Authoritarian Leftism

For some, the idea of an authoritarian left is a contradiction in terms. Authoritarianism is the province of the right, and can only ever be so. Even if the left does become violent, doing so while resisting power is fundamentally different than doing so while abusing power.

The idea of the authoritarian personality was first proposed in a 1950 book of the same name, by Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley. Some of those names may be familiar to you, and are associated with the dreaded Frankfurt School and all of the western civilization hating cultural Marxism long associated with it.

It is from this work that the widely spread F Scale came to prominence. The F Scale is a survey (take the test here) intended to measure one's propensity to fascistic sympathies, and consists of the following metrics:

• Conventionalism: A disposition to favoring established middle class values.
• Authoritarian Submission: A propensity to obey superiors without question, and to demand the same from subordinates.
• Authoritarian Aggression: A desire to punish those who violate group norms and conventional values.
• Anti-Intraception: A hostility towards an introverted disposition and self reflection, feeding into a valuation of action for its own sake.
• Superstition and Stereotypy: Belief in non-rational concepts, and to think of people in rigid, categorical terms.
• Power and Toughness: A "might makes right" kind of attitude and disdain for softer, tender sentiments and emotion.
• Destructiveness and Cynicism: A deep seated nihilism and lack of concern for the welfare of others, coming out in a propensity towards high risk adventures such as war making.
• Projectivity: The authoritarian projects these flaws and failings onto hated out groups.
• Sex: A great fear of sexual pleasure and intimacy, at least for its own sake. Sex is politicized in the authoritarian mind.

The Authoritarian Personality has a long history of criticism for rooting its analysis in the ideological biases of its authors, some of whom were, as previously mentioned, Frankfurt School Marxists. It was well and good to tie a propensity to fascism to a repressive personality type, supposedly rooted in abusively authoritarian family structures. But how did this explain what we were discovering then, and had known for some time even, that Stalin's USSR was not preferable to fascist Europe as far as authoritarianism was concerned? Moreover, Mao Zedong in China was about to embark on a new phase of leftist repression. 

One could easily suggest that the western world at that time had only known right wing authoritarianism. Russia and China were distant lands with foreign cultures and histories, and perhaps Frankfurt intellectuals could be forgiven for not viewing leftist authoritarianism in a comparable light. Similar claims would emerge out of the culture wars of the 1980s and 90s, wherein the forces of repression and censorship came mainly from right wing evangelical groups. 

Such dismissals reveal a deep hypocrisy in the leftist intellectual establishment in the west. If they are to idealize foreign cultures and hold them up as superior examples to the west, let them at least understand those cultures and their histories.

Feel the Democracy

Never the less, some elements of the F Scale do not lend themselves to a measure of left wing authoritarianism. After all, conventionality is a value completely at odds with leftism, especially today. Doesn't the left oppose stereotypical views of outgroups? Isn't the left much more tolerant of people's sexual proclivities? Isn't the left more self aware and self critical by its very nature?

One look at college SJWs should answer those questions. It should be clear by now that there is a new authoritarianism of the left. To measure it, the F Scale may have to be modified somewhat, though.

• In place of conventionalism, I'd offer up a kind of mandated subversiveness, especially when subversiveness becomes less about challenging actual power structures and more about policing personal values, beliefs and relationships. Political correctness finds its roots here - the mandating of the use of language that supposedly challenges preconceived notions of power and privilege. Even when much more, well, conventional structures of authority are used to enforce this supposed subversiveness. Silicon Valley oligopolies firing employees who challenge postmodern narratives about the social construction of gender would be an example

• Authoritarian submissiveness: We've seen the prevalence of standpoint theory, which asserts a sort of exceptional basis for truth claims made by those with marginalized identities. This drives the propensity to handwave debate in favor of insistence that "privileged" people simply remain silent and obey. The infamous progressive stack is a manifestation of this. A marginalized identitfy becomes an infallible claim on truth - provided the party line is being espoused, of course.

• Authoritarian aggression: Antifa is the most glaring example, but we see a strong predisposition to punish and hurt, rather than engage in dialogue with ideological rivals among certain kinds of leftists. Deplatforming is an obvious example. As are drives to get people fired from their jobs, artistic or cultural projects associated with "problematic" people cancelled or taken off the market, banning from social media and so forth. 

• Anti-Intraception is a bit more complicated. Authoritarian leftist spaces are somewhat notorious for "self criticism" - which seems like a kind of intraception that is not only encouraged, but mandatory. However, this is never to be done with the intent of holding the movement, its leaders and ideology to any sort of account. Rather, the activist is charged with reflecting on their own ideological shortcomings, meaning failure to adequately align with the correct line. This is a deeply authoritarian maneuver in that it is meant to insure in-group loyalty. Action for its own sake comes out in an idealization of protest and civil disobedience. The use of these kinds of militant tactics against relatively powerless rather than powerful targets - conservative students on college campuses, for example, or with the backing rather than in the face of the power of the state is a definite exercise in authoritarian power.

• The left is less prone to superstition than the right overall, but they do indulge in a heavily mythologized world view. In place of God or natural racial supremacy, the left substitutes most famously the historical dialectic marching, however slowly and frustratingly, to the ultimate end of a classless society. Since the reemergence of romanticism with the new left, an idealization of nature, goddess centric forms of spirituailty and an idealization of foreign religions has also emerged with it. This drives a tendency to paper over or ignore the obvious problems in those cultures and religious systems, either in the name of multicultural tolerance, or due to claims that western imperialism are ultimately to blame or are guilty of greater evils. 

• As for stereotyping, the notion that white males are privileged and powerful by default should qualify. Interactions with intersectional leftists make clear that people are merely the sum of their identities and the political weights and values attached to those identities as far as they're concerned. This kind of dehumanization is foundational to authoritarianism, and creates the impression that these kinds of leftists are awash in dogmas that choke off spontaneous and natural human interaction. 

• Power and toughness: We see this in the disdain that the feminized left of our time has for marginalized and alienated men, incels in particular. Not to condone the glaring pathologies of incel ideology, but the feminist disdain for those males who have lost the darwinian competition for status and resources is fairly obvious. Obvious too is their gloating despite for the social decline of the white male overall, even where it is shown that this decline occurred as a result of a global neoliberalism that no one on the left has any business defending. Additionally, a real machismo permeates even many feminist spaces, where non feminist men are ridiculed for "not getting laid" and male feminists in particular present their views with macho bravado. Which goes beyond irony to feed into ...

• Destructiveness, Cynicism and Projectivity: I hate to get anecdotal and psychological here, but such is the kind of territory we're entering here. This deals more with the conflicted internal psyche of the authoritarian, driving a sort of "death instinct" leading to destructive behavior. The authoritarian left is infamous for "eating their own", as it were. When male feminists get outed for engaging in sexually predatory behavior, I wonder if their professed feminism isn't an attempt to quell a guilty conscience? Does the white male guilt lead to a lot of self sabotaging, self destructive kinds of behaviors? There've been times when some or another radical activist's conduct was so cringy and outlandish that I wondered if there wasn't a barely repressed desire to be "put in their place" so to speak. A widespread theory in "redpill" communities online is that feminism is a kind of "shit test" aimed at men as a whole. Such ideas are difficult to prove, but equally difficult not to at least consider when seeing authoritarians at their most irrational.

• Sex. This ties into the previous point. The Frankfurt scholar's ideas are rooted in a Freudian notion that authoritarian rigidity is rooted in a kind of defense mechanism against feared and forbidden sexual instincts. The left is commonly associated with a more relaxed attitude on sexual matters, but there's clearly exceptions to this rule. So called anti-sex, or sex-negative feminism is an obvious case in point. The quickness with which cries of objectification and sexism are raised in any discussion of attraction and desire, especially on part of men towards women, suggests a discomfort with the deeper and more personal aspects of sexuality that belies the clinical objectivity and emphasis on transaction and negotiation of boundaries which define the "progressive" approach to sex. While they pay lip service to women making choices for themselves and their own pleasure, there's a thinly veiled preference for non-sexuality between the sexes that permeates left wing spaces. 

