The Progressive Cycle of Misunderstanding
How certain left-leaning activist spaces have fallen susceptible to authoritarian tendencies
Two years ago, when I began this series, The Case for Social Democracy, I made reference to an SNL skit released in October 2016, which explored the question of whose lives matter through the format of a Jeopardy contest focusing on elements of African-American culture with a visiting rural white contestant. In that first article, I used this to illustrate the point that as a country and as a civilization, we currently lack a coherent answer to this question, which lies at the heart of how we allocate our planetary resources, and that this situation contributes to the prioritization of the needs of wealthy white men over everyone else. However, in this article, I will approach the same question by posing another, more in line with one of the implied takeaways of the skit: Can progressives fight for underserved communities without simultaneously excluding those who already enjoy privilege? And how does this issue overlap with concerns about historical left-wing authoritarianism?
In the second part of this series, we explored how the socialist movement came to develop, and how some of its adherents adopted authoritarian tactics that ultimately contributed indirectly to Russia’s war in Ukraine. In the third part, we explored how the history of the United States has been defined both by brutal oppression at the hands of enslavers and optimistic change inspired by progressive leaders. What we will find in the following exploration is that many participants in the progressive movement, especially in social-media spaces such as Twitter and Instagram, simply do not care about the questions that I have posed above, either seeing the alienation of privileged people as an unfortunate side-effect of their activism or as a desirable result of it. This is not just going to be yet another article cautioning against “cancel culture” or “wokeness”; I will instead do what many on the left are fond of encouraging and attempt to get to the root causes of this behavior. Furthermore, to the extent to which the progressive movement overlaps with the more niche socialist movement, this mentality can lead to a disregard for the effect of one’s actions on the popularity of the movement, and even an inversion of morality that can lead one to support Russia over Ukraine in what ought to be a clear-cut case of an oppressor class versus an oppressed class.
The Allure of History
One cannot understand the progressive movement without understanding the role that history plays in its worldview. For a progressive, the past is a primary motivator to fight for a better society, in an effort to provide accountability for unrectified injustices, or as Martin Luther King Jr. famously described, to bend the arc of history towards justice. This is such an essential component of the thought process of the left wing of America’s political spectrum due to the understanding that these historical injustices continue to affect people’s everyday lives in the year 2023, manifesting themselves in such facts as that the average white household is eight times wealthier than the average Black household. In the face of a political environment in which foundational change often appears out of the realm of possibility, it makes sense that a sense of defeatism can emerge, in which the kind of change necessary to address the root causes of people’s suffering is simply not possible in the absence of a truly radical shift. This sense of defeatism can then become reinforced by a fixation on history, in which the struggles of the present day owe their difficulty to their deep-rooted historical connections. As George Packer put it in an article for The Atlantic,
In a country world-famous for constant transformation, historical fatalism believes that nothing ever really changes. Mass incarceration is “the new Jim Crow”; modern police departments are the heirs of slave patrols. Historical fatalism combines inevitability and essentialism: The present is forever trapped in the past and defined by the worst of it … [they] replace one myth with another one, as powerful and even attractive in its way as the naive story of July 4, 1776, being the fountain of liberty and equality for all. Disillusionment is as appealing to some temperaments as wishful thinking is to others.
Packer then cites the example of a recently published book by Jefferson Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (2022), which focuses on the history of a single municipality, Barbour County of Alabama, and the struggles against racial equality that have been fought there, which the book frames as “quintessentially American histories — inescapably local, yet national in theme, scope, and scale.” In response to this choice of focus, Packer comments,
There’s something strange and willful about picking Barbour County, Alabama, as the exemplary American place. It would be hard to find a more brutal and benighted one, but fatalism makes the selection understandable … Politics is a competition between stories — and it’s as politics that the new fatalism leads to a dead end. On a landscape strewn with the deflated remnants of old myths, with the country’s essence distilled to its meanest self, what moral identity is it possible to build? Punctured myths make us better students of history, but they leave nothing to live up to. Shame is a shaky foundation for any project of renewal. You can’t tell someone that he’s made a mess of his life because of his own bad character and then expect him to change.
He then finishes with a quote from the philosopher Richard Rorty, who explored in his 1998 book Achieving Our Country the dichotomy between what he called the “cultural left,” which focuses on the shortcomings of society on a more theoretical level, and the “progressive left,” which takes action to do something about it:
“National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals,” Rorty wrote: “a necessary condition for self-improvement.” … If Barbour County is the dark heart of America, the course of the story is foretold. Progressive scholarship makes progressive politics seem hopeless.
As I wrote in the previous article, it is difficult for me to get on board with the idea that institutions cannot fundamentally change from the principles upon which they were founded, and that the U.S.’s history of bigotry and exploitation represents its true face more than the many activists and movements that have fought for social justice. However, it is just that idea which is promoted as a result of this mindset, which can then contribute to a sense of burnout and overwhelm at the sheer scale of the entrenchment of injustice in our society. Once one has become disillusioned with the possibility of realistically addressing the root causes of these injustices, it’s understandable that they might turn to what they see as the next best thing: attempting to make a difference by educating people on the proper terminology to use regarding social issues, or as it’s often otherwise referred to,
Language Policing
The goal of language policing is simple: to minimize the amount of inadvertent harm done by people uneducated on a given issue, who might in their conversations about said issue refer either to the people affected by it or to the systems causing it with inaccurate or insensitive vocabulary, in the view of those more familiar with the issue. The logic goes that language shapes the way we think (a somewhat controversial idea known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), so if we can get people across society to speak in a different way, we can ultimately shape public opinion on social issues at the same time. For example, rather than referring to people as “homeless,” they might be referred to “people experiencing homelessness,” since describing a group solely with a potentially demeaning adjective is seen as reducing their identity to that facet of their experience. Other reasonable examples include swapping out “fireman” for “firefighter,” or “slaves” for “enslaved people.” However, it is here that we run into the first issue, which is determining which terms actually carry an offensive connotation. The Associated Press ran afoul of this in January this year after tweeting that
We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizing ‘the’ labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college-educated. Instead, use wording such as people with mental illnesses. And use these descriptions only when clearly relevant.
