Only State Power Can Tame Left-Liberal Extremism

American universities are becoming less tolerant of pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas protests, worried about ‘blowback from elected officials and donors.’ Harvard, Johns Hopkins, University of Texas and Vanderbilt have opted for new policies of institutional neutrality. Why did they put a stop to their overt support for the ‘Social Justice’ left – as evident during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020?

Conservatives who wish to roll back left-liberal extremism in our public culture must use the levers of state to institute political neutrality in public institutions. Relying on cutting government and empowering the market to create parallel institutions might work for media, but is not a viable approach for government or education. Ron DeSantis’ reforms to the school curriculum in Florida or Senator J.D. Vance’s co-sponsored Dismantle DEI Act to prohibit mandatory diversity statements and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the federal government show the way forward.

But first we must take a step back to understand the magnitude of the threat that left-liberal extremism poses to society.

This may appear puzzling insofar as soft left, liberal left, or social democratic left are terms used to refer to egalitarians who prefer to soften the excesses of capitalism rather than overthrow it. Surely these are moderates rather than extremists?

Not so.

As my new book The Third Awokening (Taboo in the UK and Rest of World) argues, while left-liberalism is moderate on economics, charting a middle path between capitalism and communism, it has evolved toward extremism on culture. This, rather than revolutionary cultural Marxism, best explains the rise of woke.

I define woke as the sacralization of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups. This produces a fuzzy inductive folk ideology I term cultural socialism, which dictates that equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for sacred identity groups are the paramount values of society.

Any desired social outcome in which identity groups are less than equal is an outrage, to be corrected by affirmative action quotas badged as ‘equity and diversity.’ Speech that a commisar or ‘community representative’ deems to have offended even the most sensitive member of a totemic minority group is blasphemy, grounds for excommunication. Cancelling the offensive protects fragile minorities from emotional harm, thereby ensuring their ‘inclusion.’ In combination, these twin moral foundations, which Jonathan Haidt terms equality and ‘care/harm’, are dubbed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).

We might imagine a cultural socialism based on intelligence or looks, as in Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopic short story, the Handicapper General, in which smart people have to wear devices that emit noises to prevent them using their brains, or attractive individuals are forced to don disfiguring masks. The drive for ‘mental parity’ between dim and clever people is likewise the subject of Lionel Shriver’s new novel Mania. Notwithstanding the flickering vogue for body positivity, this non-woke variant of cultural socialism does not describe our world. Instead we experience a woke cultural socialism revolving around race, gender and sexuality.

Woke cultural socialism produces cancel culture and the moralistic smearing of national and gender traditions. Classical liberals resist cancel culture while conservatives and gender-critical feminists oppose attacks on their traditional identities.

What Matthew Yglesias terms the Great Awokening is in fact the third wave of left-liberal emotional enthusiasm, hence my title, The Third Awokening. In the late 60s, campus buildings were occupied – sometimes by gun-toting Black Panthers – to demand more spots for black students, professors and radical ideas while conservative academics and military recruiters had their free speech curtailed. In the late 80s and early 90s, speech codes and political correctness silenced freedom of expression on campus while multiculturalism, Afrocentrism and cries of ‘Eurocentrism’ and minority ‘self-esteem’ were used to deconstruct the canon and national past. In the mid-2010s, as in the first two awokenings, race, gender and sexuality took centre stage.

Understanding our current predicament, including the polarization gripping western political culture, requires us to step back and grasp that we are living during the zenith of left-liberalism’s 120-year ascent. Left-liberalism is a distinct and powerful compound which can no more be decomposed into its socialist or classical liberal elements than water can be reduced to hydrogen or oxygen.

While liberal forms of economic socialism reach back to the eighteenth century, cultural left-liberalism has its roots in the early twentieth century, emerging invigorated through two world wars and the Cold War.

At the turn of the twentieth century, those like William Lloyd Garrison who favored free immigration tended to also endorse the free market while Social Gospel Progressives like Josiah Strong believed in social programs, government intervention, immigration restriction and the prohibition of alcohol. That is, ‘right-liberalism’ and ‘left-conservatism’ were the intellectual poles in fin de siècle America.

Only in the 1905-20 period does a recognizably modern left-liberal worldview emerge which combines leftist economic and cultural views. Liberal Progressivism, mainline Protestant ecumenism and bohemian modernism represented a sharp break from nineteenth century thinking. Their outlook was characterized by a new ‘minorities good, majority bad’ cultural reflex. Initially this involved left-liberal WASPs like John Dewey, Jane Addams or Randolph Bourne casting aspersions on their own Yankee Protestant ethnicity and culture while lauding European immigrant minorities as downtrodden objects of sympathy and, for Bourne, stimulation. The idea of a multicultural America emerged at this time, in which the enmities of the Old World were to give way to a cosmopolitan society of peace, fellowship and diversity.

Left-liberal pluralism was influential among intellectuals by the 1920s but had little congressional power. This began to change as some New Deal liberals like Eleanor Roosevelt and a few liberal Northeastern Republicans adopted cultural pluralism. Here, for instance, are the 1943 words of Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, a staunch internationalist, early supporter of Civil Rights and precursor to the liberal Rockefeller Republicans of the 1950s and 60s:

‘Minorities are rich assets of a democracy...minorities are the constant spring of new ideas, stimulating new thought and action, the constant source of vigour. Our way of living together in America is a strong but delicate fabric. It is made up of many threads…It serves as a cloak for the protection of poor and rich, of black and white, of Jew and gentile, of foreign- and native-born. Let us not tear it asunder.’