It could be objected by the radical leftist that methods deemed "authoritarian" are necessary to adequately challenge oppressive social norms and dominant power structures. Leftists have a long history of defending repressive or even violent measures carried out by their own - going back at least as far as Lenin's ideas of "kvo kovo" - meaning "who-whom." Who benefits? Repressive actions that favored the Soviet State were justified, necessary even, in a way that were morally reprehensible when carried out by conservative or reactionary authoritarians.

Similar lines of reasoning appear in Herbert Marcuse's concept of "repressive tolerance", in definitions of racism and sexism as "prejudice plus power" that render it impossible for women and minorities to be racist or sexist, and in the "standpoint theories" that lend an air of infallibility to the perspectives of the marginalized and oppressed - as long as they don't align with their oppressors, of course. 

Maybe so. But a crucial test here has to be the question of just how powerful the targets of leftist wrath and ire really are. In a sense, this holds them to their own moral standards. A civil disobedience campaign carried out against the state to protest persecution of minorities or an unjust war is a very different matter than campaigns of harassment and intimidation carried out against mere citizens who've somehow or another transgressed the boundaries of what's politically correct. One of these is punching up, the other punching down, to borrow their own phraseology. 

A defining characteristic of authoritarianism is that it punches down. Authoritarians don't look for fair fights, and they certainly don't challenge injustice when it comes down from on-high. Left wing authoritarians are no different. What they do differently is manipulate ideology to tell themselves that the victims of authoritarian aggression coming from the left are really the unjust beneficiaries of power and privilege, however striking the evidence to the contrary may be. 

The kulaks in the USSR were the ur-example, and the bloodiest instance of this seen thus far, but the dynamic whereby non-feminist academics and media personalities get drummed out of their jobs for uttering politically incorrect views is essentially the same. So too is violence carried out against unpopular speakers on college campuses, particularly if its with the tacit approval of the college's faculty and administrative structure. A strike, boycott or a protest against a corporation engaging in bad business practices does not qualify, however. Nor does a protest against a powerful and corrupt political figure, or the bringing to justice of anyone whose abused their power or violated somebody's rights. But justice always entails due process. Authoritarian leftists are open about their disdain for due process. If any kind of civil right or civil liberty is denounced as a mere tool for the oppressors to carry on dominating the weak and marginalized, good chance you're dealing with an authoritarian leftist.

An individual or group rendered powerless by a shifting power dynamic still getting treated as if they were the beneficiaries of unjust preference, and that being used as a legitimizing pretense to crack down on them. That's the defining characteristic of the very real and very dangerous phenomenon of authoritarian leftism.

Read about how intersectional feminism is an authoritarian system of power serving elite interests.

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Libertarianism and Revolutionary Socialism: Hostile Twins?

Earlier I suggested a tepid acceptance of the Democratic Socialists of America - or at least of some of its proposals. But I grow less sure of this as time goes on, and the emergence of a tendency within the DSA that should be all too familiar to long term students of the American left. Your friend and mine, Vox, recently ran an article on the DSA, following Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's surprise victory over before longtime establishment Democrat Joe Crowley in the primary for the 14th Congressional District in New York.

What Vox revealed is genuinely concerning:

Like most socialist organizations, DSA believes in the abolition of capitalism in favor of an economy run either by “the workers” or the state — though the exact specifics of “abolishing capitalism” are fiercely debated by socialists. 

“The academic debates about socialism’s ‘meaning’ are huge and arcane and rife with disagreements, but what all definitions have in common is either the elimination of the market or its strict containment,” said Frances Fox Piven, a scholar of the left at the City University of New York and a former DSA board member. 

If the concept has yet to have an agreed upon definition, despite nearly 200 years of being in existence in its modern form, perhaps there's some wisdom in reserving our support?

In practice, that means DSA believes in ending the private ownership of a wide range of industries whose products are viewed as “necessities,” which they say should not be left to those seeking to turn a profit. According to DSA’s current mission statement, the government should ensure all citizens receive adequate food, housing, health care, child care, and education. DSA also believes that the government should “democratize” private businesses — i.e., force owners to give workers control over them — to the greatest extent possible.

Yikes.

But DSA members also say that overthrowing capitalism must include the eradication of “hierarchical systems” that lie beyond the market as well. As a result, DSA supports the missions of Black Lives Matter, gay and lesbian rights, and environmentalism as integral parts of this broader “anti-capitalist” program.

Socialism is about democratizing the family to get rid of patriarchal relations; democratizing the political sphere to get genuine participatory democracy; democratizing the schools by challenging the hierarchical relationship between the teachers of the school and the students of the school,” said Jared Abbott, a member of DSA’s national steering committee. “Socialism is the democratization of all areas of life, including but not limited to the economy.

So, it's the Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers and the early Radical Feminists all over again, is it?  Rule by the women's studies department?

God help us all.

It's important to stop right here and make some things clear. I'm all for socializing certain essential services, so as to guarantee their universal access to the population. Health care is a good example. Social housing, food supplements and so on for those who need them I'm likewise 100% in favor of. I'm iffy on a universal basic income, but an expansion of the earned income tax credit to help out low income people is something I'm completely down with.

Unions or some other institution that advocates for the working class, both in the workplace and in the halls of power are absolutely vital, and the unions in America are, with some exceptions, generally much weaker than they need to be, at least in the private sector. I likewise have no quarrel with worker and consumer owned enterprises. I've lived in tenant owned cooperative housing most of my life and have been well served by it. Worker owned enterprises like the Mondragon Corporation in Spain are good examples of workable alternatives to typical American corporate structures. I'd applaud any scheme to launch such experiments closer to home.

That said, management over large manufacturing and distribution organizations is an incredibly complex undertaking, and one for which I wonder if "the workers" as a collective whole are adequately qualified, especially if governance over the cooperative is to be direct rather than via an elected body of professional directors with a fiduciary duty towards the worker/shareholders. We should expect direct democratic governance to be the preference of the American left, given its historical propensity for utopian idealism.

Professional, executive levels of management require many years of rigorous education to qualify a person for, and not simply to keep the rank and file out of those positions. One wonders whether "the workers" actually even want the added degree of responsibility and work load that comes with doubling as management, especially under the more utopian ideals of direct democracy so beloved by the American left. The practice of co-determination - labor being able to elect representatives to corporate boards of directors is another matter, and one I'm generally in favor of.

Likewise, a strong case can be made that wealth and capital are too strongly concentrated in America at present, but the idea that those who take the risk to invest capital in a business venture are all completely evil parasites who feed off the blood of the workers is much more revolutionary romanticist mythology than reality. This can be true if your economy lacks sufficient protections for the rights of workers, borrowers, tenants and the like and capital is permitted to accumulate into increasingly few hands due to a lack of at least some redistributive measures, but it's not necessarily true of all capital investment. Without some kind of capital markets, economic growth and expansion would be severely hamstrung and I suspect this is a big part of why successful economies based solely on mutualist or socialist principles are non existent both at present and throughout history.

Besides, why throw away so wonderful a tool when you can make it work for the benefit of all, via something like a sovereign wealth fund in which all citizens could have equal shares, or that the state could use to supplement public finance?

When there's serious talk of "abolishing capitalism" or "ending the private ownership of a wide range of industries" or "elimination of the market" or "forcing owners to give workers control over" private businesses, this is when, in my humble opinion, things have gone too far. Untrammeled socialism is no better, and may even be worse, than untrammeled capitalism, we just have far less experience with it in the west. While the need for regulatory safeguards should be obvious, the capacity of individual citizens to own productive capital and to buy and sell goods and services on a free market are crucial to human liberty and essential for social prosperity, and failing to recognize this has been a very grave failing of regressive leftism during its history.

