellectuals discover that individuals in the discontented classes are ‘not so bad,’ despite their poisonous tastes in politics and culture.” There, they hoped, “the great camaraderie of the male sex and the even greater one of the brass-haters” might “bridge the gap created by the uneven development of social mobility and cultural status.” Of course, they added, to “suppose that the intellectuals can do very much to guide the discontented classes by winning friends and influencing people among them” was “as ridiculous as supposing that Jews can do much to combat political anti-Semitism by amiability to non-Jews.” In our day, we might add here, the behavior of “woke,” “politically correct” students, faculty, and administrators is hardly conducive to “winning friends and influencing people” among students from conservative backgrounds! As Dale Carnegie himself reminded his readers anxious to learn “How to Win Friends and Influence People” over 80 years ago, “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” something today’s activists seem to have totally forgotten! As Talleyrand reputedly remarked 200+ years ago of Napoleon’s murder of the Duc D’Enghien, that “is worse than a crime–it’s an error!”
Whenever I read Riesman and Glazer’s remarks about children of the “discontented classes” who “became eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture, rejecting the values now held by the discontented classes,” I always think of my own personal experiences. I, too, was one of the “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture” in my own college and graduate-school days in the 1960’s, sharply critical of many of the ideas, attitudes, and prejudices of my own parents. As a graduate History major in the 1960’s at the University of Virginia who hung around with some close English major friends who were James Joyce fans, I learned to admire and identify with Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in “Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man,” with his proud, defiant resolve to “fly by” the “nets” of “nationality, language, and religion,” no longer willing to “serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church,” and determined instead to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Many of my friends and contemporaries, it seemed, had very much the same attitude and self-image, and it really seemed to me that Riesman and Glazer–and James Joyce half a century before them–were describing a well-nigh universal experience of modern Western humanity, or at least of post-Renaissance and post-Enlightenment Western intellectuals and creative artists.
I now still feel that Riesman and Glazer’s generalization about “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture” holds true for many people of my own generation–but may also be rather less applicable, sadly enough, to more recent generations, to whom Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus is no longer such a wonderfully apt archetype! Increasingly, I’m afraid, only kids born with silver spoons in their mouths will dare take the risk! The crushing burden of student debt makes such free-spirited self-discovery and intellectual exploration seem a sadly unrealistic and frivolous dream to all too many of today’s young Americans–while the rising tyranny of “political correctness,” “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and “de-platforming” makes liberalism or radicalism increasingly look and feel more like a dreary authoritarian threat to most students than like a seductively beguiling temptation!
In the 1950’s, when Riesman and Glazer wrote their article, American society was nearing the tail end of two processes that had dominated it for much of the first half of the 20th century–the assimilation of European immigrants into mainstream American society, and the spread of at least some degree of educational opportunity to rural and working-class Americans (or at least White Americans). The immigration restrictions of the 1920’s had ensured that there would be a progressively smaller and smaller and smaller population of unassimilated or only partly assimilated European immigrants speaking little or no English, clinging to “Old World ways,” and living huddled in “Polishtowns” and “Little Italies,” in Irish and Jewish tenement neighborhoods where black-shawled grandmothers haggled with pushcart vendors. The post-World War II “G.I. Bill” had given the chance for some sort of college education to countless Americans, or at least to White male Americans, who could have never even dreamed of it earlier. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, these two social trends were “coming due” and “winding down,” with the last major cohorts of White Americans moving from the tenements, “coaltowns,” “steeltowns,” “Tobacco Roads,” “Podunks,” and “Dogpatches” to Suburbia.
