recognize the movement presently seeking to overthrow liberalism for what it is: an updated version of Marxism. I do not say this to disparage anyone. I say this because it is true. And because recognizing this truth will help us understand what we are facing.
I recommend the whole essay. There is no way to give it justice by quoting excerpts. But here are a couple:
what if it turned out that liberalism has a tendency to give way and transfer power to Marxists within a few decades? Far from being the opposite of Marxism, liberalism would merely be a gateway to Marxism.
. . .The Marxists who have seized control of the means of producing and disseminating ideas in America cannot, without betraying their cause, confer legitimacy on any conservative government. And they cannot grant legitimacy to any form of liberalism that is not supine before them. This means that whatever President Trump’s electoral fortunes, the “resistance” is not going to end. It is just beginning.
His conclusion:
Liberals will have to choose between two alternatives: either they will submit to the Marxists, and help them bring democracy in America to an end. Or they will assemble a pro-democracy alliance with conservatives. There aren’t any other choices.
But the essay does not appear where liberals will read it.
This is “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree”?
If I was a Marxist, I would feel insulted. I’ve never encountered an ideology so bereft of data and logic than Woke culture.
Yes, of course. Being charitable doesn’t mean pretending to be dumb to humor those you disagree with.
No, Tomar. This is recognizing what all of the vitriol and violence has been about. This is not what most people would term a “normal” time in American history. I certainly have never witnessed a period in time when mayors in so many cities neglected the safety of their citizens in favor of political activities of which they personally approved. In some sense, however, this article may be the most charitable that one can be toward what is happening.
The Hazony essay raises an obvious question: Was Marx himself even a Marxist in his framework? This is a proposal to simply reduce the term Marxism to an all purpose insult.
Marx offered a thoroughly historicist economic theory that viewed individuals as mere pawns driven by inevitable economic forces, not independent moral agents to be either reviled as oppressors or praised as resistors of oppression in the way modern leftist extremists do. Marx thought that owners of capital had no more agency and moral responsibility than workers in this process.
In his argument against “Enlightenment Liberalism” Hazony claims that it “only moves in one direction” and that is….towards Marxism. The irony in trying to combat Marxism with another obviously inaccurate historicist argument should be obvious. In fact, we have frequently seen movement from more Marxist arrangements towards more market oriented societies and not just in eastern Europe. Conservatives somehow have a lot less trouble remembering this when discussing the success of Scandinavian countries, or Thatcher, or Reagan or the fact that China is minting new millionaires faster than anyone.
The fact is classical or Enlightenment liberalism is under attack today from BOTH extremes. Fascism is rapidly increasing in popularity around the world.
Hazony says, “By a legitimate political party I mean one that is recognized by its rivals as having a right to rule if it wins an election.” Well, Trump has already made it clear he will not view an election he loses as legitimate. He has expressed approval many times for the QAnon movement that expects and approves of a military takeover of the U.S. where there are mass arrests of his political opponents. Even so Hazony is proof that if you close your ideas hard enough to reality it is possible to see threats to democracy from only one direction
“The fact is classical or Enlightenment liberalism is under attack today from BOTH extremes.”
Umm…not familiar with any significant right of center movement with any traction whatsoever that is against Enlightenment liberalism.
Hint: when is the last time you witnessed wide-scale protests, looting, violence, etc. from a right wing movement?
Bob,
QAnon is rapidly growing in popularity, is starting to win elections, advocates a right wing military takeover of the of the U.S. with mass arrests of Trump’s political opponents, and has been spoken of approvingly by Trump many times.
The ADL has been tracking murders by political extremists for decades and murders by right wing extremists have exceeded murders by left wing extremists by orders of magnitude for that long.
I don’t doubt you are “not familiar with” these facts. Your lack of familiarity does not change the reality.
“QAnon is rapidly growing in popularity, is starting to win elections, advocates a right wing military takeover of the of the U.S. with mass arrests of Trump’s political opponents, and has been spoken of approvingly by Trump many times.”
Umm…source please. Lol!
In other words, still waiting for the first violent assault by QAnon or the first building to burnt to the ground attributed to them.
I’m not gonna hold my breath.
Bob,
Francesco Cali was the first person murdered in the name of QAnon.