which led people to mockingly suggest alternatives such as “people experiencing a croque monsieur” to refer to inhabitants of the country with berets and the Eiffel Tower. Furthermore, as for the example of people experiencing homelessness, some have commented that these people care far less about what you refer to them as than they care about actually becoming housed, which can be a nearly impossible task in many major cities, ironically run largely by Democrats, the same people having these nomenclatural debates. However, this reillustrates the above reasoning for language policing, i.e. that it gives people who feel a sense of disempowerment a way to accomplish something on a smaller scale, illustrating the extent to which well-meaning progressives face obstacles actually attempting to enact their agendas upon attaining elected office.
Furthermore, this sanitized vocabulary may actually hinder rhetorical effectiveness or even intelligibility where it’s most needed, i.e. trying to recruit people to your cause. For example, replacing “felon” with “justice-involved person,” as the San Francisco Board of Supervisors recommends, would almost require an explanatory asterisk in order to be understood by any audience not already in the know. It’s difficult to imagine that people subject to the criminal justice system are so negatively impacted by being described with the legal term “felon” as to justify such a lexical contortion. I can absolutely sympathize with the desire to humanize those whom many in society are predisposed to seeing as second-class citizens, but it doesn’t help anybody to make people feel that they are walking on eggshells just by opening their mouth in conversations about social issues.
The Sierra Club fell into a similar pitfall with its Equity Language Guide, which cautioned against calling on people to “stand in solidarity” with something, preferring “be in solidarity” in order to avoid excluding people with mobility impairments. While this is an admirable gesture, the chance of a person in a wheelchair being offended by this, especially if they’re already reading something from the Sierra Club, seems low enough that it doesn’t seem worth giving away the rhetorical punch that comes with metaphorically standing in solidarity. This downside of sensitivity-oriented language was expounded upon further by Packer in a different The Atlantic article, in which he describes the wide-reaching impact of this initiative of a relatively small group of people, i.e. the authors of the Progressive’s Style Guide, who have, in his view, successfully imposed their linguistic preferences as executive orders upon several major institutions across the country. As a linguist, I am particularly receptive to one of Packer’s objections in particular:
Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. They haven’t emerged organically from the shifting linguistic habits of large numbers of people. They are handed down in communiqués written by obscure “experts” who purport to speak for vaguely defined “communities,” remaining unanswerable to a public that’s being morally coerced. A new term wins an argument without having to debate.
Indeed, linguistic change takes place on the order of centuries, often outside of the awareness of a language’s speakers, as certain words and grammar structures are adopted, often beginning as slang, and others become seen as archaic, like how we think of the writings of Shakespeare today. The often-imagined “committee” of Old English speakers who “decided” that the word knight would be spelled with a silent k and gh never existed (since it was actually pronounced once upon a time, just as it still is in Dutch and German), but the fact that this conception is so widespread may contribute to the sense that this is how languages have evolved in the past, and so it’s just as legitimate to attempt to do so today. One instance of attempted inter-lingual prescriptivism that gained some notoriety was the case of Latinx, a gender-neutral equivalent to Latino that was invented by English speakers and adopted by Democratic politicians such as Elizabeth Warren. The problem is, not only is it unpronounceable in Spanish, but that language already has a gender-neutral option ready to be used, i.e. Latine, or even Latino itself, since many Spanish speakers actually do not consider the use of the male variant of an adjective as the default form to be sexist.
Packer also explores how these guidelines, despite presenting themselves as authoritative, often change year by year, as new reasons to abandon prior common parlance present themselves, even for words that had at one time been viewed favorably (espeically as the definitions of common words, such as racism, evolve gradually over time). These new reasons are not really new, as they are ultimately continual results of the injustices in question, which remain unsolved in an environment where it is “impossible to face squarely the wrongs they want to right, which is the starting point for any change.” In my view, Packer’s key argument is that despite purporting to synthesize empathy for those described, this kind of language surrounds them in a sort of euphemistic verbal saran wrap, through which the subject’s situation is viewed as a purely theoretical affair, when the intent was to see it as anything but. On top of all of that, foregoing participation in these exercises can be seen in these spaces as an almost violent expression of intent to exacerbate the oppression of marginalized groups, which has to be remedied through performative self-reflection and a recommitment to the progressive fight (which is especially ironic due to the disdain with which performative activism is often viewed, and is also similar to the rituals of repentance performed within the Catholic Church, which maybe shouldn’t be a surprise given the Catholic roots of the early progressive movement).
