Chapter 8. Cognitive Gluttony Meets Race and Gender
“Quarrels would not last long if the fault were only on one side.”
--la Rochefoucauld
Let’s review where we are before forging further ahead. We need to do this because, as indicated at the beginning, this is a complex argument with several interwoven and recursive aspects that are likely as hard to get one’s head around in the reading as I have struggled to master them in the writing.
Having in Part II so far defined spectacle specifically as an astounding complex in the language of cognitive psychology (Chapter 6), and having tethered that anchor to a deeper dive into brain functionality and the human endocrine system (Chapter 7), we are now ready in Chapters 8 and 9 to revisit some of the themes raised in Part I in the light of a clearer grasp of the connections among the biochemistry, psychological, economic, cultural, and political aspects of the aborning Age of Spectacle.
As we proceed we will again bring to bear the watchwords of the argument developed in Part I and deepened thus far in Part II: affluence fragilized by cost disease and especially the broader net effect, which has sired an oligopolistic surge in the U.S. economy leading to a ossified plutocratic political disorder; the lost of our stories amid the pluralization of our mythopoetical core at the end of modernity, hence the forfeiture of our means for rebuilding democratic solidarity; sharply eroded deep literacy that, in tandem with the evil twin of screen addictions, has introduced a chasm between our Enlightenment-origined institutions and our capacity as a society to understand, appreciate, and operate those institutions; and the consequent regression of the culture into a postmodern surrealist-inflected orality that beckons a revenant mythic consciousness and with it the displacement of the causal grammar of the Lebenswelt with both old and novel expressions of magical efficacy.
In sum, the contemporary American spectacle mentality sums to a polarized stereo outrage-manufacturing immoderation machine that deranges everything it touches. It is a Janus-faced mentality suspended between a clot of amnesic nostalgia in thrall to a reality that never was on the Right, and a radical egalitarian utopianism in thrall to a reality than can never be on the Left. Adolescent quality ideological thinking, tinged with darting fantasies of magical efficacy, adorns both orality-borne extremes, the Left’s version an ideology of untethered hope, the Right’s version an ideology of xenophobic hate.
Pressed tight between these clattering cacophonous manias, no subject fraught or frilly once entered the circus grounds that used to be the American agora can resist being stretched, bent, dragged, drawn and quartered: spectacalized, in other words, and shorn of close resemblance to anything real. Our politics are not polarized because of rational, understandable disagreements about difficult, open-ended issues. Our politics are polarized because our culture abets polarization at every turn even with respect to even the most trivial of issues.
We could use a spectacle detumescence about now, but we are not likely to get one. Indeed, the spectacalization process, the essential antecedent to our surrealist political condition, now manifests even in something as anodyne as the increased use of exclamation marks in social media--the only sort of narrative writing many Americans do anymore. Writes Florence Hazrat, author of a history of the exclamation point, the Chicago Manual of Style states that the exclamation mark should be used “sparingly to be effective” but, Hazrat observantly asks, “What does ‘sparingly’ mean in our emphatic times?”[1] It may “lend humanity to digital missives,” she observes, but at what knock-on cost to apprehending reality as it actually is she does not enquire. Emphatic times, indeed.
A kind of cognitive gluttony for things and experiences, as well as for the food calories begetting a national obesity epidemic, has enveloped us and threatens to drag us down into hell’s wormhole. It is just as Crichton wrote in Timeline: We must be entertained, the more sensationally he better; we must never be bored; our wandering attention is continuously for rent; and damned be the consequences which we summon all our residual strength to not think about.
Our cognitive metabolism for entertainment, for flamboyance in all forms, and for spectacle above all else, has arguably reached trans-evolutionary levels with the onset of the cyberlution. As a society we are coping so poorly with it that the Lebenswelt rather too often seems to have gotten misplaced, as already limned in Chapter 4. The trend to spectacle is of course not entirely new, but it is far more advanced now than when Saul Bellow put in the mouth of his emotionally disturbed yet still clearheaded hero Herzog these words back in 1964:
How we all love extreme causes and apocalypses, fires, drownings, stranglings, and the rest of it. The bigger our mild, basically ethical, safe middle classes grow the more radical excitement is in demand. Mild or moderate truthfulness or accuracy seems to have no pull at all.[2]
The boredom of Nietzsche’s “last man” is nothing to snuffle at, especially when the urge to break out of boredom depends over much on mobilizing the ever-captivating primal forces of racial and gender identities.
