I believe Rod Dreher was the first person I heard mention the idea that the rainbow flag is today's "Workers of the World Unite" sign in his book Live Not By Lies. Power of the Powerlesness is a great book to prepare us for resistance.
I worry where the Left is leading us with this sort of race/sex-essentialism. 50 years have been spent trying to obliterate white racial identity. Successfully -- the white-power crowd is a complete fringe today. But they won't stay that way if the Left keeps harping on race and trying to blame whites for every ill in the world. Because like it or not, there are right-wing political movements willing to meet the Left on its own race-essentialist terms. Richard Spencer and Ibram Kendi both see race as the core feature of all human relationships. The mainstream right needs an answer to this (and very soon) or the white-power-Right is going to grow, which would be a disaster. If you thought the Christian Right was authoritarian, just wait to till you meet his brother, the non-Christian Right.
The Nazis have about 2-3 percent support. Imagine for a moment if even 20-30% of whites in America developed the kind of racial-group consciousness that existed just 2-3 generations ago. Blue collar whites voting based on race: "sure he's a Nazi, but at least my kid won't get screwed out of college because he's white."
The Left is trying to use the demons of racism for their own political ends. Using demons as tools never ends well. And when I say demons here, I am not being entirely metaphorical., Colorblindness is far from perfect. The alternatives are far worse.
"The mainstream right needs an answer to this (and very soon) or the white-power-Right is going to grow, which would be a disaster."
I've been hearing this refrain for well over a decade now, and am still awaiting the materialization of such a movement. And I'm confident I will keep waiting, no matter how vicious and deranged the left becomes.
The sad fact is that conservatives believe in the American Civic Religion and its gnosis of Equality no less than Progressives. They have no ulterior point of reference, no rock upon which to stand and arrest the ever-leftward drift of our pseudo-theocratic society. They dislike the rudeness and zealotry of modern Wokeness, but don't actually disagree with any of its underlying principles. And remember: they trust authorities. If a doctor tells them their teenager needs puberty blockers to feel happy, they'll likely believe them.
We're all stuck on the same train; conservatives just want it to go slower.
I honestly haven't heard this until the last year or so, and if you heard it earlier, I think it was premature, as it's only been in the last few years that progressives have publicly repudiated the "American Civic Religion and its gnosis of Equality". as you put it. Kendi explicitly rejects "equality of opportunity" or "equality before the law" in favor of mandated outcomes by group membership. It's only a matter of time before the right follows suit. In the 60's and 70's, during a blue collar manufacturing boom, affirmative action was broadly accepted by whites. it is not today. And in a time of declining living standards, when a blue collar family expects their children to do worse in life than they did... forget it. Telling a white, unemployed factory worker that his son is privileged compared to a middle class black girl is a recipe for anger and racial resentment.
I do agree that many so-called conservatives appear far more interested in grift and cocktail parties than in actually conserving anything. Which is precisely my point. If those establishment conservatives (Max Boot, David French, et al) don't start doing something to push back against the Left, voters and donors will replace them with people who will. Trump should have been a warning shot to pay attention; instead they doubled down on their willful blindness.
Yes, as living standards decline and the economic pie shrinks, people will get more resentful towards those with preferential treatment by the state. But this says more about their day-to-day concerns than their religious ideals. Americans rejoiced in Great Society plans and Civil Rights and affirmative action---when they believed they could afford such utopian luxuries. Christopher Caldwell's The Age of Entitlement offers an excellent synopsis on this subject.
No, the religious ideals themselves are the issue. "...all men are created equal." Period. Jefferson appends stuff to that about rights and happiness and whatnot, but who cares? And surely when he wrote those words he meant to imply something more profound than, "All men are the product of sex."
The difference between the radical Kendi's of this world and one's American conservative aunt is of degree, not of kind. The latter believes utopia lies somewhere in the future---something like the South Park episode 'Goobacks,' wherein immigrants from the future travel back in time through a portal and disrupt South Park's labor market. Being from the future, whence humanity has become fully integrated and equalized, the future-immigrants all have the exact same dark-beige skin tone and all speak the same stupid monoglot. The Kendi's of this world want to get there, but are simply impatient. For the record I think he's a two-bit grifter. But then one must wonder: who's giving him money for his pablum? Who yearns to believe it?
Point is, there does not and cannot exist in America any real opposition to this dream of revolutionary egalitarianism. And even if there was, it would be ruthlessly crushed by our security apparatus. Q: How many KKK member does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Five. One actual KKK member, and four undercover FBI agents telling him to use the wrong wattage.
I would suggest that Jefferson meant that all are made in equal dignity by virtue of having a Creator. Great discussion. If you haven't read Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, you might really like it. It's all about how, by severing the connection to Jefferson's "Creator" it needs to sustain its premises of human rights and equality, Enlightenment liberalism undercuts itself.
The earliest written mention of Sherover-Marcuse’s unlearning racism workshops was in a 1976 issue of the Feminist Bookstores Newsletter, a publication known to mount pressure campaigns on publishers that mishandled feminist titles. By the early 1980s, Sherover-Marcuse’s workshops were being written about with growing regularity.
It has been percolating around universities since Foucault, a logical extension of postmodernism. I'm just saying it burst to public consciousness in the last 10 years or so.