This 1950’s and 1960’s winding-down of the old mass immigrant Americanization, along with the “G.I. Bill” expansion of educational opportunity (at least for White male Americans), resulted in there being progressively fewer and fewer occasions for bitter inter-generational conflicts between rural, small-town, or immigrant parents and their newly “emancipated” and “sophisticated” college-educated sons and daughters. In the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s, perhaps into the 1950’s, small-town or immigrant parents and their college-educated children could still engage in angry, tearful arguments over evolution, Bible criticism, dating or marrying boys or girls of the “wrong” ethnicity or religion, or “worldly” habits and practices like smoking, drinking, dancing, lipstick, jazz (or rock’n’roll) music, or Sabbath-breaking. The “kids” themselves, too, could experience new-found perspectives as a joyously liberating revelation. They might find a glorious sense of personal salvation in debunking and defying their parents’, grandparents’, aunts’, uncles’, and home-town’s or ethnic enclave’s authority figures’ prejudices against Jews or Christians, Protestants or Catholics, Irish or WASP’s–or in defending Darwin against a literal interpretation of Genesis. Aside from the progressive Americanization of vast numbers of European immigrants, the early decades of the 20th century were also marked by the literary “Revolt From the Village,” as Carl van Doren called it in his 1921 “Nation” article by that title, of writers like Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, H.L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Floyd Dell, Zona Gale, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, all criticizing the negative aspects of small-town life while celebrating urban sophistication. At the same time, “Americanization” was a similar central theme among immigrant writers. These were major themes of American life and culture throughout the first half of the 20th century–but, as I’ve observed, largely “lost steam” after the 1950’s and 1960’s, as fewer and fewer Americans defined themselves in contrast to small-town or “greenhorn” parents.
For a number of other reasons, too, I suspect that a Stephen Dedalus-like flight from the “nets” of “nationality, language, and religion” by Riesman and Glazer’s “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture” may no longer be as common or widespread an aspect of the youthful American college experience now as it still was in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The last few decades, it’s now been my impression from almost everything I read and hear, have seen a growing vocationalizing of American higher education, an ever more relentless emphasis on “usable skills” and career preparation and downsizing or outright elimination of “useless” or “impractical” major fields like History, English, and Philosophy, alongside a shrill “PC” political polarization of “speech codes” and “safe spaces,” with less and less interest in cultivating the life of the mind for its own sake or in the popular old-time quest to “find oneself.” The increasing burden of student loan debt, likewise, I think has put a vast damper in recent years on college life as a nursery of “free spirits” devoted to self-discovery through exploring the worlds of books, arts, and ideas. At the same time, “political correctness,” with its proliferation of “speech codes” and “safe spaces” demands, has made students “feel like walking on eggshells,” afraid of being denounced or disciplined for offending one or another oppressed minority with an unwitting slight or “micro-aggression.” For such reasons, I really don’t think being a college (or graduate) student these days is as much FUN as it once used to be! Thus, as I’v said, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus is no longer quite as apt an archetype for bright college-educated young people as he still was in the 1950’s and 1960’s! Sadly, there may well be proportionally far fewer “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture, rejecting the values…held by the discontented classes” walking around on America’s college campuses and on the streets of America’s college towns today than there were in the 1950’s and 1960’s. And the few remaining ones will increasingly come mainly from well-heeled families, I’m afraid!
Samuel Kronen’s January 28, 2020 AREO essay on “Bohemian Chic and the Origins of the Cultural Left” struck me as an interesting, thoughtful, and also thought-provoking analysis on the whole. Here I’d just like to make a few observations on some of Kronen’s points and arguments in his essay, whether explicitly stated or tacitly implied.
I think it may perhaps be a bit too broad and sweeping a generalization to say that all educated affluent middle-class urban secular liberals are tormented by guilt over their unfair or unearned privileges. Many no doubt are, but others, I myself think, feel that their own comforts, freedoms, pleasures, and “privileges” are perfectly healthy, natural, and legitimate–but just need to be extended more generously and equitably to everybody else, so that EVERYBODY can live like an upwardly mobile, educated urban secular white progressive academic, writer, or artist if he or she so wants to. Some upwardly mobile educated progressives no doubt do feel somehow personally responsible for the deprivations of the less fortunate. However, I suspect many others would rather put most or all of the blame (as I myself have always personally pretty much tended to do!) on unintellectual culturally philistine Babbitt-type businessmen, on up-tight blue-nosed fun-hating religious fundamentalists, and on mousily respectable shabby-genteel lace-curtain insecurely upward-mobile ex-prole petty-bourgeoisie.
