What's 'Woke'?

 What's 'woke'? and why is it called that? Philosopher Stephen Hicks has the simple explanation:

It comes out of the Left politically. Interestingly on the Right politically too (if we can use these labels, left and right, [since they're] both problematic.)

    But on the Right there’s the concept of the 'red pill,' which comes from the movie 'The Matrix.' So the idea then is that in some sense one is in a coma, perhaps a chemically-induced coma. But if you take a pill, the red pill, then suddenly the coma goes away, you wake up, and you see reality as it really is. And everything is quite different. 

    So the Left version of this comes out of the 'False Consciousness' tradition. It says that ... we are all raised [or] conditioned into a false narrative that says that [western civilisation is great] or that America is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and justice and freedom for all and so forth. But that is a fake cover story that has been 'conditioned' into all of us. And what we need to do is to raise our consciousness—and in some cases get slapped upside the head—so that we wake up and look around and realise that we really are oppressed. 

    And that’s a kind of 'awakening,' to see the world as it as it really is. So woke is just a slang-y way of saying that 'I’ve woken up,' and now I can really see that this childhood naïve story about what a wonderful culture we’re living in is false, and that one has become sensitised, and now buys into the narrative of oppression and exploitation.

"Rather than searching in Marx's texts for a condemnation in advance of the Gulag, it is a matter of asking what in those texts could have made the Gulag possible."

Cartoon by Etta Hulme

"The [destructive aftermaths of the] Soviet Union, Maoist China, Kim's North Korea, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Castro's Cuba, Mugabe's Zimbabwe, Chavez and Maduro's Venezuela, and countless other deadly authoritarian regimes and revolutions— all carried out in Marx's name, and celebrated by Marxists at their inception — are casually dismissed and dissociated from Marx's theories ... They are not 'true socialism' or 'true Marxism,' we are told, and it falls to the next socialist regime to implement Marx 'the right way.'
    "A succinct and representative example of this tendency among modern intellectuals may be seen in political theorist Matthew McManus's account of Marx's reputation over time

'But of course the most substantial objection came from Karl Marx, whose epochal critique of political economy remains in some respects the climax of the modernist project...Marxism became the chief theoretical outlook for most of the major socialist movements and parties by the end of the 19th century, with many achieving important reforms. But its reputation was seriously tarnished by the totalitarian movements in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, which appealed to Marx's legacy to advance tyranny while taking serious liberties with his thought. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989, many thought socialisms' days were numbered, though it has since enjoyed a resurgence in popularity as the inequalities and vulgarities of neoliberalism [sic] became increasingly scrutinised.'

"Note that McManus errs in assigning high status to Marx's intellectual following in the late nineteenth century, which, as we have seen, he did not possess at any point in his life or for many decades thereafter. Neither does McManus substantiate his efforts to differentiate the humanitarian abuses of Marx's twentieth century followers from Marx's own revolutionary theorising. 

    "One is reminded of the quip of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who stated in a rare moment of clarity: 'Rather than searching in [Marx's] texts for a condemnation in advance of the Gulag, it is a matter of asking what in those texts could have made the Gulag possible, what might even now continue to justify it, and what makes it intolerable truth still accepted today.' 'The Gulag question,' Foucault continued, 'must be posed not in terms of error (reduction of the problem to one of theory) but in terms of reality'."

~ Phil Magness, from recent writing

What's 'woke'? Let me explain.

 

You hear it all the time now. 'Woke.' "He's woke." "She's woke." "That's woke." Woke, woke. woke. You hear it all the time.

But awake to what?

James Lindsay likes tweaking 'woke' noses, and he's a fairly knowledgable chap on the subject. "There's a right name for the 'Woke' ideology," he explains, "and it's 'Critical Constructivism.' 

Critical constructivist ideology is what you "wake up" to when you go 'Woke'." He explains in a lengthy Twitter thread:

Reading this book [above], which originally codified it in 2005, is like reading a confession of Woke ideology. Let's talk about it.
    The guy whose name is on the cover of that book is credited with codifying critical constructivism, or as it would be better to call it, critical constructivist ideology (or ideologies). His name is Joe Kincheloe, he was at Magill University, and he was a critical pedagogue.
    Just to remind you, critical pedagogy is a form of brainwashing posing as education — it is the application of critical theory to educational theory and praxis, as well as the teaching and practice of critical theories in schools. ... [C]ritical pedagogy was developed ... to use educational materials as a 'mediator to political knowledge,' i.e., an excuse to brainwash.
    The point of critical pedagogy is to use education as a means not to educate, but to raise a critical consciousness in students instead. That is, its purpose is to make them 'Woke.' What does that entail, though? It means becoming a critical constructivist, as Kincheloe details.

As some people have said, it always starts with teacher mis-education. 

Note what we've already said, though. Yes, Marcuse. Yes, intersectionality. Yes, CRT and Queer Theory et cetera. Yes, yes, yes. That's Woke, BUT Woke was born and bred in education schools. I first recognised this right after [Helen Pluckrose and I] published our 2020 book 'Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.'
    Critical pedagogy, following people like Henry Giroux and Joe Kincheloe, forged together the religious liberationist Marxism of [Paulo] Freire, literally a Liberation Theologian, with the 'European theorists,' including both Critical Marxists like Marcuse and postmodernists like Foucault.
    In other words, when Jordan Peterson identifies what we now call 'Woke' as 'postmodern neo-Marxism,' he was exactly right. ["Yes, no, and sort of," says philosopher Stephen Hicks.] It was a neo-Marxist critique that had taken a postmodern turn away from realism and reality. The right name for that is 'critical constructivism.'

CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM CONTAINS (OR SYNTHESISES) two disparate parts: 'critical,' which refers to Critical Theory (that is, neo-Marxism or Critical Marxism), and 'constructivism,' which refers to the constructivist thinking at the heart of postmodernism and poststructuralism.
Critical Theory we all already generally understand at this point. The idea is pretty simple: 

• ruthless criticism of everything that exists; 

• calling everything you want to control 'oppression' until you control it; 

• finding a new proletariat in 'ghetto populations'; blah blah blah.

    More accurately, Critical Theory means believing the world and the people in it are contoured by systems of social, cultural, and economic power that are effectively inescapable and all serve to reproduce the 'existing society' (status quo) and its capitalist engine.

    Critical Theory is not concerned with the operation of the world, 'epistemic adequacy' (i.e., knowing what you're talking about), or anything else. They're interested in how systemic power shapes and contours all things and how they're experienced, to which they give a (neo)-Marxist critique.
    Constructivism is a bit less familiar for two reasons:
We've done a lot of explaining and criticising Critical Theory already, so people are catching on, and it's a downright alien intellectual landscape that is almost impossible to believe anyone actually believes. 