I believe the origins go back much further though, at least to the Enlightenment as Deneen says. Brad Gregory hypothesizes that the die was cast at the Protestant Reformation and maybe even at the nominalism of Scotus. I think Deneen has the stronger case, but undoubtedly the highly individualistic new Protestant religions fed a highly individualistic new Enlightenment philosophy a few centuries later. It's hard to imagine an Enlightenment in a Europe under unified papal ecclesiastical rule.
Whatever the source though, the question is how are we going to fight this demon of wokeness and race essentialism? I suspect R.R. Reno's thesis of needing a "strong god" is correct, but at this point I don't see one. (Or rather the only one I do see it ethnic nationalism which terrifies me.) I am sure that procedural liberalism (ala Mill or Locke) won't cut it.
... At first, when a new form arises, it has subversive effects on the old order, before it has additive effects that lead to a new order. Bad actors may prove initially more adept than good actors at using a new form — e.g., ancient warlords, medieval pirates and smugglers, and today’s information-age terrorists being examples that correspond to the +I, +M, and +N transitions, respectively. As each form takes hold, energizing a distinct set of values and norms for actors operating in that form, it generates a new realm of activity — for example, the state, the market. As a new realm gains legitimacy and expands the space it occupies within a social system, it puts new limits on the scope of existing realms. At the same time, through feedback and other interactions, the rise of a new form/realm also modifies the nature of the existing ones.
... Societies that can elevate the bright over the dark side of each form and achieve a new combination become more powerful and capable of complex tasks than societies that do not. Societies that first succeed at making a new combination gain advantages over competitors and attain a paramount influence over the nature of international conflict and cooperation. If a major power finds itself stymied by the effort to achieve a new combination, it risks being superseded.
... A people’s adaptability to the rise of a new form appears to depend largely on the local nature of the tribal form. It may have profound effects on what happens as the later forms get added. For example, the tribal form has unfolded differently in China and in America. Whereas the former has long revolved around extended family ties, clans, and dynasties, the latter has relied on the nuclear family, heavy immigration, and a fabric of fraternal organizations that provide quasi-kinship ties (e.g., from the open Rotary Club to the closed Ku Klux Klan). These differences at the tribal level have given unique shapes to each nation’s institutional and market forms, to their ideas about progress, and, now, to their adaptability to the rise of networked NGOs.
I personally love McGilchrist. Although I have to admit that I'm watching the video versions of Matter With Things on YouTube. I just can't do 3000 pages of him.
Using Kagan's vernacular, Donald Trump is stuck in stage 2. Great articles BTW. My favorite line is this one: "Social groups based in the communal mode tend to be dominated by people with personality disorders, who get their way by emoting histrionically." A more concise summary of modern Western man does not exist. Kagan's meta-rationality stage 5 is completely incompatible with any form of religion as it assumes that ultimate truth or meaning do not exist. However, I don't have to agree with everyone I read, so I really enjoyed those. Thanks.
I don't do any public social media, but I love substack because you can learn really meaningful things from the other commenters.
Reminds me of Kevin Williamson's description of the current "culture" as being properly called "Instant Culture" :
"The moral ethic of an Instant Culture is founded on mutual instrumentalization, a lonely and atomistic condition that necessarily relegates everyone outside the self to the Kantian Kingdom of Means. There can be no friendship among means. Decency in government is an impossibility among citizen-subjects who understand one another only as a means to some other end rather than as valuable in themselves — valuable as individuals."
Or, way back in 1978, Solzhenitsyn's Harvard commencement speech:
"Because instant and credible information is required, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be refuted; they settle into the readers’ memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, and are then left hanging? The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters pertaining to the nation’s defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan “Everyone is entitled to know everything.” (But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information.)"
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
"led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge".
Never mind, you meant to say Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. I thought you talking about his father, who was definitely NOT an Internationalist. Henry Cabot Lodge opposed the League of Nations.
I’m a student at a college in California. Going over the syllabus today we were informed that there is extra tutoring available through the “African-American Scholastic Program”, “Asian Pacific American Student Success Center”, “Latino Services Network”, and the “Filipino American Student Success Center”. (After being asked for our pronouns and told that masks were required)
Who is "Tom"? Do you know that person in real life? From elsewhere on social media in a way that allows you to determine with reasonably high probability that they are not a troll?
I actually think this is a good thing. It's exactly the same as the Afro-American Museum of History and Culture on the national mall a few blocks from the White House. It's an upside down ziggurat meant to mock the surrounding European neo-classical federal buildings. Coming soon, I believe, is a Latino museum, no doubt in the form of an Aztec/Mayan pyramid. The Enlightenment is coming to a fitting end and I'm all for it. The great god Dionysus is sweeping away the ridiculous pretensions of the Age of Reason and something called "human rights." Sane white men, you'd best strengthen yourselves metaphysically from an accelerating and galloping madness. You can run but you can't hide.
Roger Kimball at The New Criterion has a great term for all this nonsense: "virtue mongering."
I think what drives it in part is narcissism. The narcissist exhibits this sort of moral grandiosity because underneath it all he is quite insecure, and he cannot expose that soft psychic underbelly.
The best strategy in dealing with a narcissist is to deny him "supply." In other words, ignore him. Bypass this establishment and go to the one who just seeks to offer you a good meal minus the political claptrap.
This is just hysterical. Who's threatened by it? If you can, on the one hand, point out its silliness, it seems perverse to - simultaneously - portray it as some kind of harbinger of western decline.
