I have always disagreed with people who liken the aims of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) activism to those of communist regimes. Last year, I still believed that, unlike communism, which has a clear end game of seizing the means of production for the proletariat, CSJ cannot become totalitarian because it is too contradictory, divided and irrational and too often operates like a circular firing squad since its proponents often lack a common goal.
Critical Social Justice has some intellectual underpinnings in “critical” neo-Marxism, but it is mostly grounded in postmodern notions of power, knowledge and language, which view society as constructed of oppressive systems of power and privilege that legitimize some forms of knowledge over others, which then creates ways of speaking about things—discourses—that perpetuate the oppressive power structures. Most people, it argues, are blithely unaware of those oppressive discourses and need theorists and activists to reveal them to us.
CSJ manifests in current scholarship as postcolonial and decolonial theory, Critical Race Theory, queer theory, intersectional feminist, disability and fat studies or simply as (Critical) Social Justice Scholarship. It appears in activism as a drive to decolonize everything, see whiteness and white fragility everywhere and scrutinise language for evidence of transphobia, ableism and fatphobia. It is colloquially referred to as wokeism to indicate an awareness of the oppressive power structures of white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, cisnormativity, fatphobia etc. that the majority of us are sleepwalking through.
At the beginning of 2019, I predicted that CSJ would break into smaller and smaller squabbling factions and eventually self-destruct. I still thought it was dangerous and needed addressing urgently. Before it inevitably imploded, I feared that it could take out a lot of good people, damage a lot of vital institutions, inflict potentially fatal wounds to liberalism, empiricism and rationalism and undermine or even reverse progress on racial, gender and LGBT issues.
However, over the over the past six months, it has become clear that CSJ can become totalitarian. Beginning in 2019, factionalism within CSJ has been gradually replaced by hierarchies. First, white women ceased to be a priority: the white women’s tears and Karen memes demonstrated their fall from oppressed to oppressor. White gay men also fell foul of the system by frequently failing to be woke and lesbians were automatically suspected of being TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). Asians, Jews and Hispanics became “white adjacent” because large numbers of them failed to espouse Critical Race Theory. Over the last six months, the idea of combating anti-blackness and transphobia has taken centre stage and, with it, totalitarian aims to revolutionise society by abolishing the police, compelling white people to confess their inherent complicity in white supremacy and punishing and silencing anyone who disbelieves in the queer and gender theories behind trans activism.
It should be clear by now that there is a genuine and serious problem here that affects the real world, not just the ivory tower and a few mad activists. There is ample evidence of Critical Race Theory and trans activism being imposed on the workplaces, universities and schools of average people. Anyone still claiming that the Social Justice left is just a few fringe loons must be wilfully blind.
However, when it comes to politics, morality, values and culture, we humans seem to long for simplicity. We want problems we can grasp, straightforward solutions, a cause to support and an enemy to fight. Never has this been clearer than since the US election.
Unfortunately, the problems we face right now—including the culture wars with their various feuding factions and sub-factions on left and right—are extremely complicated and navigating them in a responsible, nuanced way is hard work.
Right now, many things seem very precarious and people therefore feel extremely vulnerable. We have to balance the need to protect people from the coronavirus with safeguarding the economy to stop people from losing their businesses, jobs and homes. Global power shifts are causing significant uncertainty about economic stability in the west. The need for action on climate change has become urgent. All these issues have been intensely politicized because we are also going through momentous cultural shifts. There is a sense of existential dread: democracy and even the future of the west seem to be at stake.
At such times, people generally don’t want to think about things in a responsible, nuanced way while remaining open to a variety of different perspectives. That feels like a luxury that can only be indulged in times of security. In times of crisis, people want to be presented with a simple problem broken down into some clear evil that they can fight.
Humans can also be quite single-minded and tend to focus on one problem to the exclusion of all others. This is not an entirely negative thing. We need people to specialize and to bring their specialized knowledge to bear on situations. However, interpreting society through a single facet of it can cause people to become blinkered, trapped inside ideological bubbles and to catastrophize.
I myself have focused intensely and almost solely on Critical Social Justice over the past few years. This has caused some to accuse me of misdirecting my critiques at a fringe element of the left and neglecting the greater problem of the populist, post-truth right. However, when I recently urged Americans to vote for Biden, despite the likelihood that his victory would embolden the Critical Social Justice activists, many felt that—despite having critiqued CSJ for years—I underestimated the threat. This is not true.
Critical Social Justice is not the only or even the biggest problem in the world. Its body count is very low in comparison to Covid-19 and in comparison to the death toll likely to result if we do not address climate change and antibiotic resistance. Nor is the authoritarian ideological lunacy of the Social Justice left a greater risk than that of the truth-denying, conspiracy-mongering Trumpist right. Ethical conservatives should be addressing that problem as a matter of urgency.
Nevertheless, Critical Social Justice is a legitimate danger to liberal secular democracies.
We are in the midst of an attempted cultural revolution. This must be acknowledged, understood, faced head on and defeated.