Notice the call for empathy towards minorities coupled with an implicit fear of the majority. The war undoubtedly pushed elite discourse in a pluralist and anti-majoritarian direction, but such statements had been gaining elite currency since the 1910s. In the late 1940s, bars on Asian immigration were removed while Harry Truman and, later, Dwight Eisenhower desegrated the military. National origin immigration quotas were relaxed for Cubans and Hungarians in 1956-7 while public opinion grew more liberal on immigration and race in the late fifties and early sixties. In 1965, the Hart-Celler Act created ‘colorblind’ immigration, abolishing national origin quotas.

While these were commendable advances for equal rights, they sowed the seeds of subsequent left-liberal overreach. The three underlying components of left-liberalism – the modernist quest for novelty and difference (‘diversity’), cultural egalitarianism (‘equity’) and humanitarianism (‘inclusion’) – came to be viewed as ends in themselves. Rather than trying to optimize these values for human flourishing, their proponents saw them as the end of history, unalloyed goods to be maximized as far as political reality would permit.

With each victory, the symbolic arsenal and ‘right side of history’ storyline gained power while intellectual principles remained opaque. This was a movement of hearts more than minds, akin to religion or nationalism rather than an intellectual system like Marxism or liberalism. It concentrated on deepening affective ties to particular groups and their struggles, unleashing a powerful myth of the noble ethical vanguard fighting for minorities against the scary majority.

The success of the civil rights movement created an emotional regime focused on empathy for blacks, and, by extension, Native Americans and Chicanos, women and gays. The stories, heroes and symbols of these concrete movements comprise the affective motor of the left-liberal moral order. This was more mythos than logos, empathizing than systematizing, inductive than deductive, emotional than cognitive. From the 60s onwards, what Jonathan Haidt terms the unconscious ‘elephant’ of the liberal left’s psyche was in control, not its rational ‘rider’. Indeed, the rider’s only task was to throw up post hoc intellectual justifications – Maoism, post-modernism, multiculturalism, Critical Theory – to rationalize the elephant’s ‘majority bad, minorities good’ emotional reflex.

The anti-racism taboo was the beating heart of the new moral order. While a proportionate norm against racism is important, the new race taboo attached anti-racism to our disgust reflex, brooking no limiting principles. It institutionalized white guilt. The sacralization of race is the essence of woke, the big bang of our moral universe, creating a zone of enchantment that could be stretched sideways to sexuality and gender and outwards to encompass ever more ambigious spheres of social existence, from ‘environmental racism’ to microaggressions. Like kryptonite, the magic substance could be weaponized against opponents, allowing the left to gain moral authority against the right. This narrowed the Overton Window of acceptable debate on questions like crime, immigration, education, housing and welfare, producing repeated policy failure.

Just as those who control Congress make the laws, those with power in the culture set the norms. The emergence of left-liberal cultural hegemony in elite institutions from the 60s meant that Republicans shied away from questioning the cultural impact of immigration, or the value of rising diversity, affirmative action and racial sensitivity training. The right accepted the left’s rules by playing in approved sandboxes such as economics, foreign policy and religion. Consider that abortion restrictions are relatively unpopular among Americans while affirmative action bans are endorsed by a clear majority. Yet just four red states have banned affirmative action while 14 have enacted near-complete bans on abortion.

Richard Hanania shows that congressional Republicans consistently approved expansions of civil rights law from the 60s until 2008, fearing the ‘racist’ charge. Many voted with Democrats to veto Ronald Reagan’s attempt to roll back affirmative action in the 1980s. This created a boom in class-action civil rights lawsuits and fueled a concommitant compliance regime of speech restrictions and affirmative action.

Left-liberalism has checks on economic extremism but no guardrails on cultural radicalism. This is why liberals – such as a majority of Seattle voters - responded so enthusiastically to revolutionary ideas such as ‘defund the police.’ Radicals like Ibram X. Kendi or Judith Butler demand quotas and view neutral principles as systemically racist, sexist or heteronormative. Left-liberals instead adopt an open-ended ‘we are too white and male and need diversity’ alongside a plea to ‘do more to live up to our ideals’ of diversity, equity and inclusion. The two sound different, but left-liberals’ open-ended commitment to change effectively dovetails with cultural Marxism’s revolutionary stance. Evolutionary mission creep lands us in the same place as a revolutionary march through the institutions. Left-liberalism, not cultural Marxism, delivered speech codes, affirmative action, ‘disparate impact’ and diversity training. Though the revolutionaries added critical race and gender theory, radical ideas seamlessly meshed with the incremental unbounded extremism of the left-liberal establishment.

It is time for more sustained critical examination of the left-liberalism which emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century and has come to dominate western culture since the 1960s. Though moderate on economics, it possesses no cultural guardrails against a mission creep toward hair-trigger minority sensitivity and enforced egalitarianism. Cultural Marxism does not explain the rise of woke. While revolutionaries leveraged left-liberal sensibilities and taboos to push Critical Theory in the classroom and organizations, cancel culture and the assault on the national past would have taken place without them.

The only way forward is for conservatives to focus on culture during and between elections, using state and federal power to reform public education and elite institutions. As the modest retreat from woke taking place at Harvard attests, conservative pressure can enable the moderate left to resist cultural radicalism, beginning the process of restoring trust in our institutions.