By itself, the capacity for consumers or workers to "vote with their feet" as it were and find another product or employer is a capacity that libertarians and fiscal conservatives make far too much of - with little capital or purchasing power, working and middle class individuals have little influence this way and it would take an organized move of this sort - a strike or boycott essentially - to truly influence the policies of a large and powerful corporation, and such organized efforts have never been things that conservatives and libertarians have been fans of.

But historically, neither have been authoritarian socialists, at least while in power. And socialism, past a certain point, tends to default to authoritarianism, whatever the initial intentions of its theoreticians may have been. Transforming societies to the extent they propose naturally requires a government with very far reaching powers. The capacity to buy from or work for the competition is a right a lot of people died for back in the dark days behind the Iron Curtain, and not without good reason. It is one tool with which the working and middle classes can hold business accountable, and this option would be lost in the absence of the market as a means of distribution. Why would the defenders of worker's rights want that?

Will the DSA take things to such extremes? Not likely. America's constitutional system of checks and balances and libertarian tradition would likely mitigate the worst excesses. The greater likelihood is that they'll end up being the Libertarian Party of the left: a loud, tight and small ideological grouping too obsessed with internal purity spiraling to become a serious contender for political power. But their rhetoric does concern me, and if you really are a believer in the rights of workers, consumers and above all individuals, it should concern you too.

The Vox article continues:

Examples may help clarify the difference. While both DSA and some left-wing Democrats agree that the government should provide universal health insurance, DSA ultimately wants to nationalize hospitals, providers, and the rest of the health care system as well. While both will work toward higher taxes on Wall Street, DSA ultimately wants to nationalize the entire financial sector. While left-wing Democrats believe in criminal justice reform, some DSA members are calling for the outright abolition of the police and prison systems. While both DSA and left-wing Democrats support reforms to get money out of politics, some in DSA see capitalism as fundamentally incompatible with genuinely free and fair elections. In practice, however, the two wind up ultimately taking the same positions.

If the DSA would go this far, it goes too far. The DSA may see capitalism as fundamentally incompatible with free and fair elections, and I agree there's a lot of tension between the two now and corporate influence in politics is far too great in America at present, I also see the above description of the DSA as being fundamentally incompatible with a free and democratic society. What would happen, after all, if the majority of voters actually wanted some semblance of a free market preserved, and wish only for protections against the predatory excesses of robber baron capitalism, as opposed to having their own capacity to make money be completely hamstrung?

Further confusing matters is Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a “democratic socialist” but supports a policy program that would essentially leave capitalism intact. His candidacy spurred a dramatic growth in DSA membership, and DSA backed him, but the Vermont senator has also referred to himself a “New Deal” Democrat who views Lyndon Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt — rather than Karl Marx or American socialist Norman Thomas — as his true ideological predecessors.

Let's hear it for Bernie Sanders then, and the kind of New Deal Democrat he professes to be. While I do believe Marx had some useful insights into the flawed nature of capitalism, revolutionary overthrow of it by either the ballot box or the gun carries its own huge set of problems, and there are certainly far better examples that we could be following.

Not All Heroes Wear Capes

Not what you expected out of me, perhaps? Maybe. But don't misunderstand me: I'm not channeling the spirit of Ayn Rand here. I merely point out that the equal and opposite stupid extreme to what Rand stood for is, well, also stupid. What's unfortunate is that the language of economic freedom has been appropriated by libertarians, and deployed to defend the equally misguided notion that "individuals" (read: capital) be above legally constituted sovereign organizations entirely. A useful line of rationale if one's intent is to protect capital from any and all populist demands for protection against its abuses.

What is very crucial to understand is the necessary role of the state in regulating and limiting institutional power so as to protect individual rights and freedoms from both private and public abuses.

Limited government does not necessarily equal small government. It means government that is subordinate to law, and insures that non governmental actors in society are also subordinate to law. It doesn't mean that government can't regulate or even own capital. However, it does mean that the government cannot stop individuals from owning capital all together, either alone or in tandem with other individuals in some or another kind of corporate entity. It may decide to nationalize and thus own some particular enterprise or industry or another. This is no violation of anyone's rights, since nobody has any right to any share in ownership of any business or industry, as any libertarian worth his salt would be more than happy to tell you. But it absolutely must not forbid its citizens any ownership over its productive capacity whatsoever. It's crucial now that these nuanced distinctions be properly grasped.

It means that whatever government does, it does via a procedure that is transparent and respectful of predetermined limits on its power, as set forth in a constitution or similar document. It means that those who hold government office must face the voters on occasion, and step down if defeated in elections. It means that what was once nationalized may also be privatized, and vice versa. Which is the better option is by no means consistent, and it's worth noting that the kinds of people and regimes that hew strongly to one extreme or the other tend to be violent and authoritarian. Having looked at both Castro's Cuba and Pinoche's Chile, I can say that I don't relish the thought of living in either one. The fact that just about every avid Marxist and avid Randroid I've ever engaged with personally are also horribly unpleasant and peevish people doesn't help either cause much either.

By using the mantle of "freedom" and "individual rights" as a moral rationalization for delegitimizing any role for the state in engaging in some regulation or even ownership of capital, redistribution of wealth and protection of the population from the harmful effects of untrammeled capitalism, the libertarians have opened the door for the 21st century's relegitimization of untrammeled capitalism's ugly socialist twin, and the far left's own equally spurious claims that individualistic conceptions of freedom and rights are mere apologetics for the power of wealth and privilege.

I'd like to think the excesses of the DSA can simply be chalked up to the sudden and dramatic reemergence of economic leftism - socialism even - into the mainstream of public discourse in the US body politic following Bernie Sander's 2016 presidential bid. Hopefully, the more extreme and untenable positions will be dropped from the program over time. This is what happened with other laborite and social democratic parties outside the east bloc during the 20th century, after all. One can only hope.

What this should make even more clear than it has been thus far why something akin to another New Deal is so gravely needed. It would be a huge mistake to think that the likes of Franklin Roosevelt, William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes were crypto-communists hell bent on bringing Soviet central planning to the free world by democratic means. They weren't. Their interest was in saving the public from the excesses of capitalism. Because if that doesn't happen, there will be nothing to save the public from the excesses of socialism.

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Regressive Left and Reactionary Right: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

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The Heart and Soul of Regressive Leftism

A question was put to me:

So Antifa advocates "Punch a Nazi". Would they still be OK with a male Antifa member punching a Nazi if she were a woman? Would Antifa, which is definitely very pro-feminist and committed to the principle of preventing violence against women, be conflicted by these two seemingly contradictory principles? That is the real question that is hard to answer.

It is easy to answer once you understand how the hard-line intersectional feminist mind actually works. The answer simply is yes, absolutely. Antifa have assaulted TERF feminists, why wouldn't they assault an actual Nazi woman?

Remember that antifa are the militant wing of the intersectional feminist movement. They're not anarcho-communists, whatever colors they may wave or fly or symbolism they may display. In the intersectional feminist ideology, identities are ultimately social, not biological constructs. This is very important to recognize, and clears up a lot of confusion surrounding their activities and beliefs.

Notice that these are the people pushing "trans women are women" narrative the hardest, even though they have male anatomy (unless they've had the full sex reassignment surgery and so on) "Woman" as a biological category is meaningless to them ideologically. Were you to suggest that women are defined by their anatomy and biology rather than social status and identity as marginalized people in a patriarchal society, they'd accuse you of being a misogynist, since you are "reducing women to their anatomy" and therefore "objectifying" them.

