An Alliance between the New Right and Marxism?

Last updated on: December 9, 2022 at 5:06 pm By Gene Veith

Marxists, as you will recall, believe that history is the story of conflict between socio-economic classes, and that one day the working class will rise up in revolution to overthrow the middle class property owners, ushering in the “workers’ paradise” of communism.

Most of today’s Leftists are “post-Marxists,” substituting out other kinds of group oppressions–races, sexes, sexual preferences, species, etc.–for the old class struggle. But you can still find classic Marxists pining for a communist revolution.

What surprised me, though, is at least some of them are forming an alliance with the New Right. What surprised me even more is that some on the Trump-supporting New Right are open to forming an alliance with them!

I came across a fascinating article by New York University sociologist Vivek Chibber entitled How Capitalism Endures, This article is adapted from his book The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn, which, judging from the Amazon descriptions, is a Marxist critique of the new left’s attention to culture rather than to economic class. He argues that cultural issues too have a “materialist” basis, and he attempts to bring Gramsci (a father of “cultural” Marxism) and Marx back together.

Chibber points out that today’s left is mostly bourgeois, with little connection to the proletariat.

Today, insofar as there is a left in the core economies of the advanced industrial world, it is largely divorced from the working class. It is housed mainly in professional settings like university campuses and nonprofit organizations, not in the neighborhoods and productive establishments where labor confronts capital.

Meanwhile, working class discontent is expressing itself in populist politics (my emphasis):

To the extent that members of the working class have expressed their discontent, they have done so with the means available to them, and the only such means universally available at present is the ballot box. No wonder, then, that the discontent has tended to be electoral in form and that the explosion has been populist in content, whether on the left or right. The new populist wave of the past decade is the new face of working-class rebellion today.

That is to say, Donald Trump and his supporters are the vanguard of the proletariat revolution!

The article was published in the online magazine Compact, a flagship forum for the New Right. According to its Wikipedia article, the publication was founded by Sohrab Ahmari, of “Against David French-ism” fame; Matthew Schmitz, the former senior editor of First Things; and Edwin Aponte, described as a “Marxist populist.” Wikipedia reports that Aponte came on board after he was assured “that half of the site’s content cover ‘material concerns,'” which is Marxist jargon for historical materialism, with its implications of economic determinism and class struggle.

I can’t understand how the two Catholics, Ahmari and Schmitz, could agree to this. As integralists (Adrian Vermeule is a contributing editor), they oppose “liberalism,” including what they call “liberal conservatism”–that is, the emphasis on liberty. They have that in common with communists.

See also Stephanie Slade’s article in the libertarian magazine Reason entitled In a New Magazine, the Illiberal Right and the Illiberal Left Converge with the deck “Compact brings ‘labor populism’ and ‘political Catholicism’ under one roof.” She writes,

Americans are primed to think of their politics in terms of a left-right spectrum. But these days, the more interesting and important divide is the liberalism schism, with liberal in this context referring to the principles of classical liberalism rather than left-of-center politics. Both left liberals and right liberals generally support due process, free trade, religious liberty, and the like, although left liberals are usually less concerned with economic freedom than are right liberals. . . .

Compact appears as a high-profile effort to introduce a united illiberal front, one that couples support for state enforcement of traditional social mores with a healthy appetite for redistribution and central planning of the economy. (For what it’s worth, the first day’s offerings point as well to a strong anti-interventionist bent on foreign policy.) Gluing it all together is the editors’ certainty that liberalism, whether on the left or on the right, is the enemy. . . .

By bringing a “labor populism” with deep roots in the socialist tradition and a “political Catholicism” that questions the very separation of church and state under a single roof, Compact has built an intellectual meeting place not just for post-liberal conservatives but for anti-liberals of every stripe. Watch out.

As a survivor of the Cold War and as an old-school anti-communist, anti-totalitarian, small government conservative, I second that emotion: “Watch out.”

