Why Progressives Need to Oppose Critical Race Theory
Critical anarchism is destroying the progress we can actually have in the real world
During the peak of the ‘woke vs anti-woke’ debate, some people couldn’t understand why I, as a liberal, so staunchly argued against critical race theory (CRT). They couldn’t understand why I would be ‘lining up’ on the anti-CRT side, at a time when the Republican Party was using it as a wedge against the Democrats, and the British Conservatives were similarly using it against Labour. I explained that this goes much deeper than, and is more important than partisan politics, and that not everything the right hates is automatically good. However, much of that talk was abstract, and I’m not sure people really understood where I was coming from. In this article, I will use two recent examples to illustrate my point.
Example one: just a few weeks ago, as Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee again, I began writing about a faction of far-left ‘accelerationists’ who apparently don’t mind seeing Trump in the White House again. Unlike real Trump supporters, these people are bad faith Trump enablers, i.e. they know and believe that a second Trump term will be harmful, but think that he could create the conditions that would lead to many people being radicalized into far-left ideology. For these people, nothing seems to matter except their ‘revolution’.
Example two: in the same month that Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, a very controversial article about the issue of trans kids appeared in the New York Magazine, calling for the unrestricted ‘right’ of kids to receive ‘sex-changing medical care’ (the author’s words, not mine). The article predictably caused outrage across the media landscape, and certainly did trans acceptance no favors. The thing is, so-called progressives and their media outlets keep promoting these harmful views, and sideline more moderate trans voices that could lead to practical trans rights reforms. Thus, I argued that they are complicit in harming trans people.
So what do the accelerationists and the ‘progressives’ who promote extreme ideas like Chu’s have in common? I believe the answer is a postmodern critical theory-inspired worldview, what I call ‘critical anarchism’. To put it simply, the ‘critical theory’ here refers to identitarian critical theory (as opposed to the Frankfurt School’s original Critical Theory), where people are generally divided into oppressor and oppressed groups based on characteristics like race, gender and sexuality. They might pay lip service to class, but this is clearly not their true concern, because the theory is clearly not attractive to the working class, and they don’t seem to care about this too much either. The ‘postmodern’ part refers to concepts like social constructionism, deconstructionism, and the Foucauldian idea that discourse and knowledge are ultimately rooted in power dynamics. Hence, when taken together, basically everything in our status quo can be seen as a social construct designed to oppress marginalized groups, and therefore should be dismantled through a process of criticism and deconstruction. According to the theory, this, rather than reformist liberalism, is the key to the ‘liberation’ of the oppressed.
While postmodern critical theory is an umbrella that includes many specific ideas and theories, taken as a whole, it encourages seeing almost everything as an oppressive social construct, and calls for their deconstruction and dismantling. Hence, the ultimate common result of these theories is a kind of total anarchism, that goes beyond even the goals of the classical anarchism of the 19th and 20th centuries. It gets there via so-called ‘critical methods’. Which is why I call it ‘critical anarchism’.
By promising a shortcut to utopia, critical anarchism implies that all the hard work of reformist progressive politics is unnecessary, or worse, counterproductive, because you are working to prop up an ‘oppressive’ system. By encouraging people to place all their hopes and dreams in an unreal future utopia, critical anarchism leads people away from the actual hard work of improving things in the here and now, bit by bit. This work includes coming up with viable proposals for reform, winning the debate in the marketplace of ideas, and yes, deciding to make necessary compromises along the way. Instead of all this, critical anarchism essentially teaches that we can have a shortcut to utopia simply by radicalizing enough people to agree with its worldview, and deconstructing and dismantling everything we have. What better way to ‘dismantle’ the status quo than to make moderate liberals lose elections to right-wing culture warriors, and radicalize upset young people along the way? Or to promote outlandishly extreme ideas to ‘challenge’ the status quo, to make everyone ultra confused about everything?
Meanwhile, the real world effects of this would simply be to create a reactionary backlash, and enable right-wing authoritarian politicians to take power. This, of course, ends up harming the minorities who are supposed to be ‘liberated’. But that doesn’t matter right? Because the worse things get, the more people would be forced to revolt and be radicalized, and a liberating revolution would just be around the corner, right? (This is actually what accelerationism is, by the way.) Of course, any mature person could tell you that things don’t work this way. But that is the way critical anarchists see it. They just have to do their experiment, and they don’t really care how many people are harmed along the way.
Critical race theory is simply the application of postmodern critical theory to race. It is just another way to practice this dangerously flawed theory, and by extension, the whole critical anarchist program, in the real world. It cannot get us closer to racial justice, in the way we commonly understand it, because it doesn’t even respect basic liberal values and principles. The promotion of CRT was basically an attempt to mainstream the ideas of postmodern critical theory, by riding on the coattails of the Black Lives Matter wave of 2020. As a responsible liberal, who actually cares about achieving good outcomes, I simply felt that I had to play my part to stop it in its tracks.
Real justice for minorities depends on the defeat of critical anarchism, in all its forms. We must work hard to achieve this.
Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).