Unfortunately for you, were you to do this, this would be classified as Nazi, since the intersectional feminist regards as Nazi/Fascist that which threatens people with marginalized identity sets. You don't actually have to sympathize with Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini's actual ideology in order to be considered a fascist or a Nazi by Antifa. So they would probably punch you too. Hope you've been training on the heavy bag.

'Woman" is a socially constructed identity, and constitutes whatever is deemed marginalized relative to men. And it seems to be the case that people with marginalized identities can lose or forsake those identities if they take the side of those with privileged identities. Indeed, they're especially hateful towards women, PoC, trans folk and so on who go over to even moderate conservatism, let alone Nazism.

The mindset of the intersectional feminist regressive leftist is not often studied and understood by its opponents. The thing to keep in mind is that their outlook on the world is very different than ours. It's helpful to remember that:

1 - They don't believe in a common, objective reality that we all inhabit. They believe that much that we take for granted in terms of perception, conceptual thought and basic philosophical concepts such as metaphysics (the nature of reality), epistemology (ways of knowing that reality), morality (what is right and wrong) and so on are actually psychologically and socially constructed.

2 - They have a very manichean world view. This means that they see things in very stark good vs evil terms. It's all about those with marginalized (good) vs privileged (evil) identities or combinations of intersecting identities (hence the term intersectionality). So it's white vs PoC, male vs female, heterosexual vs LGBT, cis vs trans and so on. Given point 1 above, there's no room for any kind of common understanding between opposed sides. All interactions between those with marginalized vs privileged identity sets are "power discourses" meaning zero sum contests wherein one must win and the other must lose.

3 - Positive moral concepts - goodness, mercy, truth, right and so on are defined entirely in terms of what benefits those with marginalized identity sets and/or harms those with privileged identity sets. The reverse is also true - evil actions are rendered evil by who performs them, not by the characer of the actions themselves. This is why, according to the regressive intersectionalist, PoC can't be racist, women can't be sexist and it's not objectification when women ogle (or even assault or rape) men.  Thus, in defense of the marginalized and against the privileged, the utmost of ruthlessness and mercilessness is not only justified, but mandated.

4 - As kind of an aside, Marxist-Leninism and Maoism were basically like this as well, only with the proletariat and its self appointed Vanguard representatives filling in the role of marginalized, and the bourgeoisie filling in the role of the privileged. Lenin even coined a phrase for this exact concept - "Kto Kovo." Meaning who/whom? Who benefits? Trotsky embodied a similar concept in the question, "Towards socialism or towards capitalism?" This explains much of the character of these regimes.

5 - Not all sympathizers with regressive left ideologies go all the way in regards to the above. Fortunately, most are restrained to varying degrees by the prevailing moral order of the west, which implicitly holds that moral law is equally binding on all. To believe this while still proceeding in favor of social justice and fairness is the key indicator of the genuine progressive leftist as opposed to their regressive counterpart. In our currently free and liberal society, most intersectional feminists are not this fundamentalist in their interpretation of their ideology. I describe here the ideological system in its purest form, not as it is embodied with absolute consistency.

Antifa go farther than most down the dark path of regressivism, however. I suggest that they not be trusted, and resisted where possible. Perhaps against actual, bona-fide Nazis it's worth allying with people like this. Churchill and Roosevelt did that while allying with Stalin, after all. But other than that, these extremists of the regressive left are not to be trusted.

Understand the above, and you understand the heart and soul of regressive leftism.

Read The Regressive Left: History, Theory, Methodology: The Regressive Soul
Read The Regressive Left: History, Theory, Methodology: The Militant Mind

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Neither Woke nor Red Pilled

Rapper Kanye West used to be "woke", I gather. Now he's "redpilled." The same is true of Candace Owens, aka "RedPillBlack" on YouTube. As an aside, note that Candace's channel asks whether you're sick of the "alt-left." You don't know us, Candace. How can you be sick of us?  Anyway, Kanye West recently tweeted that he "loved the way Candace Owens thinks." This is a bad thing as far as the Daily Beast is concerned: "Meet Candace Owens, Kanye West’s Toxic Far-Right Consigliere." This can't be good. We are warned. It's coming from the Daily Beast, after all. Ms. Owens must surely be little more than Eva Braun in blackface.

Given the stringent ideological conformity expected out of "marginalized" people in the wokesphere, it's hard not to applaud the ones that do manage to pop the red pill and break free of the Social Justice Inc. narratives we all get spoonfed on a daily basis. "Free thinking is a super power" Kanye West recently tweeted. And I couldn't agree more.

But is substituting being "woke" for being "redpilled" really free thinking?

In a recent Quilette article, Cathy Young tells us:

This is a healthy discussion. Unfortunately, in their understandable frustration with the social and racial orthodoxies that currently dominate liberal political culture, conservatives and libertarians risk embracing self-styled dissenters who are (to borrow a term from the social justice left) problematic allies. 

Ya think?

It's not an uncommon thing these days to see one-time progressives, social justice warriors and others on the left become disillusioned, then finding themselves descending rabbit-holes at the bottom of which are world views that I'd be very hard pressed to describe as at all preferable to the excesses of social justice.

As alt-left OG Rabbit blogs in his introductory article to alt-left thought:

Several months ago I noticed a guy following me on Twitter with the username, “A Clockwork Green.” In his bio, he identified as “AltLeft, racially aware white.” He deactivated his account, and I have no idea what ever happened to him. Shortly before he disappeared though, he had expressed his distaste for a lot of the rhetoric of the AltRight and seemed somewhat disillusioned. I began to wonder how many others there were like him. How many white progressives have begun to reject the politically correct narrative and secretly venture into thought crime circles on the web? I’m willing to bet it’s probably more than you think. Of those that pop the purple pill and make the trip…how many see all the boilerplate, post libertarian corporate conservatism, radical traditionalist Christianism, 15th century LARPing, pseuoscientific anti vaccination stuff and wacky conspiracy theories being promoted and decide “Fuck this. These people are freaks. Maybe the social justice crowd isn’t so bad after all.”

He goes on to say:

Then there are the ones who stick around. Seriously though, who are the AltLeft anyway? Who are we? I would say that the majority are white people who hold a lot of typically leftist views on economics, the environment and some social issues, yet at some point realized the new left had become hostile to any white person even slightly reluctant to act as a scapegoat for everybody else’s problems. No self respecting white person would want to be associated with a movement that trashes their heroes, their culture, their history, denies their achievements…a movement which seeks to destroy their civilization and erases their identity. Hell, besides all that, a lot of “cultural marxism” (or whatever) has become so freaky that most normal white feminists and gays are probably weirded out by it.

The anti white, anti male pathology on the mainstream left is glaring, and you'd have to be blind not to see it. This recent Guardian article on "How white women use strategic tears to avoid accountability" is an excellent case in point. My only issue with this particular article is that I find white feminists hard to sympathize with when it wasn't so long ago that they were writing similar tripe about male liberal sympathizers. Not that white/male allies are beyond reproach, but one must wonder why much of the white race hasn't been driven to Nazism by now given the abuse heaped on them in the progressive press.

Perhaps it's because we know that Nazism is far, far worse, given its track record. Hitler was the worst thing to ever happen to the Germanic race he so professed to love. But even closer to the center, the right wing has given us ample reasons thus far not to trust them. Is abandoning Trump = Hitler scaremongering in favor of hysteria that equates the Obama and Clinton democrats with communism so reasonable? Say what you will about either Lenin's politburo or the corporatist hacks at the DNC, they're most definitely not the same ideologically.

Are bizarre anti-Semetic conspiracy theories really so good an immunizing agent against the self loathing of the critical theory curriculum? It's good to abandon the oversimplified ideological tripe of The Guardian or the Huffington Post. Not so good when Infowars or Rebel Media are what take their place.

