by inventing and marketing wokeness
As American progressives, we are all in shock that Trump won the last election, garnishing not just the Electoral College but also the popular vote. The Republican Party also got control of the House and the Senate.
When a narcissistic felon gets more votes than you, the problem is not with the narcissistic felon. The problem is with you.
But, when you stop to think about it, it was a long time coming. The Democratic Party lost its natural constituency, the workers, a long time ago. The urban elites that form its voting core are not numerous enough to win election.
At the problem is not limited to the USA. All over Europe, and even in South American countries like Argentina, the Left is backsliding. Populists are winning elections by getting votes from the working class.
How could this happen?
In this article, I recapitulate the history of the Left in Western countries, and then analyze how it lost its way as the 20th century turns into the 21st.
The Left has roots in Humanism
We can trace back the birth of the Left to the humanist ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when the well-being of humans replaced worshipping God as our main concern.
In Christianity and Islam, religion served to buttress a feudal system in which society was divided between the nobility, who owned everything, and the serfs, who owned nothing and, indeed, were considered property themselves. The Pope, bishops and other princes of the Church were just part of the aristocracy, supported by a legion of priests, monks and nuns who made a tough deal to escape serfdom.
As the Middle Ages ended, the aristocracy was being replaced by a new class formed by artisans and merchants: the incipient bourgeoisie.
In the 16th century, colonialism sped up these changes by bringing into Europe the wealth resulting from the conquest of the Americas, Australia and large parts of Africa and Asia. To accelerate the exploitation of America, slavery took the serfdom of the Middle Ages to horrible extremes.
The Left appeared to fight wealth inequality and exploitation
In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution drastically accelerated this change. Part of the bourgeoisie surpassed the aristocrats in wealth and became the new masters of society: the capitalists. Thinking that they could become part of the bourgeoisie and attain freedom, the serfs moved from the country to the cities to work in the new factories, only to find new forms of exploitation. The existence of slavery in the Americas was a clear reminder of the extremes to which capitalists would go to make more money.
Capitalism obeys a perverse mechanism. If you have money, you can invest it to generate more money. But, if the only money you have is your wage, you need to spend it all to survive, so you are never able to make it grow. Over time, this causes money to accumulate on the top, into the hands of the rich, whereas the poor are forever condemned to work just to stay alive.
Owning land and property, the nobles were able to enter this game with money to invest, although some were not savvy enough and ended up wasting their riches. Capitalists became the new nobility, passing their wealth down the generations.
The churches owned land and wealth too, so they promptly sided with the wealthy industrialists, forming an alliance of religious ideas and capitalism that persist to these days. We call it conservatism.
The workers challenge capitalism
However, being crammed into factories and poor neighborhood, the workers were able to talk among themselves and organize.
Additionally, there was also a group of idealists who saw the injustice of the system. They were the new intellectual class of scientists and technocrats that had become indispensable to advance the Industrial Revolution. They were educated in the new, growing universities. A few of them talked to the workers, educating them on how to improve their lot.
A few solutions came to mind.
Workers could organize into unions. Using strikes as a weapon, they could force the factory owners to give them a better deal. However, the capitalists could use force — the police, paid squads and even the army — to break the strikes. Scabs could also be brought to replace the striking workers.
It seemed that workers could never succeed unless they could take the power of the State away from the hands of the capitalists. Since the workers were more numerous than the capitalists, this should be feasible.
The working class could garnish the monopoly of violence of the State to protect their rights.
Socialism was born.
Revolution or democracy?
Two routes presented themselves to the workers to capture the power of the State.
The first was to strengthen democracy and vote the capitalists out of power. This should be possible, since the workers were more numerous than the rich.
The second was to have a revolution, using violence to seize the power of the State away from the capitalists.
As the 19th century approached its end, the second route — revolution — seemed more promising than the first, for a variety of reasons. The democratic system was being corrupted by the rich, who bought votes, miscounted them, overwhelm the people with propaganda or cheated outright. In many countries, voting was a joke, and everybody knew it. Even if workers' representatives were elected, they could be corrupted by the temptation of wealth. On the other hand, the American Revolution (1765-1783) and the French Revolution (1789-1799) offered enticing examples of how the political system of a country could be changed by force.
Since the workers were going into the trouble and bloodshed of having a revolution, why stop at the objective of having a State more sympathetic to the workers? It would be possible to abolish capitalism altogether and create a new system in which the workers had all the power and wealth.
Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) developed the ideology known as Marxism or Communism. It proposed the overthrown of capitalism by a class struggle in which the proletariat (workers) would seize power from the bourgeoisie to produce a society in which the State would control the means of production in a class-less society. In his book, Das Kapital Marx embedded his political ideas in a complex philosophical formulation. In 1848, Marx and Engels published a pamphlet titled The Communist Manifesto, more suitable to reach the masses.