Guilt and asceticism may have their place in a strictly religious ethic or world-view, but I think they are less relevant to a more secular liberal or progressive outlook. Liberals and progressives, I’ve long felt, should be careful of uncritically adopting or accepting a zero-sum outlook on life where someone’s gain is always necessarily somebody else’s loss, where my being happy, comfortable, or successful always logically entails your being unhappy, uncomfortable, and unsuccessful–but that zero-sum mentality, I’ve always thought, is the underlying premise of the white liberal guilt syndrome.
I just read Randolph Bourne’s 1916 “Trans-National America” essay for myself a couple of days ago, and actually found it a far cry from today’s “woke” mentality. “Trans-National America” was all about welcoming and learning from the various European national groups immigrating into America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries–the Germans, Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Greeks, Scandinavians, etc., the groups described as so-called “white ethnics” or “Euro-ethnics” by 1860’s and 1970’s sociologists and pundits–but did not anywhere even mention “Negroes,” “Mexicans,” “Chinese,” or “Filipinos,” the sort of groups “valorized” (to lapse into “woke”/intersectionalist/critical-race/postmodernist lingo for a moment) by today’s “wokes.” Bourne quite definitely attacked “Anglo-Saxon” and “Anglo-American” chauvinism and provincialism in his essay–but nowhere did he denounce or demonize “whites” in general, and in fact did not really touch one way or another on the “race problem” at all, at least not in “Trans-National America.”
Bourne’s “Trans-National America” in fact pretty accurately forecast back in 1916 the actual shape of mid-20th century northern U.S. urban (and suburban, too) politics as largely consisting of the competition and also mutual compromise and accommodation of old-stock Americans (“WASP’s” or “Yankees”), Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, and other “white ethnics” (Poles, Slovaks, Germans, Hungarians, Scandinavians, Greeks, French-Canadians, etc.) Starting in the 1960’s with the civil-rights movement and accelerating in the 1970’s and 1980’s, however, this many-sided ethnic political pluralism increasingly gave way in America’s metropolitan areas to a starkly two-sided, literally black-and-white dualism of Whites versus African-Americans, the once seemingly very diverse WASP’s, Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Germans, etc. now all merged together into a single homogeneous mass of undifferentiated “white privilege.” As the “neocon” commentator Norman Podhoretz put it in a 1979 “New York Times Magazine” essay, American urban politics in the 1960’s and 1970’s had acquired a “Southerly” character defined by the starkly binary Black-White antagonism of the traditional Deep South, now viewed through the eyes of Southerners unaccustomed to Northern urban ethnic diversity, unable to notice any significant differences among WASP’s, Jews, Italians, Irish, Poles, or Germans.
Toward the end of “Trans-National America,” Bourne also noted that “the eager Anglo-Saxon” youth going to “a vivid American university” quite often found “his true friends not among his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian,” displaying In them he finds “the cosmopolitan note.” In these immigrant youths, “foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents,” he could “find many of his old inbred morbid problems washed away” among “friends…oblivious to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so provincially grew up.” He had “a pleasurable sense of liberation from the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day,” and “breathe[d].” His “new friends,” Bourne went on, had “gone through a similar evolution.” America, he felt, had “burned most of the baser metal also from them.” In other words, we could say, those college- or university-educated immigrant youngsters enjoyed a similar exhilarating liberation from the narrower aspects of their own ethnic cultures, learning to question, e.g., the more repressive and dogmatic beliefs and practices of Irish or Italian Catholicism or Orthodox Judaism, to reject German or Polish peasant anti-Semitism or old-world Jewish fear and distrust of the “goyim.”
I myself have often noted elsewhere that the last few decades of American history have seen the winding-down and exhaustion of two parallel trends, both touched on by Bourne in the “Trans-National America” passages quoted in the precious paragraph, that strongly marked American society and culture for much of the 20th century: the assimilation and “Americanization” of the children and grandchildren of the European immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the “urbanization” or “metropolitanization” of large numbers of rural and small-town <iderstern and Southern “heartland” Americans, often from the fundamentalist or evangelical Protestant backgrounds derided by H.L. Mencken and other “hip,”sophisticated” 1920's cultural critics. As suggested by Bourne, young Americans of both groups–both the European immigrants and the transplanted small-towners–often experienced an exhilarating liberation in their education, a process I myself gave often commented on. Nowadays, however, for various reasons, the college or university experience had grown increasingly less and less liberating to young Americans, is indeed FELT to be far less liberating than it once used to be. Reasons for this include the coercive atmosphere of “political correctness,” the increasing vocationalization and emphasis on “usable skills” of American higher education, and the horribly crushing burden of student debt. College just plain ain’t nearly as much FUN for American youngsters as it used to be!!
