The New Left and a bit of History

Once, in the old order, in the Ancien Régime, certain sects of the most powerful were sanctified and restricted from certain irreverence, scorn, or abuse by the public or vocal laypeople. In the Mediterranean, one could criticize the Emperor (or king or citizen body, depending) and the gods within reason, but if one overstepped the pale of dignity and decorum, penalties might ensue. If one would recant or simply shut one’s mouth promptly, the punishment, given a decent administration, would be relatively lax. With an odious or arbitrary princeps or administration anything goes. If one persisted and became a recalcitrant shouting defiance in the town square and scribbling harsh scrawl in nasty pamphlets dispersed to be read in other towns across the land, then the punishments mounted. The same applied to the kings and Church of the Middle Ages. Aside from some Norse sagas and a few other Germanic stories and legends as well as their interactions with the Romans and the more limited interactions with the Hellenes, there isn’t much we can say in Europe substantially north of the Mediterranean about the generalities of this dynamic until the introduction of Latin script (which coincides generally with Christianity).

            If we take Plato’s account of Socrates for the unabashed truth, the reality of it is counter to Plato’s sincerest apology that “he didn’t do nothing,” that in fact Socrates would not contain his poison and stay within the bounds of decorum. Even given chances at a hearing to recant and rejoin society, he balked at their offers and slapped their hands back, recoiling from chances at reunion with the Athenian citizen body and instead opted to be the mad doomsayer, the dirty street philosopher. Thus he was made to drink hemlock.

Because the state rests upon tenuous ground, it is better that support is shored as much as possible. That means ensuring that dissenters are divided, quiet, and preferably meek and silent. Dissent need not be gone and they need not be dead, but the dissenters do need to fear consequence for acting against in defiance of the interests of the state (or church) baldly, else surely a thousand flowers will bloom and the foundations of the state slowly separate. Mending those cracks is a bloodier process than suppressing the formation of excessive dissent by exiling, imprisoning, and fining dissenters as one sees fit – whatever fits the scope of the problem and the latitude one has to act with. What follows failure, inevitably, is balkanization or some other form of political fragmentation. Organized religions which collect tithes, fines, and the like operate in a similar manner, only the mechanism that divides organized religions is heresy or attrition rather than some political disintegration. States and religions are powerful forces indeed, yet it is striking that it takes merely disparate handfuls of individuals operating on their own incentives to undermine unsuccessful or incompetent institutions.

The modern state has at least token participatory reforms which give its citizens substantially more ability to easily manifest their will. This doesn’t mean that voters get what they want because voters have to know what they want and they must have to be able to instruct the system to operate according to their will, something which politicians are much more capable of doing than the median voter. Classic public choice problems ensue. Nonetheless, the principle suffices as pacification most often enough. In practice, though, the modern West sits near the pinnacle of the administrative regimes developed during the Renaissance regardless of democratic and republican reforms. Whatever the nominal input of the masses, the actual machinery is run by those we’ve styled ‘bureaucrats’ paid directly from public coffers largely regardless of quarterly or yearly performance.

Truth is, even if we tried to define their performance by econometric indicators – gathered by whom? Why, the very same professional chair-sitters, of course! – economic performance probably runs within the margins of error much of the time. Perhaps a combination of econometric indicators where applicable as well as their attention to fiscal and administrative obligations would fit better, with some subjective qualifications. No one likes a somewhat subjective assessment, but does that not describe every election? Can not a new administration set the terms for its office workers?

Invert that picture above describing the old order. That is what the nouveau Jacobins want, the modern social democrats – the radical progressives, post-Marxists, and left-bending social reformers of all stripes. They desire a world where certain groups are shielded from criticism and perceived hatred due to alleged or real past hardships or injustice. This is asymmetrical, of course, because there are a great many groups that could fall under the shit-stained feathers of this overprotective and underwhelming beast which never will for a variety of reasons. This doesn’t concern them much, however, though for their desire to spread égalité, fraternité, et liberté – equality, brotherhood, and liberty (the latter, for most of them more accurately being license or subsidy rather than freedom in the sense any reasonable person understands it; they want not only ability to do as thou wilt, but retain dignity regardless). These groups have an interesting intellectual lineage. They are at once firmly embedded in Christian theology, at least partially; the major culturally important socialist movements since the post-war period have demanded penitence from members for original sin, sacrifice to achieve grace, and rituals of supplication and humiliation. Yet they pose a major digression from conservative old Church style Christian tenets.