Communism was born.
The Left splits into anarchism, socialism and communism
The First International, or International Workingmen's Association (IWA), was a socialist organization created in meetings in London (1864) and Geneva (1866).
In these meeting there was an increasing tension because many of the early socialists — the followers of Owen and Proudhon — refused to accept Marxism, denouncing it as authoritarian and for giving too much power to the State.
In 1868, a further polarization was brought into the First International by Mikhail Bakunin and his followers, the anarchists. They proposed achieving socialism through direct economical struggle again capitalism, without participating in democracy.
At the time, the Marxists proposed achieving power mostly through elections instead of revolution, leading to gradual reform of the laws and political institutions.
The confrontation between anarchists and Marxists came to a head in 1872, at the Hague Congress of the IWA, in which the First International split into two separate organizations, socialist and anarchist.
The First International was finally closed in 1877.
In 1889, the socialists decided to exclude the anarchists and formed a Second International in Paris. However, in 1919 a new split happened, this time between revolutionary socialism and reformist socialism. The first formed the Communist International (Comintern), while the second founded the Labour and Socialist International (LSI) in 1923.
Since then, socialism and communism have been separate movements, with their own political parties and agendas. While communism created awful dictatorships in the USRR, China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam, socialism alternated in power with conservatism to give rise to the modern democratic states of Western Europe, the most egalitarian and free societies in the world.
So don’t believe anybody who tells you socialism and communism are the same thing. That is just capitalist propaganda. They have been different ideologies for a hundred years.
A brief political history of the 20th century
The triumph of the communists in the Russian Revolution in 1917 sent shivers through the spine of the capitalists. It showed that their alliance with the aristocrats and religion could be driven from power.
At the same time, socialist parties have started to win elections in Europe, while unions were able to hold a large sway over the economy. The German Social Democratic Party and German unions played a large role in ending World War I.
Anarchists were much less successful. Prevented by their ideology from participating in elections, soon became a violent and unpopular fringe.
The wealthy elites reacted by realizing that they, too, needed to seize the power of the State to achieve their goals. They fed the masses a mixture of nationalist and racist propaganda and created their own extremist parties. They blamed the socialist parties that were in power for all the ills in the country. In particular, the German Social Democratic Party was blamed for the grievous terms of surrender imposed on Germany after World War I.
Fascism and Nazism were born as copycats of socialism, even stealing that name.
In Spain, a murderous civil war started in 1936 after a failed coup against the Frente Popular, an alliance of communists and socialists that had won the last election. Supported by troops and weapons from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, as well as donations from American capitalists, the Fascists of general Franco won the war in April 1939, starting a 40 year long dictatorship.
Five months later, in September 1939, World War II started. Capitalists in the UK and the USA hoped that the German Nazis and the Soviet communists would destroy each other. Instead, the war became a struggle between the democratic and fascist versions of capitalism, as well as an attempt from Japan, Italy and Germany to seize the empires created by colonialism.
World War II transitioned into the Cold War. Communist totalitarianism took advantage of World War II to seize half of Europe. Soon afterwards, communism triumphed in China and threatened to extend itself into Southeast Asia and Central and South America.
As the new leader of the free world, the USA fought proxy wars against communism in Korea and Vietnam. It established puppet dictatorships throughout South America (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil…) and Europe (Spain, Portugal, Greece) to maintain its power. These totalitarian regimes were a new version of Fascism, the unholy alliance of capitalism with a repressive State.
A new hope at the end of the 20th century
The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 was unexpected and fortuitous.
American conservatives credit Ronald Reagan for its fall but, in reality, his corrupt and ineffective government (Iran-Contra affair) had little to do with it. I credit the political genius of Mikhail Gorbachev for this turn of events. Unfortunately, his project to transform the USSR into a democratic socialist society was thwarted by a coup.
During the 90s, all the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe, as well as some that had been part of the USSR (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) quickly transitioned to democracies. Germany was reunified. For a while, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus seemed on the path to democracy as well.
Most other former dictatorships in Europe had ended before, together with most dictatorships in South America.
The world seemed on a firm path towards democracy.
The golden formula of social democracy
The prosperous, egalitarian countries of Western Europe showed the path: a mixture of mild capitalism with socialism in which the State acted to contain the excesses of capital, to distribute wealth through taxation, and to establish a safety net in which everybody had access to education, health and safety.
Health was ensured by a public health system of doctors and hospitals paid by the state.
Education was ensured by a system of public schools and universities also run by the state, supplemented by private ones.
Safety was ensured by a fair system of laws, justice, police and prisons over which the State had absolute authority. The division between administrative, legislative and judicial powers contained corruption and established a system of checks and balances.