The threat of the so called red-pill becomes more insidious, in fact, the more "reasonable" the right wing thought embraced ends up being. Neofascist hate groups and conspiracy mongers make good comic book villains and objects of ridicule. Mainstream conservatism, however, is what's done more real harm in the last half century than any ideological fad in the free world, including intersectional social justice on college campuses, a distant second by comparison.

The reasons are made abundantly clear in Thomas Frank's 2004 opus, "What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America:"

The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.

As concise a definition of the right wing in practice as any I've ever seen.

Much as I loathe SJWs, I can't help but think that above paragraph describes something that's done vastly more harm to fabric of the western civilization so precious to the right wing than any so called cultural Marxism - again something I'm no fan of, ever has. Even the Trump administration - for all its vaunted breaks from the mainstream Republican past, for all the 'never Trump' hysteria to come from the GOP's own ranks, note that the largest legislative achievement of this administration thus far and its congress is ... wait for it ... you guessed it! The November 2017 tax cuts!

The online right is replete with disillusioned leftists pushed to the right - "redpilled" - by some or another negative experience with the regressive left. These disillusioned leftists are not to be blamed. The regressive left has only itself to blame for its defectors.

But the red pill comes with baggage of its own. It will not ultimately be cheap for those who take it. Unless, of course, they're high income and can afford a Cadillac health care plan. Because it won't be covered by most high-deductible employer health care plans, you're not going to belong to a union strong enough to negotiate a health plan that will cover it, there won't be any commie universal health care or even medicare, medicaid or public option, and there won't be any generic alternatives available for a long, long time yet.

Because shrugging all of the above off as unworkable communism is what you're buying into when you shift your politics to the right.

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Does University "Indigenization" Threaten Open Inquiry?

The Laurier Society for Open Inquiry was founded by one Lindsay Shepherd, after the fiasco at Wilfred Laurier University in January 2018, wherein she was brought before the diversity inquisition (which, unlike its Spanish counterpart, we all very much expect these days) for showing a video of U of T prof Jordan Peterson expressing his controversial views on gender pronoun usage. The LSOI has since grown to include 180 academics, students and community supporters, most from Wilfred Laurier University (WLU) and the University of Waterloo, where the LSOI is based and most active.

The LSOI has fought an uphill battle with both of these educational institutions, who have shown considerable covert sympathy to antifa and other regressive left groups in their ongoing drive to censor controversial speakers and remake our intellectual culture along Soviet and Maoist lines. Besides giving Shepherd herself the third degree - and not the kind these institutions should be known for, other events were cancelled due to the age old tactic of fire alarmpulling, tacitly supported by Canadian university administrations despite the misuse of fire alarms being highly illegal, as well as by suspiciously elevated “security and police costs” which may be passed on to the speakers themselves or the groups hosting their events on college campuses, according to a recent policy revision at Waterloo University.

The LSOI has invited one Dr. Frances Widdowson, Associate Professor in the Department of Economics, Justice, and Policy Studies at Mount Royal University – my old alma mater - to present a public lecture at WLU entitled "Does University Indigenization Threaten Open Inquiry?" on May 9. The LSOI has launched a go fund me campaign to raise funds assessed to the group for additional security needs for this event.

And not without reason. Two antifa like groups: Kitchener-Waterloo Against Fascism and the Grand River IWW Defense Committee have announced their intent to protest the group in an event called "Racists Aren't Welcome Here" on the grounds that Lindsay Shepherd and Widdowson are racists, right wingers and white supremacist sympathizers. An odd action, given that Widdowson has described her politics as “Marxist-Socialist.” The event advises participants to wear masks. We can safely guess what that means.

Ah, Antifa. If it weren’t for you, we’d still not know for sure that the far left can be every bit as hysterical and stupid as the “Obama was a communist” tricorn hat and pointed hood crowd. They and the neo-Nazis really do deserve each other. 

And no, antifa aren’t the alternative left. They’re the mainstream regressive left, just a more extreme version of it. They're the militant wing of the intersectional feminist movement and don't really care about worker's rights or economic inequality all that much, despite the Marxist and syndicalist IWW facades. They're all about identity politics, which is actually closer to fascism than anything. That these groups are tacitly (and openly) supported by media, academia and other power structures in our society suggests that they're far cozier with the elites and real systems of power in our society than their pantomimes of resistance and protest would have us believe. 

This is the alternative left. These days, leftists who support free speech, leftists like us, are the alternative, not the main stream.

In case you’re wondering, “indigenization” is yet another fad/buzzword to emerge from the wacky world of academic intersectional social justice ideology. It’s not altogether different from “decolonization” which has led to such wonderful results – as indicated by rampaging mobs, vandalized buildings and intimidated students and faculty - in places ranging from South Africa to numerous US colleges such as Evergreen or UC Berkeley. Or the feminist “transformation of the academy” of the 1980s and 1990s, which ushered in so much of this propensity towards ideology masquerading as scholarship in the first place.

The academic veneer of such programs as “indigenization” includes, in the words of the abstract to Widdowson’s talk: 

… a number of components, including proposals to increase the number of courses on indigenous subjects, the symbolic recognition of indigenous cultures, and incentives for promoting and incorporating indigenous “knowledge systems.”

This should all sound familiar to anyone who was on hand to watch Occupy Wall Street completely implode. Widdowson worries, again according to the abstract: 

While some of these developments promise to enhance the university environment, others are a threat to the open and honest exchange of ideas. This is because some forms of symbolic recognition attempt to compel faculty and students to embrace a particular political and philosophical perspective, and dictates that “Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing” be “respected and valued” discourage critical thinking.

You might be wondering: How specifically does examining things from an indigenous perspective discourage critical thinking? If anything, shouldn't it add to avenues by which one can approach an issue, thereby opening up different opportunities for students in considering said issue and encouraging them to think critically; as opposed to just following common "colonial" wisdom exclusively?

Of course, there's nothing wrong with examining "indigenous perspectives" as such, although, the question of who speaks for indigenous people as a whole stands out in my mind. One wonders if antifa groups or postmodernist academic leftists are the most authentic answers to this question. But there’s no inherent harm in the study of such ideas any more than there’s inherent harm in the study of feminist theory or critical race theory. Multiple perspective are preferable to a single perspective, after all. Were we to thoroughly demonize and try to silence these points of view, we would become the very thing we're trying to fight.

However, Widdowson’s abstract explains further: 

It is expected, in fact, that “Indigenous knowledge”, “research traditions”, and “new epistemologies” be welcomed uncritically, and indigenization advocates try to intimidate intellectual challengers with accusations of “racism” and “colonialism.” There are even arguments that the refutation of any indigenous idea constitutes “epistemological racism” or, more astonishingly, “epistemicide”. This pressure has a negative impact on open inquiry; it creates an emotional “no-go zone” that is hostile to examining indigenous-non-indigenous relations rationally. While this will increase the power of indigenization advocates and the resources made available to them, it will not improve indigenous education. Educational achievement can only be improved if people are better able to understand the world around them, and this is not facilitated by many indigenization initiatives.

This is a familiar pattern now. The problem, as we've seen time and again, is the high barrier of intellectual protectionism constructed around standpoint and conflict theory based ideologies. Rooted, of course, in the rationalization that those deemed historically marginalized require their own safe spaces - the true origin of this now so rightly ill reputed concept, to develop their own consciousness free of meddling from the dominant social groups. Capitulating to this line of thought was the original sin of academia that has led to the proliferation of the dogmatic regressive leftism of our time.

We know by now that this is intellectually catastrophic – the results of protecting any school of thought from scrutiny or criticism always end up being dogmatic, ideological echo chambers. Without external checks, belief systems have a well documented tendency to become extremist, excessive and intellectually lazy. This is why the SJWs resort to name calling and censorship, as opposed to debate, when faced with ideological opposition.