As so many abstractions, there are many ways you could divide leftism. The way I see it in the West is a threefold camp: Gnostics, Pharisees, and Puritans. Outside the West or Western-influenced countries, I don’t think the same dynamic exists; I suspect they rely almost entirely on imported intellectual political currents. Many people develop an instinctive entitlement and a form of intuitive socialism or collectivism, but it’s not the same as the intellectualized strains. I like the three categories I’ve devised because I notice patterns in history and demography, and nothing is new under the sun. One sees a lot of patterns recur in leftist movements today that we saw in the past in Gnosticism and various Gnostic heresies from the Middle Ages, as well as in Jewish communities and Puritan movements. Do we believe all of the Gnostic-inclined folk in Catalonia and Occitan died by the conclusion of the Albigensian Crusade, or is it far likelier that most of them survived, along with the later Waldensians?

Political beliefs are heritable. Religious beliefs are as well. These aren’t inherited in some bullet point fashion, in party planks and rhetoric, but in gut instinct and general cognitive patterns. There exist, broadly speaking, the left modalities of thought and the right modalities of thought which are both heritable and difficult to teach by virtue of the fact that to its opposition, it seems alien, childish, cynical, or silly. I’ve not given thought to name the modes of the right-leaning modalities yet, though I could certainly do so – and probably ought to.

The two strains of leftism which are exemplified most by heresies are large and formed the bedrock of the so-called progressive movement in the US and Fabian socialism in Europe, at the vanguard of the Democratic party in the early 20^th century and the bulk of the Labour party for most of its history. Your intellectuals and agitators may likely fall into these strains though their followers might not. Yet the Pharisees, the Jewish community, has been by far the more influential portion after the two other portions began ceding power in the late 19^th century.  

Some elements have seen the rising of notice of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. They have attempted to discredit this as  a ‘conspiracy theory’ or attribute various straw man positions to it and throw out disinformation into the fray to confuse and conflate. These are, after all, typical low-trust debate tactics; they are the methods one resorts to when one’s arguments are disingenuous and when one perceives that one’s ends are righteous no matter the means. This is exactly the position radical ‘progressive’ social totalitarian humanists and post-Marxists are in. Interesting that some give this any attention at all. It is in fact an academic question at most, and if it is, as they say, nothing more than a crackpot ‘conspiracy theory’ then it has ostensibly very little bearing on the typical left-leaning ideologue’s affairs.

That is, unless they’re not convinced with the emerging party line. That is, unless they know that some of the names that show up tied to critical theory and cultural studies are actually instrumental to the ‘New Left’ and how socialist movements have shaped themselves since the ‘70s. There is something deficient with this denial line. First they deny; then they expound with much falsehood laid in amongst trivia and fact; then they lie and create misdirection. Interestingly, among the progressives and post-Marxists and their ilk you’ll find diverging narratives. The post-Marxists and Marxists are most honest, or at least they tend to be if a straight answer can be coaxed out of them. Orthodox Marxists don’t like much of what the Institute for Social Research or its affiliates ended up spreading. It diluted the core of the message which was about economic stratification and the bourgeois-proletariat divide, which has now become a side issue for a lot of leftists with more emphasis on nominally leveling capitalism rather than outright worker dictatorship.  

MacDonald and a few others are more expert than I on the subject, but I’ve read enough to know a decent bit and can summarize briefly. European academics centered on the Institute for Social Research, but also affiliated with other minor universities in Germany and France, discovered frustration with the lack of success of international socialist workers movements. By the interwar period, the only major state in the world which had fallen to revolutionary socialists was Russia, a backward agrarian peasant society in the throes of industrializing under Emperor Nicholas’s abortive reign which should have, by Marx’s predictions, been among the last to fall to the dictatorship of the proletariat after transitioning through capitalism.

To the capacity that the great powers of Western and Central Europe had adopted many socialist policies before and during the Great War, it was tactically and with a jaundiced eye for socialist mores; for invariably, the British, French, German, and various other European flavors of socialism (all caveats applicable) were decidedly nationalistic and did not care for the bourgeois-proletarian dichotomy nearly so much as Marxists. Class warfare in the purest sense was not, it turned out, omnipresent or even really noticeable at all but in exceptionally rare instances. Social mobility was greater than ever by 1900. This did not mean that social barriers broke down or that economic strata determined status entirely either. The Marxist vision was, to put it bluntly, obviously and horribly wrong and outdated. He was looking forward to an ashen demise of capitalism which never spread because material prosperity accelerated rather than waned, and the old social orders broke down somewhat in the mildly chaotic two centuries transition from agrarian society to industrial society. A new dialectic was needed, especially one which held true the core values of Marx and Jewish communism more generally but which contradicted most of his theoretical principles. This Frankfurt School ideology became one of the movements of post-Marxism and any of the successes we attribute to the ideas thereof are probably due to the fusion of the ultimately Jewish nature of the ideals with Christian trappings. Marx and his disciples were not only patently wrong by 1920, and ideology emanating from the USSR and later the PRC replaced it as the primary revolutionary left-wing ideology, but it never gained more than a core traction in the first place because it couldn’t appeal to a broad enough base anywhere west of the Ukraine without substantial and heavy-handed outside intervention to prop it up. Mixing the ideas of the progressive era with vague Marxism and a few independent Freudian insights was brilliant enough to certainly bring something new.

