Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (11 page)

The problem with the discontent now smoldering inside America's privileged black intellectuals, so well expressed in
Showing My Color
, is that it can never be satisfied: "Nothing annoys black people more than the hearty perennial of black life in America, the persistent reality of having one's fate in America decided inevitably by white people. It is an annoyance that underlies all racial grievances in America, beginning with slavery, evolving through the eras of mass lynchings and segregated water fountains, and continuing through the age of 'white flight,' mortgage discrimination, police brutality, and the 'race card' in politics."

In Page's view, the unifying and ultimate goal of all black reformers, whether radicals like bell hooks or conservatives like Clarence Thomas, is "black self-determination." What Clarence Page and blacks like him want is "to free the destiny of blacks from the power of whites."

Within a single national framework, in which blacks are inevitably a minority, this is obviously an impossible goal. Those who advocate it are destined to frustration and anger, and thus to consider themselves perpetually "oppressed." The irony, of course, is that America's multi-ethnic society and color-blind ideal provides the most favorable setting for individuals of all origins to enjoy the freedom to determine their destinies, even if they happen to be members of a minority. Ask the Jews. For two thousand years Jews of the diaspora have not been able to free their destiny from the power of gentiles. But in America, they have done very well, thank you, and do not feel oppressed.

^*
Booknotes
, C-SPAN 2, 2 April 1999, "The Festival of the Book."

T
HE
Communist Manifesto
is probably the only marxist text that the millions of activists who responded to his message actually read. Inspired by its vision of a social redemption, Marxists went on to kill a hundred million people in the twentieth century and create the most oppressive tyrannies ever known. It is almost a decade since the empire that marxism built collapsed in ruins, but it is already evident that the lessons of this tragedy have not been learned. The progressive left and its political faith have survived even the catastrophe of their socialist dreams.

Of course, few people outside the universities today think of themselves as marxists, or will publicly admit to socialist aspirations. But behind protective labels like "populist" and "progressive," the old left is resurrected among us and with its destructive agendas fully intact. This makes the ideas of the
Manifesto
, discredited as they are, worth attending to again.

In fact, three destructive ideas advanced in Marx's tract form the core of the contemporary leftist faith. The first and most important is that the modern, secular, democratic world is ruled by alien powers. According to Marx, the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth-century did not establish true democracies. Even though the citizens of industrial nations had dethroned their hereditary rulers and vested sovereignty in themselves, this did not mean they were free. Though liberated from serfdom, workers were now "wage-slaves," captives to capital, the alien power alleged by Marx to rule the modern world in a fashion analogous to the aristocracies and oligarchies of the past. Behind the façade of political democracy, governments are controlled by "ruling classes," the owners of capital who just as effectively keep the citizenry in chains.

The second idea of the
Manifesto
flows naturally from this analysis: Politics is war conducted by other means. It is this attitude that inspires the viciousness of left-wing politics, the desire to destroy the opposition entirely, to eliminate adversaries from the field of battle. It is also the perspective that creates the reckless disregard radicals have for institutions and traditions, for what has been created by the generations that went before. In order to create true freedom, the civil orders and binding faiths of democratic systems must be subverted and then destroyed. Treachery and lies are justifiable means to achieve such fiercely desired ends.

The third Marxist idea is the hope that inspires the destruction itself. The extinction of the existing order can lead without much forethought or preparation to a liberated future — a break with the entire history of humanity's enthrallment to these alien forces. It is a mystical creed: the very state which is to be destroyed as the instrument of class oppression,
in the very act of destruction
will be transformed into a means of human liberation. Animating the leftist faith is the idea that the left itself is the redeeming power, the social messiah through whom a world of social justice will be born.

Today the alien power thought by the left to control our destinies is only rarely described as a "ruling class," although it is still perceived as that. Refuted by the history of communist empires, the left has turned to new vocabularies and concepts to rescue it from its defeats. Today the ruling class is identified as the "patriar- or the "white male oligarchy," or in disembodied form as the force of "institutional racism" or "white supremacy." The result is a kitsch marxism that follows the basic marxist scheme but results in true intellectual incoherence. Marx's idea of a classless society may make a certain sense in theory even if it is unworkable in practice, whereas the idea of a race-less society or a gender-free society makes no sense at all.

The leftist agenda can be clearly seen in the heart of present conflicts over race, which pose a fundamental challenge to America's multi-ethnic social order. Thus, the proclaimed goal of affirmative action advocates is to "level the playing field." It is defined this way to highlight the left's claim that traditional civil rights solutions have failed to achieve "real" equality, by which is meant equality of results. Traditional civil rights solutions were focused on the fairness of the institutional process, the elimination of legal barriers to political power and individual opportunity. For Martin Luther King Jr. and the traditional civil rights movement, leveling the playing field simply meant extending to black southerners, the constitutional protections accorded to all Americans. It meant making all citizens, regardless of color, equal before the law. Leveling the playing field meant creating neutral rules that did not encompass color or ethnicity but made both irrelevant to the contests of civic and economic life. This was the idea of a "color-neutral" society. It was not that color would be unseen or denied, but that color would not affect individual outcomes, certainly not through the agency of the state. By these standards, the playing field became level once government ceased to play racial favorites, a goal achieved through the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.