Comet Ping Pong Pizza was shot up without anyone being hit by a different QAnon enthusiast looking for the non-existent pizza shop basement where HRC was abusing the children. As he later commented, “The intel wasn’t 100%.”
Many others have been threatened in the name of QAnon. For the most part, QAnon members advocate violence by the government with mass arrests of their political enemies in a military coup. You could find this detail in seconds with a Google search. I learned long ago not to waste much time providing sources to people on the internet determined to remain “not familiar ” with the relevant facts and treating their own ignorance as evidence of something.
By the way, the next murder attributed to Antifa will be the first.
If any of your statements re: QAnon are true, then this would, for sure, be the biggest story coming out of the left leaning media during this political season. Are they intentionally covering it up?
The fact that you are unable or unwilling to provide sources speaks for itself.
Greg,
You cannot explicitly and directly lie like this.
“You cannot explicitly and directly lie like this.”
He already did and this MO is so typical of these folks.
I feel sorry for the Marxists having to get lumped in with the sorry intellectual lightweights.
The guy who murdered Frank Cali (then head of the Gambino crime family) was romantically pursuing Cali’s niece, which Cali forbade. The guy (Comello) was definitely a conspiracy theorist and probably mentally ill, but he also had a strong personal motive, one which doesn’t make as good of fodder for an insanity defense as “QAnon made me do it” (which is basically his defense).
Mark,
>—-” The guy (Comello) was definitely a conspiracy theorist and probably mentally ill…”
Not disagreeing with this, but just how many of the people who believe that the world is controlled by a tight conspiracy of deep state Satan worshipping cannibal pedophiles do you think are not mentally ill in a significant way?
The overwhelming majority of mentally ill people aren’t violent, but for those who are, these kind of beliefs can easily make the difference in whether or not they act out.
No doubt many of the left wing rioters we see have serious mental issues too. I’m not seeing anyone here who thinks that should prevent them from being linked to the causes they espouse.
When the pizza shop was shot up I thought that would be the end of the QAnon nonsense because it was such an idiotic and embarrassing act (what with the intel not being 10% and all) but it only seemed to make the movement stronger.
The Democrats are headed in that direction, too. See Hilary’s recent recommendation that Biden should not concede the election under any circumstances. I think the coming election and its aftermath are going to be scary…
For the most part, I think the Hazony article made some good points. However, I was disappointed when he got to the point about legitimacy. Like Greg G. above, I felt he was clearly one-sided on that point. The Right has tried to de-legitimize the Left by branding them as socialist/communist and claiming that they want to institute sharia law and that Obama wasn’t even American. QAnon itself claims that the Democrat party is supporting a worldwide child sex ring.
Greg G.: “The fact is classical or Enlightenment liberalism is under attack today from BOTH extremes.”
Yep.
In 1982 I listened to a British journalist claim that the US had the most controlled media outside the Soviet Union. He said all European journalists knew it. He claimed the owners and editors were all Marxists and good friends with Castro and gave examples
Okay, boo…
Only kidding! Ted Turner playing a Marxist, though. It really had me wondering.
Arnold is too modest to point it out, but Hazony’s essay is further confirmation of his “oppressor-oppressed” axis in 3LP. Hazony’s discussion fleshes out this mindset. Marxism, whether in the original economic version, or since that version’s eclipse with the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s abandonment of it, in its successor form of cultural marxism, sees the world as a structure of oppression. The intellectual poverty of such a conception and its inadequacy as a framework for understanding is clearly brought out by Hazony.
Highly recommended.
“No, Marxist political theory is not simply a great lie. By analyzing society in terms of power relations among classes or groups, we can bring to light important political phenomena to which Enlightenment liberal theories—theories that tend to reduce politics to the individual and his or her private liberties—are systematically blind.”
This blog does the same thing almost every day. The only difference is that most of this audience believes just as strongly in innate inequality as the SJW believe in equality.
The debate here attempts an impossible argument. It builds a relentless case that people are wired to see the world in a particular way and to be largely indifferent to other languages of political understanding, while simultaneously arguing that this somehow does not manifest into any significant systemic inequality.