You're already very familiar with the language of constructivism: 'X is a social construct.' Constructivism fundamentally believes that the world is socially constructed. That's a profound claim. So are people as part of the world. That's another profound claim. So is power. I need you to stop thinking you get it and listen now because you're probably already rejecting the idea that anyone can be a constructivist who believes the world is itself socially constructed. That's because you're fundamentally a realist, but they are not realists at all.
    Constructivists believe, as Kincheloe says explicitly, that nothing exists before perception. That means that, to a constructivist, some objective shared reality doesn't exist. To them, there is no reality except the perception of reality, and the perception of reality is constructed by power.
    I need you to stop again because you probably reject getting it again. They really believe this. There is no reality except perceived reality. Reality is perceived according to one's social and political position with respect to prevailing dominant power. Do you understand?
    Constructivism rejects the idea of an objective shared reality that we can observe and draw consistent conclusions about. Conclusions are the result of perceptions and interpretations, which are colored and shaped by dominant power, mostly in getting people to accept that power.
    In place of an objective shared reality we can draw conclusions about, we all inhabit our own 'lived realities' that are shaped by power dynamics that primarily play out on the group level, hence the need for 'social justice' to make power equitable among and across groups.
    Because (critical) constructivist ideologies believe themselves the only way to truly study the effects of systemic dominant power, they have a monopoly on knowing how it works [despite the contradiction in terms], who benefits, and who suffers oppression because of it. Their interpretation is the only game in town.
    All interpretations that disagree with critical constructivism [they insist] do so for one or more bad reasons, for example:

• not knowing the value of critical constructivism, 
• being motivated to protect one's power on one or more levels, 
• prejudice and hate, or
• having bought the dominant ideology's terms, etc. 

CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM IS PARTICULARLY HOSTILE to 'Western' science, favouring what it calls 'subjugated knowledges. This should all feel very familiar right now [hello Mātauranga Māori], and it's worth noting that Kincheloe is largely credited with starting the idea of 'decolonising' knowledge. 

    Kincheloe, in his own words, explains that critical constructivism is a 'weltanshuuang,' that is, a worldview, based on a 'critical hermeneutical' understanding of experienced reality. This means it intends to interpret everything through critical constructivism.
    In other words, critical constructivism is a hermetically-sealed ideological worldview (a cult worldview) that claims a monopoly on interpretation of the world by virtue of its capacity to call anything that challenges it an unjust application of self-serving dominant power.
    When you are "Woke," you are a critical constructivist, or at least suffer ideological contamination by critical constructivism, whether you know it or not. You believe important aspects of the world are socially (politically) constructed, that power is the main variable, etc.
    More importantly, you believe that perception (of unjust power) combined with (that) interpretation of reality is a more faithful description of reality than empirical fact or logical consistency, which are "reductionist" to critical constructivists.
    This wackadoodle (anti-realist) belief is a consequence of the good-ol' Hegelian/Marxist dialectic that critical constructivism imports wholesale. As Kincheloe explains, his worldview is better because it knows knowledge is both subjective and objective at the same time.
    He phrases it that all knowledge requires interpretation, and that means knowledge is constructed from the known (objective) and the knower (subjective) who knows it. It isn't "knowledge" at all until interpretation is added, and critical constructivist interpretation is best.
    Why is critical constructivist interpretation best? Here comes another standard Marxist trick: because it's the only one (self)-aware of the fact that 'positionality' with respect to power matters, so it's allegedly the only one accounting for dominant power systems at all.

WE COULD GO ON AND on about this, but you hopefully get the idea. Critical constructivism is the real name for 'Woke.' It's a cult-ideological view of the world that cannot be challenged from the outside, only concentrated from within, and it's what you 'wake up' to when Woked. [A different name for 'Critical Constructivism': Cognitive Onanism.]
    Critical constructivism is an insane, self-serving, hermetically sealed cult-ideological worldview and belief system, including a demand to put it into praxis (activism) to recreate the world for the possibility of a 'liberation' it cannot describe, by definition. A disaster.
    There is a long, detailed academic history and pedigree to 'Woke,' though, so don't let people gaslight you into believing it's some right-wing bogeyman no one can even define. It's easily comprehensible despite being almost impossible to grok like an insider.
    People who become 'Woke' (critical constructivists) are in a cult that is necessarily destructive. Why is it necessarily destructive? Because it rejects reality, and attempts instead to understand a 'reality' based in the subjective interpretations of power .....
    Furthermore, its objective is to destroy the only thing it regards as being 'real,' which are the power dynamics it identifies so it can hate them and destroy them. Those are 'socially real' because they are imposed by those with dominant power, who must be disempowered. Simple.

To conclude, Woke is a real thing. It can be explained in great detail as exactly what its critics have been saying about it for years, and those details are all available in straightforward black and white from its creators, if you can just read them and believe them.

 

The Fairytale of Hegemonic Neoliberalism

One of the great untold stories of the 20th century political left is how they lost the debate on economic issues within the economics profession. So they moved over into the English department (and other humanities) instead, and resumed teaching discredited economics there. This might explain, explains Phil Magness in this guest post, why many of the humanities adopt an explicitly conspiracist epistemology when they talk about economics as a discipline — and why their graduates adopt an explicitly conspiracist approach to opposing political ideas. As examples, you can see the recent "scare" over the Atlas Network, and the long-running scare story about how the world is being taken over by something called "neoliberalism."

What is "neoliberalism"? As Magness explains, "neoliberalism" is essentially an intentionally imprecise stand-in term for free-market economics or for economic sciences in general; for conservatism, or for libertarians and anarchists; for authoritarianism and for militarism; for advocates of the practice of commodification, for centre-left or market-oriented progressivism; for globalism and for welfare-state social democracies, for being in favour of or against increased immigration; for celebrating rocketing house prices or promoting policies to make them fall; for favouring trade and globalisation or opposing the same; or for really any set of political beliefs that happen to be disliked by the person(s) using the term. In short, it's a fairy-tale used to describe any kind of "dragon" of which a certain type of person is against. But dragons don't exist....

The Fairytale of Hegemonic Neoliberalism

by Phil Magness

Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz recently made waves in academic circles with a book declaring the end of something called “neoliberalism” and outlining the contours of a suitable replacement.

“That question has come to define the current era,” Stiglitz explained. After describing the allegedly dying paradigm with a series of vague economic concepts that include tax cuts, deregulation, and global finance, he declared “the neoliberal experiment” a “spectacular failure.”