Rather than aiming to subconsciously shift people’s opinions, language policing can also be employed in a way more overtly attempting to control certain narratives. This can be clearly seen when it comes to the situation in Israel-Palestine, which can hardly even be referred to as a conflict without someone objecting to the perceived implication of both sides enjoying roughly equal status, rather than an asymmetric imbalance of power heavily skewed in Israel’s favor. During the flare-up of the region in May 2021, a trend emerged of progressive social media accounts “correcting” headlines from major news outlets that appeared to portray the conflict in a neutral light, rather than one painting Israel as the aggressor. As much as I sympathize with the Palestinians in their struggle against apartheid, it is not necessarily the job of the news media to editorialize, but to attempt to present the facts and allow audiences to draw their own conclusions. (Of course, this standard of “objectivity” is seen by some on the left as a hallmark of white-centric culture.)
In the above list, “PLM” refers to “Palestinian Lives Matter,” a phrase which is seen as co-opting the successes of the Black Lives Matter movement. In response to the wave of anti-Asian hate crimes that took place around the same time, use of the phrase “Asian Lives Matter” was discouraged for the same reason, in favor of the somewhat grammatically ambiguous hashtag #StopAsianHate. In literally restricting the scope of whose lives matter to a single community, the progressive movement does not do itself any favors.
For this level of conscientiousness and attention to detail, what kind of recognition could a member of the progressive movement receive? Very little, as it turns out that all of this is considered the “bare minimum” to participate in these conversations, and someone who might like for their hard work to be acknowledged could have their allyhood status questioned and invite infantilization, being described as fishing for “brownie points.”
The Social Media Consensus
To get a better picture of the consequences of the progressive burnout that prompts this language policing, it becomes necessary to understand a certain consensus that, from my point of view, emerged in some social-justice-oriented online spaces, i.e. on Twitter and Instagram, or collectively “Twitstagram” if you will, in the weeks after the murder of George Floyd, and was still clearly in effect at the time of the aforementioned Israel-Palestine flareup. As the momentum of the progressive movement has somewhat waned in the time since, I have not personally seen this kind of mindset as much recently at the time of writing, but I still think it’s worth discussing, since it could easily return at some point in the future. According to this “Twitstagram consensus,”
- There is no spectrum of understanding; a person has either personally experienced something, and therefore fully understands it, or hasn’t experienced it, and therefore doesn’t understand it at all, that
- Space in a conversation is a zero-sum game; any space taken up by one person is inevitably space taken away from another, and that
- People’s intentions are irrelevant next to the consequences of their words or actions.
The consequences of this combination manifest themselves in numerous circumstances. First of all, people who are found guilty of a faux pas, such as using outdated terminology as discussed above, are often admonished to go educate themselves on the issue in question, but if we accept point #1 to be true, then there’s no point in educating oneself, which is also widely seen as a pre-requisite to becoming a proper ally. Furthermore, there’s no way to justify letting a person who doesn’t understand an issue take up space in a conversation about it if we accept point #2, since they will inevitably do more harm than good in so doing; even the act of speaking up can be seen as paramount to theft from a marginalized person, i.e. an act of punching down. Once we’ve gotten to this point, it doesn’t matter if the person who spoke up had no intention of contributing to someone else’s oppression; according to #3, there’s little difference between them and your unfriendly neighborhood right-wing Internet troll.
Given this kind of environment, little conclusion could be drawn other than that socially conscious members of marginalized communities want allies to simply be seen and not heard, with exceptions for those simply offering their support (like participating in a protest chant or resharing a post) or those with notable track records of contributing to the movement in other ways. However, many have also recalled the famous Desmond Tutu quote that “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor,” arguing that the silence of people on issues that don’t directly impact them represents “complicity” or is “deafening,” especially given the ways in which they have likely benefitted from a form of privilege. Simultaneously, speaking up for the sake of breaking such silence can be seen as performative virtue signaling (thereby making it meaningless at best) if it’s plausible that they did so as a result of social pressure, such as the infamous case of the #BlackoutTuesday black squares on June 2, 2020. What began as a spontaneous upwelling of solidarity was lambasted as millions of Instagram posters crowded out the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, preventing it from being used to share organizing information, leading to accusations that the whole operation was a false flag designed for that purpose and that those who had participated in it had contributed to white supremacy. As the months went on and support for the BLM movement began to recede, having posted a black square became seen as a form of virtue signaling, making the whole endeavor a huge exercise in wasted energy. There was no clear way to navigate this environment bereft of nuance, turning many off from the progressive movement entirely as what I like to call the cycle of misunderstanding played out in myriads of microcosms of our wider society.
To be clear, people were absolutely enraged at what they had seen in the spring of 2020, where tens of thousands of unnecessary COVID deaths were followed by nine minutes of devastating footage broadcasting George Floyd’s unnecessary death. They were not predisposed to act reasonably, and would have seen any calls to do so as white-supremacist tone policing. My high school classmates and I were outraged too, especially after being robbed of the graduation ceremony that we had worked towards for years. But you have to ask yourself: is this a responsible way to run a society? Are the people who would cast you as a class enemy over minor infractions the same people whom you would want making the decisions that require a degree of maturity? Or does this phenomenon represent the unmitigated outpouring of years of living in an environment inconducive to properly processing the suffering that it generates?
Unlike conservatives, the outrage of progressives comes from the right place; that is, a sense of empathy for those who have been at the short end of this country’s unfairnesses. I would still place my faith in the progressive movement to find the solutions for the many social ills that we face, however long it may take to get there. At the same time, though, I have seen troubling signs in my relatively limited experience dealing with other progressives.