It is silly, Tom. The problem is that nearly every major cultural, educational, media, and political institution in America does not view it as silly. They view it as sacred. And they are using their positions of power to enforce this new orthodoxy. Whether you realize it or not, you are living through the creation of a theocracy right now.
If so, it's a theology of inclusion, no — everyone matters equally? To me, it seems like it's the opposite of divide & conquer: everyone's an American...
I find this baffling. After the last 5 years, if you really still believe that the Left has any desire to include anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest, I'm don't think there's anything that will convince you. You're too far down the rabbit hole. You've accepted the new theology.
I take your point, but I think a lot of it is to do with both sides caricaturing, rather than talking to, each other. And the more they do that, the more irrational the whole thing becomes.
I would say I’m certainly left-leaning, and I’m a) happy to include people who disagree with me b) debating guys who subscribe to The Upheaval.
... a passage from the late Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites ... is worth repeating here:
The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their
[->] belief in “social construction of reality”
[->] – the central dogma of postmodernist thought
– reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.
you are a dupe, there is no "inclusivity" of perspective or culture, it all made up (a faux religion) by a specific group, the PMC and their corporate masters, digital capitalism.
seems to me there's only 2 types of people — either you subscribe to a global cock-up theory, or to a global conspiracy theory.
I'm afraid I'm firmly in the cock-up camp.
But I can also see how the desperate search for meaning & control in a random, chaotic world might lead some people to believe they, alone, identify a pattern
nobody is "alone", there is profuse evidence of all sorts of globalist schemes and corporate schemes, and the intersection of that stuff with politics, moral panics, etc.
a classic example was how the suffragette movement got in bed with the psychotic, war mongering "progressive" Woodrow Wilson to get Prohibition, arguably the worst piece of legislative morality in the last 100 years.
FDR got in bed with southern racists to get them to vote for his New Deal because he needed their votes, arguably extending Jim Crow for a couple of decades.
your head is buried in the sand, and/or you are completely ignorant of history, something bizarre for a NS Lyons subscriber.
You all need to chill. Tom can disagree if he wants. This is a diverse and inclusive community! (Though not very equitable, and you have to pay to be included...)
The concept, of which you are no doubt ignorant, is called "divide and conquer". And speaking of "western decline", you will note (or probably not because of ignorance) that "divide and conquer" is what brought down the Roman Empire.
there is no "inclusivity", it is ideologically tribalistic groupthink. faux inclusivity.
"marginalized people" are human shields that globalist finance and media-tech oligarchs (digital capitalists) hide their schemes behind, same as "green new deal"
Have you read the #twitterfiles (which have been mostly ignored by the mainstream media)?
If not, you are fabulously uninformed.
Freddie DeBoer (a rare leftist that has some intellectual integrity) has written numerous exposes of the toxic disaster on the cultural-left.
In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell vividly described the fratricidal infighting and backstabbing on the "left" during the Spanish Civil War (1930s). That was eclipsed by 10,000,000s of deaths each under Stalin and Mao, a significant part of were also backstabbing and factional infighting. Pol Pot. Castro. etc.
Maurice Mitchell wearing a light blue button-front shirt over a white T-shirt, against a black backdrop.
Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party.Credit...Axel Dupeux/Redux
Michelle Goldberg
By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
It’s no secret that many left-wing activist groups and nonprofits, roiled by the reckonings over sexual harassment and racial justice of the past few years, have become internally dysfunctional.
In June the Intercept’s Ryan Grim wrote about the toll that staff revolts and ideologically inflected psychodramas were taking on the work: “It’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult.” Privately, I’ve heard countless people on the professional left — especially those over, say, 35 — bemoan the irrational demands and manipulative dogmatism of some younger colleagues. But with a few exceptions, like the brave reproductive justice leader Loretta Ross, most don’t want to go on the record. Not surprisingly, many of Grim’s sources in the nonprofit world were anonymous.
That’s why the decision by Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the progressive Working Families Party, to speak out about the left’s self-sabotaging impulse is so significant. Mitchell, who has roots in the Black Lives Matter movement, has a great deal of credibility; he can’t be dismissed as a dinosaur threatened by identity politics. But as the head of an organization with a very practical devotion to building electoral power, he has a sharp critique of the way some on the left deploy identity as a trump card. “Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces,” he wrote last month in a 6,000-word examination of the fallacies and rhetorical traps plaguing activist culture.
Addressed to the left, Mitchell’s keen, insightful essay seemed designed to be ignored by the broader public. It had a deeply unsexy headline, “Building Resilient Organizations,” and was published on platforms geared toward professional organizers, including The Forge and Nonprofit Quarterly. Among many progressive leaders, though, it’s been received eagerly and gratefully. It “helped to put language to tensions and trends facing our movement organizations,” Christopher Torres, an executive director of the Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice institute, said at a Tuesday webinar devoted to the article.
Mitchell’s piece systematically lays out some of the assertions and assumptions that have paralyzed progressive outfits. Among them are maximalism, or “considering anything less than the most idealistic position” a betrayal; a refusal to distinguish between discomfort and oppression; and reflexive hostility to hierarchy. He criticizes the insistence “that change on an interpersonal or organizational level must occur before it is sought or practiced on a larger scale,” an approach that keeps activists turned inward, along with the idea that progressive organizations should be places of therapeutic healing.