His prognostication received a celebratory response from political commentators, many of whom have similarly proclaimed the concept’s demise in anticipation of a more progressive replacement paradigm. Obituaries of this type are now a weekly feature of political and academic commentary. Stiglitz himself also previously announced the “death” of neoliberalism several times to similar fanfare in 2019, in 2016 — and in 2008 before that.

Curiously, among all the cries that the neoliberalism wolf is dead or dying, little attention has been given to a more fundamental question: Does that wolf even exist? And did it ever exist?

Origins

I’ve examined the origins of the term “neoliberalism” before, tracing it back to 1920s Germany, when it served as a favourite term of disparagement for laissez-faire economics used by Marxists and fascists alike. So clearly it has an earlier use. But pejorative terminology originating in discredited extremist ideologies from interwar Germany is a grossly deficient basis on which to establish that the maligned object is anything other than a caricature.

“Neoliberalism” has certainly become a favoured academic buzzword used since that time, although common notice of it in the scholarly literature dates no earlier than the mid-1980s, when attention was drawn to it by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Even then the term did not achieve widespread academic use until the late 1990s [popularised here in EnZed by the likes of Jane Kelsey], and it has only supplanted another favourite bugbear of the activist world, “globalisation,” in the last decade or so — globalisation having having now become a scare-word for the other side of the political spectrum!

Still, this usage pattern remains exceedingly strange for an ideological paradigm that is commonly alleged to have dominated  economic policy right up to the present day. Conventional depictions of “neoliberalism” routinely assert that this paradigm captured the economic policy-making apparatus of the United States, and eventually the world, starting around 50 to 70 years ago. The dating alone necessarily entails that the alleged neoliberal takeover took place before the vast majority of the world even knew that neoliberalism existed, let alone what neoliberalism was. Which poses an obvious question ...

Where Have All the Neoliberals Gone?

When one probes this strange usage pattern a little further, it quickly becomes apparent that the term’s anachronistic deployment is only the beginning of its problems as a suitable descriptor. The term’s very definition is, to put it mildly, fluid and notoriously imprecise. As Jason Brennan and I note in our book Cracks in the Ivory Tower, neoliberalism is essentially an intentionally imprecise stand-in term for

free market economics, for economic sciences in general, for conservatism, for libertarians and anarchists, for authoritarianism and militarism, for advocates of the practice of commodification, for center-left or market-oriented progressivism, for globalism and welfare state social democracies, for being in favour of or against increased immigration, for favouring trade and globalisation or opposing the same, or for really any set of political beliefs that happen to be disliked by the person(s) using the term.

The “neoliberal” designation has been applied to an array of political and economic beliefs, including internally contradictory ones. In the political-candidate space, it purports to describe everything from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump. To those who use it with regularity, the only recurring certainty is that neoliberalism is bad. Or to quote left-wing columnist George Monbiot, neoliberalism is “the ideology at the root of all our problems.”

Except there’s also another problem beyond the term’s fluid definition. When investigating the seemingly obvious question of who actually espouses neoliberalism, one quickly finds that almost nobody actually subscribes to this supposedly dominant paradigm. There are almost no actual people who call themselves “neoliberal” — who advocate, adopt, or seek to impose “neoliberalism” on the economy. Nor have there ever been.

Some readers might respond that the term was batted about between the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium and the mid-’50s as a way to rebrand classical liberalism. This is nominally correct. But the adoption of this name was contested from the outset in 1938, and never really stuck on the free market or laissez-faire side of that internal debate, its supposed home in both the interwar German uses and in the academic discussion between 1990 and today.

At best, the self-described “neoliberals” of the midcentury drifted into an attempted melding of (1) international free market liberalism in matters of trade, regulation, and commerce with (2) a robust and fiscally solvent European-style welfare state. Not only does this latter half of this equation meet with approval on the progressive left, but it’s a much more difficult case to maintain that the modern American economy is a derivative of the eventual product of that midcentury discussion, the German Ordoliberal school.

There are also a handful of recent attempts by free market thinkers to re-appropriate the “neoliberalism” label for themselves. But this movement is entirely a response to the term becoming academically trendy in the past decade, not any intellectual continuum to a laissez-faire past. Commendable as the effort to change the word’s overwhelmingly pejorative use into a positive may be, its current adherents probably number in the hundreds. They both postdate the claimed “neoliberal” takeover and remain far removed from the instruments of power that it supposedly wields — and has wielded for over 50 years.

So practically speaking, the total number of people in the world today who would identify themselves with the allegedly dominant ideology of the last half-century is negligible. In fact, the number of academics on the left who devote their lives to decrying “neoliberalism’s” supposed stranglehold over the American and global economies exponentially exceeds the total number of self-described adherents of neoliberal ideology today or at any time in the past.

Taking Neoliberalism Seriously

Neoliberalism, we are constantly told, still runs the show, has run the show for over half a century, and is on the verge of being replaced by a progressive alternative on account of its “failures.” So what happens then if we take this cliché at face value? What happens if we try to actually identify where and how specific neoliberals came to control American economic policy after World War II?

The term’s modern use has exceptionally strong association with Ludwig von Mises — one of the economists who rebuffed the moniker at the aforementioned 1938 colloquium — and with Milton Friedman, who preferred to call himself a classical liberal. As much as we may value their respective economic contributions, neither Mises nor Friedman ever enjoyed anywhere close to the widespread control over economic policy that is often ascribed to them.

Both wrote in an age when Keynesianism was ascendant in economics, and particularly when Keynes’s American expositor Paul Samuelson enjoyed nearly complete saturation in economic education due to the popularity of his college textbook and associated political prescriptions.

Mises articulated a sweeping case against economic interventionism on both philosophical and practical grounds, including a recurring observation that central planning was both inherently susceptible to graft and impossible to implement without disastrous misallocation. Briefly stated, the entire premise of the central planner undercuts the signaling mechanism of prices, which in turn renders him incapable of allocating goods and services to functionally meet even basic consumer wants and needs. Yet Mises remained an outsider to the halls of political influence until his death in 1973, and only found wider vindication after the fall of the Soviet Union validated his longstanding critique of their economic model. [SEE: 'Mises Against the Neoliberals']

Friedman is a somewhat similar case in that his best-known policy work, Capitalism and Freedom (1962), was an outsider’s critique of the entire New Deal order and subsequent welfare state. His monetary theories did acquire some policy salience in the 1970s, but only after stagflation revealed systemic faults in the dominant Samuelsonian approach to central banking that had taken hold in the previous two decades.