It’s important to note that the ideas came not merely from a peculiar Jewish theology and mindset, but that also from a nepotistic milieu composed almost entirely of Central and Eastern European Jews or their descendants elsewhere. The degree to which the social networking is paramount to their success cannot be understated. (Note the phrase “social network” and connect the dots.) This is true for the various movements connected to the Frankfurt school to one degree or another: sociology (they spearheaded the drive for the various ‘sub-group’ studies – women’s studies, black studies, etc.), Boasian anthropology (which predated the Frankfurt school somewhat), literary theory (namely guys like Derrida and Lacan), and a few other movements as well. Look deeper into critical theory if you’re interested to see how deep the tendrils extend.

For background, a common idea around 1900 was that Europe was at the forefront of the world – and with good reason. Europeans had emerged as the economic and military masters and thus dominated through colonial empires and vast diplomatic projections essentially the whole of the world at this time. The Ottomans were the sick man of Europe, an anemic power clearly waning from its heights three hundred years before. It had never recovered from its defeat at Vienna when the powers of Central Europe had rallied against the Turkic Saracen and its over-projection in the Balkans. Sub-Saharan Africa was almost entirely under colonial control or undeveloped backwater at this time, while North Africa was divided among France, England, and the Ottomans. India, including what is now Bangladesh and Pakistan, were firmly under the British Raj. Persia was a kingdom content to subsist and little else, having recovered some of its identity from the Ilkhans and Timurids; as fortune smiled upon Russia, she looked down upon Persia, and so Persia’s borders shrunk until 1900 where Persia’s borders were little more than modern Iran. China was longed for as a European protectorate, weak and desperately seeking shelter from Japan’s predatory gaze. Most of the states in the Americas had declared independence from their former colonial masters, yet the influence of the former masters was still profound, though the US was coming to dominate the former Spanish colonies more.

There was also a racial component to this in the popular mindset. Europeans were at the forefront of humanity. There was no brotherhood of man. There was no bringing the savage from the jungle, except in starry-eyed pulpy fiction books with a crooked and progressive premise. These books were a sign of things to come. Nay, the conservative ideal still held too much sway, and though the Christian sentiment hints through the equality of souls and manumission before the almighty to progressivism and post-Marxism as well, they were formative movements. The incipient progressive movements were corporatist ones with moderate social reforms and a heavy jingoist hand and still the conservative sentiment above, replete with figures like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Asquith, and (I would argue) Lloyd George among others. The racial hierarchy was exactly as in the hierarchy of civilization and trust I mentioned previously: Europeans share roughly at the top with the Northeastern Asians, and the vast middle is dotted with a gradient of Arabs, North Africans, Indians, Central Asians, and so on, while American Indians, Australian Aboriginals, and Sub-Saharan Africans lie at the very bottom.

There were some attempts through 1880 to 1940 or so to bring Christianity and education to American Indians and to a lesser extent to Sub-Saharan African colonials, and it was clear in any case in reservation schools in the US and in African colonies that neither peoples would make especially good Christians and nor would they make good scholars. This was the beginning of the so-called white man’s burden and the reckoning of Europeans with the precise scale of their conquests. Through three hundred years of settlement, exchange, and warfare, the domains of indigenous peoples in North America had been reduced from expanses once dotting almost the entire continent to marginal lands mostly languishing in the interior – in truth, they lay claim to territory but did not hold property in the same regard as Europeans, for territory was a tribal claim rather than individual plots insured by a corporation. Africa had been brought to heel quicker and in bloody fashion, but with a smaller overall percentage of the indigenous population dying from communicable disease transmitted from Old World to New. It helps that some contact between the Arabs and Berbers of Northern Africa and the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa had long been established and so the shock wasn’t so great as that of the Americas.

Adorno, Fromm, Horkheimer, Marcuse – these are the names of some of the most important figures associated with the “conspiracy” of the “nonexistent” Institute for Social Research. Originally based in Frankfurt, they dispersed in the 1930s when the NSDAP evicted most Jewish academics from Europe. Since they were the subject of little attention internationally, they established an incipient Institute for Social Research based in New York with ease – no one was familiar with these men other than that they were accredited Jewish academics. No one paid much mind to their research in the US state department or immigration when they arrived. They weren’t known to be anarchists or otherwise subversive, and unfortunately they weren’t executed by firing squad or guillotine in Germany. That would have spared us – or, at least might have spared us -  some of the worst elements of Tumblr, Plebbit, and other social media sites where social signaling means outdoing everyone else in the most ridiculous displays of victimhood, hyperbole, and obnoxious rhetoric proclaiming the vileness of the preeminent civilizations and the virtue of the mediocre, the timid, and the vanquished.