The claim becomes that society has developed a deep unease with inequalities that are innate. It is deeply unfair, and politically destabilizing to assert that identity groups that we claim to be INNATELY UNEQUAL AND INNATELY BIASED tend to apply systems unequally.
“The only difference is that most of this audience believes just as strongly in innate inequality as the SJW believe in equality”
You need to define “equality.” Frist, people who post here tend to look at the world in terms of Individuals. SJW’s view it in terms of collectives. Individuals *are* innately unequal – they have different degrees of intelligence, beauty, health, strength, and so on.
SJW’s tend to define “equality” in terms of outcome. If two definable groups have, on average, different levels of “success,” however that is defined, then, to an SJW the system is inherently unfair.
Your second point seems to be that the fact that different people – perhaps different groups of people – tend to see the world differently must lead to systemic inequality. I agree that if Jill believes she has personal agency and that she can improve her condition by her own actions she is more likely to “succeed” (there’s that word again) than is Jack who believes that the system is rigged against him and that no action on his part will improve his life. That difference of belief will likely lead to unequal outcomes. But is that inequality necessarily systemic? Perhaps it is if victimology is taught in most schools.
I don’t understand your last statement:” It is deeply unfair, and politically destabilizing to assert that identity groups that we claim to be INNATELY UNEQUAL AND INNATELY BIASED tend to apply systems unequally.” What does it mean to “apply systems unequally”?
The context here is the general ability levels and behavioral disciplines of various identity groups. I don’t need to define exactly what or why that is important because I don’t base any of my personal beliefs on it.
I think government has a responsibility to represent its citizens as equally and as widely as it reasonably can. The only equality I care about is what the government presents to its citizens, not what citizens or groups of citizens are capable of. Just because you are smarter than someone else doesn’t mean you have a stronger claim to your government than they do.
I agree that incessant arguments about equality of outcomes is corrosive.
But what you and most other posters are doing that I don’t agree with is to then dismiss the resulting claim, that the government has evolved to treat certain classes of people better than others. That can be true regardless of any equality of outcomes arguments.
The disconnect is amazing. The immediately prior post was on the Boomer and the Millenial, and it explored how our society and government evolved to create a different, and probably more difficult set of circumstances for the Millenials.
If someone is intellectually capable of seeing how these types of intergenerational tensions can evolve through the decisions of government, how can they be so blind to other types of identity inequities?
In the end, the only practical value of identities is to define certain common perspectives among citizens. Can the government deliver its promises to people under certain particular circumstances? There should be a good faith attempt to do so.
Before the 1960’s, American blacks suffered from white people who actively tried to oppress them. After the Sixties, blacks suffered from white people who actively tried to help them. Which has hurt them worse?
The following Progressive / paternalistic policies have helped to create an underclass of all races:
• Minimum wage laws, which hurt the least employable workers (i.e., the least educated, least experienced, and most discriminated against)
• Occupational licensing, which reduces jobs and makes relocating to other states more difficult
• Rent control, which reduces low-income housing
• Welfare restrictions that favor single-parent families
• High marginal tax rates on earnings by welfare recipients
• Zoning restrictions, which reduce low-income housing
Here are a few numbers:
• Between 1940 and 1960 – when Jim Crow was in full force – the black poverty rate dropped from 87% to 47%.
• Between 1972 and 2011 – with the Civil Rights Acts, the Great Society programs, and Affirmative Action in place – the rate dropped from 32% to 28%.
• In 1948, the unemployment rate for blacks aged 16-17 years was 9.4% and for blacks aged 18-19 it was 10.5 percent. The rates for whites of the same ages were 10.2% and 9.4%.
• Today, the unemployment rate for young blacks is 35% – three times higher than it was in 1948.
• In 1960, 22% of black children were being raised without a father.
• In 1995, 85% of black children were being raised without a father.
Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw the possibility of this outcome in his book, “Democracy in America”:
[An American despotism] would degrade men without tormenting them…. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood…. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Thus, it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself…. Each nation is reduced to being nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
> But the essay does not appear where liberals will read it.
No, rather Quillette is a bastion of liberalism, thus the essay does appear where liberals will read it.
And a good thing, too—this is an excellent and thought-provoking essay.