Working conditions were improved with a shorter work week and longer vacations, which forced the employers to hire more people, decreasing unemployment.
The book The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Canadian psychologist and Harvard professor Steven Pinker, documents this quick raise in human well-being at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. He attributes it to the policies enacted by modern states.
Alas, poverty, inequality and exploitation persisted!
However, the social democratic parties of Europe, inheritors of 19th century socialism, had the formula to combat it. Tax the rich and use the money to help the poor with unemployment benefits, free healthcare, free education and other perks.
The rich, however, strongly objected.
They had other plans.
The subversion of the Left
Right when it should have been successful, the plan started to fall apart.
A few misguided French philosophers, disillusioned with the failure of communist, invented post-modernism. According to them, the agenda of the social democracy was not good enough. It was time to move past it. But they never propose anything to replace it.
The idea jumped across the Atlantic into the USA. Some people started to ponder: if communism had failed, what was going to take its place as the ideology of the Left?
The obvious answer was socialism, or social democracy, which had been hugely successful in Western Europe. The problem was that conservatives have successful convinced their fellow Americans that socialism was the same as communism, a hundred years of political history be damned!
Following the steps of the postmodernists, many on the Left started saying that the whole progressive agenda had been a failure. Nothing was good enough. Claiming success in any issue was tantamount to treason. Some even doubted that any progress was made at all.
What about the oppression of women? The Patriarchy was still there!
What about the persistent racism against Blacks? The Civil Rights Movement was not enough!
What about colonialism? Many countries were still in abject poverty!
The rich were listening carefully.
From history, they knew that the danger lied in the alliance between the working class and the intellectuals. That’s how socialism got started.
They knew that the intellectuals were key to any social change. History had showed that workers needed the direction of brilliant minds to achieve their objectives.
But what if a wedge could be driven between the intellectuals and the working class?
What if the crazy ideas of some intellectuals could be encouraged, so they would collide with the common sense of the masses?
How the universities were taken over
The key was the universities. That’s where intellectuals could be bought.
Luckily for the rich, American universities were already in their pockets.
Most European universities are run democratically by the faculty, students and staff. Elections are held regularly to elect the deans and the president. I took part in such elections when I was a professor of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid from 1989 to 1991. Besides, most European universities are public and financed by the government through a transparent process. The salaries of the professors are fixed by law.
In contrast, American universities are de facto dictatorships run by the regents, which are a few individuals chosen from wealthy and politically powerful elites and accountable to nobody. Deans and presidents are appointed by the reagents, not elected. The salaries of the professors are negotiated individually when they are hired and kept secret. “California Senate Bill 1162 (SB 1162) required universities to comply with mandatory salary reporting for faculty and staff.”
The reagents hold the purse strings. For example, when a research grant is awarded to a university by federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or the National Science Foundation (NSF), the grant money is divided into direct costs, which go to the scientists who submitted the grant to fun their research, and indirect costs, which go to the university top administrators to spend as they please. Indirect costs range from 40% to 120% of direct costs. I know. For 20 years, I supported my research at UCLA with grants from the NIH and the Veterans Administration (VA). I have been a reviewer of grants for the NIH and the VA for a dozen years.
Scientists in STEM departments fund their research, and a large part of their salaries, from grants from the government and industry. In contrast, Humanity departments are funded directly by the university. This gives university administrators, who are hired and controlled by the regents, a way to decide which departments get the money and which ones are left at the side of the road.
The book The Fall of the Faculty, by Benjamin Ginsberg, a political scientist and Chair of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University, documents how control over the universities was taken out of the faculty and handed over to a growing body of administrators with political agendas. Universities became less democratic and more driven towards politically correct dogmatism.
Quietly, top university administrators started defunding political studies departments that could spread socialist ideas dangerous for the rich. Instead, they funded departments that specialized in gender, racial, LGTB and colonial issues. These departments started spinning new ideologies.
The key was to deemphasize class differences and wealth inequality. These issues were dangerous to the rich, because their obvious solution was to tax the rich more and channel the money to the poor.
All that talk about the one percent, unions, workers' rights, public health and public education was definitely bad. However, talk about the Patriarchy, LGTB rights, racial oppression and colonialism was okay, because it would never lead to social changes that would challenge the power of the wealthy.
In fact, these issues would piss off the workers. Many of them were socially conservative, after all. The new politically correct lingo coming out of the universities reeked of intellectual elitism, which the workers instinctively despised.
On top of that, workers' issues had been dismissed by the same Democratic Party that had promised to defend them.
It worked. The chasm between the Left and the workers grew and grew and grew.
The icing of the cake was that the wealthy came out looking like political saints.
