I was chatting with a friend online, S., who wondered: "How has the American left in weird ways gone so far left while in other ways getting almost completely disconnected from the actual working class?"
He was trying to figure Marxism’s role in this shift.
Well, I’d been watching this transformation for years and had an explanation. Following is the answer I gave.
The ONE-TWO PUNCH
Our current left was born (stillborn I’d say) from the convergence of two trends. It helps to see them as a kind of ONE-TWO punch. As follows:
1) In the middle of the 20th century, Marxist thinkers hatched a strategy called "the long march through the institutions". We in America are now seeing something like the belated results.
The "long march" doctrine arose when it did because Marxist intellectuals realized that, contrary to Marx's predictions, the western working class was not organizing itself for revolution, but was rather, in their view, being seduced and misled by the glittering toys of mass culture and the dreamy promises of capitalist ideology.
Their solution? To focus efforts on the main public-facing professions, on a slow takeover of education, media, and other areas of mass influence.
As this takeover would require time, they dubbed it “the long march through the institutions”, with a nod to Chairman Mao. They theorized that once leftists had control of these key institutions, they could use them to forge a true revolutionary consciousness in the masses, and then an actual revolutionary movement.
This "long march" strategy is one of the reasons so many hard-core leftists starting in the post-war period were content to become academics. They could tell themselves they were seeding the ground. The Frankfurt School thinkers, with their Marxist cultural criticism, offered a bridge over which would-be revolutionaries could walk themselves into academia. One could be an edgy "revolutionary" without having to mix much with the actual working class. This latter was a key perk, the Original Hypocrisy on which our current left's Stratospheric Hypocrisy is built.
So, yes, the long march strategy ultimately bore fruit, although a different fruit than originally intended. What happened?
Orthodox Marxism was increasingly debunked. So that in the intervening decades the work of all those "left" professors shifted focus to cultural analysis: Foucault, structuralism, the postmoderns--thinkers in all these movements set their sights on something other than class warfare. By the mid '80s, checking the issue du jour, one saw it was nearly always some form of identity warfare--all the marginalized “victim” groups, whether sexual or racial or whatever. The French intellectual movements of the 1960s had crossed the Atlantic in a big way and infected American universities, and by the '80s the results were unmistakable. No more was the focus on supporting the American working class in general: rather everything was suddenly feminism, African-American studies, post-colonialism, gay and lesbian rights, racism racism racism.
With this shift, the main base of the Democratic Party, the huge number of white working class Americans, itself suddenly became suspect, especially if those white working Americans also happened to be Christian. Though Marxism as an economic philosophy was defunct, identity squabbles based on race or sexual behavior became a new, supposedly "revolutionary" battleground. And note: Though Marxism itself had been left behind, the authoritarian ethos of Marxism was retained. For most of these academic Lenin wanna-be's, classical liberal rules of engagement were suspect. There was, for instance, little worth supporting in our Constitution, with its dangerous protections of free speech and religious liberty. They wanted none of it, because in good Marxist fashion their goal was to direct what people were to say and think. They were going to forge "the Revolution".
This, in short, is how our professoriat and the media shills who now echo it came to abandon economics as the basis of their progressivism. In the US, this shift in academic focus slowly changed the very idea of what it meant to be "on the left". Class struggle became secondary to sexual/racial politics.
And then this deeply entrenched fake new “leftism” met up with a parallel development occurring in the Democratic Party, as follows.
2) The Democratic Leadership Council, created in the mid-1980s by Bill Clinton and cronies, pushed the party toward an explicit embrace of big business. In my view, the DLC was the beginning of the end of the Democratic Party as a party of working people, though sadly it has taken decades for the American working class to realize just how badly they've been sold out.
The DLC is the origin of what we see today: a Democratic Party just as beholden to Wall Street and corporate CEOs as the old GOP ever was.
But note: When the Democratic Party stopped fighting for working folks in the 1990s, when they abandoned the American working class for the CEOs, they knew they still had to show they were fighting for SOMETHING. They still needed some banner to wave to claim their left-wing cred. Voilà! The banner was there on offer from the children of "the long march through the institutions". The party just needed to pretend it was fighting for the identity dignity of all the new supposed victim groups. Which is what they did.
Note also that doing this would not require Democratic pols to break ranks with Wall Street or the big corporations. They could screw over the mass of the working class (those folks in flyover country) while getting all emotional in their speeches about things like transgender bathroom passes and the “rights” of illegal immigrants.
Party leaders thus found a pseudo-revolutionary movement they could meld with: all the SJW morons that now swarm our academies and publish in rags like Slate and Salon and Vox.
The Democratic Party has thus become a fake left party in the same way that our academic leftists are for the most part fake Marxists. Both have abandoned the bread-and-butter fight for the relative comfort and glitz of identity squabbles. Lady Gaga couldn't be happier.
What happened in 2016 is thus pretty clear. Enough of the American working class, especially the white working class, had finally seen the Democratic scam for what it was. Fortunately, they switched to Trump in protest against both the corruption of the establishment GOP and even more so in protest against the fake leftism of their former party.
That's my quick take on why the American "left" is what it is. Interbreed fake academic Marxists with a fake working class party and you get what we see today: a double-fake movement of screaming little Stalins of all flavors and dyed hair colors. Their mantra stems directly from their academic programming: "You're a racist! You're a homophobe! Down with the patriarchy! Die, bigot! Transphobe! End white supremacy! Racism racism racism!" And this in a country where gays and lesbians can live their lives as they choose, where more women are graduating university than men, and where a white-majority population twice elected a black man as president.
Read the pages of our left-liberal press and these SJW -isms are virtually all that is talked about. You can follow one or another of these rags for a month straight without finding a single article about the struggles of working Americans in general, because, see, too many of those working Americans, being white and churchgoing, are seen as hateful bigots who need to be sent to gulags for ideological training. And that's not a joke. It is to me absolutely believable that these people, if empowered, would set up gulags in which to imprison their identity enemies.
Hopefully hardworking Americans will continue to realize how fake and how toxic this new "left" really is and will keep voting it out of power. At present only a populist right seems capable of meaningfully defeating this pseudo-left.
And so: "the long march through the institutions" and the Democratic Leadership Council. The One-Two Punch that gave us our supremely fake left.
Cheers.
E.M.
My novel A Taipei Mutt is now in print. The Asian capital unmuzzled.