All the problems Mitchell elucidates have been endemic to the left for a long time. Destructive left-wing purity spirals are at least as old as the French Revolution. Jo Freeman’s classic essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” about how resistance to formal leadership in second-wave feminism led to passive-aggressive power struggles, has remained relevant since it was published in the early 1970s. It’s not surprising that such counterproductive tendencies became particularly acute during the pandemic, when people were terrified, isolated and, crucially, very online. There’s a reason Grim’s article was titled “Elephant in the Zoom.”
“On balance, I think social media has been bad for democracy,” Mitchell told me. It’s a striking statement, given the organizing work he did in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo., where social media played a major role in galvanizing protest. But as Mitchell wrote in his essay, social media platforms reward shallow polemics, “self-aggrandizement, competition and conflict.” These platforms can give power to the powerless, but they also bestow it on the most disruptive and self-interested people in any group, those likely to take their complaints to Twitter rather than to their supervisors or colleagues. The gamification of discourse through likes and retweets, he said, “flies in the face of building solidarity, of being serious about difference, of engaging in meaningful debate and struggle around complex ideas.”
The publication of “Building Resilient Organizations” and the conversation around it are signs that the fever Mitchell describes is beginning to break. It’s probably not coincidental that that’s happened in tandem with the end of pandemic restrictions and the return of more in-person gatherings.
But that doesn’t mean the dysfunctions Mitchell identified will go away on their own once people start spending more time together. He puts much of the onus on leaders to be clear with employees about the missions of their organizations and their decision-making processes and to take emotional maturity into account in hiring decisions. He urges leaders to support unionization efforts, seeing unions as the best way to mediate employee grievances. Rather than simply chiding young people for their unreasonableness, he’s trying to think through more productive ways to manage inevitable conflicts.
After all, the ultimate aim of social justice work should not be the refinement of one’s own environment. “Building resilient and strong organizations is not the end goal,” said Mitchell. “It’s a means to building power so we can defeat an authoritarian movement that wants to take away democracy.” Here’s to remembering that in 2023.
-----
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. @michelleinbklyn
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 18, 2022, Section SR, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: The Fever Is Breaking.
How Herbert Marcuse’s widow used a Scientology-linked cult’s methodology to gamify Identity Politics and thus helped steer the U.S. Left down the dead-end path of identitarian psychobabble.
It has been obvious for a while that the "woke" cargo cult zombies are sertifiable, but glad to see that it is now semi-official in the pristine eyes of the corporate-state.
(actual "news": rumor has it that vegan fast food drive throughs are being tilted up in suburban test markets.)
Many eons ago being a “gay” restaurant was supposed to mean that you got chic food of a rarefied quality that only the richest and most discerning of snobs were allowed in and allowed to order. Men all looked like George Clooney or Denzel Washington, Michelle Yeoh sat next to Marlene Dietrich behind you and Nina Simone played piano and sang to you.
The rainbow flag was to sucker you into believing this.
The reality was that a rainbow sticker actually mean George Clooney’s cousin Al served onion rings dripping oil into the ranch sauce in plastic cups, and you found one of Marlene Dietrich’s eyelashes (or was it pubic hair) in the inedible kale whatever, and you had to wait an hour for the check from Denzel because Michelle Yeoh at the bar was busy selling booze to heavy men in crop tops and cutoff shorts.
The reality is that if it weren’t for ‘gay’, virtually all restaurants would be cafeterias.
Needless to say perhaps but a restaurant that puts stickers in windows is probably not such a great restaurants.
Not to say that I don’t love stickers - I love bumper stickers on other people’s cars. “I visited Mystery Hill” - go for it. And steer away from me!
I believe Rod Dreher was the first person I heard mention the idea that the rainbow flag is today's "Workers of the World Unite" sign in his book Live Not By Lies. Power of the Powerlesness is a great book to prepare us for resistance.
I worry where the Left is leading us with this sort of race/sex-essentialism. 50 years have been spent trying to obliterate white racial identity. Successfully -- the white-power crowd is a complete fringe today. But they won't stay that way if the Left keeps harping on race and trying to blame whites for every ill in the world. Because like it or not, there are right-wing political movements willing to meet the Left on its own race-essentialist terms. Richard Spencer and Ibram Kendi both see race as the core feature of all human relationships. The mainstream right needs an answer to this (and very soon) or the white-power-Right is going to grow, which would be a disaster. If you thought the Christian Right was authoritarian, just wait to till you meet his brother, the non-Christian Right.
The Nazis have about 2-3 percent support. Imagine for a moment if even 20-30% of whites in America developed the kind of racial-group consciousness that existed just 2-3 generations ago. Blue collar whites voting based on race: "sure he's a Nazi, but at least my kid won't get screwed out of college because he's white."
The Left is trying to use the demons of racism for their own political ends. Using demons as tools never ends well. And when I say demons here, I am not being entirely metaphorical., Colorblindness is far from perfect. The alternatives are far worse.
"The mainstream right needs an answer to this (and very soon) or the white-power-Right is going to grow, which would be a disaster."
I've been hearing this refrain for well over a decade now, and am still awaiting the materialization of such a movement. And I'm confident I will keep waiting, no matter how vicious and deranged the left becomes.