One of the problems with Hazony’s piece is that he abuses the word “liberal,” sometimes using it to refer to classical liberals who are on the right, and sometimes to refer to American liberals on the left.
Another problem is that he doesn’t define the word “equality,” which can mean:
1. Equality under the law
2. Equality of opportunity
3. Equality of outcome
His point that Marxists can use examples of inequality to condemn America makes sense if one accepts either the second or the third definitions of equality. But note that these neither of these “equalities” are humanly impossible to achieve. No one can provide equality of opportunity to people who have different abilities and are born into different situations and cultures. Similarly, no one can provide equality of outcome to people who think and act differently. How, for example, can a person who disdains education as “acting white” possibly end up in the same place as one who works hard to obtain a good education regardless of any obstacles in her path?
As fallible, limited human beings, the best we can hope to provide is equality under the law – something, by the way, that the woke left explicitly rejects as “racist.”
A third problem is that Hazony seems to believe that, had the Founders gotten it right, the country’s social structure could be run on autopilot. There would be no need to ever defend it from rent-seekers and radicals.
You’re right, equality types 2 & 3 are not possible, but that doesn’t mean they won’t continue to tear everything down in pursuit of it.
Actually, let me say that #3 is impossible. Equality of opportunity is possible and what we should be striving for, but you seem to be saying that equality of opportunity is meaningless unless it leads to equality of outcome. I do not agree with that.
No, I’m not saying that equality of opportunity must lead to equal outcomes. I’m saying that there’s no way to ensure that people have equal starting positions. For example, I grew up in a small mining camp in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico. There is simply no way in which I could have the same opportunities as someone who grew up in New York City.
I guess it’s all in what you mean by equality of opportunity. I see your point, and I guess I need to give it some more thought.
Ok, good point. Words are malleable, especially these days. By opportunity I’m thinking mostly in terms of access – access to quality schools, institutions (museums, theaters, etc.), community institutions (boys and girls clubs, civic centers, libraries), after school programs. Of course, I was a kid back in the 60s and 70s. Nowadays kids have the Internet, which gives them a lot of access to great stuff should they choose to take advantage of it.
I suppose the culture you grow up in could impact your opportunities as well. My parents were both college educated and it was taken for granted that my sister and I would be as well. A kid growing up in the culture of “getting an education is acting white” is unlikely to have the same opportunities that I did, even if he/she lives in New York.
No, #2 is also impossible. Or rather, it depends on how you define opportunity. I suppose if you defined it in an incredibly narrow way, #2 becomes possible. But none of those are meaningful definitions in my opinion.
I repeat my comment to last Sunday’s post:
Arnold, thanks for your annotation and many ideas. We can continue discussing ideologies forever. We will see attempts to renew and repackage old ideas and present them as a new moral revolution. But we cannot ignore that the activists advancing today the new moral revolution are interested in grabbing power by any means –and that is why we should call them the new barbarians. Ideas and ideology are an excuse to grab power, as much power as necessary to get rid of all opposition and control the masses. A few days ago, your reference to Robin Hanson reminded us that we have norms against overt dominance and submission: these are the norms the new barbarians want to abolish.
The new barbarians were trained in college and universities and now they are taking control of professional organizations. I just read this
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-hypocritical-oath-054
(sorry gated) about the American Medical Association. It’s not only in the U.S. that the take-over is happening –here in Chile, it has been much worst since the “social outbreak” similar to the post-Floyd outbreak took place last October, before the pandemic.
You are right to argue in your last paragraph about the civil war scenario. I will not repeat what I said in a comment to a previous post.
This is the sort of thing nationalist and traditionalist right-wingers have been saying for at least a hundred years, probably longer. “You may not like our cruelty, our unreasoning traditionalist repression, our racism, etc. but it’s us or the Commies– you’ve got to pick a side.” Victor Klemperer’s diary of the Nazi years, IIRC, recounts Hitler’s use of this propaganda line, complete with accurate stories about Stalin’s atrocities, to try and win over the German middle.
The persistence and successes of liberalism over all that time should give pause to people who might be tempted to think, in the face of our present difficulties, that liberalism is really so weak and feeble, so unable to win on its own, as the Hazonys of the world would like us to believe, and would like it to be.