People who anticipate that CSJ could evolve into something akin to a Maoist revolution complete with struggle sessions are not conjuring this possibility out of nowhere. Many people within the movement strongly advocate such a scenario and they enjoy a public respectability that right-wing authoritarian extremists do not. Neither are people wrong to think that Trump would oppose CSJ over-reach more forcefully than Biden will. Biden may not oppose it at all. This doesn’t make Trump a likely saviour of liberal, secular democracy, however.
I still think it unlikely that this attempted revolution can succeed in the long term, even in America where its advocates are strongest. Liberalism is too deeply rooted in American culture and in the Anglosphere, and CSJ is too incompatible with fundamental human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity to gain widespread public support. But therein lies another danger. If expectations of fairness and reciprocity are felt to be being transgressed, the darker side of humanity—our tribal and territorial instincts and our wish to avenge injustice and prejudice—emerges. This is particularly dangerous as the targets of CSJ movements add up to a majority. White, working class men and, increasingly, women; LGBT people who reject queer theory; Asians, Jews and Hispanics; and a growing number of black people who don’t buy into Critical Race or postcolonial theory are being incentivised to fight back. Some on the populist right do so with the same tools as the woke: identity politics, collective blame, competitive victimhood and dehumanising tribalism. This is unlikely to end well.
All the following things are true:
CSJ is neither the only nor the biggest problem in the world.
CSJ is a genuine problem that has been underestimated and it has respectability and power.
The populist, post-truth, conspiracy-mongering right is also a significant problem.
The woke left and the populist right feed each other’s narratives of injustice, victimhood and existential danger and thus increasingly lead people to condone violence as a solution.
CSJ is genuinely attempting a cultural revolution against the majority of the population.
The general population is unlikely to stand for this.
The populist right certainly won’t.
This all adds up to a recipe for disaster unless the liberal left acts fast to publicly discredit Critical Social Justice and assert an alternative worthy of respect. At the same time, an ethical conservative right needs to reject populist conspiracy theories and post-truth narratives in favour of a rational and consistent conservatism that has integrity.
The question now is not which side is worse but: How can we, making common cause with people from both left and right, defend the values of liberal secular democracies, including freedom of belief and speech and respect for science and reason, and push back the ideological lunacy before it spirals out of control and takes all of us with it?
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Unfortunately – and I don’t say this with any glee – the only way to fight cancel culture and CSJ is to fight fire with fire. Picket their homes. Dox them. Organize counter-demonstrations. Because well-intentioned essays no matter how rational and generous are not going to do the job.
Yes. Full-on head-on confrontation.
It’s gone way past the point where it might be laughed out of town, and the trajectory is towards civil war, literally. It might well end up with actually having to take out the obscene fraudulent virulent hate-mongerers. And better that than a lesser showdown that doesn’t kill it stone dead, so it only arises new in some further mad distortion of Marxism.
the following is my own human(e)ity idealism fictionalized; it’s one belonging in an unfortunately unattainable world in which there no longer are any horribly violent acts or even apathetic responses to needless suffering] ….
IN ALL DUE FAIRNESS
Listening to her teenage daughter’s recorded screams, the distraught mother could not contain her grief. With heaving sobs, she stood to leave the courtroom, only to have her weakened knees buckle and collapse onto the courtroom floor.
Heartfelt gasps came from many in the audience (while some other spectators she’d suspected to be but heartless voyeurs), as the bailiff, district attorney, and even defense council, rushing to assist the bereaved woman.
Slowly, gently facilitating the trembling frail woman to her feet, the three courtroom officials somehow misperceived stability in her pale expression and gradually pulled away their hands. But she was so shaken by the prosecution’s key evidence—that of the accused’s own trophy audio-video of her only child’s last tortured hours alive—she fell hard, flat unconscious.
The night the girl was kidnapped, the desperate mother had locked her daughter out of the house in an attempt to correct the otherwise average girl’s increasing tendency to breach curfew. It was the first (and tragically final) time the mother had, still with much reluctance, attempted such a tough-love measure. Only it had gone the most horribly wrong.
By all accounts, the mother had been a fine parent, as was the girl’s father; although he, until then healthy, had died suddenly of a massive coronary less than a month after his “little princess” had been prolongedly tortured, then murdered in the worst way.
The girl’s assailant had caused her all the real hell any parent wishes against their child ever having to nightmare about, let alone actually instinctively enduring for the sake of surviving the atrocity, only to be snuffed out at day’s end anyway.
And that appeared to have been the last straw. …
Suddenly everyone on Earth was aware of an unprecedentedly profound Great Change, and one that would become a far better existence than just moments before. The planet-wide awakening was a massive shift that would finally find favour for the most materially, physically, mentally and spiritually poor people of all.
For starters, every fortunate person was forced, as though by true magic, to empathically share in the anguish suffered by the greatest life-sentence affliction that Fate can cruelly, yet with cold apathy, reserve for a parent—a child lost to a torturous death. Now all bore a tiny portion—thus one sometimes imperceivable—of that enormous emotional turmoil otherwise suffered solely by those individuals who’d received the lottery-jackpot-odds lousiest of parental luck.