The sad fact is that conservatives believe in the American Civic Religion and its gnosis of Equality no less than Progressives. They have no ulterior point of reference, no rock upon which to stand and arrest the ever-leftward drift of our pseudo-theocratic society. They dislike the rudeness and zealotry of modern Wokeness, but don't actually disagree with any of its underlying principles. And remember: they trust authorities. If a doctor tells them their teenager needs puberty blockers to feel happy, they'll likely believe them.
We're all stuck on the same train; conservatives just want it to go slower.
I honestly haven't heard this until the last year or so, and if you heard it earlier, I think it was premature, as it's only been in the last few years that progressives have publicly repudiated the "American Civic Religion and its gnosis of Equality". as you put it. Kendi explicitly rejects "equality of opportunity" or "equality before the law" in favor of mandated outcomes by group membership. It's only a matter of time before the right follows suit. In the 60's and 70's, during a blue collar manufacturing boom, affirmative action was broadly accepted by whites. it is not today. And in a time of declining living standards, when a blue collar family expects their children to do worse in life than they did... forget it. Telling a white, unemployed factory worker that his son is privileged compared to a middle class black girl is a recipe for anger and racial resentment.
I do agree that many so-called conservatives appear far more interested in grift and cocktail parties than in actually conserving anything. Which is precisely my point. If those establishment conservatives (Max Boot, David French, et al) don't start doing something to push back against the Left, voters and donors will replace them with people who will. Trump should have been a warning shot to pay attention; instead they doubled down on their willful blindness.
Yes, as living standards decline and the economic pie shrinks, people will get more resentful towards those with preferential treatment by the state. But this says more about their day-to-day concerns than their religious ideals. Americans rejoiced in Great Society plans and Civil Rights and affirmative action---when they believed they could afford such utopian luxuries. Christopher Caldwell's The Age of Entitlement offers an excellent synopsis on this subject.
No, the religious ideals themselves are the issue. "...all men are created equal." Period. Jefferson appends stuff to that about rights and happiness and whatnot, but who cares? And surely when he wrote those words he meant to imply something more profound than, "All men are the product of sex."
The difference between the radical Kendi's of this world and one's American conservative aunt is of degree, not of kind. The latter believes utopia lies somewhere in the future---something like the South Park episode 'Goobacks,' wherein immigrants from the future travel back in time through a portal and disrupt South Park's labor market. Being from the future, whence humanity has become fully integrated and equalized, the future-immigrants all have the exact same dark-beige skin tone and all speak the same stupid monoglot. The Kendi's of this world want to get there, but are simply impatient. For the record I think he's a two-bit grifter. But then one must wonder: who's giving him money for his pablum? Who yearns to believe it?
Point is, there does not and cannot exist in America any real opposition to this dream of revolutionary egalitarianism. And even if there was, it would be ruthlessly crushed by our security apparatus. Q: How many KKK member does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Five. One actual KKK member, and four undercover FBI agents telling him to use the wrong wattage.
I would suggest that Jefferson meant that all are made in equal dignity by virtue of having a Creator. Great discussion. If you haven't read Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, you might really like it. It's all about how, by severing the connection to Jefferson's "Creator" it needs to sustain its premises of human rights and equality, Enlightenment liberalism undercuts itself.
the repudiation blossomed recently, but the actual historical origins go way back
https://zero-sum.org/the-first-privilege-walk/
excerpt:
The earliest written mention of Sherover-Marcuse’s unlearning racism workshops was in a 1976 issue of the Feminist Bookstores Newsletter, a publication known to mount pressure campaigns on publishers that mishandled feminist titles. By the early 1980s, Sherover-Marcuse’s workshops were being written about with growing regularity.
It has been percolating around universities since Foucault, a logical extension of postmodernism. I'm just saying it burst to public consciousness in the last 10 years or so.
I believe the origins go back much further though, at least to the Enlightenment as Deneen says. Brad Gregory hypothesizes that the die was cast at the Protestant Reformation and maybe even at the nominalism of Scotus. I think Deneen has the stronger case, but undoubtedly the highly individualistic new Protestant religions fed a highly individualistic new Enlightenment philosophy a few centuries later. It's hard to imagine an Enlightenment in a Europe under unified papal ecclesiastical rule.
Whatever the source though, the question is how are we going to fight this demon of wokeness and race essentialism? I suspect R.R. Reno's thesis of needing a "strong god" is correct, but at this point I don't see one. (Or rather the only one I do see it ethnic nationalism which terrifies me.) I am sure that procedural liberalism (ala Mill or Locke) won't cut it.
Robert Kegan, John Vervaeke, Iain McGilchrist are pretty good sources on cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology (developmental stages).
my favorite futurist "map":
https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
similarly:
re: David Ronfeldt's TIMN model of social change
disruption -> disintegration -> regression to ideological tribalism -> reintegration at a higher level / social form
https://twotheories.blogspot.com/2009/02/overview-of-social-evolution-past.html
---excerpts---
... At first, when a new form arises, it has subversive effects on the old order, before it has additive effects that lead to a new order. Bad actors may prove initially more adept than good actors at using a new form — e.g., ancient warlords, medieval pirates and smugglers, and today’s information-age terrorists being examples that correspond to the +I, +M, and +N transitions, respectively. As each form takes hold, energizing a distinct set of values and norms for actors operating in that form, it generates a new realm of activity — for example, the state, the market. As a new realm gains legitimacy and expands the space it occupies within a social system, it puts new limits on the scope of existing realms. At the same time, through feedback and other interactions, the rise of a new form/realm also modifies the nature of the existing ones.