There's nothing indigenous in my mind about the construction of a manichean view that romanticizes so called indigenous knowledge while viewing “white” or “western” ways of knowing; logic, reason, enlightenment etc. as being innately oppressive and discriminatory. This is rooted in German critical theory and French poststructuralism. Germany and France were not indigenous first nations in North America, last time I checked.

Plus, while I can't attest to how effective "Indigenous knowledge”, “research traditions”, and “new epistemologies” would actually be since such concepts tend to be vaguely defined, I've always felt that this view that science, logic and empiricism were somehow inherently "white" was actually the most insidious form of white supremacy going. It implies that in order to remain culturally authentic, non European cultures should stick to premodern ways of thinking and leave this science stuff to us white guys, who are the only group expected to disdain its own premodern traditions in favor of enlightenment rationality. If I wanted to actually ensure the continuation of Eurocentric colonialism, that's precisely how I'd do it in this day and age. A problem, however, is that the predictably unequal outcomes you'd get from "indigenous" vs "white" methods of research and scholarship would be laid entirely at the feet of "institutional racism", thus fueling another round of dogmatic intersectional activism.

None of this precludes looking honestly at how the European conquest and settlement of the Americas proceeded, or at how evils that were visited upon the natives were rationalized. Nor should indigenous traditions be shunted aside entirely. They should be studied and understood honestly. An honest look at historical evils is not the same the demonization of the present day descendants of the perpetrators of those evils, and refusing to study such matters for fear of causing offense, usually to more conservative types, is capitulation to a political correctness of another sort, and not of a better sort than that which equates any criticism of social justice ideologies with oppression and racism themselves.

Our academic institutions must censor no one, and they must shelter no one's views from reasoned critical examination. Peaceful protest must be allowed. The heckler's veto must not be. The stakes are high. If free speech and free inquiry perish in our institutions of learning and research, than they are doomed in the broader society and in our civilization as a whole.

Read The Regressive Left: Theory, History and Methodology Pt 3: Academic Anarchy

Read The Regressive Left: Theory, History and Methodology Pt 4: Postmodern Pandemonium

Read The Regressive Left: Theory, History and Methodology Pt 5: Radical Ruckus

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A Liberal's Selective Memory

As I type this, Areo is the single best news and opinion blog on the internet. Describing itself as "an opinion and analysis digital magazine focused on current affairs — in particular: Humanism, Culture, Politics, Human Rights, Science, and, most importantly, Free Expression" Areo should be on the subscription list of every liberal minded alt-leftist. Senior editor Malhar Mali and assistant editors Helen Pluckrose and Oliver Traldi never fail to deliver top notch material. 

The recent article, "A liberal Who Remembers" by Traldi reads as a laundry list of my own grievances against the present state of left of center politics. Among the things Traldi remembers about being a liberal in the George W. Bush years was a respect for science, human decency, the search for objective truth, a respect for due process, opposition to war and a general disdain for neo-con linguistic chicanery, authoritarianism, hawkishness and puritanism. The article laments the recent decline of the once proud liberal tradition in America into the fever swamps of SJW hysteria and regressive left hypocrisy.

He will get no argument from me on any of that. I suspect Mr. Traldi and myself would agree on way more than we'd disagree on, and the internet definitely needs more voices such as his.

They've Always Been This

What I will say by way of difference of opinion, however, is that my own memory of the progressivism of the Bush years is not quite so fond. I've noticed a tendency among alternative leftists to look with fondness on some mythical past golden age of the left, a time when we got our activism right. While the alt-left was originally called "The Left Wing of the Alt-Right," I'd suggest we'd be better described as the reactionaries of the left. These damn SJWs with their dyed hair and made up gender pronouns can get off my union household's lawn.

While there are certainly many aspects of previous iterations of progressive politics that are preferable to today's, we should be careful not to romanticize our own past too much. The left has a rather long and sorry history of its own brands of smugness, self serving doublethink and ideologically driven denial of reality. 

Perhaps it was the old left, that of the early to mid 20th century, with its corrupt unions and municipal party machines. While these institutions did do much good, they're far from beyond reproach. What of the old left's dogmatic and sectarian socialist and communist parties, some of whom took orders from Moscow, and whose internal quarrels in places like Wiemar Germany actually helped right wing authoritarian regimes come to power? Soviet apologists both in and out of the Kremlin used a lot of the same kinds of whataboutism that we now see from SJWs. It was the mystical proletariat and their revolutionary vanguard party rather than feminist and critical race theorists who claimed carte blanche to act entirely as they wished, but their rationalizations were remarkably similar. No rules apply to the self described marginalized revolutionary. It was the old left of Great Britain as much as the totalitarianism of Stalin's Russia that George Orwell satirized in his classic 1984. It would be well into the postwar years that these types would catch on to the fact that the USSR was not the worker's paradise that they'd been hoping for, to put it mildly.

Was the new left of the turbulent 1960s any better? College students would gradually supplant organized labor, the deeper cultural analysis of the Frankfurt School would likewise supplant stale Marxist-Leninist economic reductionism, and impoverished minorities and women at home and abroad would succeed where the blue collar proletariat had failed and usher in an era of non hierarchical participatory democracy that would bring liberation from both capitalism and stale bureaucratic socialism alike. Or so they hoped.

The results in actuality would plant the seeds of what we're seeing on college campuses now. Radical groups like the Students for a Democratic Society would idealize despots such as Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro, whom one could argue were not significant improvements on Stalin or even Khrushchev''s USSR. Their own groups were rife with the kinds of purity spiraling, virtue signaling and eventually violent protest that we're now seeing. The Weather Underground of the late 1960s make today's antifa groups look tame. 

While the radical "spirit of '68" would gradually taper off over the course of the 70s, the feminist migration into the universities was well underway. The ideological foundations of all of the regressivism we're now seeing: postmodernism's denial of a common reality and the resulting ascendance of authoritarian and opportunistic "Standpoint theories", the view that speech offensive to "marginalized peoples" - or their self appointed representative vanguard - constitutes a kind of oppression that warrants censorship, the erosion of the boundary between activism and scholarship and the self serving denial of the possibility of being racist towards whites (try telling that to a white South African farmer) or sexist towards men (try telling that to a divorced father) were all securely in place on university campuses across the western world by the late 1980s. 

Thus, I do not remember the left of the Bush era being quite so liberal as Traldi recollects. What I do remember is the emergence among progressives of the new Atheism - the popularity of authors such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and YouTubers such as TJ Kirk, then called the Amazing Atheist. The problem, as far as they were concerned, was too much church attendance in red state America. All of the problems of the Bush White House were simply reducible to uneducated bumpkins who believed in an invisible man in the sky.

Religious belief systems are not beyond criticism, of course. I'm an agnostic myself. But what was truly odious about the religious right was not that they believed in God per-se. It was that they so flagrantly used religion in such self aggrandizing ways. They bear much more resemblance to the kinds of people whom Christ actually contended with in the gospels - money changers in the temples and self righteous pharisees who, thinking themselves without sin, were more than happy to cast the first stone, than with Christ himself. 

None of this exonerate religious belief from the very real problems presented by a reading of the bible, of course. But it also represented a troubling shift towards preoccupation with people's private beliefs among outspoken progressives. The left of the Bush years was much more worried that rural Mississippians were praying in conservative churches than they were about the hawkish foreign policies and regressive economic policies of the Bush White House and its largely captive congress. An air of smug superiority over the common people, as opposed to solidarity with the common people, increasingly became a trait of the Bush era left. 

What I remember about Bush era liberals is how unwilling they were to discuss comparable problems with the theology of Islam, or the glaring racism and authoritarianism of the nations in the middle east we were at war with. I even remember UK author Nick Cohen writing a book denouncing Islamist apologism on the left in 2007, while still remaining critical of neo-con hawkishness. Very much while Bush was still in office.