In rehabilitative return, those most unfortunate parents who’d suffered such unjust extreme loss, inexplicably felt very great relief from their overwhelming affliction. Their trembling hands slowly left their tear-streaked faces, for their heavy hearts no longer suffered the agony alone.
With the supernatural change, however involuntary, when all shared in such a terrible personal toll, it became a literal—rather than just the common figurative—sharing of grief. It was analogous to a fiscally imprudent national government that had invested a large sum of treasury funds into an eventually losing deal; but with the shortfall shouldered by the large collective citizenry, the burden on the individual taxpayer was so much greatly lessened, if not unnoticeable.
Rather than being specific thoughts invasively transmitted and received, it was loosely comparable to an expecting husband’s sympathy pains suffered for his greatly labouring pregnant wife.
Yet perhaps the greatest change was that through which all people who’d intentionally caused physical and/or psychological suffering, henceforth they justly yet involuntarily sustained the most bitter of the forced empathy.
Suddenly, if one took the cruel liberty to sexually violate another, in greatly shocked bewilderment the rapist simultaneously suffered the very same tearing sensation of his own violently invasive act, thus leaving him with no option but to self-servingly retreat in agonizing pain, however mysterious in origin. Indeed, it brought profound physical new meaning through actuation to the profane verbal directive, ‘Go f— yourself!’
And if one blindly with contempt spewed out racist or any of the many other bitter forms of venomous bigotry towards another person unprovoked, he personally experienced the very same emotional pain intended for the innocent recipient.
If a man had shot another person, he then experienced the very same excruciating pain and terror suffered by his victim, rather than just the newly typical universal tiny share; and, by just extension, if one gratuitously harmed a harmless stray animal—a neighbour’s benign beloved pet being the example considered, (non-human) animals being intellectually incapable of malicious acts simply for the sake of malice—the offender thus experienced both that animal’s suffering as well as its owner’s emotional anguish.
Thus the only remedial action was always to wholeheartedly—with genuine empathic remorse—apologize to the victim and without any doubt never again commit such a recklessly callous offense.
Even academics agreed it all was akin to everyone having been spontaneously cerebrally re-hardwired to literally share in others’ dreadful suffering, like so many undisturbed antennas suddenly receiving the immensely distressed signals from a few isolated agonized antennas.
Most assumed the change was implemented by a kindly sentient omnipotent source. This was defined by monotheists as God, and by polytheists as multiple powerful spirits; while others believed greatly advanced caring alien-race monitors were responsible.
Many secular humanists theorized it was simply the good within humankind itself psychically coming to long-overdue overpowering conscience terms with the disproportionate injustices suffered by some but not by most others.
Of course the change was also well received by many other worldwide examples of disproportionate suffering, notably that of desperately poor citizens of developing nations wanting for the most basic of life’s necessities. Indeed, great empathic relief was felt long before the arrival of overflowing shipments of water purification devices, as well as the exponentially larger quantities of food and medicine than ever before—all gratefully given by the prosperous nations because the planet’s privileged people were abruptly enduring what had consumed the world’s most needy for far too long.
And in return, the fortunate givers felt physically and mentally so much better.
Although initially the otherwise fortunate felt indignant by the change, that they’d done nothing personally wrong to justify the unfavourable empathy, soon it no longer felt like an imposition but rather a universal effect in which all were naturally wanting to treat all affliction, just as though it was in fact one’s very own turmoil.
And contrary to the usual human-history pendulum swing of ideological and political mood, the Great Change was a permanently solidified authentic sense of others’ upheaval, therefore no chance would remain of all reverting to the unjust existential norm of yore …
(Frank Sterle Jr.)
I think my one disagreement with what you have written here is that CSJ absolutely IS a huge threat and one of the biggest problems we face, namely because it influences all the existential problems we’re going through right now. The populist right isn’t going to do anything about climate change, for example, and right-wing identity politics won’t let individuals do it even if they wanted to. The “savages” of the colonial era are being echoed in the “white supremacists” of today – the message might be different, but the marketing is the exact same, that certain people are less-than-evolved and you can tell them by the color of their skin. I’m a transgender man (recently out) and I can’t even count how many times I’ve been called “transphobic” for supporting the idea that sexual biology is, at this time, immutable, no matter what I change my outside to. If you’re not with us, you’re against us.
CSJ is worse than a bunch of activists making noise, it’s a mindset and schema of thinking that is being imposed upon us to replace previous schemas with their diametric opposite. All the other issues, from the economy to the environment to healthcare, will be viewed through this lens, not the other way around. The UK already sees this with how the NHS handles transgender people, so wrapped up in “trans women are women” that they send Pap smear reminders to trans women who haven’t surgically transitioned and won’t need them even after they do (even being transgender myself, I think it’s extremist).
The bigger problems we have – cleaning up our environmental mess, closing income and healthcare gaps, mitigating the effects of natural disasters both on- and off-planet (like meteors and radiation, guys, don’t get all sci-fi on me!) are going to require massive teams of diverse individuals to solve. We’re not going to have these massive teams available if person A won’t work with Person B because B is a “threat to A’s right to exist.” And CSJ is training us (obviously not ALL of us but many, especially our professionals and academics) that we don’t even have to work with people who disagree with us.