Long gone was the image of the ruthless, exploitative Scrooge, with his pockets lined with money and politicians at his fingertips.
Instead, now the rich were philanthropists who donated large sums of money to the universities, erected buildings with their names on it, and funded worthy political causes. Like, you know, the Sackler family that killed hundreds of thousands by marketing OxyContin, a supposedly non addictive opioid (read Empire of Pain, by Patrick Radden Keefe).
Wokeness, Identity Politics, whatever…
So clever was the plot that the new ideology into which the Left had degenerated remained nameless for the longest time. It was, simply, the Left. Never mind that it has long since lost the working class and stopped advocating for the poor.
In his book The Identity Trap, Yascha Mounk calls it the Identity Synthesis. However, this name and its similar one, Identity Politics, failed to catch on. Most people call it wokeness, while others vigorously point to the golden past of this word to signal racist danger among Blacks.
It doesn’t matter, as long as we know what we are talking about. ‘Wokeness’ seems to be the word chosen by both conservatives and numerous progressives to name this subversion of the Left. So we should forget the old meaning of ‘woke’ and go with the new one.
The Identity Trap is a brilliant expose of the interlinked ideas that form the fabric of Identity Politics: critical race theory, feminism, intersectionality, antiracism and anti-colonialism. The underlying idea has been called pan-oppression: that all oppression systems form a whole, so you cannot fight one without fighting the others. This divides the world between victims and oppressors.
Much to their chagrin, the male, White workers that still form the core of the American working class find themselves in the camp of the oppressors, even though they are still being exploited and impoverished. Many Hispanic men see themselves heading the same way.
Compelled speech
Mounk also documents how the Identity Politics ideology was successfully marketed from the universities to society. The PR departments of colleges and corporations took wokeness over as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies.
The ugliest side of DEI is the suppression of free speech and forced indoctrination.
For example, the picture above shows a screenshot from a mandatory online class about wokeness imposed on faculty and staff by UCLA. Note how pretty innocuous statements like “You are transgender? Really? I couldn’t tell” are microaggressions that you have to apologize for.
Even though the existence of microaggressions is still a controversial idea, this class forces you to accept it, together with implicit bias and intersectionality, other beliefs of wokeness.
The next picture shows how the class forces you to accept as fact a controversial statement by Derald Wing Sue, one of the inventors of the idea of microaggressions.
This is called ‘compelled speech’: not only you are not allowed to give your opinion, you are forced to give an opinion that you may not share as a requirement to pass this mandatory course. Nowhere in this online course there is an option for employees to disagree.
Your intentions don’t matter — one of the core beliefs of wokeness.
Universities should be arenas for the free debate of ideas. Compelled speech and political indoctrination are contrary to the mission of the universities.
No wonder so many people are angry at wokeness.
Forging a progressive future
When we examine the history of the Left, as I have done in this article, the path to follow should be clear. The main political issue has always been economic inequality. When the Left abandoned it to pursue obscure ideological goals, it lost its natural supporters: the workers and the poor. Since they form the majority of the population, with their support it would be easy to win elections. Without it, the Left gets relegated to a minority urban elite hypocritically claiming to support the oppressed while protecting their privileges.
We need to focus on the issues of the workers and the poor:
Redistributive taxation that takes money from the rich and gives it to the poor. To compensate for the natural tendency of capitalism to concentrate more and more wealth in the hands of the rich.
Free healthcare for all. Because the right not to die from diseases and to live a healthy life is a basic human right that should not depend on how much money you have.
Free education for all. Because democracy is impossible without a well-educated populace. In a world of ever-expanding knowledge, education is the most empowering tool. Universities that the poor cannot afford feed contempt for the educated elites.
A fair system of justice and police that does not over-punish the poor and forgive the rich. Nobody should get a get-out-of-jail card by hiring powerful lawyers. Nobody should be sent to jail for being too poor to make bail and pay a lawyer.
Free-speech. Which should have never been abandoned by the Left. No more political correctness and elitist new words and grammar. No more canceling people who dare challenge the political dogmas. No more political indoctrination at the universities. Make diversity of ideas and expression the most important diversity of all.
Sexual freedom for everybody. Let’s start making reproductive rights the rights of everybody, and not just women. Freedom of contraception and abortion, buy also freedom of men not to support children that they didn’t want to produce. How about large public subsidies for parents raising children?
Yes, less wealthy people may not be completely onboard with some of the socially progressive ideas of the educated middle class, but they will come around if we engage them in honest conversation. Most Americans these days support abortion rights, gay marriage and drug legalization, as we have seen in single-issue votes in Red states.
Note: The hyperlinks in this article are not affiliated links. Whenever possible, they point to non-commercial sources like Wikipedia.
Copyright 2024 Hermes Solenzol.
Comments