To these noble and intrepid Bush era liberals, this came across as being a tad bit victim-blaming, if not outrightly racist. I distinctly remember Bush era liberals reacting with similar anger to observations that college feminists could be no less sexually puritan and censorious than the True Love Waits and Purity Balls crowd that they so loved to make fun of, were. Clerical celibacy and waiting until marriage to have sex were so repressive and unhealthy, but crying sexist over men complimenting women and hosannas of praise sung to lesbian separatists were as much a staple of "progressives" in 2006 as they are of progressives in 2017. They just didn't yet have tumblr and twitter to further extend their reach. 

At the end of the day, what most offended Bush era liberals about all the odious things that the Bush White House was engaged in: middle east wars, erosion of civil liberties, science denial, sexual repression, a black-and-white world view, religious fundamentalism, censorship and the circumvention of due process was that whites, males, Christians, conservatives and Republicans were the ones doing them. And they were no less obnoxious, arrogant and condescending in their tone towards anyone who disagreed with them. Argue with the Bush era progressive about anything, no matter what your actual beliefs, and expect to be lumped in with Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. The basket of deplorables of not so long ago.

 And even then, none of it was new. While there have always been principled liberal and egalitarian voices and causes on the left, and I do count the authors and editors at Areo among these, regressive hyper-partisanship and bigotry turned against the self have always been a part of the left in the western world, and likely always will be.

And I should know. I too am a liberal who remembers.

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Read The Regressive Left: Theory, History and Methodology beginning with part 1, Recent Regressions

Regressive Left Pt. 5: Radical Ruckus

The feminist and critical race theories that swept higher education in the 1980s did not spring suddenly from nowhere. Radical feminism emerged as an outgrowth of the so called new left of the 1960s, and these were in turn influenced by the German Institute for Social Research, more commonly known as the Frankfurt School. It is to these that we now turn our attention.

It is important that we divest ourselves of the notion of "good second wave, bad third wave" when it comes to feminist radicalism. Alongside reforms necessary to achieve the worthy goal of gender equality was a deeply regressive streak has marked the shadow side of feminism from its inception. As we will discover in future installments of this series, ideas surrounding the abolition of the family and marriage as core kinship arrangements and replacing this with communal child care and free love go back to the utopian communalists of the early 19th century, on both sides of the Atlantic. While for some this might not sound so bad, consistent throughout the movement's history is an ideological purism that was disdainful of notions such as privacy and individual rights. Thus, what came to be called radical feminism in the late 1960s, early 1970s was itself less of a break from the feminist tradition than it first appeared, just as the third or fourth or whatever wave we're on now is less novel than is commonly believed once delved into a little.

While some on the new left of that time tried to argue that feminism merely distracted from the more "important" issues of class, race and war, the feminists had claimed the ideological and moral high ground by establishing themselves as oppressed and men, even male leftists, as oppressors, as well as by extending its radical critique further, into even people's most private and intimate relationships and innermost thoughts. The new left, intentionally rooting itself in a critical theory much more comprehensive than the mere economic relations emphasized by Marxism, had set the precedent whereby more totalistic and sweeping forms of critique took precedent over lesser, mere "institutional" forms, was without any kind legitimate defense against the feminist criticisms.

Early second wave feminist organizations and activists, such as the October 17th movement, later renamed The Feminists, founded in the late 1960s by radical activist Ti-Grace Atkinson, well exemplified the strange sort of co-dependency that so often exists between radical egalitarianism on the one hand, and the totalitarian impulse on the other. While an even then sympathetic media showed the public a movement of idealists committed to uplifting women's status in a patriarchal world - a laudable goal - the reality underlying the image was much more - to borrow one of their own terms - problematic.

The group did away even with the concept of elected offices, since these created hierarchy, and lots were drawn to delegate tasks once done by officers to the membership on a rotating basis. While idealistic, this also diminished group efficacy as the talents of the membership were misappropriated and project continuity continually disrupted. The group became almost cult-like in its level of demands placed on the membership, and the zealous degree of in-group policing. Members who were late for meetings or put private and personal priorities ahead of the movement's were reprimanded.  It was determined, for example, that no more than 1/3 of the membership could consist of married women (and later barring married women all together), since marriage was determined to be an oppressive institution and married women risked having their loyalties divided between the group and their families.

Early feminism was known for the practice of "consciousness raising" wherein members would hold group "struggle sessions" to borrow a term from the Maoist lexicon, wherein they'd discuss their experiences of life in a patriarchal society. The concept of disadvantaged people joining together to discuss their problems and strategize about ways of dealing with them is not inherently regressive, and is indeed a potentially liberating and democratic exercise. However, as is often the case with regressive leftism, the devil is in the details.

Activist Kathie Sarachild, who coined the term consciousness raising, produced an article entitled "A Program for Feminist Consciousness Raising" which makes these diabolical details immediately apparent to anyone with any penchant of how ideological indoctrination works.  Sarachild outlines "classic forms of resisting consciousness" some of which include:

• Excusing the oppressor (and feeling sorry for him)
• False identification with the oppressor and other socially privileged groups
• Shunning identification with one's own oppressed group and other oppressed groups
• Thinking one has power in the traditional role
• Belief that one has found an adequate personal solution or will be able to find one without large social changes
• Self cultivation, rugged individualism, seclusion and other forms of go-it-alonism

In short, dependency on the group was intentionally fostered by demonizing persons outside the group or those women who had succumbed to "false consciousness" and strayed from the narrow path of the one true faith. As Eric Hoffer puts it in his seminal work on ideological fanaticism: "To be in possession of an absolute truth is to have a net of familiarity spread over the whole of eternity. There are no surprises and no unknowns." 

You may be asking: why should I be concerned about this? What impact could a small handful of marginalized radicals half a century ago possibly have in today's world? While bizarre and eccentric, surely the excesses of the early radical feminists could be forgiven in light of the vastly greater evils they struggled against?  

The answer is that the early radical feminists, though not wholly innovative as mentioned previously, did lay the foundations for how their more enduring and successful sisters in academia a generation later would operate, and what their core ideology would be. And that, in turn, is what gave rise to the current cultural hegemony of the SJWs. The emphasis placed by consciousness raising on activism and group solidarity around the idea of an infallible doctrine was carried over into the women's studies classroom.  The second wave notion that "the personal is the political" began the process of legitimizing the politicization of individual's private choices, which when coupled with critical theory (which we'll soon examine) laid the groundwork for the legitimization of feminist criticism and now colonization of popular culture. Even sex was not spared the critical gaze, and it was here that doubt was cast on women's capacity to legitimately consent to heterosexual relationships, so comprehensive was the grip of patriarchy theorized to be on not only the material conditions, but the very thoughts of the downtrodden and marginalized.

The radical feminists were an outgrowth of the new left of the 1960s, and here the apple did not fall far from the tree. This period in the history of western radicalism, perhaps the most legendary and romanticized in western history, is deep and complex, with a lot of ins and a lot of outs, as the old saying goes. It cannot be dealt with in any real measure of detail here. What was seen repeatedly, however, were the problems inherent to a politics committed to dramatic and sweeping changes to the very structure of society and human relationships, and how difficult this is to effect without resorting to regressive means.

Perhaps the definitive new-left organization was the Students for a Democratic Society, or the SDS for short. Here again, as with the feminists, we see the wide gap that separates the idealistic origins of radical egalitarian activism, and the frequently regressive and violent acts that follow. 

In his brilliant work, The Dark Side of the Left, author Richard J. Ellis traces the movement, beginning with its origins in the idealism expressed in the Port Huron Statement, authored primarily by SDS front-man Tom Hayden. The SDS criticized not only the pervasive racism and inequality of American society at the time, but also the failure of the old-left, with its ossified trade unions and bureaucratized socialist parties, to adequately address the problems. The SDS would move beyond its origins as the student wing of old left League for Industrial Democracy.  Bureaucratic capitalism and socialism alike were denounced in favor of a more comprehensive and inclusive participatory democracy. 