The same error again and again.
Both communism and fascism were based on the same totalitarian collectivist ideology.
If you take the trouble to read the Fascist Manifesto by Mussolini, it differs little from the communist slogans. Nevertheless, you continue to call fascism a movement of the far right and communism a movement of the far left, and this is your decisive mistake!
The only and decisive difference between these movements, which occupied the same ecological niche (and precisely for this reason, so hated each other), was the attitude of the elites towards them. In the 30s of the last century, the elites viewed fascism as a force capable of destroying communism. This allowed fascism to come to power where the communist movements in the West were particularly strong.
The totalitarianism of the left today has entered into exactly the same symbiotic relationship with the elites as fascism did back then. Elites, concerned only with their own prosperity, gladly support the left, allowing them to silence the disaffected.
You still don’t understand that there is no far right and far left, and you are very surprised when it turns out that the modern leftists do not care about the problems of an ordinary citizens and Antifa become so similar to the blackshirts of Mussolini.
The danger of SJW, which you still consider to be marginal group, is much higher than you anticipate, and the consequences of its coming to power will be much more devastating than you can imagine.
Elites have always relied on the marginalized in their quest for absolute power and their union has always led to disaster.
You a smart woman, Helen. Forget about the right and the left for a while, think about the totalitarians and the possible consequences of their alliance with the elites, who always need the obedient masses, and then you will understand how grim our immediate prospects look if we do not have enough strength to stop the transformation of our society into a kingdom of totalitarianism.
Spot on, Anonnymouse.
Mussolini was the editor of the Italian socialist party’ newspaper, and realising the absurdity of international solidarity of the ‘proletariat’ when Italian soldiers were dying by the hundred thousand at the hands of Austro-Hungarian soldiers in WW1, he junked the internationalism in Marxism to create a national Marxism, just as did Stalin … and Hitler.
There is an excellent comprehensive history of Italian fascism as a recent book, in which this is brought out.
Exactly. See https://theotherclub.org/2017/08/cosmetic-distinctions.html
And check the “cosmetic distinctions” tag.
Well there is one huge difference.
Post-truth Trumpist right spreads mostly through the bottom castes of the society. They have little power and best they could have done was to elect Trump for one turn. Trump hasn’t succeeded much in fighting CSJ, neither he brought any form of fascistic dictatorship.
CSJ spreads exclusively through the elites. Universities, politicians, journalists, celebrities. This means that in long term it has a vastly bigger potential to impact or even shape the decision making process of western countries and societies.
CSJ is not as incompatible with liberalism as one would think. If you listen to its brahmins they all invoke the principles of equality, reciprocity etc. that classical liberalism failed to deliver. In my opinion it’s best treated as a _reformation_ of liberalism or a _schism_ within it. This is why it’s far more difficult for liberals than it is to reactionary right to argue with CSJ clergy. Of course reformations tend to go ugly like some extreme protestant sects or Salafi movement do, but history shows that such movements are usually here to stay and that they are a permanent source of instability and trouble, occasionaly seizing power in one country or another.
No. It is not some ‘reformation’. It’s backlash against the masses for not buying the original Marxist nonsense.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with equality. That’s an obscene feint. It’s all about hate-mongering towards the very people Marxism sought to ‘liberate’.
Of course, this was always itself a feint: Leftism is the attempt to hide own status-striving by ‘projecting’ it on to all ‘non-believers’.
Wars and taxes only have an impact on men? You must be joking. “Women had always had the vote at local level”? Hardly. In fact, women were denied rights vis-a-vis their husbands in their own homes until fairly recently, i.e., the 1970s.
Come again?
* DIRECT impact. Being blown up or shot, having been dragged away from your entire life for the purpose, and on top of that having to pay a good slice of your wages in taxes to pay for such ultimate enslavement and punishment on top of supporting the wife and kids. Now that’s what you call a major direct impact. As opposed to what impact on women?!
* Do you not know the history of the franchise at all?! Women as far back in time as historical record go always had the vote re matters in which they had an interest/ They had the vote in both the manor and church courts. See my book chapter on the history of the franchise.
Why not make informed and sensible comments instead of spurious ones, and reply to points actually made instead of misrepresenting, as the only way you can make some lame point of your own?
Nice article Helen.
I’d be interested to hear you elaborate somewhere your understanding of “populism,” and justify why you think populism itself is a problem.
You speak of the “populist, post-truth right,” and note that “some on the populist right” do “[white] identity politics.”
I don’t deny there are targets fitting these descriptions, but many of us – who I hope qualify as your “ethical conservatives” – express our anti-wokeness as populism: the elites we’re against are the powerful wokes who, as you note, “enjoy a public respectability that right-wing authoritarian extremists do not.” It’s because we’re pro-truth that we’re against the (lying) woke elite. Why do you invariably think “populist” and “post-truth” together? For us, these determinations are opposed, not necessarily connected.
“Limitation of space,” would be a fine enough answer, but I do worry that, by heaping scorn on “populism,” your categorization renders a respectable conservative position immoral a priori.