Illustration: Soviet poster dedicated to the 5th anniversary of the October Revolution and IV Congress of the Communist International (1922). Иван Васильевич Симаков / Ivan Vasilyevich Simakov ( 1877—1925) [1], Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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Conservatives Split over Religion

Last updated on: December 9, 2022 at 7:45 am By Gene Veith

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We’ve been blogging about National Conservatism (see here and here and here). Much of the controversy over the movement has to do with its religious agenda, its seeming openness to establishing Christianity as the nation’s official religion.

But, as Joshua Tait points out, not all National Conservatives and other members of the so-called “New Right”–essentially, the Trump-inspired ideology that favors the working class, limits on capitalism, making America great again, and opposition to woke progressivism–are religious. In fact, many conservatives are irreligious, or even anti-religious.

In his essay The Growing Religious/Secular Rift on the Illiberal Right, Tait sums up his thesis in his first paragraph:

On the illiberal right, there’s a divide between religiously motivated conservatives and their secular allies. This divide will likely grow, and be felt at both the elite and popular levels. In one sense, this is not new: There has long been a religious/secular fault line in the conservative coalition. But as hypocritical as the religious right can be, religious—generally Christian—impulses have at times tempered American conservatism. Now, however, we already see signs of a cynical irreligious right and how its ideas and attitudes have infected politically minded believers.

Just as church involvement has been declining in the general population, he says, it is declining among conservatives. Some of them are arguing that since the “nation” they are championing is no longer all that religious, religion must play a smaller role in the conservative movement. A major constituency of the New Right are the “folk libertarians,” whom Tait describes as “the deeply ingrained political culture that rejects the overweening authority of both the state and scolds.” They dislike the “scolds “of woke progressivism, but they also dislike the “scolds” of traditional Christianity. He quotes New

[Nate] Hochman argues that from here out, social conservatism will mean “race relations, identity politics, immigration and the teaching of American history.” Issues like “school prayer, no-fault divorce and homosexuality” are nonstarters. . . . Critically, the New Right won’t “restore” Christians “to their pre-eminent place in public life.” “But it may have an actual chance at winning,” Hochman concludes. Given the poor performance of ballot measures aiming at restricting abortion this November, Republican strategists are probably learning this lesson right now.

Tait names the non-religious and even anti-religious figures on the New Right and discusses other aspects of this divide. He seems to recognize that members of the religious right, with their numbers and their activism, are important foot-soldiers for the conservative movement, but, quoting Hochman, they are “partners, rather than leaders.”

Hand in hand with this declining influence, Tait, who is not sympathetic to the New Right, notes a “hardening of the right-wing discourse.” Christianity has always injected a strain of compassion into conservatism. He concludes,

Perhaps Hochman is right, and a secular right will become ascendant politically and intellectually. But an American right wing that jettisons serious Christianity is a frightening proposition. Although Christianity can, when it intersects with politics, veer toward self-righteousness and exclusiveness, orthodox Christianity also foregrounds forgiveness, charity, and hope. These virtues are essential to democracy.

He quotes Ross Douthat, the Catholic columnist for the New York Times, who tweeted to his liberal readers, “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.”

What do you think of this? Perhaps Tait and Hochman overstate their case. A political movement needs voters, as well as political theories, and if 80% of Republicans are believers, which is the figure Tait gives, they are going to retain their influence, despite what the movement’s secularist intellectuals might prefer.

And perhaps the Trumpist “New Right” will fade away, along with their fearless leader, and we will see a revival of the old small government, free enterprise brand of conservatism, the “liberal right” that values liberty, democracy, and constitutionalism. That brand of conservatism formed a coalition of citizens with libertarian, business, and religious interests united around opposition to Communism. Today something similar could emerge, united around opposition to woke progressivism, with its big government ideology and its hostility to constitutional rights. In that scenario, the “illiberal” right, which also promotes big government solutions, might ally with the “illiberal” left.

Would you Christian conservatives in the audience persist with a purely secularist conservative movement, one that cared nothing for moral and “family values” issues but was all about “race relations, identity politics, immigration and the teaching of American history”? Would that be enough to secure your political allegiance?