While Friedman’s brand of monetarism is frequently credited in the “neoliberalism” literature for the aggressive interest rate “shock” policies of Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve (1979-87) in a quest to tame inflation, this common account conveniently neglects that Friedman himself was harshly critical of the Fed throughout the same period that it was supposedly under his philosophical guidance. Near the end of the Volcker term, Friedman went so far as to denounce the Fed’s record as an erratic and politically manipulated succession of missteps that openly rejected a stable monetarist rule even while speaking in nominally monetarist rhetoric.

Note that even here one can still legitimately debate the extent to which a Friedmanite policy undergirded these events, but the record points to a messy implementation at best and one that forced him into confrontation with the blunderous obstacles of political execution. It did not, however, entail a “neoliberal” takeover of even monetary policy either before or since that moment, let alone the entire economic paradigm.

Neoliberalism and Political Influence

Far from signifying its validity, Mises and Friedman are actually illustrative of a central defect in the “neoliberalism” literature. Their prescriptive approaches to economic policy — typically calling for a deeply constrained or rule-based form of economic intervention in Friedman’s case, and broad adherence to economic non-intervention in Mises’s framing — have been eschewed for politically entrenched alternatives that favour proactive government intrusions into most economic matters.

Even more so, the main political instruments of economic policy making reveal a conspicuous absence of supposedly “neoliberal” figures throughout this period.

As my friend Peter Boettke recently remarked, there was never a Treasury Department operating under the guidance of James M. Buchanan; never a Friedman Fed; never a Hayekian Council of Economic Advisors.

Instead, the more common norm for political appointments to key economic positions is (1) traditional Keynesians, (2) liberal and conservative New Keynesians, and (3) technocratic empiricists of both the center-left and progressive variety. Instead of “neoliberals,” we find these roles populated in the more progressive moments by Samuelson, or Robert Solow, or James Tobin, or Walter Heller, or Arthur Okun, or Alan Krueger, or — yes — Joseph Stiglitz (chair of the CEA, 1995-97) himself. In more conservative moments such as the George W. Bush administration, key economic policy appointments have typically gone to New Keynesians such as Ben Bernanke and Gregory Mankiw.

One could extend this observation to international bodies that allegedly represent the “neoliberal” era as well.

Although some recent works have attempted to write Mises and Friedrich Hayek into the deep genealogy of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the IMF, and similar institutions, the evidence for such paths of influence resembles more of a “six degrees from Kevin Bacon” game than any meaningful shaping of policy.

Key “neoliberals,” at least of the Misesian free market non-interventionist type, are always noticeably missing from the formative political events of these institutions, such as the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 (attended by Keynes himself, along with an assortment of New Dealers) and the key rounds of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (1948) that eventually produced the WTO in 1995. [SEE ALSO: 'Why Austrians are Not Neoliberals']

And when one looks to the modern political leadership of these allegedly “neoliberal” institutions, they do not find laissez-faire theorists or Friedmanites or Hayekians or Misesians. Instead, one is more likely to find their leadership roles populated by political and economic figures hailing from the left of centre and favouring varying degrees of interventionist technocracy. These institutions routinely attract career politicians such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Pascal Lamy, left-of-center New Keynesians such as Lawrence Summers, or — once again — progressives such as Joseph Stiglitz (World Bank chief economist, 1997-2000) himself.

Given these and other recurring patterns of political appointments that chafe with the notion of a politically dominant “neoliberalism” paradigm, it becomes entirely reasonable to question the utility of the entire “neoliberalism” literature. Far from fighting to supplant a prevailing ideology for our age, “neoliberalism’s” critics appear to be battling a phantasm of their own imagining.

And conveniently, that phantasm also serves as an intellectually unsophisticated and pejoratively deployed stand-in for any and all things the same people dislike about free market economics without having to actually engage free-market arguments.

* * * * * 

Phillip Magness is an economic historian specialising in the 19th century United States. He is the author of numerous works on the political and economic dimensions of slavery, the history of taxation, and the history of economic thought. 

Dr Magness spent over a decade teaching public policy, economics, and international trade at institutions including American University, George Mason University, and Berry College. His work has appeared in scholarly outlets including the Journal of Political Economy, the Economic Journal, Economic Inquiry, and the Journal of Business Ethics. In addition to his scholarship, Magness’s popular writings have appeared in numerous venues including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, Reason, National Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

His post first appeared at the American Institute of Economic Research.

The world is being increasingly tribalised. Everyone seems to speak as an "azza" -- as a Māori, as a single mother, as member of the downtrodden community of the day --- yet as it turns out, dividing folk into ever-smaller warring groups doesn't work out too well for anybody. And as James Hartley outlines in this guest post, a new book explores how  philosophical liberals from all sides are joining arms against this New Separatism ...

The Coming Crack-Up of the Left: Yascha Mounk’s ‘The Identity Trap: A Story of Power and Ideas in Our Time’

by James Hartley
There is a spectre haunting the Western world, but it is no longer Marxism. Widely dubbed “Woke ” -- as in, having been awoken to alleged social injustices -- this ideology “is likely to make us stray from, not guide us toward, the kind of society to which we all have reason to aspire.” It is “likely to create a society composed of warring tribes rather than cooperating compatriots.” It is a “trap,” on both political and personal levels.

The most striking thing about those quotations from The Identity Trap: A Story of Power and Ideas in Our Time is the author. You might have assumed the author was a conservative, rehearsing well-worn arguments. But Yascha Mounk is a Man of the Left. His last two books were examinations of, in his words, right-wing illiberalism that “presents an acute danger to the survival of our political system” and is “an existential threat to democracies.” But, in his newest book, Mounk explores how the threat to liberalism also comes from the Left.

In a fairly sympathetic account, Mounk begins by tracing what he dubs the “Identity Synthesis” from its intellectual origins with Foucault through its culmination in Bell and Crenshaw. The trouble arose when these academic theories were unleashed upon the young. Social media compounded the problem, allowing the easy establishment of narrowly delineated identity groups. Then came “the short march through institutions,” in which college graduates immersed in the identity synthesis brought their strident beliefs into the workplace. The real break-out into the culture, though, occurred with the election of Trump. People steeped in the identity synthesis suddenly felt powerless, leading to a new realisation:

The guy down the hall may not really be the biggest enemy of society. But he often turns out to be the biggest enemy over which you have some modicum of control….[A] small but consequential portion of [activists] grew intolerant of internal dissent — and directed much of their anger at anybody who dared to violate the unwritten norms of the identity synthesis.

Mounk is alarmed about the “way in which the popularised form of the identity synthesis is transforming the reigning norms and ideals of mainstream society, from neighbourhood schools all the way to government offices.” Consider, for example, the new wave of progressive separatism: “progressives have increasingly militated for the creation of spaces and organisations in which members of minority groups can remain among themselves.” Separate but equal spaces were a hallmark of Jim Crow laws, which once upon a time were vehemently opposed by the Left. But Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream is now out of fashion; Segregation is back. Why?