Kronen referred to the “anti-majority ethos” of H.L. Mencken and other cultural critics of the 1920's. He quoted Mencken as writing ”in words reminiscent of a modern whiteness studies class” that the normal American of the pure-blooded majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed,” holding “crude and shallow” political ideas, being “almost totally devoid of aesthetic feeling,” and utterly ignorant of the “most elementary facts about the universe.” Actually, whether or not Kronen realizes this, for all his contempt for the “booboisie” Mencken was far from being any sort of leftist, radical, or even liberal in politics. In fact, rather than being a follower of the “lyrical left,” he was a rock-ribbed conservative who proudly called himself a “tory,” despised “idealists,” socialists, radicals, and “do-gooders,” bitterly attacked FDR and the New Deal in the 1930's, and expressed doubts about democracy and majority rule. Indeed, many American conservative journalists and pundits through the whole past half-century have been great admirers of H.L. Mencken. Thus, an “H.L. Mencken Club” came into existence in 2008 as an “organization for independent-minded intellectuals and academics of the Right,” hosting speakers like Patrick Buchanan and Charles Murray, according to their website holding conferences devoted to themes like “political correctness across the democracies, the increasing overlap of Right and Left within the ‘respectable’ political spectrum, and the eclipse of any recognizable Right in our leftward racing party system.”
“unintellectual culturally philistine Babbitt-type businessmen, on up-tight blue-nosed fun-hating religious fundamentalists, and on mousily respectable shabby-genteel lace-curtain insecurely upward-mobile ex-prole petty-bourgeoisie”
That is beautiful.
Good article. Thank you to the author.
I’m very glad to hear that Ray Andrews (Feb. 1, 2020, at 10:49 PM) liked my posts so much, and found them “most thoughtful.” I do feel it both a great pleasure and a sacred duty to contribute my 2 ¢ worth to the conversation on current social, political, and cultural issues on AREO, trying to illuminate them to the best of my ability with my own knowledge of history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and literature, both from my formal education and from my lifetime of private reading. Since I first discovered it a couple of months ago I’ve found AREO a blessedly welcome “safe space” (to borrow “woke” lingo for a moment) for a type of thoughtful, humane, tolerant, TRULY liberal (but also truly conservative as well!) politics currently being all but completely squeezed out of today’s America by both the “woke,” “intersectional” Left and the reactionary Right. AREO is one of the few homes currently available for a sane, thoughtful liberalism all too rare these days in the Democratic and Republican parties alike, seldom discernible either in “The Nation” and “The New Republic” or on “Fox News,” “Breitbart,” Rush Limbaugh, etc.! AREO is one of the all too few venues in early 21st century America where if you reject the “woke” left you don’t have to embrace the Republican Party or the AltRight, where for instance you can openly, proudly declare BOTH that you favor Medicare for All and paid parental leave for everybody, AND likewise that you really don’t think students should be flunked for quoting Jordan Peterson in a term paper or professors fired for suggesting that a preference for marriage and motherhood or for studying English or History rather than Chemistry or Engineering might perhaps be the true explanation (rather than sex discrimination) for the underrepresentation of women in STEM studies and careers!
By the way, I’d also just like to note here at thus point that I thought “Chasbo2″ summed up a central basic tenet of my own political credo when he wrote on January 32, 2002 (7:35 PM) that “Everyone should have equal human and civil rights” and then criticized “woke” zealots for rejecting the “idea of trying to relate to individuals–an idea that was a settled consensus for fifty years in our society.” I, too, have always felt that everyone should have equal human and social rights, and should be related to as individuals!