Photo: East rift zone, Kilauea in Hawaii, by Dave Bunnell, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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How Institutions Become Corrupt

Last updated on: November 29, 2022 at 7:35 pm By Gene Veith

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Often I stumble upon brilliant, clarifying insights that seem just tossed off in a piece of writing on a completely different topic.

Two history professors, Michael C. Behrent of Appalachian State and K. Steven Vincent of North Carolina State, wrote an article for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal entitled Administrators Have Seized the Ivory Tower. In it, they decry the enormous growth in the number of administrators on college campuses, which sometimes pay more for administrative positions than they do for classroom faculty. Such bureaucracy, they argue, is responsible for many of the problems and much of the decline in American higher education.

Speaking as a former professor and a former administrator, I think they are right. But what floored me was this comment in the article’s last paragraph:

The founders of the democratic tradition understood that institutions are prone to corruption. This does not mean that they cease to operate. It means, to the contrary, that they continue to function, but in ways that no longer serve their original purpose. Modern universities — including the UNC System — might be compared, in this sense, to the Renaissance papacy or the 18th-century British parliament: rich and powerful organizations only vaguely aware of their original mission.

Think about that. . . .Their point is that modern universities have become corrupt because, while they still function, they have forgotten their original purpose; namely, to educate young adults and to transmit and add to the fund of human knowledge. Instead, they have become credential machines in which the faculty is preoccupied with leftwing politics, the administrators are preoccupied with making money; and students are preoccupied with socializing.

The papacy in Luther’s time had forgotten its original purpose in the early church of being the bishop of Rome to instead make claims to be the ultimate infallible authority in the whole church and to reign over a worldly empire. The British parliament originally was established to ensure the liberties of the commons, but by the 18th century it was trampling on the liberties of its colonists.

But let’s keep applying this to other institutions that have been corrupted. . . .

The institution of marriage? Instead of serving its original purpose to bind a man and a woman together to form a new family with a view to conceive and care for children, marriage has been turned into a transient romantic attachment between two people of any sex, whose purpose is self-fulfillment.

Churches? Do some of them “no longer serve their original purpose,” namely, to save and equip people for eternal life by means of Word and Sacrament? Or are they preoccupied with politics, prosperity, status, and other worldly concerns?

Our government? Does it serve its original purpose? Or has it become corrupt?

Public schools?

Businesses?

The news media?

I invite you to play along in the comments. What other institutions are functioning in ways that depart from their original purpose and so can be described as corrupt?

HT: George Leef

Photo by form PxHere, CC0

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Technology and Materialism

Last updated on: November 28, 2022 at 1:17 pm By Gene Veith

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Technology has undoubted benefits. But modern technology can bring with it a certain mindset and worldview–utilitarianism, materialism, and reductionism–which, in turn, can lead to unintended consequences.

Swedish theologian Stefan Lindholm sorts out these issues as they apply to Artificial Intelligence, Transhumanism, and other contemporary issues with the help of the French Reformed thinker Jacques Ellul. Lindholm is a Lutheran priest (what they call pastors in Sweden) and theology professor at the Johannelund School of Theology, operated by the Lutheran Swedish Evangelical Mission.

His article, Jacques Ellul and the Idols of Transhumanism, is published in Religion & Liberty, the periodical of the Acton Institute, edited by Anthony Sacramone. (We blogged about him and his magazine, which is now available for hard-copy subscription. His fans will want to read the essay in which he tells of his return to Christianity and to Lutheranism.)

Jacques Ellul, to be mentioned in the same breath as Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, was a Christian thinker who wrote about the effects of modern technology back in the 1950s, when even television was brand new and long before the internet and the digital revolution. And yet he anticipated much of what we are trying to deal with today and gives us some helpful concepts to make sense of it all.

I’m going to extract from Lindholm’s article what he gleans from Ellul. I’ll then make some applications of my own. I’ll let you read the article to learn of Lindholm’s applications to Artificial Intelligence, Transhumanism, the Singularity, and the like. Ellul’s analysis also helps to account for the ethical ideology that has become popular among our tech lords, which I’ll post about next week.