... Societies that can elevate the bright over the dark side of each form and achieve a new combination become more powerful and capable of complex tasks than societies that do not. Societies that first succeed at making a new combination gain advantages over competitors and attain a paramount influence over the nature of international conflict and cooperation. If a major power finds itself stymied by the effort to achieve a new combination, it risks being superseded.
... A people’s adaptability to the rise of a new form appears to depend largely on the local nature of the tribal form. It may have profound effects on what happens as the later forms get added. For example, the tribal form has unfolded differently in China and in America. Whereas the former has long revolved around extended family ties, clans, and dynasties, the latter has relied on the nuclear family, heavy immigration, and a fabric of fraternal organizations that provide quasi-kinship ties (e.g., from the open Rotary Club to the closed Ku Klux Klan). These differences at the tribal level have given unique shapes to each nation’s institutional and market forms, to their ideas about progress, and, now, to their adaptability to the rise of networked NGOs.
...
---end excerpts---
I personally love McGilchrist. Although I have to admit that I'm watching the video versions of Matter With Things on YouTube. I just can't do 3000 pages of him.
Using Kagan's vernacular, Donald Trump is stuck in stage 2. Great articles BTW. My favorite line is this one: "Social groups based in the communal mode tend to be dominated by people with personality disorders, who get their way by emoting histrionically." A more concise summary of modern Western man does not exist. Kagan's meta-rationality stage 5 is completely incompatible with any form of religion as it assumes that ultimate truth or meaning do not exist. However, I don't have to agree with everyone I read, so I really enjoyed those. Thanks.
I don't do any public social media, but I love substack because you can learn really meaningful things from the other commenters.
Great piece. Cowardice will NOT be rewarded. The proper answer for much of our current culture is: FUCK OFF.
Reminds me of Kevin Williamson's description of the current "culture" as being properly called "Instant Culture" :
"The moral ethic of an Instant Culture is founded on mutual instrumentalization, a lonely and atomistic condition that necessarily relegates everyone outside the self to the Kantian Kingdom of Means. There can be no friendship among means. Decency in government is an impossibility among citizen-subjects who understand one another only as a means to some other end rather than as valuable in themselves — valuable as individuals."
Or, way back in 1978, Solzhenitsyn's Harvard commencement speech:
"Because instant and credible information is required, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be refuted; they settle into the readers’ memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, and are then left hanging? The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters pertaining to the nation’s defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan “Everyone is entitled to know everything.” (But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information.)"
RE: RIGHT WING CONTROLLED OPPOSITION
https://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/78-78/45197-im-convinced-that-the-whole-national-review-is-a-cia-operation-murray-rothbard
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
This is all true but the virulent anti-League of Nations Lodge was an internationalist?
huh?
"led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge".
Never mind, you meant to say Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. I thought you talking about his father, who was definitely NOT an Internationalist. Henry Cabot Lodge opposed the League of Nations.
Sadly, I am starting to doubt this is true: " the reasonable people who make up the rest of our society."
I’m a student at a college in California. Going over the syllabus today we were informed that there is extra tutoring available through the “African-American Scholastic Program”, “Asian Pacific American Student Success Center”, “Latino Services Network”, and the “Filipino American Student Success Center”. (After being asked for our pronouns and told that masks were required)
A lot of that kind of stuff is Soros funded, or similar. Completely corrupt. Festering pustules of toxicity.
Why are we so fascinated by what is in the tide pools when a tidal wave is coming ?
I enjoy your writing both NS and Tom but find the comments a liitle snarky.
Move to higher ground. Get out of the cities.
Who is "Tom"? Do you know that person in real life? From elsewhere on social media in a way that allows you to determine with reasonably high probability that they are not a troll?
Does NS Lyons personally know "Tom"???
I actually think this is a good thing. It's exactly the same as the Afro-American Museum of History and Culture on the national mall a few blocks from the White House. It's an upside down ziggurat meant to mock the surrounding European neo-classical federal buildings. Coming soon, I believe, is a Latino museum, no doubt in the form of an Aztec/Mayan pyramid. The Enlightenment is coming to a fitting end and I'm all for it. The great god Dionysus is sweeping away the ridiculous pretensions of the Age of Reason and something called "human rights." Sane white men, you'd best strengthen yourselves metaphysically from an accelerating and galloping madness. You can run but you can't hide.
It pains me to see veterans included in Seritfy's lineup.
Roger Kimball at The New Criterion has a great term for all this nonsense: "virtue mongering."
I think what drives it in part is narcissism. The narcissist exhibits this sort of moral grandiosity because underneath it all he is quite insecure, and he cannot expose that soft psychic underbelly.
The best strategy in dealing with a narcissist is to deny him "supply." In other words, ignore him. Bypass this establishment and go to the one who just seeks to offer you a good meal minus the political claptrap.
This is just hysterical. Who's threatened by it? If you can, on the one hand, point out its silliness, it seems perverse to - simultaneously - portray it as some kind of harbinger of western decline.
It is silly, Tom. The problem is that nearly every major cultural, educational, media, and political institution in America does not view it as silly. They view it as sacred. And they are using their positions of power to enforce this new orthodoxy. Whether you realize it or not, you are living through the creation of a theocracy right now.