Meanwhile the real threat to all living beings including the non-humans on this mostly non-human planet is the systematic destruction of the biosphere upon which we all depend – even for our next breath. And simultaneously the now everywhere 24/7 surveillance state in which everything you do, say and even watch on electronic media is listened into by Big Brother. And everywhere you go too the moment you turn on your “mart”-phone and via all of the surveillance cameras and high-in-the-sky facial recognition cameras etc.
There is now nowhere to hide!
But even that is the inevitable outcome of the military-industrial-propaganda/entertainment complex which Eisenhower warned us against. At another related level we are now “living” in what the truth-telling journalist and social critic Chris Hedges called the Brave New Dystopia which combines the dark visions of both Huxley’s Brave new World (and Brave New World Revisited) and Orwell’s 1984 – the essay is available online.
Check out the Counterpunch essay titled How the Market Destroys the Lifeworld by Thomas Klikauer and Nadine Campbell which joins all the dots re how all of the above is inter-connected.
Unfortunately there is almost nothing that can be done about this situation because the pattern that now patterns and CONTROLS everything and everyone has an immense power and momentum behind. Furthermore this pattern-patterning did not just manifest over night – it is the inevitable outcome of the drive to obtain power and control over everyone and everywhere at the root of Western culture (in particular). Lewis Mumford the historical growth and development of this drive to totalizing power in his two books Technics & Civilization, and The Pentagon of Power.
Check out the Kindle review of the book by Paul Gilk titled Picking Fights With the God’s – A Spiritual Psychoanalysis of Civilization’s Superego. Paul pays homage to the work of Lewis Mumford.
Nonsense extreme-ideological comment. There is no destruction of the biosphere in the offing. Demographers agree that global human population is set to peak mid-century and then fall off a cliff. The slight increase in atmospheric CO2 (driven by temperature rise, NOT the cause of it) has led to a 15% extra greening of the planet (CO2 is plant food). Global temperatures were higher in the 1930s than now, and are set to fall substantially over the next few decades as we progress through a grand solar minimum; this being a phenomenon of the now known driver of continuous climate change, which is variation in extra-solar cosmic-ray seeding of cloud to make the albedo effect (white cloud reflecting the sun’s energy back into space), caused by variations in the sun’s magnetic field (in turn related to variation in solar surface activity).
The short-term issues re species diversity owing to the temporary global human over-population should be the focus of attention, for sure, but with all species being in dynamic reciprocal relationship there is always natural re-balancing, whereby there are always species waiting in the wings to exploit any niche that becomes available.
Your comment reveals the dire need to improve education to make people at least basically literate in science and the philosophy of science.
Now this is a conspiracy theory by Steve Moxon (denying climate science with nonsense) if ever there was one. Your post has not the least whatever to do with Helen Pluckrose writing about postmodernism, freedom of speech. In fact if I understand her right she is writing precisely to establish humanism and science.
Great piece Helen! Used it as the featured piece in my daily newsletter on wokeism: https://snsmkr.com/the-fruits-and-thorns-of-liberalism-and-illiberalism-snsmkr-daily-digest/ As I wrote there:
This all has the distinct ring of Martin Niemoller’s post-war formulation:
First they came for the men, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a man.
Then they came for the whites, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not white.
Then they came for the white-Adjacent, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not white-Adjacent.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Think it stops there? Think again [link to article: “Straight Black Men Are the White People of Black People.”]
No, but it stands in the way of solving some of the biggest problems in the world.
As I wrote a little earlier today, our own current split of American liberals, progressives, and leftists into wokes and anti-wokes, authoritarians and liberals, Critical Social Justice and non-CSJ supporters, strikes me as uncannily echoing the split of American radicals and leftists in the 1930’s into “Stalinists” and “anti-Stalinists, as reflected for instance in the contrast of the “regulars” of Alcoves 1 (anti-Stalinist) and 2 (Stalinist) of the City College of New York lunchroom in those years, as recalled by “veterans” of those “alcove wars” like Irving Kristol (1920-2009), a 1940 CCNY graduate who was then a Ttrotsktyite Marxist and later became a leading neoconservative pundit. Here, for everyone’s information and entertainment, are a few interesting relevant paragraphs on those 1930’s CCNY alcoves from Kristol’s January 1923, 1977 “New York Times” article “Memoirs of a Trotskyist,” posted online at
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/01/23/archives/memoirs-of-a-trotskyist-memoirs.html:
“But the only alcoves that mattered to me were No. 1 and No. 2, the alcoves of the antiStalinist left and pro-Stalinist left, respectively. It was between these two alcoves that the war of the worlds was fought, over the faceless bodies of the mass of students, whom we tried desperately to manipulate into “the right position” but about whom, to tell the truth, we knew little and cared less.”“
“I shall not say much about Alcove No. 2—the home of the pro-Stalinist left — hut, Lord, how dreary a bunch they seemed to be! I thought then, with a sectarian snobbery that comes so easily to young radicals, that they really didn’t and never would amount to much. And I must say—at the risk of being accused of smugness—that in all these intervening decades, only two names from Alcove No. 2 have come to my attention. One is now a scientist at a major university. The other was Julius Rosenberg.”