Ellul’s key book on the subject is The Technological Society, originally published in French in 1954 and translated into English in 1964, at the suggestion, Lindholm adds, of Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian classic Brave New World. Ellul focuses on “technique.” Here is how Lindholm explains the concept and what Ellul does with it (my emphases):

Technique is simply defined as the complex of rationally ordered methods and means for making all human activities more efficient. On the surface it may not sound harmful, but problems arose in the modern period when this innate tendency in human practical rationality began to be applied to virtually all areas of human life and beyond, converting everything into a means to an end. As a consequence, the ends to which the tightly controlled means are directed have been arbitrarily stipulated by the whims and wishes of human societies. The modern methods of technique, so understood, are all-pervasive and have become a complex integrated and autonomous system that has slipped out of the hands of humans so that we are always and everywhere in the hands of technique. It has become its own kind of all-embracing ideology. Ellul points out that for modern people, virtually every problem in every domain of life—from a mere inconvenience to an illness to an existential crisis—is expected to have a technical solution. The irony is that the problems that technique is supposed to solve often arose as a consequence of an earlier technique. The result is a kind of technological totalitarianism that exponentially will—although not by absolute necessity, Ellul is careful to add—continue to shape and control human societies and life. . . .

[Ellul] remarks: “When Technique displays an interest in man, it does so by converting him into a material object,” and man will be guaranteed the kinds of “material happiness as material objects can [guarantee].… But the technical society is not, and cannot be, a genuinely humanist society, since it puts in first place not man but material things.” Ellul is convinced that human or “spiritual” excellence and progress is not reducible to technique. Conversely, material development is not identical to spiritual or intellectual maturation.

In other words, preoccupation with technique–how we can get something done–requires thinking about what means can lead to a desired end. And when our techniques are turned into successful technology, we are encouraged to see everything as a means to an end and to assume that all of our problems can be solved by technology. Technique and technology reduces everything to materialistic terms. And technique and technology makes us think that everything is subject to our own control.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but modern technology and the modern attitude towards technology have displaced religion and have taken the place of religion.

As theologian Norman Wirzba points out in The Paradise of God: Technique (Techne) in the antique was the human way of working with the inherent order and reason (Logos), whereas the modern combination of the two—technology—is the exaltation of human intelligence as the order of things. Ellul teases out the spiritual consequences:

The individual who lives in the technical milieu knows very well that there is nothing spiritual anywhere. But man cannot live without the sacred. He therefore transfers his sense of the sacred to the very thing which has destroyed its former object: to technique itself. In the world in which we live, technique has become the essential mystery.

Again, read Lindholm’s article for how this applies to the tech world. But let’s consider how it applies to other issues.

For example, sex. This natural drive can create problems for people. So we have developed techniques and technological solutions. Sex can lead to pregnancy, which sometimes women and men do not want: so we have used our technology to provide contraceptive pills and devices. Pregnancy sometimes happens anyway, so we have come up with abortion technology, whether surgical or chemical, to take care of that problem. Some people want sex but do not have a partner, so we have technological solutions, such as pornography on the internet and sex robots. But do you see how this technological approach to sex reduces its natural and moral meaning?

Some people would prefer to be a different sex. Technology can solve that problem too, with puberty blockers, masectomies hysterectomies, castration, and plastic surgery. Do you see how this technological approach to gender reduces human beings to the status of inanimate material, to be fabricated like any other raw material according to consumer demands? And do you see the danger of unintended consequences?

Or consider education. Classical education was preoccupied with “ends,” with things that are valuable in themselves, such as the absolutes of goodness, truth, and beauty; humane qualities such as virtue, freedom, and duty; and spiritual realities such as faith, hope, and love. Modern education, assuming education must be a means to some material end, asks, but what can you do with all that? Teaching became reduced to a set of techniques designed to achieve strictly material and measurable ends, whether economic (getting a good job; making lots of money) or social (holding to progressive ideologies and attitudes).