If so, it's a theology of inclusion, no — everyone matters equally? To me, it seems like it's the opposite of divide & conquer: everyone's an American...
I find this baffling. After the last 5 years, if you really still believe that the Left has any desire to include anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest, I'm don't think there's anything that will convince you. You're too far down the rabbit hole. You've accepted the new theology.
I take your point, but I think a lot of it is to do with both sides caricaturing, rather than talking to, each other. And the more they do that, the more irrational the whole thing becomes.
I would say I’m certainly left-leaning, and I’m a) happy to include people who disagree with me b) debating guys who subscribe to The Upheaval.
you apparently don't actually read NS Lyons' articles?????
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/reality-honks-back
excerpt:
... a passage from the late Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites ... is worth repeating here:
The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their
[->] belief in “social construction of reality”
[->] – the central dogma of postmodernist thought
– reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.
...
you are a dupe, there is no "inclusivity" of perspective or culture, it all made up (a faux religion) by a specific group, the PMC and their corporate masters, digital capitalism.
seems to me there's only 2 types of people — either you subscribe to a global cock-up theory, or to a global conspiracy theory.
I'm afraid I'm firmly in the cock-up camp.
But I can also see how the desperate search for meaning & control in a random, chaotic world might lead some people to believe they, alone, identify a pattern
nobody is "alone", there is profuse evidence of all sorts of globalist schemes and corporate schemes, and the intersection of that stuff with politics, moral panics, etc.
a classic example was how the suffragette movement got in bed with the psychotic, war mongering "progressive" Woodrow Wilson to get Prohibition, arguably the worst piece of legislative morality in the last 100 years.
FDR got in bed with southern racists to get them to vote for his New Deal because he needed their votes, arguably extending Jim Crow for a couple of decades.
your head is buried in the sand, and/or you are completely ignorant of history, something bizarre for a NS Lyons subscriber.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354-500-revealed-the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world/
You all need to chill. Tom can disagree if he wants. This is a diverse and inclusive community! (Though not very equitable, and you have to pay to be included...)
This exchange has disappeared down a rabbit hole.
Back to the real world and the cafe with the little signs: you detect the end of the western world there?
web search: "Mindaroo ucla substack"
Billionaire mine owner (including coal to China) hides corporate corruption behind "green" and "social justice" blather and fake philanthropy.
wake up dimwit.
Well, everyone except straight White Men.
The concept, of which you are no doubt ignorant, is called "divide and conquer". And speaking of "western decline", you will note (or probably not because of ignorance) that "divide and conquer" is what brought down the Roman Empire.
That's a really interesting point (not the one about the Roman Empire!).
You perceive yourself as being excluded by these little signs. But I presume they are intended inclusively —
"You [Thomas Taylor], of course matter; these people [who have been historically marginalised] *also* matter".
Everyone's a winner!
there is no "inclusivity", it is ideologically tribalistic groupthink. faux inclusivity.
"marginalized people" are human shields that globalist finance and media-tech oligarchs (digital capitalists) hide their schemes behind, same as "green new deal"
web search: "Mindaroo ucla substack"
A classical example of how corporate and political corruption "intersect" "wokeism:
Corporate $billionaire$ Democrats push child mutilation into mainstream medical institutions:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers
Have you read the #twitterfiles (which have been mostly ignored by the mainstream media)?
If not, you are fabulously uninformed.
Freddie DeBoer (a rare leftist that has some intellectual integrity) has written numerous exposes of the toxic disaster on the cultural-left.
In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell vividly described the fratricidal infighting and backstabbing on the "left" during the Spanish Civil War (1930s). That was eclipsed by 10,000,000s of deaths each under Stalin and Mao, a significant part of were also backstabbing and factional infighting. Pol Pot. Castro. etc.
A few of 100s/1000s of examples:
the below article references: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/06/inside-the-washington-posts-social-media-meltdown
the below article references: https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/progressive-organizing-infighting-callout-culture/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/16/opinion/left-activism.html
OPINION
The Left’s Fever Is Breaking
OPINION
MICHELLE GOLDBERG
The Left’s Fever Is Breaking
Dec. 16, 2022
Maurice Mitchell wearing a light blue button-front shirt over a white T-shirt, against a black backdrop.
Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party.Credit...Axel Dupeux/Redux
Michelle Goldberg
By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
It’s no secret that many left-wing activist groups and nonprofits, roiled by the reckonings over sexual harassment and racial justice of the past few years, have become internally dysfunctional.
In June the Intercept’s Ryan Grim wrote about the toll that staff revolts and ideologically inflected psychodramas were taking on the work: “It’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult.” Privately, I’ve heard countless people on the professional left — especially those over, say, 35 — bemoan the irrational demands and manipulative dogmatism of some younger colleagues. But with a few exceptions, like the brave reproductive justice leader Loretta Ross, most don’t want to go on the record. Not surprisingly, many of Grim’s sources in the nonprofit world were anonymous.
That’s why the decision by Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the progressive Working Families Party, to speak out about the left’s self-sabotaging impulse is so significant. Mitchell, who has roots in the Black Lives Matter movement, has a great deal of credibility; he can’t be dismissed as a dinosaur threatened by identity politics. But as the head of an organization with a very practical devotion to building electoral power, he has a sharp critique of the way some on the left deploy identity as a trump card. “Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces,” he wrote last month in a 6,000-word examination of the fallacies and rhetorical traps plaguing activist culture.