Volatile Milieux
On October 24, 2020, I attended an anti-Back-the-Blue counter-protest in Ithaca, NY, alongside fellow Cornell students who were, due to the Zoom classes of the time, essentially strangers. After an hour or two decorating our banner, the Proud Boys marched over and stood across the square from us, as both sides chanted their slogans attempting to drown out the other side. Eventually, most of them packed up and left, which was something that we took great pride in. A few students and I took off our masks to grab dinner, and they introduced me to an organization called CARS, or “Cornell Abolition and Reparations Society.” Over the next month and a half, this group, which included the President of the Student Assembly at the time, spearheaded a push to disarm the Cornell University Police Department, arguing that it posed an existential threat to the safety of students of color on campus. A resolution in the Student Assembly was debated for weeks in public Zoom sessions, in which the vast majority of speakers, including myself, voiced their support for the measure, along with a handful of conservative Ben Shapiro-types who held up the conversation with bad-faith talking points (although they argued that they were in the minority because others like them did not want to expose themselves by speaking up). At one point, one of the student representatives opposed to the resolution invited the head of the CUPD to one of these Zooms without telling anyone in advance, which infuriated CARS’s Black organizers, who saw it as a significantly retraumatizing breach of trust.
When the resolution failed by a 14–15–1 vote, someone from the Cornell Republicans managed to bring this issue to the attention of national pundits, leading to a right-wing personal smear campaign of certain student organizers, while CARS filed recall petitions attempting to remove the representatives who had voted against the resolution, claiming that they were representing a racist minority of students and the interests of the CUPD over the student body. The resolution was then simply reintroduced in a slightly different form, the vote on which was boycotted by the representatives opposed to it in an effort to deny a quorum, but one of these representatives seemingly didn’t get the message, and the resolution thereby passed 15–1–13. This was met with celebration from CARS, but the university administration rejected the resolution a few months later, citing a New York State law that requires the presence of an armed police force on campus, meaning that the Ithaca Police Force, which doesn’t know the campus as well, would have to take over in the CUPD’s absence. As far as I can recollect, this law was never once mentioned during the debates leading up to the resolution’s passage, but its effect meant that the intent of the resolution was doomed to begin with.
A similar explosion of tempers unfolded across New York City six months later, as the campaign of progressive mayoral candidate Dianne Morales was accused of condoning racial discrimination, sexual harassment, employee abuse and union-busting within its workplace just weeks prior to the Democratic primary election. Key staff went on strike, bringing the campaign to a standstill as volunteer events were cancelled with little explanation until the details of the situation became public a few days later. At this point, a rally in support of and organized by the strikers was held outside the campaign headquarters near Bryant Park, labeling Morales a “socialist in the streets; capitalist in the sheets.” Although I don’t know as much about Morales’s side of the story, she argued that the whole situation was a huge misunderstanding, declared her support for the right of the strikers to unionize, and expressed hope that the dispute could be resolved. However, it was seemingly too little too late, and as the strike entered its second week, progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threw their support behind Maya Wiley, a more experienced candidate who came close to success in a very tight ranked-choice election.
Around the same time, another youth-led organization was reaching the high water mark of its influence, the Sunrise Movement. On July 1st, 2021, they led a march from Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza near the United Nations to Senator Chuck Schumer’s office in the neighborhood to demand the creation of a Civilian Climate Corps to help mitigate the impact of the climate emergency on America’s infrastructure, where I saw one of my high school friends get arrested for obstructing the entrance to the building. A week later, Schumer announced his support for the CCC, which was seen as a huge win. This success didn’t last long, though, as the Sunrise Movement was soon embroiled in controversy as its Washington D.C. branch issued a statement cutting off connections with Jewish progressive groups over their affiliation with Israel. This was then repudiated as antisemitic by the national branch of Sunrise, who had not been consulted beforehand (although the Black Lives Matter D.C. branch initially defended their statement). As negotiations over the Build Back Better Act stalled due to the intransigent Senator Joe Manchin, the Sunrise Movement organized a fruitless hunger strike and laid the blame squarely at Biden’s feet when the reality emerged that the bill did not have the votes to pass, due to his perceived failure to make use of the so-called Democratic congressional “trifecta” that didn’t really exist in practice.
During that same fall of 2021, the prominent Met Gala was attended by Rep. AOC, who wore a white dress with the words “Tax the Rich” written in red on the back. Meanwhile, a crowd of demonstrators had formed outside, protesting against the enormous disparity between the wealth put on display and the underserved communities whom AOC claims to serve. This was also commented on by many on social media, who saw AOC as selling out to the rich establishment by agreeing to attend such a luxurious gathering. However, many also came to her defense, arguing that by propelling the idea of taxing the rich into the center of public discourse, she had done more for the progressive cause than those making a fuss outside and online had. A bit later in 2022, the U.K.-based youth-led Just Stop Oil organization gained notoriety for their tactic of vandalizing art galleries, essentially antagonizing the general public in the process while assuming that government leaders would care about the targeted works of art, which even other progressives objected to. (Ironically, Just Stop Oil accepted donations via cryptocurrency, one of the highest-emitting technologies to gain prominence during this decade, leading to speculation that it was actually a deliberate operation on the part of oil executives to discredit the climate movement.)