That cultural tic or bias, precisely, is what unifies the disparate collection of subjects discussed in this chapter, many of which have already been mooted above in different contexts to make other points. These are subjects that might otherwise have no place in a book on the Age of Spectacle, but so capacious is the spectacalization impulse that it is hard to find any subject able to resist being dragged into it in one way or another. Principle of exclusion are therefore hard to come by when describing the spectacalization process in the culture, and its onward flow into our politics. But we can at least divide them into those subjects that have the most direct relevance for politics--culture war issues, mainly race and gender--and those less in the political crosshairs. This chapter looks at the first group; the next at more philosophically rarified aspects of our condition that, while not as obviously political, are hardly inconsequential to politics and culture alike.
Cognitive Gluttony Racialized
The American disposition to cognitive gluttony was obvious to a fault in the more extreme reactions to the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The reaction to that outrage, on balance, was arguably the best thing that had happened in the United States in years, since most of the protests were peaceful and racially integrated; what violence there was had little to do with George Floyd, more to do with the predictable results of tactically withdrawing the police in most cases to avoid more incendiary blue-on-black/black-on-blue violence. (Seattle and Portland were notable exceptions, already mentioned in passing, but the point is that they were exceptions.)
Every American generation, it seems, must rediscover for itself the challenge of structural and sticky legacy racism and mobilize constructively to overcome it. Not much constructive mobilization was on offer, alas, and it took a foreigner, Bruno Maçães, to best capture the moment:
. . . while racial progressivism has drawn many more white professionals to protests, both real and virtual, than ever before, polls show few of them support meaningful reforms of housing or school policies, which are the basic obstacles to reducing racial inequalities in this country. Instead, they apparently prefer to read Robin DiAngelo and reflect on their own sins.[3]
As nearly always lately, the spectacular fringes dominated the nation’s consciousness after May 25, 2020, enabled by the media which, as usual, chose to emphasize for its clickbait business model purposes. The reactions that seized pride of place were utterly adolescent, shedding layers of raw ideology without shame or self-awareness. A slogan, “law and order,” meant as a dogwhistle for “it’s ok to shoot people of color,” was not a serious response to the challenge. Neither was “abolish the police” or even merely “defund” the police, which amounts practically to the same thing. These were just slogans matching the child-like “acting out” temperament of the times: impatient, arational, emotional, simplistic, fact-free, zero-sum, and totalistic. Alas, it turns out that just as the extreme zero-sum Right is largely about race, wrongly understood because it prefers snapshots to videos, the zero-sum Left is also largely about race, also wrongly understood as bio-essentialist instead of genuinely cultural. Ironically, here we have agreement on the premise—which happens to be incorrect—but polarization on the answer, both parts of which are incorrect.
It is at a deeper level, however, that the most vivid lava flows of mass narcissistic irrationality may be found. Those flows help explain why the summer 2020 “moment” has not only never gone away but has grown more invasive of common sense. “We aren’t worthy” mea culpa self-abasement based on a presumption of personal obliviousness to white-skin privilege—what Alain Finkelkraut has called “self-racism”—bears a classic Jeremiad tone that is church-like to the bone and pew. This is leftwing post-Protestantism, or an emanation of the Protestant Deformation, as James Kurth once dubbed it, made possible by the nadir and subsequent abdication of mainline Protestantism.[4] Rightwing post-Protestantism we owe to the failure of its once-aspiring Evangelical pretender replacement to channel genuine Christian values instead of “prosperity” and, at the extreme, AR-15s. Create a vacuum that large in the mythopoetical center of a culture and multiple candidates will vie to fill it.[5]
We must ultimately succeed in filling that vacuum with a sensible constructive consensus on race if the culture is to endure in anything like a coherent form. American society needs desperately to unify its vision of a better future around some basic reality predicates and principles of social solidarity. As already suggested, a culture cannot depend for its survival on disillusionment and diffuse guilt alone. But that has not been developing lately; rather the reverse.