Addressed to the left, Mitchell’s keen, insightful essay seemed designed to be ignored by the broader public. It had a deeply unsexy headline, “Building Resilient Organizations,” and was published on platforms geared toward professional organizers, including The Forge and Nonprofit Quarterly. Among many progressive leaders, though, it’s been received eagerly and gratefully. It “helped to put language to tensions and trends facing our movement organizations,” Christopher Torres, an executive director of the Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice institute, said at a Tuesday webinar devoted to the article.
Mitchell’s piece systematically lays out some of the assertions and assumptions that have paralyzed progressive outfits. Among them are maximalism, or “considering anything less than the most idealistic position” a betrayal; a refusal to distinguish between discomfort and oppression; and reflexive hostility to hierarchy. He criticizes the insistence “that change on an interpersonal or organizational level must occur before it is sought or practiced on a larger scale,” an approach that keeps activists turned inward, along with the idea that progressive organizations should be places of therapeutic healing.
All the problems Mitchell elucidates have been endemic to the left for a long time. Destructive left-wing purity spirals are at least as old as the French Revolution. Jo Freeman’s classic essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” about how resistance to formal leadership in second-wave feminism led to passive-aggressive power struggles, has remained relevant since it was published in the early 1970s. It’s not surprising that such counterproductive tendencies became particularly acute during the pandemic, when people were terrified, isolated and, crucially, very online. There’s a reason Grim’s article was titled “Elephant in the Zoom.”
“On balance, I think social media has been bad for democracy,” Mitchell told me. It’s a striking statement, given the organizing work he did in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo., where social media played a major role in galvanizing protest. But as Mitchell wrote in his essay, social media platforms reward shallow polemics, “self-aggrandizement, competition and conflict.” These platforms can give power to the powerless, but they also bestow it on the most disruptive and self-interested people in any group, those likely to take their complaints to Twitter rather than to their supervisors or colleagues. The gamification of discourse through likes and retweets, he said, “flies in the face of building solidarity, of being serious about difference, of engaging in meaningful debate and struggle around complex ideas.”
The publication of “Building Resilient Organizations” and the conversation around it are signs that the fever Mitchell describes is beginning to break. It’s probably not coincidental that that’s happened in tandem with the end of pandemic restrictions and the return of more in-person gatherings.
But that doesn’t mean the dysfunctions Mitchell identified will go away on their own once people start spending more time together. He puts much of the onus on leaders to be clear with employees about the missions of their organizations and their decision-making processes and to take emotional maturity into account in hiring decisions. He urges leaders to support unionization efforts, seeing unions as the best way to mediate employee grievances. Rather than simply chiding young people for their unreasonableness, he’s trying to think through more productive ways to manage inevitable conflicts.
After all, the ultimate aim of social justice work should not be the refinement of one’s own environment. “Building resilient and strong organizations is not the end goal,” said Mitchell. “It’s a means to building power so we can defeat an authoritarian movement that wants to take away democracy.” Here’s to remembering that in 2023.
-----
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. @michelleinbklyn
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 18, 2022, Section SR, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: The Fever Is Breaking.
I see what you mean about weaponization of moral panic — even the headline there gave me a sugar high
#twitterfiles
"wokeism" intersects with the corporate-state, national security and political corruption.
https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/new-emails-biden-white-house-behind
it is weaponized by moral panics (egregores)
faux religion
A classic on the spiritual and psychological pathologies present at the origins of "identity politics".
(author is a science historian, "class struggle" socialist opposed to IdPol)
https://nonsite.org/the-first-privilege-walk/
The First Privilege Walk
BY CHRISTIAN PARENTI
NOVEMBER 18, 2021
How Herbert Marcuse’s widow used a Scientology-linked cult’s methodology to gamify Identity Politics and thus helped steer the U.S. Left down the dead-end path of identitarian psychobabble.
...
50% probability: s0r0z tr0ll-b0t
https://substack.com/profile/592-tom
Solid
It has been obvious for a while that the "woke" cargo cult zombies are sertifiable, but glad to see that it is now semi-official in the pristine eyes of the corporate-state.
(actual "news": rumor has it that vegan fast food drive throughs are being tilted up in suburban test markets.)
Folks it’s just advertising.
Many eons ago being a “gay” restaurant was supposed to mean that you got chic food of a rarefied quality that only the richest and most discerning of snobs were allowed in and allowed to order. Men all looked like George Clooney or Denzel Washington, Michelle Yeoh sat next to Marlene Dietrich behind you and Nina Simone played piano and sang to you.
The rainbow flag was to sucker you into believing this.
The reality was that a rainbow sticker actually mean George Clooney’s cousin Al served onion rings dripping oil into the ranch sauce in plastic cups, and you found one of Marlene Dietrich’s eyelashes (or was it pubic hair) in the inedible kale whatever, and you had to wait an hour for the check from Denzel because Michelle Yeoh at the bar was busy selling booze to heavy men in crop tops and cutoff shorts.
The reality is that if it weren’t for ‘gay’, virtually all restaurants would be cafeterias.
Needless to say perhaps but a restaurant that puts stickers in windows is probably not such a great restaurants.
Not to say that I don’t love stickers - I love bumper stickers on other people’s cars. “I visited Mystery Hill” - go for it. And steer away from me!