The PBS program on racism in Chicago in the 1960’s watched by Ray Andrews depicted “hillbillies” as the most despised group, regarded as “white tash” by the “respectable” whites, and by everyone else as “just plain white,” so they couldn’t win either way–while today’s “woke” of course would still consider them “Privileged.” It reminds me of two of my own observations–(1), that American social and political discourse has shifted from a many-sided “pluralist” to a two-sided “dualist” or “binary” view of ethnic group relations in the past half-century, and (2), that a responsible, humane politics involves walking a fine line between insulting and appeasing groups whose beliefs, behavior, or practices we ourselves disapprove of, between needlessly antagonizing them on the one hand and condoning beliefs or practices we consider fundamentally false, bad, or wrong on the other.
First, in the past half-century we have largely stopped noticing subgroupings and subcategories among white Americans–as for instance between “WASP’s,” “Yankees,” “Irish,” “Italians,” “Jews,” “Poles,” “Germans,” “hillbillies,” “rednecks,” etc. As I’ve often observed elsewhere, in the last few decades American politicians and pundits have largely abandoned the long-standing picture of American urban politics as a many-sided contest of numerous competing ethnic and interest groups perpetually jockeying with each other for limited comparative advantages, continually making and unmaking coalitions and alliances for the sake of “a slice of the pie,”“a piece of the action,” “a cut of the graft,” “a place in the sun.” Instead, we have increasingly adopted a starkly dualist, literally black-and-white racialist vision of an apocalyptic struggle of Oppressors and Oppressed. As the “neocon” pundit Norman Podhoretz put it over 40 years ago in a 1979 “New York Times Magazine” article on “How the North Was Won,” American society as a whole had in the 1960’s and 1970’s adopted a “Southerly” view of American race and ethnic relations, seeing Northern cities as not basically any different from the South and largely ignoring ethnic differences among Northern whites.
Podhoretz saw a “new direction” of American liberalism rising and spreading in the 1970’s, “Southerly” in its “conception of the racial problem,” viewing the North as “in all essential respects no different from the South in its feelings about blacks and in its treatment of them.” It was a view natural to Southerners used to seeing the “sin of racism” as “the curse of the South,” and also to living in “a homogeneous society where almost everyone not black was of Anglo-Saxon Protestant ancestry.” They viewed the Irish, Italians, Jews, Slavs, Germans, Greeks, and other European immigrant ethnics of Northern cities as simply “an undifferentiated mass of whites,” though for Podhoretz “even the category white was misleading” in “a city like New York.” The same of course would likewise also go for the Chicago “hillbillies” in the PBS special watched by Ray Andrews.
In the North, Podhoretz argued, the racial “situation” was “radically different” from the South. In most Northern states, “laws prohibiting rather than mandating discrimination against blacks were on the books.” While it seemed to Southerners “as though the blacks of the North were segregated…penned up in ghettos and kept out of the neighborhoods and schools of the whites,” Podhoretz called this a “distorted view.” Blacks “were not segregated in the North,” he argued. They “did live together in certain neighborhoods,” but “so did Italians and Jews and Slavs and other ethnic groups,” who all “clustered together for a great variety of reasons, of which discrimination (from which they all suffered themselves) was only one and not necessarily the most important.” They felt “more comfortable living among ‘their own kind,’ surrounded by stores catering to their tastes and with churches and synagogues conveniently at hand.” In this, “blacks in New York and other great Northern cities differed hardly at all from other ethnic groups.” However, this pluralist vision, so self-evidently common-sensical to mid-20th century urban Americans, seemed to be fading away in the 1970’s.
In the second place, the situation of the Chicago “hillbillies,” and more generally of the early 21st century white working-class “deplorables” insulted in 2016 by Hillary Clinton, points to a lesson for serious, humane progressive politicians sincerely (and not just rhetorically) interested in furthering the well-being and addressing the legitimate grievances of our society’s “losers” and “subalterns.” It reminds us that they need to find a happy medium, walk a fine line, between insulting and antagonizing voters with less than 100% “eblightened” or “politically correct” outlooks by calling them “deplorables,” “bigots,” “racists,” or “sexists,” and pretending to endorse views or begaviors we in fact consider very seriously problematical. We should not insuly or demonize the “deplorables,” but we should also not falsely pretend to embrace their views if they seriously bother us!
“an undifferentiated mass of whites,”
As you point out later, whitey now does have one official differentiation and that is between the woke allies and the deplorables. If you aren’t woke you are deplorable. Thus the left ceded the working class to Donald Trump.