In each of these cases that I’ve described, a significant breakdown in understanding occurred between the branch of the progressive movement willing to take drastic action and those whom they perceived to be their opponents, be they conservatives genuinely opposed to the movement or other progressives who might simply prefer a different approach. In my view, these breakdowns were the result of an inability or an unwillingness to see from a more nuanced perspective, or in other words, a conviction in the self-evident correctness of one’s approach. To be clear, I wholeheartedly support the efforts of young people to try to shape the world around us to better meet our needs, but I also think that this resistance to nuance may be in part a result of the relative youth of the organizers involved, just in the same way that older people are often unable to see beyond the privilege of having grown up in a more stable economy.
Identity Politics
As discussed in the second part of this series, there is an idea in political science known as horseshoe theory, which posits that the far left and the far right have more in common with each other in terms of their rhetoric and their methods than either has with the center. In that article, I described the extent to which this theory holds true as the embrace of uncompromising authoritarianism by both extremes. Another hallmark of both the far left and the far right is the tendency to sort society into immutable categories, be they based on race, gender, or something more culturally specific. This is often referred to in the U.S. as “identity politics” or more derisively as “wokeness,” and can be seen, for example, when progressive activists paint all white people with the brush of having been descended from enslavers. While it’s true that white people have continued to benefit from the racial hierarchy that slavery left in place, it’s estimated that 40% of Americans are descended from Ellis Island immigrants, so their ancestors couldn’t have been here during the era of King Cotton.
In my view, this rhetorical phenomenon is actually perpetuated by the same kind of grammatical shortcoming of the English language that introduces the perceived ambiguity around the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” which some see as being followed by an implied “Too,” whereas others see an implied “More.” It’s easier to say that “white people uphold racism” than “some white people uphold racism” or “the people that uphold racism are white,” but the former statement could be interpreted as an allegation of collective responsibility for racism. Then, when other activists hear this being said, it may push them in the direction of believing that all white people actually are at fault for racism, which can then be argued for using the valid point that as a result of benefitting from racism, white people have a responsibility to actively contribute to the effort to defeat it. But there’s a subtle distinction that can easily be overlooked there: saying that racism is the fault of all white people, as opposed to saying that it’s their responsibility. Unfortunately, as we know, especially in conversations across the aisle, nuances like this are routinely lost in translation, contributing to the frustration of progressives when other people don’t understand what they mean and ask for an explanation, which is often seen as an imposition on one’s emotional energy, leading to calls to go educate yourself using Google, pedagogical literature, or other such tools.
This whole approach can also run into issues of incompatibility with non-American cultures, notably in France, which has historically embraced a philosophy of universalism dating back to the Revolution, emphasizing the similarities within its diverse population rather than their differences. Referred to as le wokisme, many French intellectuals see this trend as a characteristically American encroachment on their values, portending a slippery slope to heightened interracial tensions and potentially even civil war. France, of course, has historically been far from immune to systemic racism, and is experiencing an ongoing wave of Islamophobia in response to the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis, but it’s important to remember that just like in the case of the muted reception of the term Latinx, other cultures naturally have a tendency to think about social issues in a way that some U.S.-based activists may see as ignorant or behind the times.
This is especially ironic given the predisposition of liberals and progressives to maintain a tolerant attitude towards foreign cultures, known as cultural relativism, especially for those cultures that have been the subject of oppression by colonizers. This can trap progressives in uncomfortable contradictions, such as viewing criticisms of widespread Muslim intolerance of homosexuality as Islamophobic, when a more sensible perspective would be that even cultures that have been or are the subject of oppression are capable of perpetuating oppression themselves in other forms, which is just what has happened with the Jewish leadership of Israel. One story stands out to me in particular, that of one of my high school teachers, who described how, after a lesson inviting students to consider whether or not they would be tolerant of a hypothetical culture in which every third baby is sacrificed, he was reported to the administration for alleged racism. This took place around late 2016 or early 2017, during his first year working at the school. In an incident that made national news, a business professor at the University of Southern California also came under fire after Black students in his class accused him of saying what sounded like the N-word in class, but which was really a Mandarin filler word, pronounced like nei-ge, which he was saying in order to demonstrate how people from different cultures like to fill time during speech pauses. In response, some commentators wondered if the students expected Chinese people to find some other word to fall back on.
The Chilling Effect
In the face of this kind of institutional orthodoxy, many academics have felt pressure not to make themselves a target of what they perceive to be a zealous inquisition of students and fellow faculty members, which has been compared to the kind of hypervigilant group self-policing ubiquitous during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, discussed in the second part of this series. Writing in an article for The Atlantic, Black intellectual John McWhorter cited several anonymous interviews with left-leaning professors who suddenly found themselves concerned about the constantly shifting red lines of progressive discourse:
One professor notes, “Even with tenure and authority, I worry that students could file spurious Title IX complaints … or that students could boycott me or remove me as Chair.” I have no reason to suppose that he is being dramatic, because exactly this, he says, happened to his predecessor.
A statistics professor says: “I routinely discuss the fallacy of assuming that disparity implies discrimination, which is just a specific way of confusing correlation for causality. Frankly, I’m now somewhat afraid to broach these topics … since according to the new faith, disparity actually is conclusive evidence of discrimination.”
Continuing by exploring the racial dynamics that have been exacerbated by this process, McWhorter writes,
Being nonwhite leaves one protected in this environment only to the extent that one toes the ideological line. An assistant professor of color who cannot quite get with the program writes, “At the moment, I’m more anxious about this problem than anything else in my career,” noting that “the truth is that over the last few years, this new norm of intolerance and cult of social justice has marginalized me more than all racism I have ever faced in my life.” … This episode represents a pattern in the [professors’] letters, wherein it is white students who are “woker” than their Black classmates, neatly demonstrating the degree to which this new religion is more about virtue signaling than social justice.