“I do believe their dreariness was a fact, and that this dreariness in turn had something to do with the political outlook they took it upon themselves to espouse. These were young college students who, out of sympathy with Communism as officially established in the Soviet Union, had publicly to justify the Moscow trials and the bloody purge of old Bolsheviks: had publicly to accept the self-glorification of Joseph Stalin as an exemplar of Communist virtue and wisdom; had publicly to deny that there were concentration camps in the Soviet Union, etc., etc. Moreover, since this was the period of the popular front, they had for the time to repudiate (by way of reinterpretation) most of the Marxist-Leninist teachings on which their movement ostensibly founded.”
“Though I had no trouble understanding how a young man at that time could have joined the Young Communist League, or one of its “fronts,” I did find it hard to imagine how he stayed there. Not everyone did stay, of course; many of the members of Alcove No. I had had their first political experience with a Stalinist group and had left in disillusionment. But those who did stay on for any length of time—well, it had to have deleterious effects on their quality of mind. After all, members of the congregation of Alcove No. 2 were actually forbidden, under pain of ostracism and exile, from entering into conversation or even argument with any member of Alcove No. 1! This prohibition was dutifully obeyed….”
“Which brings me to Alcove No. 1, where pure intellect— a certain kind of intellect. anyway — reigned Unchallenged. Alcove No. 1 was the place you went to if you wanted to he radical and have a theory as to the proper kind of radical you should be. When I say “theory.” I mean that in the largest sense. We in Alcove No. I were terribly concerned with being “right” in politics, economics, sociology, philosophy, history, anthropology, etc. It was essential to he “right” in all of these fields of knowledge, lest a bit of information from one should casually collide with a theoretical edifice and bring the whole structure tumbling down. So all the little grouplets that joined together to make Alcove No. I their home were always in keen competition to come up with startling hits of information—or, better yet, obscure and disorienting quotations from Marx or Engels or Lenin or Trotsky— that would create intellectual trouble for the rest of the company.”
“The Trotskyists, with perhaps a dozen members, were one of the largest grouplets and unquestionably the most feverishly articulate. Almost as numerous, though considerably less noisy, were the Socialists, or “the Norman Thomas Socialists” as one called them, to distinguish them from other kinds of socialists. Among these other kinds, none of which ever had more than two or three representatives in Alcove No. 1, were the Social Democrats (or “right-wing socialists”) who actually voted for F.D.R., and the “revolutionary socialists” who belonged to one or another “splinter group”—the Ohlerites, the Marlenites, the Fieldites, the Lovestonites, and the who-can-remember-what-other-ites—which, finding itself in “principled disagreement” with every other sect, had its own little publication (usually called a “theoretical organ”) and its own special prescription for achieving real socialism. In addition, and finally, there were a handful of “independents” —exasperating left-wing individualists who either could not bring themselves to join any group or else insisted on joining them all in succession. What held this crazy conglomeration together was quite simply, the powerful presence of Alcove No. 2, and. beyond that, the looming shadow of Stalinism with its threat of so irrevocably debasing the socialist ideal as to rob humanity of what we were certain was its last, best hope.”
To my comments of last night comparing our current authoritarian and liberal progressives to the 1930’s Stalinists versus anti-Stalinists described for instance in Irving Kristol’s memoir of the different City College lunchroom alcoves, I would just add my wish that more contemporary liberals and progressives would recall the parallelism, and openly oppose the “woke” Critical Social Justice zealots for the reincarnated 1930’s Stalinists they actually are. It would be a great tragedy if the CSJ zealots succeeded in completely, permanently capturing the Democratic Party. It might be really very nice, for instance, if President-Elect Biden’s advisors were reminded of the 1930’s ideological battles recalled in Kristol’s CCNY alcoves memoir.
Ochlocracy and totalitarianism are not mutually exclusive.
In other words, the political center (aka the exhausted majority of America) needs to stand up and make its voices heard. Because otherwise the voices at the extremes are going to tear our society to shreads.
It seems American liberals, progressives, and leftists are about to fight the “Stalinist”–“anti-Stalinist” battles of the 1930’s all over again, that 90-odd years after the college days of the “New York Intellectuals” American college campuses in the 2020’s may in effect see a replay of the City College “alcove wars” between Communists versus anti-Communists recalled in the memoirs of writers like Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz! In the 1930’s,Party-line Moscow-loyal Communists bitterly argued and debated with a loose anti-Moscow, anti-Stalinist coalition of Trotskyites, Norman Thomas Socialists, and New Deal liberals. These days, the “woke”, “politically correct” Critical Social Justice zealots are the latter-day successors of the 1930’s Stalinists, while people like Helen Pluckrose are filling the role of Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and their anti-Stalinist friends in the 1930’s “alcove wars”!
“CSJ cannot become totalitarian because it is too contradictory, divided and irrational and too often operates like a circular firing squad since its proponents often lack a common goal.”
So, sort of like France in 1793/94?