The old left's dogmatic Marxism and idealization of the Soviet Union were held to criticism, though the new left would come to repeat the same mistakes with its own idealization of third world revolutionaries such as Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro and the Vietcong.  Today's regressive left, condemned by Maajid Nawaz for its idealization (or at least refusal to condemn) Islamist societies is indeed following a very well trodden path. 

The SDS committed itself to many laudable goals, including civil rights, southern voter registration, opposition to the Vietnam war, anti poverty activism and a more thorough democratization of American society. But, as Ellis observes, its utopian ideals were liabilities to group efficacy. Like the feminists would a short time later and that its spiritual successors in the anti-globalization movement and Occupy Wall Street would decades later, the SDS undertook experiments in radical democracy that caused more problems than they solved. A commitment to direct democracy consensus decision making that might have been workable on a very small scale caused organizational paralysis that only worsened as the decade of the 1960s progressed. Meetings became notoriously long and drawn out. The group squandered its credibility on the romanticization of both the marginalized poor at home and oppressive regimes abroad, such as Castro's Cuba and Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam.

In group loyalty grew harder to maintain as the movement became increasingly disconnected from mainstream political life. The time honored methods of maintaining group cohesion became increasingly paramount. Namely the demonization and devaluation of society outside the group. For leftist groups whose nature was to champion the people against the oppressive system, this became (and remains) a difficult circle to square. The outcome, by the late 1960s, were the reasons that the rational reaction among long time observers to the antifa riots surrounding Trump's 2017 inauguration and at college campuses around the nation that same year would have been a strong sense of deja-vu. The 1968 democratic party convention and the final SDS convention in 1969, followed by the "days of rage" - led and instigated by antifa's spiritual predecessors, the Weather Underground-in Chicago that fall, saw what would have made the rioting we've seen in recent years look tame.   

As with the feminist radicalism of the time, the new left of the 1960s remains relevant today because in many crucial respects, it never really ended. The weathermen would go underground and eventually fade away during the 1970s, but the romance of the 1960s revolutionaries at home and abroad remained and influenced the culture of the west. Looking back, one wonders why it took until 2016 to return with the vengeance that it finally did. Then again, looking at the WTO protests of the late 1990s and Occupy Wall Street following the 2008 great recession, it becomes apparent that it never really went away completely, even in the US. 

It is worth looking, then, at the intellectual and ideological origins of the new left, as these origins explain events in 1968 as well as they do events in 2017. The often maligned German Institute for Social Research, more commonly known as the Frankfurt School, had its origins in post world war one Germany. Max Horkheimer differentiated critical theory from traditional theory in that "it seeks to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

A noble endeavor.  Critical theory, both in the Frankfurt School and outside of it, has become a vast body of work, with perhaps the only consistency being its complexity. Like the French postmodernists whom we discussed previously, who owe much intellectual lineage to Frankfurt despite their frequent disagreements, Frankfurt critical theory is notoriously vague, abstract and dense material to study. Key works of critical theory include The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality coauthored by Adorno and several other Frankfurt Intellectuals, and The One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse.  There are many, many others.

Early critical theory draws on the ideas of Sigmund Freud as much as on the ideas of Karl Marx, to leave the strict economic determinism attributed to Marx behind and to suggest that repression was psychologically internalized, like a form of neurosis. Their critique went beyond the capitalist mode of production and began deconstructing western civilization itself, largely in an attempt to explain why fascism and not socialism ended up benefiting politically from the great depression, the greatest crisis in the history of capitalism, as well as the reasons why authoritarian norms were reproduced inside the ostensibly socialist Soviet Union. 

In some cases, modernity and the enlightenment themselves were held to criticism. It was not merely that reason, rationality and the scientific method resulted in technology that extended the power and reach of any would-be tyrant. It was that domination and oppression were literally encoded into these ways of thinking. Knowledge itself was seen as a thing to be mastered and controlled. Later identitarian variations on this idea framed the enlightenment as the "colonization" of knowledge in the case of race theorists or the "penetration" of knowledge in the case of feminist theorists. The reason for the metaphors should be obvious. 

Here we see some of the origins of the reemergence of romanticism, the original counter-enlightenment, that swept the world in the 1960s, exemplified by the flower-child era.  Emphasis is placed on subjectivity and experience over rationalism and empiricism, and people and cultures who were more expressive and were supposed to have lived in harmony with nature are extolled in preference to the regimentation thought inherent to a strictly enlightenment world view.

This romanticist turn on the left was in response to the failures of Marxism: its failure to triumph in the west, as well as its failure to realize a liberated society in the USSR and its satellites. Socialist economic ideals were not abandoned, mind you, not yet at least. But they would increasingly take a back seat to cultural issues and a critique of mass society. As exemplified by the SDS we looked at earlier, the radical left would focus less and less on the unions and socialist parties, who had become ossified, bureaucratic and conservative. More emphasis was placed on media and academia, as this was where ideas were produced and disseminated.

This leads us to the idea of a “long march through the institutions” - this idea that a vanguard of leftist intelligentsia were going to gradually ascend to prominent positions in cultural institutions and use those positions of influence to shape the population according to their liking. Here we see precedent and origins for the "transformative" educational initiatives that feminist theorists would undertake decades later. This is the dreaded "cultural Marxism" so often touted by the right wing as the cause of the erosion of western cultural vitality. And not without some warrant, though we've seen that the critical theorists were distrustful of orthodox Marxism as well.  Contrary to popular belief, it was not Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci who coined the concept of the long march (though his ideas of “cultural hegemony” as an explanation for a lack of revolutionary consciousness among western working classes warrant comparison to critical theory) but rather a German student leftist by the name of Rudi Dutschke. 

Like many elements we look at in our study of the regressive left, critical theory is not inherently regressive. Collective self reflection of this nature can be a good thing. But the right wing is not as without cause for concern as the orthodox progressives in places like rationalwiki (ha ha!) would have us believe. The inversion of the modernist ideas of western exceptionalism, white man's burden and manifest destiny that we see among SJWs today - the view that white European culture is uniquely and exceptionally evil no doubt finds a good part of its origins in Frankfurt School inspired ideas. Western civilization's loss of robustness and confidence in its own history and traditions is fast revealing itself to be causing as many, if not more problems than it's solving. 

In addition, Frankfurt School intellectuals were not themselves immune to their own brand of authoritarianism, even as they sought to themselves understand the Authoritarian Personality more deeply. As a more historical example, observe Herbert Marcuse’s infamous concept of “repressive tolerance”, appearing in the 1965 publication A Critique of Pure Tolerance, asserting that censorship and repression of conservative and right wing ideas was justified in a way that repression and censorship of liberal and progressive ideas were not was, perhaps the most glaring example.  This idea, itself derived from Leninist thinking that we'll look at in future installments, also underlies and precedes the power-plus-prejudice formulation we looked at in the last installment, and the kinds of hypocrisies this enables. 

The Radical Ruckus that was kicked up in the 1960s and 70s obviously failed to transform society in the ways they'd hoped. This was due to the contradictions inherent to radical egalitarian thought and activism, as expressed by Ellis in Dark Side of the Left.  But neither was it completely defeated either, despite an ostensibly conservative turn in the political climate come the 1980s. The radicals retreated into counter cultural enclaves and, of course, the humanities and social sciences in academia, with results we saw in the previous installment, Postmodern Pandemonium. The feminist transformation of the academy was the success of the long march through the institutions, with regressive results we're now seeing both on and off campus.

It would be tempting to ask: where was the right wing in all of this? For all the panic you've no doubt recently heard from the right about cultural Marxism, conservatism had, by and large, been poorly equipped to handle this regressive left coup in the academy, and from there in the broader popular culture.  

To be continued in Part 6: Conservative Complacency. 

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