McWhorter then comments on the parallels between this present-day phenomenon and the aforementioned Cultural Revolution, citing an anecdote that feels particularly unjust from the point of view of the admonished professor:
Overall I found it alarming how many of the [professors’] letters sound as if they were written from Stalinist Russia or Maoist China. A history professor reports that at his school, the administration is seriously considering setting up an anonymous reporting system for students and professors to report “bias” that they have perceived. One professor committed the sin of “privileging the white male perspective” in giving a lecture on the philosophy of one of the Founding Fathers, even though Frederick Douglass sang that Founder’s praises. The administration tried to make him sit in a “listening circle,” in which his job was to stay silent while students explained how he had hurt them — in other words, a 21st-century-American version of a struggle session straight out of the Cultural Revolution.
The school that implemented the mentioned anonymous reporting system may well have been Stanford University, whose “Protected Identity Harm” initiative was seen as stifling to the exercise of free and open debate on campus. Although I don’t think anyone is saying that the situation on college campuses is anywhere remotely near the level of 1966 Beijing, the fact that the comparison can be made at all spells a ominous warning of the kind of authoritarianism that has plagued left-wing movements in the past. I also do not think that this kind of behavior necessarily emerges entirely organically, but instead begins online, where the aforementioned “Twitstagram consensus” is enforced, and is then brought by people into their face-to-face interactions in the interest of self-consistency. In Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, one of his twenty pieces of advice for resisting the advance of authoritarianism is to not preemptively give away one’s agency by self-censoring in anticipation of potential reprisals, since this is to do the authoritarian’s work for them. However, it is just this anti-ostracism protective measure that is encouraged by the chilling effect generated by this environment of mutual suspicion and distrust.
The Anti-Western Pitfall
As mentioned earlier, all of this is taking place in an environment of pessimism regarding the potential of the United States to eventually become a country that embodies the principle of liberty and justice for all. With this being the case, an anti-American, anti-Western and generally anti-establishment mentality can become seen as a prerequisite to participating in conversations about social issues. This takes the form of what I have said that I find to be a strangely conservative perspective on the nature of institutions, i.e. that they cannot fundamentally change from the principles upon which they were founded, but instead have certain inherent qualities inalienably baked into them. In this perspective, it’s commonplace to hear such ironclad formulas being laid out as “capitalism (and by extension the United States) could not exist without exploitation,” presented with similar confidence as “humans could not exist without air.” Although these claims may have a degree of truth to them, this can lead to a degree of conspiratorial thinking, as a certain lens through which to view the actions of international actors becomes set in place. For example, in response to a news story in March reporting on the existence of lithium reserves in Iran, socialist commentator Alan MacLeod cynically speculated that “We are going to hear a TON about human rights in Iran soon,” implying that this natural resource discovery would serve as motivation for a U.S. intervention in Iran by the same military-industrial complex that instigated the wars of the early 2000s, which would be justified using language of spreading freedom and democracy to the local population. However, we already do hear about human rights in Iran, as a consequence of the many-month-long wave of protests against the country’s fascist theocratic regime, which MacLeod also portrayed as a covert CIA-sponsored regime change operation.
This anti-Western perspective leads directly into the camp of the far left who are often referred to pejoratively as “tankies,” so named for their support for the Soviet Union’s tank-based invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to prevent that country’s communist government from attempting to democratize. If you were to ask a tankie, the war in Ukraine does not represent the valiant effort of a nation formerly colonized by Russia to win independence and self-determination, but a U.S.-orchestrated bloodbath intended to weaken Russia, one of America’s major geopolitical rivals, whose victory would represent a major loss of prestige and influence for the West, which would therefore mean a victory for the working people of the world. At the same time, they see Russia’s decision to invade as a justified reaction to NATO expansionism, which has taken the form of Eastern European countries voluntarily choosing to join the alliance. Never mind the well-established track record of Putin as a devotee of fascist Russian imperialism, or “ruscism” for short; the short-term goal of sticking it to the West takes precedence, Putin can be dealt with later, and anyway he’s helping China, which is a major communist country. The true irony is that the same people who so habitually take black-and-white positions that they expect others to adhere to suddenly do find it within themselves to see from a more nuanced perspective, i.e. that Putin is the lesser of two evils. That is, if they don’t support him outright.
If anyone is a fascist from a tankie’s point of view, it’s Volodymyr Zelensky, who, despite being Jewish, they see as continuing the legacy of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, who led a Ukrainian resistance against the Soviets during the Second World War, given that Ukraine, like many other countries, has experienced a rise in the far right in recent years (fueled by none other than Putin himself!). Never mind Russia’s atrocities against unarmed civilian populations; the U.S. has (arguably) done worse in the Middle East, so why aren’t you criticizing them? The reason why the workers of Ukraine are suffering isn’t because Russia is trying to plunge them back into the authoritarianism of the 20th century; no, it’s because the U.S. and the U.K. won’t let Zelensky sign a peace deal that would give Russia what it wants, i.e. swathes of Ukrainian land, and if the war would just end, then the workers of Ukraine wouldn’t have to suffer anymore. When confronted with the overwhelming popularity of Zelensky and the war effort among average Ukrainians, who are willing to endure power outages, food shortages and bombing rather than submit to the Muscovite yoke, tankies wave this away as evidence of CIA propagandization, revealing their disbelief in the ability of people to make decisions for themselves. They back up this position with lengthy missives describing how the hardships that Ukrainians and others endured during the Soviet era didn’t actually happen, or weren’t that bad, or the only people who suffered were those who deserved it on account of being Nazis and/or the bourgeoisie, while they also wield the ban-hammer judiciously against those who would contradict this narrative. This unofficial ideological competition seems to serve to bolster the standing of each individual as a veritable comrade in the eyes of their Reddit peers, eligible for service in the propaganda department of the future Party that they envision, to a degree that almost makes it appear as satire.
