Yes. This is basically correct.
They’ve worked by stealth, taking advantage of peoples’ good nature, their desire to be fair, their wish not to discriminate on the basis of what other people cannot help looking like or being.
The Republican Party was … is? … a creature of its Donor Class. So long as these people were making money, Republican leaders didn’t really care what was happening below the surface of society, except insofar as it gave them the opportunity to feed their base with some rhetorical red meat on ‘cultural issues’.
The Old Left openly proclaimed its desire to destroy capitalism … ie to disposses the rich (and, in practice, the middle class).
The new Identity Politics Left doesn’t do that. Partly because dispossessing the rich and instituting Central Planning and government ownership has proved to be such a dismal failure wherever it’s been tried on a serious scale.
But also … the working class, especially in America, proved to be such a disappointment to the Left. They just wouldn’t follow their supposed saviors.
And, ironically, the middle-class Left itself has done quite well out of capitalism. Why nationalize Facebook or Google, when you’re making a nice salary there in very pleasant working conditions?
But … there were other groups in society which did have grievances, most of them at least partly legitimate: women, Blacks, sexual minorities.
Orthodox Marxists had considered these groups as auxiliaries for the aroused proletariat. (In fact, a number of bitter internal fights among Marxists occurred over just how auxiliary these groupings should be. Some Marxists outright opposed Black Nationalism, for example. One group – the ‘Workers League’ even wrote that “The working class hates faggots and women’s libbers, and so do we.” A direct quote. Another, the ‘Revolutionary Communist Party’, opposed busing, and analyzed homosexuality as bourgeois decadence, to be cured in re-education camps.
This was in the 1970s. Both groups are still active, but have changed those unpolitic positions. And in any case, although the small orthodox Marxist sects are not without influence – they have a counsellor in Seattle – they’re not the Left’s heavy batallions. Of some importance, but not mainstream.
For most of the Left these groups became the new targets. After a while, the ‘working class’ was forgotten, and class politics was replaced by ‘identity politics’.
The rich capitalists found that they could appease the Left very easily: hire more women, more Blacks, adopt some ‘woke’ jargon, start a Department of Diversity … easy peasy.
So… the radicals of the Sixties grew up, got jobs, rose in their professions – but retained the view of Blame America First. When the Soveit Union collapsed, it was, in a way, a blessing for them: the Communist Threat had vanished. They were no longer tarnished with being either advocates of, or advocates of surrender to, World Communism.
They especially went into teaching, at all levels. A natural profession for them. This was not the result of some diabolical centrally planned plot – just a natural progression. It has given them the youth, or a large fraction of it.
Most importantly, they now have far, far more influence than the Old Left ever did. The Communist Party USA, as a result of its participation in the unionization struggles of the 1930s, helped by its ‘Right turn’ to Popular Frontism in 1935, ended up with serious influence: they controlled 11 national unions, 1/3 of the CIO, and had a serious presence in many other unions. They had serious influence in Hollywood. But … the great mass of the American people were patriots, and when the Cold War began, the CP’s influence evaporated.
Now the Left’s influence in American life is both broad and deep, and there is no equivalent of post-war Russian expansion – which the CP had to support – to discredit them.
So what can we do? That’s what we need to discuss.
But first we need to examine how far the Left has gotten in taking over the most important institution in America (as in all other countries). Here, they’re just beginning… It’s the institution, the strength of which, or lack of it, has deteremined all previous revolutionary situations, when society teetered on the brink of a radical takeover.
And that institution is … whoa, this is way too long already, let’s stop here. New thread needed.