Love your posts BTW Peter, most thoughtful.
This seems confused and difficult to sort out. It accepts the racialization of our identities as setting the terms of the debate.
Everyone should have equal human and civil rights. Period. Let people self-sort within that framework, as ethnicities, religions, political parties, nudist colonies, whatever. That’s what happens in a free society. We should not emphasize white identity or even accept it as a particularly meaningful category. This is the disastrous result of Peggy McIntosh and her flimsy “white privilege” essay. (She wrote another essay 20 years later saying people were misusing her work, and we should remember that everyone was an individual, but she didn’t protest her influence over much.)
Individuals should have rights and governmental recognition. It shouldn’t matter what color they are. (By the way, America is rushing toward minority whiteness only if you don’t let Hispanics identify as white, which they tend to do. This talking point just fans the flames.) Furthermore, this writer’s conflation of whiteness with the bourgeois, the conventional, and the middle-class again unnecessarily racializes something that is not tied to race. How many from other races also share these values?
If people want to go to the Italian-American club or go to the Episcopal Church every week, so be it. We don’t need a cultural commisar to organize that or give permission, nor do we need big media to tell us its opinion. But critical theorists won’t let us forget whiteness, because, as Bonilla-Silva, the head of the American Sociology Association says, “Color blindness is racism.” They reject the idea of trying to relate as individuals–an idea that was a settled consensus for about fifty years in our society. Instead, increasing the contradictions, the tensions, the conflicts, is something that they, critical theorists let’s call them, think will benefit from. I think that they’re wrong: nothing in the world could be more counter-productive for the people they purport to want to help. But it will get them personally some power within institutions. So there we are.
Chasbo2’s complaint about the critical theorists and cultural commissars who “reject the idea of trying to relate as individuals” to our fellow Americans of various races, colors, ethnicities, and religions, a “settled consensus for about fifty years in our society,” also points to a potential peril or pitfall on “Cynic’s” emphasis on the Jewish background of American educated white secular progressive activists. While I most certainly do not wish to silence, censor, or “de-platform” writers like “Cynic,” nor in any way to deny or restrict his right to post observations about the national or ethnic background of someone like Yascha Mounk, I also feel that an undue or obsessive emphasis on such things fundamentally conflicts with the ideal of regarding and treating people as individuals. On a somewhat personal note, I still vividly remember my own youthful puzzlement, irritation, and annoyance in my own high-school and college days at my own parents making disparaging or politely suspicious comments about the ethnicities of some of my friends and classmates whom I myself regarded strictly as individuals–I often felt like angrily snapping “why the f__k can’t I just think of so-and-so on his or her own merits and for his or her own traits??” I also felt the same “what the f__k??” annoyance at some of mu high-school or college classmates who seemed to obsessively insist on emphasizing the ethnicity of other classmates! I always sort of resented the personal implication that I, T. Peter Park, was myself somehow stupid, naive, unobservant, unsophisticated, or lacking in “savoir-faire” in my own apparent failure to prioritize certain group memberships they themselves regarded a somehow significant. Moreover, I’ve also already commented in this “thread” on the fact that American progressivism has always had a significant elite WASP element!
Once again it all boils down to American Cultural Imperialism with a side order of Class Privilege.
“As Yascha Mounk comments, “progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white.” and white – read “Jewish”. Specifically, Ashkenazim. vis Yashcha Mounk himself. “Mounk was born in Munich. His mother is Jewish, and had been granted permission to leave Poland in 1969. He has said he felt like a stranger in Germany, and though German is his native language, he never felt accepted as a “true German“ by his peers.[1]” per Wikipedia. Make no mistake about it, the identification of “Anglo-American traditionalism, its WASP archetype and the puritanism of middle-class life” as something to be reacted against was an accomplishment of Ashkenazi Jews who, arriving on the east coast of the United States at the turn of the last century, perceived the then WASP ascendancy as something to be competed against, undermined and overcome. Still going on when Tom Wolfe wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities. Now accomplished as Donald Trump joins Benjamin Netanyahu in carving up the West Bank for the benefit of “illegal” Jewish settlements therein.