Many socialists will not reach this height of self-delusion, but they will argue against American support for Ukraine in the context of opposing the military-industrial complex, which is indeed vastly overfunded and siphons away resources that could be used to revitalize America’s underserved communities. This is what the Democratic Socialists of America, the leading socialist organization in the country (with whom I agree on most other issues), did in their initial statement following the first wave of Russian attacks in February 2022, along with other leftists. They also argue that the U.S.’s indirect participation in the conflict risks igniting a nuclear war with Russia, which could wipe out civilization as we know it. However, I don’t think anyone would imagine that these same people would sympathize with American leaders if they were the ones, rather than Putin, habitually threatening the world with atomic hellfire in exchange for territorial aggrandizement. Although the desire to dismantle what they see as a wasteful militaristic institution like NATO is understandable, it’s unclear what they mean when they say they would replace it with “institutions of mutual security based on law and justice.” Getting the nations of Europe to stop fighting each other after millennia spent doing just that was and is a major accomplishment, for which NATO can assume some of the credit (especially given that resolving differences peacefully is thought by some to be a hallmark of democratic societies). Furthermore, equating U.S. support for Ukraine with American troops on the ground, as if we actually are in a state of hot war with Russia, simply does not reflect reality, but it is what Democratic candidate Marianne Williamson and People’s Party candidate Cornel West do when they call for the U.S. to “wage peace” rather than war by calling for negotiations to satisfy Russia in the short term, recalling Neville Chamberlain’s campaign of appeasement towards Hitler with regard to the latter’s territorial plans for Czechoslovakia.
To be clear, I do not believe that the far left poses anywhere near the level of threat to democracy that the far right currently poses, and I do not believe that the kind of people I have described in this article make up more than a vocal minority. That being said, I still felt the necessity of putting together a response to this authoritarian tendency, given the ease with which new initiates to the progressive movement may find themselves drawn by its appeal.
The mindset of the far left is one that has not moved on from the Cold War, an environment whose return they explicitly hope for, as a multipolar world is one in which American hegemony is being challenged. This is despite the fact that there were well over a dozen nuclear close calls during the Cold War, a natural consequence of people’s predisposition to misunderstand each other and act rashly as a result. Ultimately, they see Ukraine and other “small countries” as geopolitical chess pieces for the major powers to move around, evident in their calls for Ukraine to have non-alignment imposed on it as part of their proposed peace deals, an idea starkly in contrast with their professed belief in the right of peoples to self-determination and serving to bolster the case for the horseshoe theory. It should be clear by this point that the only self-determination that they believe nations should be allowed to make is one that aligns themselves against the West and towards their so-called “utopian” vision. Ukrainian socialists, for their part, care little for this betrayal by their so-called “comrades” abroad.
Whereas Desmond Tutu called upon us not to remain neutral in situations of injustice, some tankies go so far as to give the American Civil War the “both-sides” treatment, just as the far-right does, arguing that the North’s nascent industrial capitalism was just as brutal, if not more so, than the literal slavery of the Confederacy. This parallels the narrative promoted by some progressives of Lincoln as a “white savior,” who doesn’t deserve credit for the abolition of slavery, which should instead be viewed as the result of a primarily Black-led struggle. This is despite the fact that Karl Marx himself, who lived in New York City at the time, was a vocal proponent of Lincoln’s effort to build a more perfect Union.
Might does not Make Right
Keep in mind that during the early 1930s, the leader of the German Communist Party, Ernst Thälmann, saw the Social Democratic Party as worse than the Nazis, since at least Hitler was willing to openly state his objectives, whereas the Social Democrats were pretending to fight for the working people. In the same way, tankies and many socialists make no secret of their disdain for more moderate progressives and liberals, especially the latter, whom they view as being fascist-lite due to their association with the mainstream establishment and their support for maintaining some of the existing capitalist system within which more incremental changes could be made. It’s true that the mainstream condones some of the most toxic and reprehensible traits of our society, and we need people who will stand up to it. It’s also true that many centrist liberals have been willing to give away major concessions to the right ever since President Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over.” But I believe that for the average person, who doesn’t necessarily follow politics except around presidential elections (or even then), relating to them on a personal level and offering them a new perspective, i.e. that the hardships they experience don’t have to be facts of life, will go much further than expecting them to immediately sign up for radical change or else be called a bigot or a fascist.
The principles of liberalism go all of the way back to the Enlightenment, in which a just society would be run not by a strongman monarch or chairman, but by the ideals of reason and equality. It is these principles upon which democracy is based, and they require a willingness to trust other factions than one’s own with the reins of power. This is at the root of how we as a civilization can move on from the days of ‘might makes right,’ although supporters of a violent populist uprising do not necessarily valorize this principle of restraint. Ironically, left-wing activists often cite 19th- and 20th-century scholars extensively, much of whose work can also be traced back to these Enlightenment principles. This can contribute to a torrent of jargon and metaphorical rhetoric that one must sift through in order to comprehend and participate in debates within the left, in a manner similar to that of sectarian debates between followers of a religion. In an additional irony, while the far left sees liberals as fascists, the far right sees liberals as communists, which an average night of Fox News makes evident. What both sides are right about is that liberals tend towards an aversion to extreme positions, preferring not to take rash actions, even if they believe the status quo to be unjust. Liberals also tend to emphasize the importance of individual freedoms over the needs of the collective.