Pluckrose is correct. It has been a rather interesting journey to see how many people need this patiently explained as I recognized early on the hijacking of the moral certitude of the ethics of racial integration back in the late 80s as multiculturalism became radicalized. There is no longer ‘multicultural literacy’, there is only a narrowminded and shallow political dogma whose irrational demands have put on a black man suit. And then a black woman’s suit. And then a black queer woman’s drag complete with iron fists.
I speculate that at some point some kind of minority performance is the only thing that’s going to get the attention of the poor folks who thought they have been awakened when in fact they have been ‘woked’, a completely different type of transformation. I can’t see how universities, who should be doing this work, are going to rescue themselves from their own bureaucratic cowardice. So to that end I have been reluctantly tossing my porkpie into the circle of reason surrounding the particularly tiresome subjects of race as they crop up. It’s sad that Pluckrose and her colleagues’ apt sense of humor is now only darkly appreciable. But hey, darkness is my business and my sense of humor may be darker still.
As a former Progressive (I was ‘born’ that way) Black Nationalist who dropped militant oppositionalism in time for our Bicentennial and triumph of crossover in the 70s to an early adopter of Thomas Sowell & Glenn Loury’s more sophisticated takes on race and integration all the way through to being the founder of the Conservative Brotherhood blog league – I have seen quite enough racial traffic from various political perspectives to identify charlatans when I hear them. As difficult as it might be for the mainstream to recognize and appreciate genuine black American thought, it is even more difficult to deal with the diversity and contradictions of that thought. Thus it might be most useful to sound off via negativa. What black Americans are NOT.
I feel confident in asserting that black Americans are NOT and never will be pacified by whatever fashionable predicates and pronouns call us out of our individual names. So if you even *think* about the nerve it takes to suggest the term ‘bipoc’, you must conclude it is an insult of the first order. We are NOT that. Don’t even go there.
We are not George Floyd. We are not Trayvon Martin. We are not any proxy or abstraction you can ever imagine. And if we say so, we’re lying. We are individuals. We are Americans. We are not interested in any sort of revisionism. We don’t need any movements. We don’t need any allies. We don’t need any racial theories, strategies, tactics or approaches. Only honesty. We are ourselves. Deal with us.
Paraphrasing Michael Jackson and The Staple Singers, You’re just another part of me, and I am just another part of you. So respect yourself.
MDC Bowen,
I sat up straight for this, and straighter still for the final paragraph and a bit. I salute you as a fellow traveler. I am more than prepared to deal.
Thank you for this bit of sparkle on a gloomy day.
Your statement “We are not interested in any sort of revisionism” is an odd one indeed. Isn’t all of history revisionist, as is any discipline, including science? What we learn from the history of any field of study is that new ideas constantly arise to challenge the old ones. Sometimes the new ones are right, sometimes not. But the point is that all disciplines are guided by “uncertainty.” If you are not interested in revisionism, that means that your truth, once established, is THE TRUTH. Sounds rather dictatorial, doesn’t it? (sort of like those SJW’s that you dislike for the same reason.)
“Revisionism” has a very specific connotation, particularly in the context given. In case you were unaware of that, it really undermines your fairly shoddy attempt at a ‘gotcha’ moment.
Thanks Helen, very nicely weighed. The left and the right are both deeply disturbed. Each should attend to its own sickness before worrying about the other.
False. The usual six-of-one-and-half-a-dozen-of-the-other cop out. CSJ / identity politics / PC (interchangeable terms) is a near century-long developing political-Left backlash to try to blame ‘the workers’ instead of the failure of Marxist theory, which is a total failure to comprehend human nature. The political Right is conservatism: the understanding that politics is a clash between often irreconcilable different motivations (facets of human nature), and that the way forward is realism, not ideology. The Left caricature of what it imagines is political Right is more a ‘projection’ of the Left’s own faults.
Then what, Steve, do you consider Trump and his followers? They’re commonly considered to be of the far or “alt” right, but they certainly do not fit your definition of conservatism.
They certainly do fit the definition of ‘conservative’. They’re pushing back against the ridiculous, malicious, obscene extemism of the left now adopted by elites. That’s not somehow its mirror-image. It’s conservative push-back. You’ve swallowed the usual ‘projection’ by extremists.
The chief issue in your response is your passive construction, “They’re commonly considered…” Really now? Considered by whom? What exactly is “the far right”? I’ve yet to see anyone adequately define alt-right that doesn’t come across as a caricature or strawman. Border security, constitutional originalism, controlled immigration, and economic protectionism all seem to be the chief concerns of both conservatives and Trump supporters (according to the data) and conservatives. The overlap wouldn’t make a useful Venn diagram. Are you implying then, that these positions are “far right”?
I see nothing objectionable in Steve’s definition of conservatism. Realism vs. Idealism, Nature vs Nurture have long been in use to philosophically differentiate the Right from Left in the US. Perhaps you might give your own understanding of what you think conservatism is.
Helen Pluckrose still doesn’t get quite how serious this is, and gets it wrong re the roots: ‘postmodernism’ is not the root.
‘Identity politics’ — a better term than ‘critical social justice’ — is the most all-pervasive and deep-seated totalitarianism the modern world has ever experienced, and the trajectory is towards full-blown civil war.