As Mounk explores the facets of the identity synthesis, the pattern becomes clear. Dividing people into separate groups is not a means to an end; Division is the goal itself. People are physically separated into different places. People are told that it is impossible to understand those who are in different spaces. Adopting food or clothing or music or whatever from people in another space is forbidden as cultural appropriation. Speech needs to be regulated to make sure people in preferred spaces never hear something with which they disagree. Public policy should be structured to favour some groups over others.

One might think a society of warring tribes is something we should avoid, but this is exactly the goal of the identity synthesis. My life, for example, is seriously problematic in this new world. Well over a century ago, my ancestors came from a motley amalgamation of European countries. I grew up in Southern California, and thus my native cuisine is enchiladas, burritos, and tacos. My first musical loves were rock bands playing variations of blues songs. My religious beliefs originated on the Eastern edge of the Mediterranean Ocean. In years past, I would be considered a quintessential American. Now, I am a walking example of “cultural appropriation.” But, of course, so is every other American.

The identity of “American” is exactly what is most intolerable to the proponents of the identity synthesis. At a minimum, you must include a hyphen, preferably a color or ethnic or gender hyphen. Ideally, you will embrace your intersectionality and add more than one hyphen. Having added those hyphens, you now have your group, and we will put up the walls around your group, and you can then engage in tribal warfare with other groups for power. This may sound like a caricature, but it is hard to escape this image as you read through the examples in Mounk’s book.

As Mounk notes, the real threat to the identity synthesis comes not from conservatives. Far too many conservatives have embraced the hyphenated status given to them by the proponents of the identity synthesis and are engaged in tribal warfare. The threat to the identity synthesis, and the main targets of its proponents, are the old-fashioned liberals, whether they fall on the right or the left of the political spectrum. There was once widespread agreement on the virtues of collective self-determination, individual freedom, and government neutrality. Debates were over what role the government should play in advancing those values. But in the new landscape, those fundamental values are under attack, illuminating the common ground between liberals of the left and right. Mounk, in a book clearly written for political liberals, notes “a surprisingly wide and varied set of political and religious traditions give their adherents reasons to view with deep skepticism any worldview that puts group identities like race and ethnicity at its moral and epistemological center. Philosophical liberals should welcome these allies with open arms.” That admission is equally important for those on the right.

The timing of the publication of this book could not have been better. When the presidents of Ivy League universities are unwilling to say in a congressional hearing that a call for the genocide of the Jews would violate the school’s student code of conduct, it exposes the rift in the Left’s coalition. Many liberals are suddenly realising the threat coming from the Left. Mounk mentions John McWhorter’s claim in Woke Racism that engaging with “the Elect” is futile. Mounk is more optimistic. But regardless of which path is best, the first step is acknowledging the problem. “Right-wing populists and the advocates of the identity synthesis see each other as mortal enemies. In truth, each is the yin to the other’s yang. The best way to beat one is to oppose the other — and that’s why everyone who cares about the survival of free societies should vow to fight both.” 

If you know someone, particularly someone on the left of the political spectrum, who has not yet realised the inherent dangers coming from the proponents of the identity synthesis, then this book will make an excellent gift.

* * * * 

James Hartley is Professor of Economics at Mount Holyoke College. A California native, he earned his B.A., M.A, and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Davis. His publications include The Representative Agent in Macroeconomics, Real Business Cycles: A Reader (co-edited with Kevin Hoover and Kevin Salyer), and Mary Lyon: Documents and Writings.

His post first appeared at the American Institute for Economic Research blog.

Contemptible European Philosophy: Final Exam

[Humour alert: When philosopher professor Stephen Hicks last taught Contemporary European Philosophy, he offered this alternative final exam.]

Contemptible European Philosophy
Dr. Shicks
Alternative (Reality) Exam

1. Identify the correct choice. Jean-Paul Sartre was a(n):

a) Existentialist.
b) Essentialist.
c) Excellent way to put yourself to sleep.
d) Guy who knew how to have his way with the ladies.

2. “Why does the universe exist?” is logically equivalent to:

a) “Why doesn’t the universe not exist?”
b) Itself.
c) Asking for a one-way ticket to the mental ward.
d) All of the above.

3. Michel Foucault wrote a book.

a) True.
b) False.
c) The statement must be deconstructed to reveal its hidden power agenda.

4. Suppose during the exam that you look deeply into the soul of the person next to you and find the meaning of life. This would be:

a) Proof that you have mastered the metaphysics portion of the course.
b) Cheating, and therefore a violation of the university’s Honor Code.

5. The number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin is:

a) Infinite, since angels are non-physical beings and therefore not bound by physical limitations.
b) Zero, since angels are non-physical and dancing is by definition a physical activity.
c) Zero, since dancing is a lewd activity that morally pure angels would never engage in.
d) A statement that is in principle unverifiable and therefore meaningless.

6. The greatest philosopher of the 20th century was:

a) That beret-wearing guy.
b) Scooby Doo.
c) Oprah Winfrey.
d) Greatness is over-rated.

Bonus Question

7. Show your work.

[Disclaimer for a litigious age: This is not the real exam. This is an exercise in humour. If necessary, please look up “humour” in the dictionary.]

PART 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

 

So if you've been reading this series, you now know what identity politics is, and why we've all been talking about gender and race and .... and .... getting so fucking tired of it all. But if you've been reading, now you know what caused all the nonsense, why it stinks so much, and why it's been causing so much bloody conflict. 

Here's something else about it that stinks. If you've been around academia or company's personally departments, you'll have heard the term "intersectionality." And if you've been listening in to people who want to make victims out of everybody, you'll have heard them shouting about it -- and shouting even louder about how they need to silence those who have so-called 'privilege.' 

So just what the hell is this "intersectional analysis"? And why should you care? Your second-favourite blogger is on the case...

Intersectionality: How some tribes are made more equal than others

"Identity politics amplifies the human proclivity for us-versus-

them thinking. It prepares students for battle, not for learning."

~ Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind

THE "MYSTERIOUS HIDDEN FORCES in society” mentioned in Part 4, those concealed agents of oppression that Marx + Marcuse allegedly uncovered, are what they say justifies the blatant suppression of free speech. To fight against this would-be censorship, you have to know how they generally go about it.

Marcuse’s hidden structure is given legs by the left’s tool of so-called “intersectionality.” In essence, it's an engine to divide and conquer -- to create in innocent folk the omnipresent feeling of victimhood, and in others the disarmingly guilty feeling of unearned privilege. Why would someone do this to others? Simple. Because they want power. If you can talk on behalf of some folk while you help silence others, then political power can be yours, you hope. It might be only a stone's throw away.