Or consider religion. Church membership is down, so we look for “techniques” to grow the church. Since that mindset sees everything as a means to an end, we evaluate Christian worship, doctrine, and practices accordingly, jettisoning those elements that we think get in the way of the goal. Technology, we think, can help, so we make use of high tech production equipment, musical recordings, video screens, online services, and the virtual reality metaverse. Some things might be gained, if we are careful, but what is lost or ignored? At what point, in Ellul’s terms, have we transferred the sense of the sacred to the very thing which has destroyed the sacred?

How else could we apply Ellul’s analysis?

Photo: “Jacques Ellul in his studio” by Jan van Boeckel, ReRun Productions, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The Making of the Non-Binary Gender

Last updated on: November 27, 2022 at 6:13 pm By Gene Veith

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When we think of “transgender,” we usually think of men wanting to become women and women wanting to become men. But there is more to it than that.

Yesterday we posted about the 130 genders listed on an application form for San Francisco’s guaranteed income for trans people. Most of them were variations on the theme of being “non-binary.” That is, being neither a man or a woman.

It occurred to me that people who claim this gender identity may be casualties of the sexual revolution and of radical feminism.

Yes, human beings have a powerful drive for sex. But we also have a powerful drive not to have sex. Virtually every culture fences off sex with taboos and moral rules. Virtually every human being has inhibitions about sex. Because sex by its nature is for marriage and procreation, it is too important and too powerful to trivialize. Women need to protect themselves and be protected against sexual predators, and men need to cultivate the self-discipline not to become sexual predators.

Our own culture, though, has thrown off its taboos and inhibitions. Contraceptives and abortion have made it possible to have sex without procreation, and thus without marriage. The sexual revolution has worked hard to eliminate all natural inhibitions about sex. The culture works to eliminate all taboos by sexualizing our entertainment and our art forms, thus normalizing sex apart from marriage and reproduction. Even our technology is sexualized, as pornography cuts off sex not only from procreation and marriage but from any human contact whatsoever.

The result is an intense cultural pressure, especially among young adults, to be sexually active. If not with the opposite sex, then, since sex no longer has an essential connection to procreation, with someone of the same sex. And if no one is available or willing, sexual pleasure–the only dimension of sex that survives–can be found in the privacy (a remnant of the inhibitions) of one’s computer.

But what if a person does not want to play these games? Religion and morality can liberate a person from these pressures, but what can someone with little conception of religion and morality but who wants sexual integrity do? One option is to reject sex altogether, not in the sense of celibacy or chastity, but rejecting one’s own sexual identity, with all of the pressures and expectations that go with it. To be neither a woman nor a man. To be non-binary.

There is ideological pressure that works in the same direction. Radical feminism teaches how woman are fundamentally oppressed. So who would want to be a woman? And the fundamental oppressors are men. So who would want to be a man?

Far better to be neither a woman nor a man, to be non-binary, to be one of the 130 options.

This is just speculation. I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. Then again, I’m not sure I believe psychologists or psychiatrists on this subject, since they mostly seem to accept the notion that gender is a matter of self-identification disconnected from the body.

I know that some young children, when asked by their teachers to choose their gender, will say they are non-binary. Even though they know little about what that or being a boy or being a girl means, adults, including sometimes their progressive parents, will seize on that and subject them to gender negation treatments. But that is simply gender dysphoria plus child abuse.

Whatever the reasons why a given individual wants to be or feels non-binary, I am confident that it has something to do with the breakdown of the family, the distortions of both masculinity and femininity, and our disordered sexual ethos.

And resolving today’s confusions about gender and sex will require the restoration of marriage and parenthood.

Image by pikisuperstar on Freepik

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On China’s COVID Protests

Last updated on: November 28, 2022 at 10:16 am By Gene Veith

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It’s not just China but The “People’s” Republic of China. It was supposedly born out of a revolution of the working class, in which the “masses” rose up to overthrow the ruling class. Funny thing, though. Communism may have its beginnings as a populist movement, but once the revolution takes place, the “people” are put under restrictions like never before. But, as tyrants eventually learn, the people can only be pushed down so far until they rise up.

China, under President and Communist Party chairman Xi Jinping, has adopted a “no COVID” policy. Any outbreak results in brutal lockdowns of apartment buildings, factories, cities, and regions. We had a taste of that in the early phase of the epidemic, but locking down is no metaphor in China takes, as people infected with or exposed to the disease are literally locked into their homes.

Even now, long after the rest of the world has moved on from such restrictions and even after the Omicron variant now dominant is proving much less dangerous than the earlier varieties, China has become more strict than ever. There have only been six deaths from COVID in the last six months out of tens of thousands of cases in a nation of 1.4 billion. But Chairman Xi has demanded that there be no cases at all.

The populace has been chafing over the heavy handed quarantines. Loved ones are dying not from COVID but from the lockdowns, as caregivers are prevented from caring for aging parents and ambulances are prevented from going into infected areas. Last week at the world’s largest iPhone factory--where your iPhone was probably made if you have one–some 200,000 workers blew up, with some fleeing the plant due to rumors of a COVID outbreak, knowing that they wouldn’t be allowed to go home, and others protesting living conditions in make-shift dormitories they were forced to live in. When the promised hazard pay didn’t come through, the protests turned to rioting.

But then, across the country, all Hell broke loose. In the city of Urumqi residents have been prevented from leaving their homes for as long as 100 days. Last Thursday, a fire broke out in an apartment building. Blockades and quarantine enforcers in hazmat suits delayed firefighters from getting to the fire. And residents of the building were unable to escape because the doors had been locked from the outside. As a result, ten people perished in the fire.

As accounts of the fire and videos of the enforcers hindering rescuers spread on social media, protests broke out–in the city, in the region, in universities across the country, and in towns and cities everywhere–as thousands of Chinese citizens poured into the streets in defiance of both the lockdowns and the government, which has a history of brutally crushing all dissent.

But the demonstrations soon went beyond just protesting the COVID restrictions. In Shanghai, China’s largest city, protesters chanted “Step down, Xi Jinping! Step down, Communist Party!” They set up memorials of candles, flowers, and placards and held up blank sheets of paper, which has become a symbol of censorship. (Censored Americans may want to use that.) They chanted, “Need human rights, need freedom.” And “Don’t want Covid test, want freedom!” And “Don’t want dictatorship, want democracy!”

Comments the UK Daily Mail in a heavily-illustrated account of the protests, “Every of these slogans is enough to send a person to jail for 10 years.” The people chanted the slogans anyway.

Perhaps the protests will blow over. Perhaps they will be crushed and the chanters will be identified from the videos and imprisoned for ten years. But perhaps not.

Mass popular uprisings like this one recall the overthrow of communism in the Soviet Union. The government did try to crush the rebellion, but the military forces, with their guns and tanks, refused to fire upon their fellow citizens and joined the revolt. While that was going on, China had a popular uprising of its own, but the military obeyed and did the government’s dirty work.

We’ll have to see what happens this time. Perhaps the government will make some concessions on the issue, easing the lockdowns. But such concessions often raise expectations and lead to other kinds of changes, as the people see that the government can be forced to do their bidding. Reportedly, the government has flooded protest zones with security personnel, emptying the streets for now. But the knowledge that a seething, angry mass of citizens who yearn for freedom exists under the surface can only be unsetting for the communist rulers.

Some American progressives have been looking fondly at Chinese authoritarianism (see here and here and here) for being able to “get things done” without all of the messy limitations on government imposed by a free society. Think, for example, of columnist Thomas Friedman’s fantasy of being “China for a day,” in which time the government could solve our environmental and economic problems with impunity.

But governments would do well to fear their people. Authoritarian governments are especially afraid of their people, which is why they try to control them so completely and try to make them fear their government. But freedom has a way of asserting itself.

Photo from Twitter via Daily Mail

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