While many Ashkenazi Jews have indeed been prominent among American progressive, liberal, and radical activists, and while Jewish liberals and leftists have indeed often criticized WASP elites as a politically reactionary, socially exclusive, culturally Philistine influence, yet there has also always been a significant elite-WASP element in American liberalism and progressivism. 19th century Abolitionism was an overwhelmingly WASP movement, ultimately harking back to New England Federalist hostility to slave-owning Southern Democrats, and gaining much intellectual and spiritual support from the 1830’s, 1840’s, and 1850’s onward both from the likewise overwhelmingly WASP New England Transcendentalists and from evangelical Protestants. After the Civil War, “Mugwump” opposition to the Gilded Age “Robber Barons,” whom they disdained as boorish half-civilized parvenu vulgarians, was spearheaded by genteel, cultivated Boston Brahmins, New York/Hudson Valley patricians, and Philadelphia gentlemen, all imbued with “noblesse oblige” ideals of unselfish public service. As the 19th century began winding to a close, the “Mugwump” types were joined in their hostility to robber-baron capitalism by “Social Gospel” Protestant clergymen. The early 20th century “Progressive” movement was likewise largely led by well-educated elite old-stock WASP’s inspired both by “Brahmin” traditions of rational public-spirited civility and by :do-gooding” Social Gospel moral aspirations. We all know the epochal role of the Hudson Valley patrician Roosevelts–Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor–in 20th century American liberalism. In the 1950’s, many commentators noted how Joe McCarthy exploited “anti-Communism” in a status-resentful demagogic populist attack on elite WASP figures and institutions, politicizing the rancor both of anxiously upward-mobile second- and third-generation immigrants and of fearfully downward-mobile heartland-American fundamentalists against supposedly snobbish Yankee Brahmin bastions like Harvard, Yale, the Army. the State Department, the diplomatic corps, and the Supreme Court. In their 1954 anatomy of the mid-20th century American socio-political strains and fissures revealed by “McCarthyism,” David Riesman and Nathan Glazer noted what they saw as an informal tacit political and cultural alliance between Jews and Yankee Protestants, joined by their shared Old Testament and Enlightenment traditions. In the 1970’s, intellectual spokesmen for the largely Catholic “White Ethnics” (Irish-. Italian-, German-, Polish-, Slovak-etc.-Americans) like Andrew Greeley and Michael Novak complained that the liberal/progressivist American “Establishment” or “cultural elite” was largely dominated by a coalition of Jews and Ivy League WASP’s.
There’s a lot to like in this essay, it doesn’t even have to be true to be useful.
” An identity is invariably formed in reaction to something else:”
… but that strikes me as both true and useful. I hope this article gathers many comments.
I just found the source for my earlier observation today about David Riesman once making a comment about the shared Old Testament and Enlightenment heritage of Jews and elite WASP’s. It was on pp. 547-548 of his chapter on “Orbits of Tolerance, Interviews, and Elites” in his 1964 book “Abundance for What?” Citing the findings of an 1955 Harvard Graduate School of Education survey on “Reference Groups on the Formation of Public Opinion,” Riesman observed that “it would seem as if Yankees of higher education share an Enlightenment (and perhaps in some cases also an Old Testament) culture with the Jews and a prejudice against the Irish Catholics, while the lower-class Protestants feel an envy and resentment akin to that with which many urban Negroes feel for the Jews.” Riesman’s observation about Jews and elite Yankees sharing a prejudice against Irish Catholics should of course be understood in the context of widespread Jewish anxiety and dismay about the support of many Irish-Americans for Father Coughlin in the 1930’s and 1940’s and for Joe NcCarthy in the 1950’s–while the Yankee prejudice was much more afainst the Irish as “Papists” and/or as rowdy uneducated hard-drinking lower-class immigrants and slum-dwellers.
I just finished watching something on PBS about racism in Chicago in the 60s. Seems the most despised group was ‘hillbillies’ — to the ‘respectable’ whites they were white trash, and of course to everyone else they were just plain white, so they couldn’t win. Of course the woke would still consider them Privileged.
The difference is that the white people they were deriding back then were people who actually had reactionary, even racist, views. The white people they’re deriding now are mostly their allies.
LOVE this post! Good job!