In his best-selling book The Coddling of the American Mind, American academic Jonathan Haidt traces the emergence of this influential tool to a 1989 essay by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor then at UCLA (and now at Columbia, where she directs the Center on Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies). In the essay, she argues that a black woman’s experience in America is more than just the sum of “the black experience” and “the female experience.” There are “layers” of structural oppression, she claims, that this would allegedly gloss over.

Crenshaw’s important insight [explains Haidt] was that you can’t just look at a few big “main effects” of discrimination; you have to look at interactions, or “intersections.” More generally, as explained in a recent book by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge: ‘Intersectionality as an analytic tool examines how power relations are intertwined and mutually constructing. Race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, ethnicity, nation, religion, and age are categories of analysis, terms that reference important social divisions. But they are also categories that gain meaning from power relations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class exploitation.’[1]

These categories can be mapped on a diagram as a series of bipolar dimensions, as one Kathryn Pauly Morgan did in a famous diagram now taught in university classrooms around the western world. Every graduate from the last two decades in most disciplines has had this rammed down their impressionable young throats. The simplified diagram shown below shows only seven axes of victimhood; Morgan herself identifies fourteen!

In an essay describing her approach [says Haidt], Morgan explains that the centre point represents a particular individual living at the “intersection” of many dimensions of power and privilege; the person might be high or low on any of the axes. She defines her terms like this: “Privilege involves the power to dominate in systematic ways …. Oppression involves the lived, systematic experience of being dominated by virtue of one’s position on various particular axes.” Morgan draws on the writings of French philosopher Michel Foucault to argue that each of us occupies a point “on each of these axes (at a minimum) and that this point is simultaneously a locus of our agency, power, disempowerment, oppression, and resistance. The [endpoints] represent maximum privilege or extreme oppression with respect to a particular axis.”[2]

If this looks like a particularly lunatic version of a magazine quiz (“10 Questions to Reveal How You’ve Been Victimised By Reality” or "7 Questions to Expose Your Privilege") or a particularly disrespectful parlour game (just how insulted should, say, a non-white disabled female feel at being told they’re a victim of nature?) then you’d be right.[3] It is precisely what Washington Post journalist Michael Gerson once described as “the soft bigotry of low expectations,”[4] performed as a pseudo-scientific dance.

According to Morgan’s view however, any young, white, attractive, euro, anglophone who is a gentile, heterosexual, able-bodied, rich, credentialed, cis-gendered, fertile male is ipso facto an oppressor to some degree. Whatever they’ve done, or haven’t done themselves. [Shout this loud enough, and Marama Davidson will show up soon enough to applaud.]

Quite how you are responsible for someone else’s alleged infirmity is another matter never fully addressed: what nature has rent asunder in the poor, infertile, disabled, non-white, lesbian, politics will (somehow) be able to make whole again. And note that however much the politicians screw the scrum in favour of these alleged victims, they still remain victims by virtue of their underlying power differential. (So as the Hobson’s Pledge organisation has discovered, whatever happens in law to “redress the power imbalances” to favour minorities, middle-aged straight white males will always remain their oppressors.)

And it matters not at all how tolerant you yourself are; in this world of power-driven adjectives if any one of those privileged adjectives describes you (able-bodied, fertile, swinging a penis) then you are one of the oppressing class and, in the views of Marcuse and his followers and fellow travellers, people like you must be silenced as a matter of social justice. After all, “the end goal of a Marcusean revolution is not equality but a reversal of power.”

Marcuse offered this vision in 1965:

It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise [i.e., the allegedly 'privileged'], and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth [i.e., the alleged victims of reality] presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.’[5]

There have been millions willing  and eager to undertake that suppression. Often violently.

NOW REMEMBER, THIS IS what your children are being taught on every campus.

Imagine an entire entering class of college freshmen whose orientation program includes training in the kind of "intersectional thinking" described above, along with training in spotting so-called micro-aggressions, [i..e, what we used to call an unintentional slight, but can now be "weaponised" by the would-be power-luster. More on this here and here.] By the end of their first week on campus, students have learned to score their own and others’ levels of privilege, to identify more distinct identity groups, and to see more differences between people. They have learned to interpret more words and social behaviors as acts of aggression. They have learned to associate aggression, domination, and oppression with privileged groups. They have learned to focus only on perceived impact and to ignore intent … [and they'll have forgotten what they went to university to learn, and have no time in the curriculum for it anyway.]

This combination of common-enemy identity politics and micro-aggression training [see Chapter 6] creates an environment highly conducive to the development of a “call-out culture,” in which students gain prestige for identifying small offences committed by members of their community, and then publicly “calling out” the offenders. One gets no points, no credit, for speaking privately and gently with an offender—in fact, that could be interpreted as colluding with the enemy.[6]

How will students fare who have been taught this bile? We don’t even need to guess, just observe:

Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and to cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people below the line are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Furthermore, there is no escaping the conclusion as to who the evil people are. The main axes of oppression usually point to one intersectional address: straight white males.

You've wondered why the "woke" can so easily label straight white folk as "Nazis"? Here's a clue right here. But even a non-straight can be in danger if they're part of the "power structure":

An illustration of this way of thinking happened at Brown University in November of 2015, when students stormed the president’s office and presented their list of demands to her and the provost (the chief academic officer, generally considered the second-highest post). At one point in the video of the confrontation, the provost, a white man, says, “Can we just have a conversation about—?” but he is interrupted by shouts of “No!” and students’ finger snaps. One protester offers this explanation for cutting him off: “The problem they are having is that heterosexual white males have always dominated the space.” The provost then points out that he himself is gay. The student stutters a bit but continues on, undeterred by the fact that Brown University was led by a woman and a gay man: “Well, homosexual … it doesn’t matter … white males are at the top of the hierarchy.”[7]

OBSERVE AGAIN THAT ALL the qualities chosen by the intersectionalists are, almost each and every one of them, something you have at birth, something about which you can do nothing, something which (in their own eyes) is considered to be a negative. There is not a single quality about which one can do anything, and almost none that have real existential import. In a very real sense, these identitarians are not just in revolt against reality, they are blind to genuine human values.

[T]he tribalists keep proclaiming that morality is an exclusively social phenomenon and that adherence to a tribe—any tribe—is the only way to keep men moral … [Yet their only moral] standard is “We’re good because it’s us.”[8]

For centuries, philosophers have identified morality as a science based on free will -- a field of study based on our ability to make choices, and to judge those choices against a given moral standard. But by this intellectual sleight of hand, your ability to make choices is considered irrelevant to whether your are good or bad. Your birth made you that way -- and the intersectional diagram will show you how.