The willful wallowing in disillusionment, its lachrymose edge prominent as it trudges on, amounts to a performative narcissistic fantasy for 21st-century flagellants. It breeds, since it works as a market, and adores ahistorical and tautological self-help books like Robin DeAngelo’s White Fragility. Any book with the right tone that dodges real history suggests that the ideologically propelled despise actual history because it spites their desire to weaponize a caricature of it for polemical purposes. No ideology can bear the weight of a full, nuanced historical consciousness or it would not be an ideology, and thus would be unable to express itself with its characteristic motivated arationality.
Case in point: the poster prepared by staff of the Smithsonian’s Museum of African-American History purporting to show hard work and rational thinking as manifestations of “Whiteness” and “White Culture,” a formulation clearly premised on the assumption that culture is directly downstream from a warped version of ethno-biology. [6] It struck me that my former State Department bosses Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice might have been puzzled, even a bit put out, to learn that hard work and rational thinking are “White” traits. That outrage was quickly withdrawn and an apology offered, but the poster ended up, in full color, in Newsweek anyway, where many saw it. Nor is the bizarrely bad idea behind the poster dead: According to Matthew Yglesias, Oregon teacher-training materials have claimed that asking math students to “show their work” reinforces “White supremacy.”[7]
Clearly, most normal people, even if not particularly well educated, have enough sense to reason that if some sort of Platonic ideal of “Whiteness” exists, then “Blackness” too must be admissible as a cultural descriptor. But Leopold Senghor’s “Negritude” notions notwithstanding, this is madness born of a combination of lazy ideological thinking and encyclopedic ignorance. The actual cultural diversity of peoples on this planet who might fall under the “Black” rubric is flat-out stunning, but most Americans are clueless about that on account of their cloying insularity. Same goes for “White,” of course, which has anyway been a shifting category over time in American history; but sub-deep literate rightwing populists don’t know that either.
Even just within the United States ponder what possible intrinsic cultural “Blackness” could make Alicia Garza, Te-Nehisi Coates, John McWhorter, Dave Chappelle, and Shelby Steele think similarly about politics…not to mention Senator Tim Scott? Not to mention, too, the late, great Dick Gregory and those two former bosses of mine. What “Black culture” unites Jesse Jackson (descendent of slaves), Barack Obama (Kenyan father, white mother), and Kamala Harris (Jamaican father, Tamil mother)? A soft spot for Martha and the Vandellas oldies maybe?[8] One wonders if any of the employees who created that Smithsonian poster even know what a Tamil is, or have ever met one in India, Sri Lanka, or Singapore.
Yes of course there is a black subculture in the United States; indeed, there is not just one, but a range of Afro-American subcultures running from New Orleans to Oakland and St. Louis in between. These are identifiable by dialect, food ways, musical tastes, and other factors besides. That’s besides the point, however. The point is that the origin and evolution of these subcultures have nothing of significance to do with biology or certainly with any biological essentialism. They are artifacts of protracted, changing cultural experiences, period and full stop.
The renewed national moral panic over race jump-started again in May 2020—and that is what it has been, a moral panic, similar to the #MeToo panic of a few years earlier[9]—may be an additional source of the zero-sum redux laid out in Chapter 2, or it may be a consequence of it; probably it is both. But one thing is certain: This is a factor in American life that never goes completely away because it doesn’t know how. So we need to address it head on since, as we have seen in rehearsing the George Floyd episode, it is unavoidable raw material for competitive spectacalization.
Moral panic over race episodically crosses the nation’s path like a comet blazes across the night sky. The panic is inherently disposed to an either/or, zero-sum form, which is just one reason we should stop using the terms “Black” and “White”—with capital letters in print—to write about the subject. What vocabulary could possibly be more evocative of the zero-sum than “Black” and “White” juxtaposed against each other, when the juxtaposed words even when not capitalized often connote opposites?
Indeed, we now have a near consensus on social media that everyone must be categorized as either “White” or “Black”—the two-valued dualism Americans so love rears its ugly head again—and that causes a problem for both Indigenous people (that word, too, must now be capitalized according to Turabian and the Associated Press stylesheet) and especially so-called Hispanics. The category “Hispanic” is a bureaucratic fantasy invented by the U.S. Government to group people who speak Spanish as their first language as if that by itself could define an ethnicity.
Obviously, “Hispanics”—or even worse, Hispanx, which is to Hispanic what equity is to equality, namely a made-up word designed to reify an ideological tic—from Spain and Chile, say, have complexions about as light as any “white” person in the United States, while many “Hispanics” from Cuba are dark. And that says nothing about groups of indigenous peoples from Central America for whom Spanish is not really a first-language, but who get lumped into the “Hispanic” category anyway for lack of understanding of where else to put them. But on social media these days the typical view is that all minorities (except Jews and Asians) are “Black” because a minority cannot by identity politics definition be “White,” no matter their skin color—and those are deemed to be the only choices available. And so in a matter of a few years we have moved from capital-B Black because of a race-essentialist error to capital-B Black because of a zero-sum ideological fixation.
We should refuse to capitalize “black” and “white” when they refer to groups of people, unless grammar demands it as with sentences beginning with either word or when used within scare quotes to point out ideologized uses. If the Associated Press’s woke priesthood doesn’t like it, it’s their problem. Again, black and white are not monolithic cultures or subcultures but merely colors—of sorts, since in wavelength terms black literally means no color and white means all colors. And obviously, neither color aptly or accurately describes any person’s skin tone except maybe that of rare albinos and a small number of Papuans. Again: No one with a remotely competent idea of the diversity of peoples with darker-toned skins would ever lump all such people together in a single cultural label starting with a capital letter, so the practice depends on a encyclopedic ignorance ripe for ideological manipulation.
The same is obviously true for “white” people. The AP did not demand that white be capitalized but it is becoming more common anyway because of the understandable, if still pernicious, longing for equivalence between presumed opposites. To use capitals for these terms is to surrender to the shallowest version of identity politics ideology on offer and to further feed its contention of being self-evident. To do so not only falls into the trap of zero-sum, either/or thinking, it also contributes to making so-called racial politics just another form of American political blood sport.
That said, some Afro-Americans (a better term) insist on using “Black” with a capital “B” for god and understandable reasons. As already noted, there clearly are subcultural characteristics that apply to most Afro-Americans, but far more pithy by way of a rationale, Barbara Chase-Riboud, the Afro-American sculptor, painter, and author who has lived most of her life in France, argues that as long as lighter-skinned people insist on mis-calling themselves “white,” with all that used to imply and for some still implies about supposed racial hierarchies, she will call herself “Black.” Translation: White European Christians created the artificially stark categories of “black” and “white” for purposes both foolish and foul, and as long as they persist in their error of thinking in terms of groups rather than individual human beings—and she’s right, white people started that—they have no right to tell darker-skinned people what to call themselves. Chase-Riboud’s implicit challenge: If you stop the nonsense you created, then so will I.
Chase-Riboud’s key point raises an interesting conundrum. She is clearly referencing Martin Luther King’s plea for a colorblind society: “by the content of character, not the color of skin.” But what if suddenly she were to get her way? Is colorblindness when deliberately practiced by Caucasians of European origin not a virtue but a sin for its seeming to dismiss the sticky residue of racism that persists into the present day? (Critical Race Theory is not wrong about that premise, just wrong about everything else—more on that anon.) Is it not an insulting “by your own bootstraps” intimation, as if that pulling were as easily achieved as proclaimed?
It certainly can be. That leaves most Americans with a difficult ideal to put into practice: Know privately, in one’s heart, that colorblindness is and must be the goal of a better American society; but speak in mixed company, as it were, in such a way as to acknowledge the stickiness of a regrettable past. That can be a tough balancing act, but protracted difficulty is a just wage for former protracted depredations. It is in any case a necessary act, for it bears merit in correcting impressions gone astray.
This time as in earlier times of American moral panic about race, a vicious dialectic has sprung loose: Today, probably most Afro-Americans have come to conclude that all the disadvantages they face are the result of continuing systemic racism, when in fact only some of them are the result of mostly unsystematic but sticky racism from times past. This is a distinction with a difference, for that conclusion strikes properly intentioned and in times past often brave white Americans more as a triple accusation of failure, bad faith, and arrogance. Vicious dialectic, indeed.
Discrimination in residential housing markets, for example, usually called red-lining, used to be racist up and down the line. Today discrimination in residential housing markets, for buying and renting alike, has less to do with racism than it does with the fact that chastised lenders post-2008 must follow strict guidelines based on credit-worthiness data. Afro-Americans as a group—for sticky reasons having to do partly with past racism—often do not score well. Many avoid checking accounts, work in cash-economy jobs, and either abjure having credit cards or else get stuck in debt partly because of them. Banks don’t often hand out loans in such circumstances, and if they do they demand interest rates and collateral obligations imbalanced from the norm. To them that’s business, not racial discrimination. The result may be roughly similar to the bad old days if we discount the significant growth of the Afro-American middle class over the past half-century, but unless one thinks conscious motivations are unimportant, the difference between then and now does matter.
Many “whites,” particularly younger ones who did not witness the changed attitudes of the past sixty to seventy years, also erroneously believe that all the disadvantages Afro-Americans face are the result of continuing systemic racism. That they believe this appears often to be a willful obsession with pronouncing themselves guilty and forcing their own atonement. It has precious little to do with a firm grip on social or historical reality. Ask such a contemporary flagellant how a systematically racist nation, supposedly still unreformed today, came to elect Barack Obama President of the United States not once but twice, and expect some awkward pauses followed by some remarkable logical gymnastics. Ask them to explain the fact that Afro-Americans as a group have higher average per capita living standards than any “black” minority or majority population anywhere in the world, whether in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, the United Kingdom, or elsewhere in Europe. More awkward pauses, most likely, will follow.
Meanwhile, forming the other side of the dialectic, many less well-educated and less pluralized white Americans fear that black empowerment will loose cannonades of revenge upon them for past sins real and imagined. When misperceptions about racism and misperceptions about a desire for physical revenge meet, they produce a downward spiral of mistrust, anxiety, and mutual alienation. Worse, opportunists on both sides magnify these misperceptions for their own purposes, and that makes it all worse.
That, regrettably, is where we are. Race in America should not be seen as a zero-sum struggle; a closer look at historical reality suggests quite the opposite. European-origin settlers and imported black slaves, not to mention all the other immigrants of various skin hues to the United States over decades, have gotten so entwined in so many ways during more than three centuries of American history that any flat either/or statement about it must be false.[10] That certainly includes Critical Race Theory in general and the 1619 Project in particular, which base themselves on an antique version of the Marxist theory of surplus labor value that ignores 20th-century growth economics in its entirety—except that CRT isn’t a theory at all in contemporary form but instead an ideological premise.
It also includes any “white supremacist” manifesto that points to genetics as a main factor in observed social differences. This is almost too easy to demonstrate: The genetic endowment of most Afro-Americans is the same as that of Afro-Caribbean immigrants to the United States, yet the record of educational and professional achievement of the two groups is hardly the same. That view, too, is based on an ideology, that of racialized 19th-century Social Darwinism. Obviously, then, both Critical Race Theory and “theories” of white supremacism are precisely symmetrical in their error of the zero-sum premise; each is an exact reflection of the other with only the valence flipped. Neither “theory” can count as high as three.
The zero-sum perspective applied to racial politics does have a logic, a simple one but just not the right one: The wound visited upon the weaker side of the twinning is so old and so deep, and has been so long left fully unredressed—because, one suspects, fully redressed it can never be—that the pallet of primal emotions surrounding it goes often uncontained. And the more emotion-laden a hurt or a fear becomes the more zero-sum the shape it tends to take. This is despite clear objective evidence of massive progress in race relations in the United States over the past sixty to seventy years, and thus the moral panic this time around looks ever more like a textbook example of Tocqueville’s Paradox, already described in Chapter 5, one translation of which reads: “When inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention. When everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed. Hence the more equal men are, the more insatiable will be their longing for equality.”[11] Tocqueville did not continue the thought but long before him, according to Plato, Socrates, did: The closer perceived inequality spites perfection the angrier and more impatient some people become.
This accounts for the intense anger expressed over this issue in America today, and its reification in the insistence that America remains afflicted by systemic racism. The insistence falls flat when confronted with the facts: Not only did this supposedly systemically racism society twice elect a black man to be President, but two black individuals, one male and one female, served consecutively as Secretary of State in a Republican Administration.[12] Apparently, however, none of this matters: Race relations are deeply polarizing today in America and lately the terms used in what passes for a discourse are themselves contributory factors to the re-rooting of the zero-sum mentality.
This is nowhere clearer than in the mainstream elite media. Here is an excerpt from a leaked transcript of a 2019 New York Times staff meeting, wherein a young woke staffer addressed an old guard veteran journalist, Executive Editor Dean Baquet (the first Afro-American to serve as NYT Executive Editor)—with Editor-in-Chief A.G. Sulzberger in the room—as follows:
I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting. Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? . . . . I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so to me it’s less about individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country. And I think particularly as we are launching a 1619 Project, I feel like that’s going to open us up to even more criticism. . . [13]
Fast forward a year or two from 2019: Apparently thanks to Sulzberger’s surrender to the Left, the New York Times clearly came to reflect the staffer’s view—at least before November 5, 2024—as did the Washington Post, and the old guard is either fired, like James Bennet or, like Baquet, retired. It thus falls to right-of-center voices to refute the premise—expressed here in typical postmodern “feel” language, in which subjective experience takes pride of place over a presumed non-existent objectivity—when refutation should be the province of everyone free from the throes of ideological (i.e., secularized religious) hallucinations. That is unfortunate, for it helps certified liars like Sarah Huckabee-Sanders to plausibly (to some) characterize Republicans as normal and Democrats as crazy, as she more or less did on February 7, 2023 in response to President Biden’s next-to-final State of the Union address.[14]
A final observation about the new secular religious cult of antiracism. It does not fight or reverse the supposed tide of surging racism; it contributes to it by reifying the zero-sum premise embedded within it. It is, in a phrase, an example of racism inverted. A yawning irony must be laid out here.
Exactly as Barbara Chase-Riboud said, “people of color” did not invent what has become identity politics; Caucasian European Christians did.[15] They invented its categories, and the special British contribution of its heinous but revelatory “one-drop” rule as well, out of the radically dualistic nature of their base theological indoctrination: There is life and afterlife; there is heaven and hell; there is one true and right religion, all the others being false and wrong. Having invented it these European Christians gave themselves an arrogant superiority complex, on the basis of which between roughly the 15th and 19th centuries they excelled at exporting intimidation, violence, rapine, outright thievery, disease, and death to most of the rest of the planet—which is not even to speak of how they treated non-Christian minorities, ethno-linguistic and religious—within Europe. All the while most convinced themselves that they had a civilizing mission to fulfill—for again, they imagined the world binary-divided into civilized and uncivilized or “savage,” breaking down roughly according to skin tone. To top it all off, many, especially in the Anglospheric world, came to adopt Richard Cobden’s ode to free trade, which allowed European marauders to congratulate themselves for being economically efficient as well as moral, in a characteristically Calvinist way.
America, though born of the Enlightenment’s womb, was not an exception to the two-valued distortion of human nature and the world at large. The more excited or frightened Americans became now and again the more self-referentially God-addled they got. Perhaps the most striking example of the strong undercurrent of American political theology resides in a radical Abolitionist lyric to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe: “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” Seen from the perspective of the early 21st century, Ms. Howe could reasonably be described as being the opposite of Whistler’s Mother: Mrs. Whistler is clearly seated on her rocker in the famous 1871 painting; Mrs. Howe, however, was off hers.
Abolitionism was a new crusade, and like its precursors knew only two sides: the children of the sons of light and the children of the sons of darkness. In this case, white men were adamant about freeing black men from other white men, but none of that altered the two-valued conception of what was going on between 1861 and 1865. Crusades domestic and foreign inhere in the nature of American thinking whenever the nation is aroused from its materialist obsessiveness.[16] Nothing of significance has changed.
So what, then, is the essence of CRT/1619 Project antiracism? It is the uncritical and unselfaware adoption of the disastrous, originally Caucasian European Christian conception of a binary, two-valued, zero-sum reality of global racial hierarchy by its own principal victims. It is, to repeat, absentminded inverted racism.