By your definition, FDR and JFK were both nationalist and traditionalist right-wingers.
I think that it has been, what, a month since the Harper’s letter’s critique of Cancel Culture- a letter written by so-called classical liberals (I will simply accept their claim for purposes of argument). Even there you could see the problem Hazony is outlining in this later essay.
Liberals get the bullet last.
As if to prove Hazony correct, out pops Pelosi to declare anyone in favor of electoral integrity “enemies of the state.”
And Hillary Clinton to incite civil war with her injunction “Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances.”
These are the people so many liberals and neo-conservatives choose with which to side. The common enemy of this alliance between progressives, liberals, and neo -conservatives is the popular vote. We are constantly told without any evidence whatsoever that a citizenry not in thrall to an ideological elite is an authoritarian menace. The little people voting for peace, prosperity, and personal autonomy are a threat to democracy our cut-and-paste intelligentsia relentlessly declaims. Populists, the ignoramus intellectuals decree, are anti-pluralism, as if that made a bit of sense. The populist support of pragmatic results is very scary to word-spinners immersed in the cant of ideology.
The prophesied populist apocalypse always threatens to appear but somehow never materializes. The elites of all the ideologies agree and shake their heads in consternation at the populist horrors but never manage to articulate exactly what they might be, or maybe it’s something someone said a few years ago. No matter, they all know it was authoritarian and it was bad. Never mind the lawless tyranny they impose with their open borders by fiat and mobs set free to burn small businesses down night after night.
The last real ideologue who actually made a positive difference was Margaret Thatcher and she enjoyed populist support and was in fact often described as populist. Competence and pragmatic results are the mortal enemy of ideological elites, so she was opposed by an alliance similar to that supporting a Harris regency. https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/feb/18/margaret-thatcher-was-hated-by-liberals-socialists/
Milton’s Satan spoke like an ideologue of this ilk. May the independent, unaligned, ticket-splitter, undecided, alienated, plurality of voters in their infinite variety, yearning for real reform and a better tomorrow take to heart the words of Gabriel and remember that although the election results may already have been decided, a day of reckoning with the reign self-serving, sterile, unproductive ideological elitism is in reach. A modern, representative democracy is no farther away than a constitutional convention.
And to the ideological tyrants, the words of Gabriel, our angel of Democracy, shall be realized:
“And thou sly hypocrite, who now wouldst seem
Patron of liberty, who more then thou
Once fawn’d, and cring’d, and servilly ador’d
Heav’ns awful Monarch? wherefore but in hope
To dispossess him, and thy self to reigne?
But mark what I arreede thee now, avant;
Flie thither whence thou fledst: if from this houre
Within these hallowd limits thou appeer,
Back to th’ infernal pit I drag thee chaind,
And Seale thee so, as henceforth not to scorne
The facil gates of hell too slightly barrd. “
Meh. The two most recent populist American candidates are/were Trump and Sanders. Neither strikes me as particularly competent or pragmatic. While Trump isn’t ideological, Sanders certainly is.
Trump didn’t get us into any new wars, didn’t launch any new huge vanity social programs or moonshots, didn’t bend a knee to the climate cultists, got some pipelines completed, reduced the rate of increase in regulatory drag, and saw unemployment decrease and wages increase in his first three years. That is about as competent as one can hope for under the USA electoral system.
Sanders is only called a populist because the party elites got busted rigging the primary last time around. He says he is a democratic socialist and he is a member of the Progressive International and I take him at his word for it. Of course democratic socialists are democratic in the same sense that North Korea is a democratic people’s republic: they want every aspect of life of ordinary existence subject to regulation by technocrats. So, really just state capacity libertarians in disguise with no concern at all for the democratic process and allowing individuals to participate in the political process.