The intersectionalists have chosen qualities, of course, that you cannot change -- and that, since only the un-privileged few who are victims are able to ever acquire -- are necessarily divisive. But one could just as easily, and with much more coherence, draw up a diagram of life-giving virtues which anyone (even the alleged victims) could choose; actions and behaviour that one could follow as a means to shake off their poor start in life, perhaps, and to pursue real, meaningful life-enhancing values – like those shown in Figure 4 below. But benevolent outcomes like individual growth, prosperity, success and happiness take individual effort, not group whinging – “his own happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it”[i] – and would hardly fuel the social unrest Marcuse and his followers are after. Indeed (if you recall) their system is designed to mitigate against these very things!

Happy, successful people don’t follow dictators. Victims do. And it is victims that these power-lusters hope to harvest.

Commenting on this phenomenon at its birth, many years ago, Ayn Rand observed that it marked an important transition in human affairs: the explicit emergence of what she called “the hatred of the good for being the good,” and the arrival on the scene of creatures dedicated only to destruction. She marked the 

virulent cases of hatred, masked as envy, for those who possess personal values or virtues: hatred for a man or woman because he or she is beautiful or intelligent or successful or honest or happy. In these cases, the creature has no desire and makes no effort to improve its appearance, to develop or use its intelligence, to struggle for success, to practice honesty, to be happy (nothing can make it happy). It knows that the disfigurement or mental collapse or the failure or the immorality or the misery of its victim would not endow it with his or her value. It does not desire the value: it desires the value’s destruction. (Emphasis in the original.) [9]

It represents not just a revolt against values, but against reality itself.

Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the “unfairness” of nature and volition, and to establish universal equality in fact—in defiance of facts. Since the Law of Identity[10] is impervious to human manipulation, it is the Law of Causality that they struggle to abrogate. Since personal attributes or virtues cannot be “redistributed,” they seek to deprive men of their consequences—of the rewards, the benefits, the achievements created by personal attributes and virtues.[11]

NOW, I BET MANY of you on the so-called "right' are reading all this while thinking smugly to yourself things like "those stupid Lefties," and  "at least I'm too smart to have fallen for all that crap." Well, tomorrow I'll explain to you why you're probably very wrong about that.

More on that tomorrow...

CONTINUED IN PART 6: 'The Right Adopts the Left's Love Child'

PART 3 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'

NOTES
[1] Haidt, Jonathan. The Coddling of the American Mind (pp. 67-68). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid (pp. 68-69). 

[3] As Hicks and others have noted, this form of measurement raises suffering and victimhood to a kind of moral high ground. It’s underlying ethic sets others above self, the weak above the strong, and elevates those who suffer most over those who avoid or diminish suffering. Indeed, it sets a group’s victim status as central to social virtue, and sets all rules in relation to their alleged suffering. The connection to so-called hate speech should be obvious. See on this the discussion between Yaron Brook, Onkhar Ghate and Greg Salmieri on Free Speech & Patreon, December 2018, https://www.blogtalkradio.com/yaronbrook/2018/12/23/yaron-brook-onkar-ghate-greg-salmieri-free-speech-patreon

[4] Gerson coined it for a 2002 George W. Bush speech to the NAACP, which concluded “No child in America should be segregated by low expectations, imprisoned by illiteracy, abandoned to frustration and the darkness of self-doubt."

[5] Haidt, Jonathan. The Coddling of the American Mind (p. 66). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[6] Ibid (p. 71).

[7] Ibid  (p. 70)

[8] Ayn Rand, ‘Selfishness Without a Self,’ collected in the book Philosophy: Who Needs it

[9] Ayn Rand, ‘The Age of Envy,’ (1971) collected in the book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 1971

[10] The ‘Law of Identity’ to which she refers is Aristotle’s philosophical law, not to be confused with the laws created by identity politics. It can be quickly summarised as: things are what they are.

[11] Ibid.

[i] Ayn Rand, on whose virtue schema this diagram is based, from ‘Galt’s Speech,’ collected in For the New Intellectual

IDENTITY POLITICS (Part 4): Politics & Polylogism, Marx + Marcuse

So now you know what identity politics is, and something about what makes it stink: it stinks, because it says everyone who's born the same, or are grew up the same, thinks the same. So "stay in your lane"!

It suits the group-think merchants to promote this bullshit because (they hope) they can surf to political power on the group conflict it creates.

But how do they get away with it?

TODAY we burrow down into how this idiotic groupthink emerged into political life, and from where. And for that, we have to go all the way to Germany, and a bearded bloke in the British Museum Library, and their excuse for why the proletariat seems so generally happy with the fruits of capitalism, and wholly un-ready to revolt ...

Some Causes: Politics & Polylogism

"To the Frankfurt School, Freud offered a psychology admirably suited

to diagnosing the pathologies of capitalism… Thus Marcuse has an

explanation for the new generation of revolutionaries-in-training for

why capitalism … seems to be peaceful, tolerant, and progressive—when,

as every good socialist knows, it cannot really be—and for why the

workers are so disappointingly un-revolutionary. Capitalism does not merely 

oppress the masses existentially, it also represses them psychologically."

~ philosopher Stephen Hicks (Explaining Post-Modernism, pp 162-3)

THE POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIES REPRESENTED by encouraging group conflict were grasped early by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979).

Marcuse had a rare heritage. He was a German Marxist from the Frankfurt School, and also a student of Martin Heidegger, who embraced Nazism during the later war. In the rarefied atmosphere of Sixties America, Marcuse's writings on revolt and political power would make him “the father of the New Left.”

From Marx, Marcuse got the rejection of reason as a universal tool.  Like Marx, he promoted instead the notion of poly-logism – of so-called “multiple logics” – the idea that the conditions of one’s birth and upbringing “hard wire” your thinking and your very means of thought. 

You think we're all talking past each other? Of course, say Marcuse and Marx: because what's true in logic for your group is not true for mine.  They do mean this literally:

Marxian polylogism asserts that the logical structure of the mind is different with the members of various social classes. Racial polylogism differs from Marxian polylogism only in so far as it ascribes to each race a peculiar logical structure of mind and maintains that all members of a definite race, no matter what their class affiliation may be, are endowed with this peculiar logical structure. [Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action]

It wasn't born as a "socialist" idea however. It was embraced by both right and left: For the European left at this time, the defining feature was class; for the European right, it was race. For both, the important thing was the collective -- the only difference was how the collective was defined. 