As a progressive, I tend to believe that the needs of the collective have long been overlooked at the cost of individual freedoms in America, but I also see the supposed tension between the two as a false choice. The way I see it, the best way to guarantee individual freedoms is to build a strong community that can provide for those in need. I believe in a vision of justice that is not a zero-sum game, but that invites everyone to participate in its realization. And I believe that the democratic model can succeed where the authoritarian model fails.
In his 1946 pamphlet, Why I Write, George Orwell concisely summarized his views thus: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” Similarly, world-renowned physicist Albert Einstein, in his 1949 essay Why Socialism?, stated that: “it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism… How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?” Orwell, of course, gave us one of the most impactful depictions of authoritarianism to date, i.e. his novel 1984, where the ruling party, “English Socialism” (or “IngSoc”) and its cult of personality surrounding the pseudo-mythical figure, Big Brother, were based on a blend of the Soviet Communist Party and the Nazis. Orwell’s commitment to antifascism was such that he had been one of thousands to volunteer to fight on the side of Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, where he saw firsthand the consequences of left-wing infighting that he would recount in his Homage to Catalonia (1938). I don’t claim to know the solution to left-wing infighting, and I myself use the term “social democrat” rather than “democratic socialist,” due to the former’s emphasis on a political model rather than an economic one, and due to the statements of self-identified democratic socialists on Ukraine as compared to social democrats, as discussed in this article. However, I know that it’s counterproductive when communists call Orwell a fascist, which if you believe, I have a bridge across the Ebro to sell you.
The “End of History”
Genuinely good ideas, like wealth redistribution from the top 0.1%, have been discredited in the eyes of many in the public partially as a result of the tendency of a vocal minority of their supporters to advocate for other injustices, such as subjecting professors to “listening circles” or, on a more extreme level, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With an unhealthy fixation on the past, the far left embraces the idea invoked by the revolutionary anthem L’internationale, i.e. “This is the last decisive battle,” just in the same way that supporters of free-market capitalism felt the allure of describing the dissolution of the Soviet Union as marking the “end of history.” What both sides fail to understand is that history is not really supposed to end. If history has ended, then there’s no more room for development or for growth on the part of human civilization. But it’s true that the end of history is an idea that reassures the anxiety inherent in the uncertain future, that generations of humans have hoped to witness in the form of eschatological prophecies that have always failed to come true, from the Christian Rapture to the restart of the Mayan Calendar. What very much can and should end, though, is the era of scarcity and inequity that has lasted for 12,000 years since the Agricultural Revolution until the present day. To help accomplish this, progressives and social democrats can study the past, learn its lessons, and present the public with a model of an optimistic and just future. They won’t be able to do much about the far-right propaganda machine, but they won’t be handing it a brush with which to paint the left as power-hungry, hypocritical and unpatriotic, either.
Socialists tend to argue that progressives and social democrats would be unable to fund their imagined social programs without prompting newly taxed billionaires to take their money abroad and capitalist enterprises to move their exploitation to the Global South. Maybe I’m just an idealist, but I argue that with a sufficient degree of governmental and cultural development, a country could contain this wealth exodus with strong legal oversight measures, and its people could even accept slightly lower standards of living in order to relieve Global Southerners of their burden. I’m not saying this would be easy — a populist backlash would be sure to ensue in response to the latter, and special interests would in many places attempt to bribe democratic systems into leaving their privileged positions untouched. However, after everything that we’ve seen in this article, I do not see an unnecessarily violent revolution as a desirable path forward at this time.
Marx and MLK both believed in bending the arc of history towards justice, but the followers of the latter did not hold the insalvability of the country in which they lived as a tenet of their philosophy. King’s supporters did not insist on “left unity,” which in practice has meant adherence to the authoritarian model espoused by Marxism-Leninism. And if King was alive today, I don’t believe he would see Democrats and Republicans as the same, as imperfect as the Democrats are, nor would he scoff at things like the adoption of Juneteenth as a federal holiday (which was fought for by Black activists) as Malcolm X would have, but would instead recognize them as meaningful milestones along America’s unfinished journey towards equality. Indeed, on the competing worldviews offered by capitalism and communism, King had this to say:
Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.
There’s one more thing I’d like to address. It’s possible that a tankie or other far-left reader may come across this article, and call me a “liberal,” that term that they so often use as a four-letter word. If such a thing does occur, I would respond just as Democratic presidential candidate Matt Santos did in the political drama, The West Wing, upon being called this by his Republican opponent:
Liberals ended slavery in this country… Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed every one of those programs, every one. So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, ‘liberal,’ as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor.
At this point, in order to better understand the motivations of many involved in the modern progressive movement, we have to look at the experiences of Generation Z and our temporal neighbors, millennials and Gen. Alpha, during our upbringing. Tune back in hopefully some time in the next few months for the next part of this series, which will explore this issue in detail. I will leave off on a note that has echoed in the ears of millions who have traveled far in search of the possibility of a better life, despite the many imperfections of their destination:
