As surely as the American body politic has seams, it now appears bent on coming apart at them. The centrifugal force of a blood feud between conservatives and liberals is only half the story. The other half is the displacement of inclusively-minded liberals by exclusively-minded progressives.
The main liberal party of the twentieth century, the Democrats, were always known for disarray. The array of interests represented by the party assured that. Blocs, in the course of vying for influence, were bound to rock the boat. Those Democrats who had no need of a bloc were liable to find the rocking a bit much. Still, at the end of the day, there was a sense of being Democrats all. Underlying shared values were sufficient for cohesion.
All the while, however, something was happening that would lead to a crisis of value-sharing. More and more liberals were casually becoming amenable to the concept of class struggle. People who would never have thought of espousing Marxism itself seem to have thought nothing of picking up Marxian tropes. As they did so, they gave liberalism an aspect of slavishly canting piety. For example, the reflex of depersonalizing responsibility for antisocial behavior and looking for root causes in society got to be so compulsive that the phrase “root cause” became a running joke among the unsympathetic. Some legacy liberals turned away in disgust. They would soon receive the derogatory new label
neoconservative from erstwhile peers who, for their own part, were turning to the dogmatically progressive left.
Next the American vision of society as one big assemblage of individuals came under pressure from multiculturalism, with its premise that ethnic identity groups ought to be affirmed, celebrated, accommodated, and given a wide berth; not expected to dissolve in the fullness of time. The liberal abhorrence of lumping people together, founded on the recognition that it's the groundwork of bigotry, became untenable for progressives. Not only did it fit badly with multiculturalist assumptions, but it collided head-on with Marxist ones. Marxist thought doesn't really get rolling until it has lumped people together and designated certain lumps the enemy. Liberals oppose prejudice as a matter of principle. Marxists have less time for principle than for useful prejudice.
Modern progressive politics made a ready basin for a confluence of two dynamics. One was this Marxist imperative to submerge individuals in classes, lest minute particulars make a mess of political clarity. The other was the universal tendency for schools of thought to seek their strong forms over time and for movements to take on the character of their firebrands. Those who are most militant in agitating for racial justice will tend to villainize whites indiscriminately. Those who are most militant in agitating against entrenched ways will tend to villainize elders indiscriminately. The tendency runs to an extreme in the case of feminism, a movement that was bound to act as a magnet for women inclined to misandrous sisterhood. And so, among today's archetypal progressives, political engagement has become war on biological class enemies.
Males. White people. White males. Old people. Old white males. Or old white heterosexual cisgender males. The categories expand and contract, merge and split and morph from moment to moment as progressives improvise exceptions for their perceived clients, traps for their adversaries, and shelters for themselves. Personal virtue is beside the point. Every young white male, be he ever so woke, is in for it when he becomes an old one. Ostracism will come when newly ascendant progressive powers decree it. It came two years ago to one who was not male or particularly old or the least bit backward in her politics. It was sufficient that she was white, and the fact that she was Jewish clearly told against her in the unguarded early moments.
For details, please refer to the article "
Women’s March Roiled by Accusations of Anti-Semitism" in
The New York Times (December 23, 2018). The gist is that one of the organizers of the Women's March, Vanessa Wruble, was morally isolated and then organizationally marginalized for her identity. The faction that accomplished this consisted of a black woman, Tamika Mallory, and a Latina, Carmen Perez, later joined by the Palestinian-American Linda Sarsour and "another woman named Bob Bland, a white fashion designer who created one of the first Facebook pages about the march". These four proceeded to lead the organization under a cloud of rancor until
it was announced in September, 2019, that Mallory, Sarsour, and Bland were "moving on to other commitments".
Meanwhile, Wruble's antagonists had fallen back to the position of deploring anti-Semitism in principle and allowing that Wruble had one foot within the pale inasmuch as Jews had been victims of oppression. They downplayed their ties with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan (who anyway complicates the puzzle of progressive solidarity by inveighing not only against whites generally and Jews particularly, but also against LGBTQ people). But come what may, these progressive paragons will never appreciate the spectacle they make in the eyes of mere liberals as they stamp through their activist careers, grimly totting up and doling out credit for victim status as if that were the currency of virtue and they the purse-keepers.
Fifty-five years ago, the black civil rights worker James Chaney faced death with two other young men, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. They were white. They were Jewish. They were not the only whites or the only Jews who put their lives on the line in the cause of justice for black Americans. At the same period, black Americans' strongest ally in this world was the United States Government, personified by a white president who had made up his mind to see the battle through regardless of political consequences ("Well, what the hell is the presidency for?") and an equally resolute Department of Justice, a bastion of white males. America was that rare kind of country in which members of the ethnic majority will rally around a small minority. It's that kind of country today, even while its federal government languishes in piratical captivity. All along, Jewish white Americans, both female and male, have stood in the forefront of efforts to preserve civil liberties and to extend social justice. Yet they are now under attack from people who, if not merely ignorant or merely absorbed in the Palestinian cause (to the exclusion of the Uyghur cause and the Tibetan cause), are perhaps resentful of a moral example which they cannot hope to follow. For more, please see "
On the Frontlines of Progressive Anti-Semitism" (
The New York Times, November 14, 2019).
When progressives assign themselves and others to biologically determined classes, they escape the need to test their views against common standards of reason or to circumscribe their claims with common values, because they have denied commonality itself. Opinions from across a biological border can always be dismissed out of hand by saying, in effect, “Consider the source.” Fundamental notions of justice or of moral responsibility can, like the literary canon, be dismissed by saying they embody the interests of an oppressor class.
This trick of escaping may be a deliberate strategy, but it takes us on a wild binge at the expense of communal health. Of course, a civic organism as well endowed as American democracy may prove robust enough to experience a binge like the current one and still show up for work in the morning. It does have a history of rebounding from misspent nights to do better work than before. Maybe even this period of fevered lumping-together and pulling-apart will turn out to have been only a phase in the life of a growing nation. Then, if it’s not too late, we can give all our attention to the state of our undeniably common planet.