This could seem amusing. For one example, David Ricardo’s 200-year-old Law of Comparative Advantage (which demonstrates the win-win proposition of free trade) was condemned by German Marxists because he was bourgeois, by German racists because he was a Jew – and by German Nationalists because he was English! So that was it: free trade was out, without any need at all to address any of Ricardo’s reasoning. Because by this anti-principle of multiple logics, reason is no longer universal, and each group has its own “logic” – precisely the formula for dissent, disagreement, and disruption that a Marcuse was after.

Marcuse was reinforced in this rejection of reason by Heidegger, who called it that “most stiff-necked adversary of thought" – an obstacle to be discarded. Marcuse was happy to throw it out: bathwater, baby, and all. 

HE THEN SET ABOUT about redressing the problem apparent to every Marxist no matter how blind: that the masses were simply failing to become impoverished under capitalism, and would therefore never rise up in revolt in the manner than Marx had long predicted. 

On this troublesome point, Marcuse found comfort in the ideas of Sigmund Freud. When Freud applied his worrisome psychoanalytics to social philosophy, he found himself arguing that civilisation is “an unstable, surface phenomenon based upon the repression of instinctual energies,” the forces of civilisation having evolved (according to Freud) “by incrementally suppressing instincts and forcing their expression into polite, orderly, and rational forms. Civilisation is thus an artificial construct overlaying a seething mass of irrational energies in the id.”[1]  To Marcuse and, the Frankfurt School, “Freud offered a psychology admirably suited to diagnosing the pathologies of capitalism.”[6]

It was not that the masses were not impoverished, argued Marcuse[3], who was blind to folk around him who were enjoying the fruits of rising post-war prosperity. It was simply, he argued, that individuals en masse were themselves blind to the so-called “structural impoverishment”that is allegedly implicit in the capital system,:“increasingly unaware that the apparently comfortable world they live in is a mask for an underlying realm of brutal conflict and competition.”[8] 

You didn't realise all that was seething underneath the surface of your weekly supermarket shop, did you.

Since the proletariat themselves however are blind to this brutal, if implicit, “structural” oppression -- if Joe Sixpack enjoying his relative peace and comfort to much to even see it -- then Mr Sixpack must have his eyes opened! Opened, insisted Marcuse, by overt political action from outside the proletariat. By a “great refusal.” It was the job of the insightful activist, he said, to "lift the veil" from victims’ eyes. Only then would they rise up and overthrow their structural oppressors. 

ALL THIS SOUNDS MAD enough. But first, he had to sell them a new idea of oppression. Instead of being happy in their own rising wealth and prosperity, they had to be taught to be unhappy in the alleged inequality of this blessings across the land -- to be upset that some others were pulling down more -- to be angry that the majority of the wealth, comfort, and power was in the hands of the "oppressors." To be angry about it, and to act.

One of the first "direct actions" Marcuse called for was to silence these alleged “oppressors.” (This was "cancel culture" back in the sixties.) Silencing the alleged oppressors on the grounds of this new view of equality, based upon so-called “power differentials.” Silenced as a matter of "social justice." In his widely influential 1965 essay titled “Repressive Tolerance,”

Marcuse argued that tolerance and free speech confer benefits on society only under special conditions that almost never exist: absolute equality. He believed that when power differentials between groups exist, tolerance only empowers the already powerful and makes it easier for them to dominate institutions like education, the media, and most channels of communication. Indiscriminate tolerance is “repressive,” he argued; it blocks the political agenda and suppresses the voices of the less powerful. If indiscriminate tolerance is unfair, then what is needed is a form of tolerance that discriminates. A truly “liberating tolerance,” claimed Marcuse, is one that favours the weak and restrains the strong. Who are the weak and the strong? For Marcuse, writing in 1965, the weak was the political left and the strong was the political right.[5]

He went on to argue that that the forces of the left must therefore use the arguments of “tolerance” against the powerful forces of intolerance allegedly commanded by the capitalist class. He therefore demanded 

the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought [sic] may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behaviour – thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives.[6]

Remember, this is what he called "repressive tolerance."

If we summarise, he is arguing that

“Because Western civilisation is inherently oppressive... speech should be free for those who oppose freedom, capitalism and the foundations of Western society, but not for those who defend them.”[7]

And in case the reader misses it, Marcuse makes the point explicit:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. [8]

This is a message impossible for any reader to miss. And they don’t.

[Remember some years ago for example when Chris Trotter was defending Helen Clark's illegal pledge-card spending as "acceptable corruption"? And then applauding her subsequent Electoral Finance Act “shutting down those with money [as] a necessary restriction on freedom of expression”?[10] That's where this comes from. Observe the widespread justification and even denial of the violence in Albert Park earlier this month? That's where it leads.] 

Following this script, those who dissent from the new orthodoxy are shouted down, denied platforms, forced into sensitivity re-education courses, forbidden from speaking, intimidated, mobbed, and even threatened with violence to get them to shut up. Consider again University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s call to her backers — “Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here!” [9] That was Marcuse’s message in action. So too is the shouting down of "TERFs" and "Nazis" by folk too ignorant to even know what Nazism means.

All is acceptable when it’s your Team’s corruption you're defending.

We see here too, slithering in from stage left, one of the most irrational ideas afloat on this whole sea of abject, anti-rational nonsense: the idea that is called intersectionality. It is this notion – justifying that some groups be made more unequal than others – that powers much of the tribalism shutting down modern debate.

MORE ON THAT TOMORROW.

CONTINUED IN PART 5: Intersectionality, or 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

PART 3 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'

NOTES

[1] In his 1930 book Civilisation and Its Discontents
[2] Summaries of Freud and Marcuse are from Stephen Hicks’s Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition), (2013), pg 161-2.
[3] In his 1955 book Eros and Civilisation, making the obvious hat tip to Freud’s tome, and the 1964 best-seller One-Dimensional Man
[4] Ibid, pg. 162-163, summarising the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer
[5] Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind; How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, pg. 65
[6] Herbert Marcuse, ‘Repressive Tolerance,’ 1965
[7] Steve Simpson, ‘At the Heart of the Attacks on Free Speech, (2015), collected in Defending Free Speech, ed. Steve Simpson (2016)
[8] Ibid.
[9] Tom Palmer, ‘The Three Most Pressing Threats To Liberty Today,’ Cato Policy Report, December, 2016
[10] Editorial, NZ Herald, 18 December, 2017, which noted that “during the controversy over this bill. Illiberalism reigned. ‘People shouldn't be able to say that,’ was a common refrain… There was often an implied trade-off: that shutting down those with money was a necessary restriction on freedom of expression. It reeked of political commentator Chris Trotter's disgraceful conclusion a year ago that the unlawful spending on Labour's pledge card had been acceptable corruption.”