If we go to countries that are less primitive we can find all kinds of excellent populist leaders performing quit competently. Conte, in Italy, who said “if populism is the attitude of the ruling class to listen to the people’s needs […] and if anti-establishment means aiming at introducing a new system able to remove old privileges and encrusted power, well, these political forces deserve both these epithets” has gotten a lot of major reforms enacted. And comparing 2019 over 2018 GDP per capita, Orban’s Hungary came out on top, with the populist leaders in Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, and Latvia all posting gains while Germany, France and Spain all declined. Say what you will about Bolsonaro but he got pension reform done and launched major privatization initiatives: https://panampost.com/mamela-fiallo/2019/08/23/brazil-bolsonaro-and-guedes-oversee-a-wave-of-privatization-of-state-companies/?cn-reloaded=1. Chances are that if a country is getting wealthier
Hazony’s article is well done, but it seems as though many of the commenters here didn’t actually read through it. That is probably because most people recoil at using the same term to describe historical “Marxism” with its specific content, connotations, and associated implementations in various past regimes, and the abstraction into “Generalized Marxist Framework-ism”, specifically to leverage the boo-word nature of the word.
Even the modified version of “Cultural Marxism” – which at least admits of the distinction and signals that it is a variation on an abstraction of the historical theme – has had a tough time catching on. Google ngrams shows that use of that phrase has exploded simultaneously and proportionately with The Great Awokening, but it is still ten thousand times less common than Marxism alone, which means something very different to most people. Cultural Marxists are mostly “Marx-ish”
There is also the question of what is means by “Revolutionary Reconstitution”. In the Soviet Union this certainly involved immediate change accomplished by violence and terror, but was still distinct enough from Marx’s writings that we call the augmentation of the doctrine “Marxism-Leninism” with justice. And what about gradualist, Gramscian ‘marching’, with its strategically minimally provocative political expediency and which is certainly the method by which Hazony’s ‘Marxists’ “seized control” of important American institutions of influence. Is that ‘revolutionary’ in the Marxist sense just because the accumulated change is large, but without suddenness or the regime-overthrow level of violence?
My position is that ‘Progressivism’ is simply the right word for “Oppressor-Oppressed-Framework-Ism”, as it is the euphemism that the old far-leftists used to describe themselves without irony, that modern wokesters would be and are happy to use to refer to themselves, and that the uninterrupted American tradition of progressivism, which as Hazony admits predates Marx by some time, has contained within it the basic elements of the Social Gospel and general political formula elements from the beginning (arguably all the way back to Calvin). Marx did not make much of a splash in the Anglosphere until the early 20th Century, but Bellamy’s “Looking Backward”, arising out of the parallel American – and specifically New England – progressive tradition, was a smash hit and one of the most influential books of its era.
That many ‘liberals’ also like to use the term progressive to describe themselves does make it hard to draw the line in the sand that Hazony wishes he could use to cut this bit of nature at the joints, but there are no natural joints, and the line is always moving.
That’s because the real ‘liberals’ are the libertarians, and the left-liberals have always been progressives in principle but never fully in practice, at in a gradualist democratic approach it simply takes a great deal of time to overcome inertia and traditions and entrenched opposing interests and rectify Auster’s unprincipled exceptions one at a time, whichever one is most feasible given the context which is path-dependent and historically contingent.
The way we know this is true is that left-liberals (and Outer-Party ‘conservatives’) have no ability to articulate any actual argument against what the Current Year’s radicals are advocating for. They always give in because they *believe* in what they are giving in to, and *believe* that if they are resisting it is mostly resisting for bad reasons of weakly rationalized personal interest that they recognize are lapses of righteousness and piety and at best compromises with unfortunate realities that can and should be abandoned just as soon as the situation allows for it.
Let’s go back to the that Open Letter in Harper’s. Note that many of the signatories are on record being in favor of penalizing ‘hate speech’, but imagine some of those classic left-liberals who actually believe (or think they believe) in “free speech” and who most likely only lack the necessary flexibility to update their views to Current Year woke progressivism due to their advanced years.
If you ask a classic left liberal why we should not cancel, penalize, or prohibit, clear ‘hate speech’, and instead tolerate it all the time, what is their answer? They don’t have one. If they are still in favor of a concept of free speech without exception but they can’t explain why to their woke opponents or to themselves, then they are just being ‘conservative’ with regard to inertia of sticking with things they have been used to thinking for a long time.
In these and many other instances they are not in fact ’embarrassed by the stubbornly lingering inequalities’ that ‘Marxists’ point out to them, they cannot deny the fact that the newest ‘Marxists’ simply have more coherent fidelity to shared principles and are willing to bite a few more bullets to accomplish the implications of the common ideology.