By no means do I claim that progressivism would not have continued to progress without the Frankfurt school, but I do not think that they would have continued wholly unabated in the same odious vector they have expertly steered in reality. Part of the backlash to so-called racism and the other ‘–isms’ the Frankfurt school achieved so much success in demonizing, along with their staunch and fair weather allies among the New Left and Old, was due in part to associating European pro-civilization values, and Western European values especially with the declining imperial orders and the notorious regimes of the First and Second World Wars, as well and a few other very stark memories and examples of real and perceived injustices. They took great lengths to exaggerate the latter. It’s worth noting that the Institute for Social Research, their spin-offs, and disciples weren’t the first to contort uppity, agitated minorities toward politics ultimately far-removed from said minorities’s direct welfare. Marxists, left anarchists, and social democrats had engaged in that very tactic prior with disaffected groups, just usually with lesser degrees of success. The Frankfurt School, broadly, and the waves of communists influenced by Marxist-Leninist propaganda emanating from the USSR were and are far more successful than their predecessors could ever have dreamed.

That success directly correlates with a precipitous decline in the power of the West. There’s no doubt the role of the World Wars in the decline of global Western power as well. True, France and Britain were unable to sustain their empires in whole after the massive losses of blood and treasure in the course of these wars. The Netherlands and Belgium lost their possessions outright as a result of the Second World War and Germany experienced a massive contraction in both its borders and population (owing to the war and deaths of Germans during the expulsions from the Eastern Bloc). Yet they didn’t have to completely abandon their empires wholesale. It just happened that the US leveraged Britain and France into a protracted and sloppy decolonization while at the same time the citizens of either country became more worried about social programs than prestige programs. After all, both the empires and welfare states are terribly expensive, but the last man sees the welfare state as giving him a more-or-less good insurance policy whereas empire benefits primarily the aristocracy and a few corporate concerns.

In Europe during the period which led to the student riots in ’68, the French communists and a bunch of figures affiliated to them were all the rage in Europe. Even if a student at lycée had not read much Derrida, Foucault, Marcuse, or Sartre personally, the talking points, rhetoric, and energy had all filtered down very effectively. The same was true in the US only perhaps delayed by ten years and not quite as drastic. The hippies were a bunch of kids from mostly middle class families who heard idyllic renditions of Marx with heavy helpings of critical theory in school, loved their shitty Beat literature, and developed a longing for escapism due to the Vietnam War. They regressed to lumpenproles without realizing it.

On the alternative right, we tend to spend excessive time analyzing the influence of what I called the ‘Pharisee’ camp of leftism above. We analyze them of course not only in their influence as it pertains to the left but as an ethnic group as well. We do this much to the exclusion of our endogenous Christian and post-Christian left, precisely because their influence is so vast and it is imperative to understand the alien above the familiar. In reactionary circles, they like to wax poetic more often about the triumph of the ‘Calvinist interpretation of history’ and other diversions which, while interesting – and I think it is also important to understand the Puritans and Gnostics in our societies, though they are not as influential as the Jews despite their greater numbers – serves to deny parallel developments in Jewish thought (Jewish eschatology and communism) and attributes all of the Western world’s woes to Puritan Calvinists, French revolutionaries, and the participants of the Paris commune.

            Unfortunately, the momentum of the Old Left and the fervor of the New Left have delivered us solidly into the clutches of a wicked trap. Not only does a folk need a strong family and line of descent to tie everyone together, but capitalism itself requires positive fertility and decent demography to survive. Yet across the West, we on the whole slide toward old barren spinsters. In the best cases, abortion suppresses the most unfit, but it’s also used by healthy and intelligent individuals. On the other hand, contraception has proved disastrous, since it is by nature dysgenic as it requires a modicum of intellect, trust, and diligence to use properly and consistently. Combined with the decline of traditional institutions and a general moral decay, it seems as though without some struggle to face and require us to test ourselves and shrug off the weight of undue guilt, apathy, and the worst of our hollowness.

There are spillover effects in the meantime. As I mentioned before, institutions are degrading. Crime is increasing for the first time in about twenty years. I wouldn’t be surprised if the current tick is a sign of a new trend as states move away from effective riot control and mass incarceration and as the law enforcement and judicial system as a whole deteriorates. Families are tattered even among many middle class folk whether by distance and separation from old communities or drugs and turning inward to mass media due to vibrancy and the dangers that brings. Look for the return of political violence as well, in the way that Europe and Central and South America have seen it in the past.

In general, as our elites –  who are largely Semitics and cosmopolitans generally – sit on their sordid thrones in all the splendor befitting the upper castes of Central and South America, so too will our country take on the same flavor. I see no reason that the US and much of the West will not come to look more like Brazil, Mexico, or Colombia in the next five to fifteen years.

Only great tides of blood can wash away the stains.