It also reveals the zero-sum basis of identity politics for what it is: Class war translated from class into bio-essentialist groups, making it just as divisive as anything the MAGAt world has managed to devise. The difference, of course, is that the MAGAt world does it on purpose so as to harvest the divisions reified by hatred, while the woke world seems to have no clue what it is doing. The woke want to create polarized divisions where they do the most harm, but erase an ineradicable and benign division—the one that allows for the life-giving complementarity of men and women—to do the most harm in that domain, as well. Taken together there may be no better illustration of the old adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Of course, CRT identity politics wants to reverse the valance of traditional racist language, but by trying to do so it only deepens the harm that the original error let lose on the world at large, and on America in particular. We cannot correct an error by doubling down on the error; we only get more error, and more convoluted error at that. We don’t get closer to healing and dignity restored; we get closer to the whirlwind.
The identity politics of the children of liberal progressivism has now devoured their parents’ deepest hopes. Addressing race in constructive, socially healing, and unifying ways has all but been abandoned in favor of a false utopia of what amounts to permanent guilt for some and an encouragement to revenge for others. There is nothing constructive about it. Hope has turned to galloping tragedy, and spectacularly so.
[1] Hazrat, “The exclamation point was long scorned. Now, we love it!” New York Times, March 19, 2023.
[2] Herzog (Fawcett, 1964), p. 385.
[3] Maçães, “How Fantasy Triumphed Over Reality in American Politics.”
[4] Kurth, “The Protestant Deformation.”
[5] See Ross Douthat, “The Religious Roots of the New Progressivism,” New York Times, July 7, 2020.
[6]
https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333
[7] Yglesias, “Not Every Anti-Racist Idea is a Good One,” Washington Post, February 28, 2001, p. B1.
[8] An antidote to both “woke” and White Supremacist conflations about race is to read together two short essays published on the same day by the New York Times: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Who’s Afraid of Black History?” and John McWhorter, “DeSantis May Have Been Right,” February 16, 2023. Read together these essays compose the best very short course on Afro-American history available.
[9] The consequences of the #MeToo moral panic have yet to run their course. More on that below.
[10] A point I argue in telling of the stories of John Lewis Waller and his grandson, via his daughter Jennie, Andy Razaf: “Fascinating Rhythm,” American Prospect, June 23, 2021. See also anything the late Stanley Crouch wrote about this.
[11] Democracy in America, Vol. II, Part II, Ch. 13, p. 538 (J.P. Mayer edition). Not by accident does this occur on the last page of a chapter entitled “Restlessness in the Midst of Prosperity.”
[12] I worked for them both at the Department of State, despite my not being and never having been a Republican.
[13] Quoted in Ashley Feinberg, “The New York Times United vs. Twitter,” Slate, August 15, 2019. The 1619 Project was an initiative of the semi-autonomous New York Times Magazine, not the main paper staff itself. It was pitched by one of the Magazine’s staff writers, Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose deficient scholarly background lead to myriad errors in the study. Hannah-Jones refused to correct major errors pointed out by credentialed scholars who fact-checked her text. See the illuminating essay by one of them, Leslie M. Harris, “I Helped Fact-Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me.” Politico, March 6, 2020. The 1619 Project authors have since summarily rejected all the criticism directed at the study by credentialed historians by claiming that all the critics are white.
[14] Colby Itzkowitz, “Ark. Gov. Sanders goes at ‘woke’ left in GOP Response,” New York Times, February 9, 2023, p. A4.
[15] I cannot resist a personal aside here. The now-acceptable term “people of color,” which presumably include “Black” and brown people—is brown supposed to be capitalized, too?—sounds a lot like the term “Colored people” that was a relatively polite term in segregated Virginia where I grew up—between Negro, which was a formal term and was always capitalized in print, and the common slur-term “nigger” which was rarely written and not capitalized when it was written. Signs on the one bathroom meant for Negro use in the Peoples Drug Store read “Colored.” This is why, no matter how hard I try, I cannot utter the phrase “people of color” without cringing, still, after all these years.
[16] See my “Can Americans Count to Three?” The American Interest, March 9, 2018, which is a fuller version of “The Anglo-Protestant Basis of U.S. Foreign Policy,” FPRI E-Note, February 13, 2018.