All leftism is incomplete leftism, and left-liberals are simply slightly more incomplete than woke-liberals. That is mostly due to them being older and wealthier and thus the kind of people who can’t help being alarmed at certain big, fast changes even though they sympathize with them in principle. The “biological solution” to generational turnover means we will just get a new generation of old-guard and new-guard, and so on until there is finally no more ruin in a nation left.
That leads to another issue with using the term ‘Marxism’, which is that if you call the current generation of left radicals ‘Marxists’, then when they get old, what do you call their foils in the next generation who are perpetually moving further out: “Even-More-Marxists”? It is an ironic fact that even Marx wasn’t ‘Marxist’ enough according to the historical crimethink scrutinizers.
Harzony seems to use the term Marxism as almost interchangeable with illiberalism (on the left) or “oppressor vs. oppressed” ideologies. That’s not really what it means though. I don’t think one can infer that someone who believes racial or gender outcome differences are due to racism necessarily believes profit is exploitation, or someone who believes in hate speech laws necessarily believes in nationalizing most of the economy. He seems to be trying to impute a coherent ideology to recent left-wing equivocations about property damage in riots, but I think that’s a fool’s errand. Sure, the post hoc rationalizations given by pundits are pseudo-Marxist in tone, but that doesn’t mean that’s the motivating ideology. They just got angry and wanted to break things.
We shouldn’t assume behavior is motivated by a coherent political ideology, and try to figure out what it is by observing. Most politics occurs at the level of the id.
Decent comment.
Obama was called a Marxist. Over and over. If the word retains any meaning at all…like if Romney was a Nazi what word can you go to when there’s real Nazis around?
When I was at the University we studied about Marxist economic theory, class struggle, dialectical materialism and the end of history. Karl Marx.
I’m just not seeing it here. Oh, the tensions are all there but what people are calling Marxism is pretty far removed.
Steve Banon – “We’re Leninists.” I think the case can be made?
America’s left-wing is far too obsessed with identity politics to be considered Marxist. In addition, the left-wing has formed an alliance with the multinational-globalists.
Apple, the NBA, BlackRock et al, they all support BLM!
This is Marxist?
They’re not “Marxists” unless the media calls them Marxists – even if they are.
Calling any group a name which they deny is problematic – the name / descriptor will only stick if cultural leaders, especially the media, support it.
(Sort of like calling Republicans “red” and Democrats “blue”, but Reps didn’t quite deny it or fight against it. Calling homosexuals “gay” took away the happy meaning.)
Democrats will deny the label, and the media will deny it and many will even claim those labelling them are doing “hate speech”.
As Hazony mentions, the same sentiment of envy-anger was seen by (pre-) Marxists in the French Revolution, even before Marx. Similar to how Reagan Derangement Syndrome was not named until Bush Derangement Syndrome, and now Trump Derangement Syndrome. Republicans should be calling it Democrat Derangement Syndrome.
His article is great. But terminology of calling it “Marxism” won’t be adopted, and Reps can’t make it be adopted. We should be looking for a new label, even tho it’s also accurate to call it fascist. Like the Chinese commies have become.
Perhaps “mob-liberals”. Because they support mob-protests, both peaceful and not so, when the protests are in line. “PC-liberals” supporting violence. “PC-fascists” is also true, but won’t stick.
In 1965, after he got the Civil Rights Act passed, Pres. LBJ gave a commencement speech at (black) Howard University where “equality” changed from equal opportunity towards equal outcome:
The voting rights bill will be the latest, and among the most important, in a long series of victories. But this victory–as Winston Churchill said of another triumph for freedom–“is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”…
But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.
Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.
This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
Some core concepts of Marx’s theory don’t square with Yoram Hazony’s essay; for example, “historical materialism” and “the growth of the productive forces.” Marx argued that ruling classes persist as long as their rule increases productivity. If and when an oppressed class would establish a new “mode of production” with greater productivity, then “transition” or revolution occurs. Marx believed that an “internal contradiction”—the law of the declining rate of profit— would undermine capitalism. Then proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat would unleash productivity and eliminate economic scarcity.