‘Identity politics’ (often or even usually dubbed ‘political correctness’) is the result of a political-Left major backlash against the mass of ordinary people (in Europe and ‘the West’), beginning in the 1920s/30s, in the wake of the persistent failure of Marxist theory to be realised in European ‘revolution’ or any real change through democracy. In shifting the blame away from Marxist theory and its adherents, and on to those the theory had prescribed and predicted would have been the beneficiaries — the workers — if only they had responded accordingly; then the cognitive-dissonance within the political-left mindset caused by this crisis to an extent was salved.
The intellectual rationalisation was first by invoking Freud’s now comprehensively discredited notion of ‘repression’ to attempt to explain a supposed impact on ‘the workers’ of ‘capitalism’ acting within the context of the family. With most workers (the group considered the principal ‘agents of social change’ in a ‘revolution’) being male, then the theoreticians had in mind the male as ‘head’ of the family. It was a simple extension in political-Left imagination for ‘the worker’ to change from being the putative conduit of the impact of ‘capitalism’ to its embodiment, leaving women to be deemed a replacement supposed ‘oppressed’ and ‘disadvantaged’ ‘group’.
This implausible and unfalsifiable non-scientific nonsense mainly festered within academia until the co-option after 1968 by the political-Left of a movement which appeared to be akin to the revolutionary activity predicted by Marxism: the US ‘civil rights’ movement. This added to the ‘new oppressed’ the category ‘non-white’, which like that of women could be envisaged as an inversion of a retrospective stereotype of ‘the worker’. In the wake of the similarly seeming revolutionary Stonewall riots of 1969, the ‘gay rights’ lobby was also co-opted to further add to the abstract demonised aspects of ‘the worker’, thereafter retrospectively stereotyped as male plus ‘white’ plus heterosexual.
The strands of the ‘new oppressed’ combined in a new (neo-Marxist) conceptualisation to account for these political shifts after the fact, which came to be termed ‘identity politics’ (or more pejoratively but accurately, ‘cultural Marxism’, and latterly dubbed ‘modernising’ [sic] in political parties). The deemed ‘groups’ replacing ‘the workers’ – subsequently expanded to embrace the disabled, the elderly, trans-sexuals and the obese – are abstractions rather than groups per se, and in any case far too heterogeneous to be in reality ‘oppressed’ or ‘disadvantaged’; providing a window on the sophistry and origin of this politics as other than it purports.
This absurd situation arose through the political-Left’s forcing of specific conflicts to be considered as emblematic of Marxist struggle, rendering them as generalisable, with their participants abstractions. US Afro-Americans became generic ‘ethnic minorities’, and ‘gays’ became ‘homosexuals’. The history of feminism — not just of the ‘third wave’ — is of upper-class or upper-middle-class women demanding to somehow to be the same as their very high-status husbands and males within their rarefied social milieu; which even if it could make any sense given profound sex difference, hardly was a basis of anything comparable for the great majority of either women or men. The upshot is that ‘identity politics’ is a ‘gravy train’ for the already privileged. Worse, it is an instrument of oppression against the very ‘group’ perennially disadvantaged and the victim of prejudice, which formerly had been identified as worthy of the liberation Marxism promised: the vast majority of (necessarily lower-status) men.
The pretence to egalitarianism is perfect cover for what ‘identity politics’ actually is: the very perennial and ubiquitous elitist-separatism the political-Left ethos attacks and denies; rendered a quasi-religion, being an ideology in the wake of the Christian notion of ‘the promised land’ in the utopia/dystopia of equality-of-outcome.
You are disregarding what Helen Pluckrose says about white women now being classified as oppressors when historically we certainly were not. White women are only recently approaching parity after centuries of exclusion from positions of social authority and recognition. You seem to resent feminism. How do you know none of the white women who wanted the same status as their “high-status husbands” were not qualified to receive it? Was Eleanor Roosevelt less talented than her husband? What about Mozart’s sister, also a musical prodigy, who was not able to pursue a career such as his due to her gender? I agree with your distaste for identity politics, but think you need to re-evaluate your own apparent biases.
Hi Marian.
No. I’m not disregarding re ‘white’ women. Left factionalism always happens: it was bound to happen that the faux ‘groups’ would further differentiate and be pitched against each other. As for your repeating the usual contention of the sexes and ‘parity’, you evidently are not familiar with the basis of human sociality. The sexes are different, and with the basic biological principle of the female being the ‘limiting factor’ in reproduction, all social system (in all cultures, at all times through history) is built around serving the female interest. Mary Wollstonecraft failed to see that the laws of her day re property, marriage & divorce were to ensure no male ever escaped responsibility to provide for his wife and children no matter how absurd and unjust the circumstances. That it may not have served all the interests of an upper-class female is beside the point. Exception proves the rule, as they say. The suffragettes similarly were myopic in failing to see the democratic deficit was male: national government was back then all about ‘imperial’ issues — wars and taxes to pay for them, all of which impacted directly only on men not women. Women had always had the vote at local level (on both manorial and church courts) back to time immemorial, which is where their interests were manifest.