Fashionable economic ideas about big government, such as Modern Monetary Theory, pale in comparison to Marx’s theory of the growth of the productive forces.
In my opinion, current ideologies don’t fit Marx’s theory. Instead, they develop around coalition-formation in grand status contests among social groups, given economic scarcity. (I have never met a person who doesn’t care about status.)
Welcome back Mr. Alcorn! Nice to see you back@
Thank you! Glad to be back!
To boil down what many of the commenters have said: This is a very expansive definition of Marxism that, however, doesn’t include Marx or classical Marxists.
Perhaps wokeism, like Marxism, is another “Christian heresy”.
FWIW, “Marxist” has been attached to nearly everything imaginable. As broad a term as it is, not sure that Hazony has gone too far astray. I most frequently encounter the term in literary critiques where it is used pretty much the same as Hazony uses it. Literature students are typically taught something along the lines of:
“A Marxist critical perspective explores ways in which a text reveals the ideological oppression by a dominant economic class over subordinate classes. In order to do this a Marxist might ask the following questions:
* Does the text reflect or resist a dominant ideology?
* Does it do both?
* Does the main character in a narrative affirm or resist upper-class values?
* Whose story gets told in the text?
* Are lower economic groups ignored or devalued?
* Are values that support the dominant economic group given privilege?
* This can happen tacitly, in the way in which values are taken to be self-evident.”
Then there is Marxist psychology which involves merging Freud with Marx which gave birth to the Frankfurt School. “Like Karl Marx, the Frankfurt School concerned themselves with the conditions (political, economic, societal) that allow for social change realized by way of rational social institutions.”
Freudian-Marxist Herbert Marcuse argued that capitalism prevents us from reaching the non-repressive society “based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations.”
We have Marxist aesthetics which is “a theory of aesthetics based on, or derived from, the theories of Karl Marx. It involves a dialectical and materialist, or dialectical materialist, approach to the application of Marxism to the cultural sphere, specifically areas related to taste such as art, beauty, and so forth. “
There is even a Wikipedia entry on Marxist criminology.
Even avowed Marxists see the term as an unusually broad one:
“To be a Marxist doesn’t require belief in an armed uprising to bring about a new world, in violent change or authoritarianism. It just means acknowledging as a fact something that already exists: the class struggle. The tactics and strategies workers employ to achieve class consciousness and act to end the exploitative system are ours to determine.” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/12/marxism-socialism-class-struggle-materialism
Hazony’s usage, which he explains in detail, does not do much wrong to that definition.
It will be interesting.
On one hand, there are actual literate Marxists out there now. The ones who truly understand it ( I suppose – by that I mean I can understand what they say about it ) have little more than contempt for identity politics. They do not consider it Marxist. They consider it Liberal. I’m not even sure idpol is considered worth of Useful Idiot status to them.
Their proof is 2008, the bailouts.
We’ve had Marxism “infiltrate” society before, in the Vietnam era. It got moderate-ed out. The joke in “The Big Chill” was naming the shoe company “Running Dog”. A ha ha.
What’s been lost is the knowledge that the nation state is an imperfect instrument. A million Chomskies bloom, not realize that the role of the state is not to make perfect the world but to drive the snarling-toothed into the smallest space. And that mistakes will be made; by making government a competitive enterprise we then see the drive ti survive dominating all the high flown rhetoric.
This means making deals. Like, “as you stare into the vaccuum of his eyes” stuff.
They are Marxists because they’ve had some measure of training and they don’t really know much of anything else. But don’t confuse them with most of the people in the streets rioting. They know nothing of the realities of actually doing real things in the real world. I don’t mean they’re utopian; they just don’t have enough scars to know how utterly bloody minded humanity really is. Or, worse, they do.
It’s different – as Hazony said they’ve dropped a lot of the jargon. It’s about balance of power, it’s about class and it’s about their perception that there is privilege. Where I see specialization, they see privilege – I couldn’t do what Jamie Dimon does, nor could very many people at all. That sort of thing.
But in the end, liberalism will most likely win out. Marxism believes too much in design where reality will absorb all you could ever design and still spit you out. But these people, the Marxists, see the Democratic party with clearer eyes than anyone I’ve read in a while.
It should be interesting.