But though the civil rights battles of the 1960s eliminated racial barriers, the results did not become equal. In the left's perspective, this could only be explained by a hidden racism. According to the left, procedural fairness merely masked an institutional bias that effectively preserves the status quo. Just as traditional marxists deride "bourgeois" democracy as a political sham to preserve the power of a ruling class, so the civil rights left dismisses equality of opportunity as a sham to preserve the superior position of a dominant race. In the old model, an institutionalized class system subverts the democratic form of free elections to preserve a hierarchy of social power. It does not matter that the political process is formally democratic, because the economic class system creates institutionalized inequality. (Of course, this marxist idea is refuted by the fluidity of the American class structure. Currently, 70 percent of American millionaires are first generation; in short, they earned their fortunes. Individual opportunity does exist, and thus individual freedom to succeed or fail.) The contemporary left and its liberal allies merely transpose this analysis (fatuously, it must be said) to the issue of race.

According to the civil rights left, it is the force of "institutional racism" that makes equal opportunity a myth. Educational admissions tests, so it is argued, are culturally rigged to appear neutral, while actually favoring applicants of the dominant color. But this claim is easily refuted. Asian immigrants, who struggle with both a foreign language and an alien culture, consistently score in the highest ranges of standardized tests, surpassing whites and gaining admission to the best schools. Affirmative action measures in education are in fact often designed by the left to limit opportunities for Asian minorities, while favoring low-scoring Hispanics and blacks.

The case of Asian-Americans shows that the leftist idea is impervious to factual evidence, and that when the left demands a level playing field, it is not really interested in neutral rules and equitable standards. Instead, the racial left wants to redistribute social goods according to its own plan and its own standards of "justice," which exclude persecuted minorities like Asians, Armenians, and Jews. The left is not interested in an equal process, and only rhetorically in an equal result. What interests the left is accumulating power, which it justifies as the power to arbitrate what is socially "just."

This power is necessarily a totalitarian power in the sense that to realize its agenda the left must invade and dominate the sphere of private life. Consider what it would mean to take the left's demand for equal results in racial competitions at face value. It is true, for example, that 40 percent of America's black children are poor. This condition obviously puts them at a disadvantage in any educational competition, just as the left contends. The left argues that to make up for this handicap, it is necessary to rig educational standards. But 85 percent of those poor black children come from single parent homes. It is
that
circumstance — and not any alien power like "institutional racism" — that actually handicaps them and leaves them unequal. This is the reality the left does not want to face.

A child born into a single parent family is
six times
more likely to be poor, regardless of race, than a child born into a family with two parents. By the time such children are ready to compete, they may suffer from dysfunctional behaviors, or have developed disabling habits, or have internalized cultural attitudes hostile to academic achievement, or simply lack the supportive environment a middle-class home provides. Excessive dropout rates among affirmative action students are the statistical indicators that these handicaps are real. No rigging of standards can make up for deficiencies like this.

In the face of such realities, what can leveling-the-playing-field mean? Making up for the mistakes of the biological parents? Forcing them to get married? Compelling them to be responsible to their children? Requiring them to teach their offspring to study hard and not be self-abusive? Should the state become a Big Brother for those who fall behind, taking over their lives and curtailing their freedoms?

The level playing field that would produce an equality of results is, in fact, a socialist utopia — and hence a totalitarian state. To achieve it would require a government both omniscient and wise, a state that would massively intrude into individual lives. Such a state would mandate comprehensive transfers of opportunity and wealth, and would have to conduct a relentless crusade against defenders of liberty and the rule of law. The call to level the playing field, pushed to its logical conclusion, is a call for the systematic subversion of American individualism and democracy. It is the kitsch marxism of our time.

In the aftermath of the communist collapse, the totalitarian danger is so remote that the normal tendency would be to discount it. But to do so would be to ignore the immediate threat inherent in the assault. It is very possible to destroy the foundations of social trust without establishing a social alternative, and it is the nihilistic ambitions of the radical assault that now present the most serious social threat. Underlying the idea of racial preferences, for example, is a corrosive premise that the white majority is fundamentally racist and cannot be fair. For those who embrace the idea, the institutions, traditions, and rules that white majorities have established merit no respect. The premise of affirmative action preferences is an assault on the very system of economic and legal neutrality that underpins our pluralistic democracy. By denigrating the rule of law as merely a mask for injustice and oppression, the left destroys faith in the very system that makes democracy possible.

In supporting racial preferences, the left appeals directly to the state to abandon its "color-blindness" and compel the white majority to open doors that would otherwise remain closed. It claims that minorities are "excluded" and "locked out" because statistics show disparities between minority representation in certain jobs, or at certain educational institutions, and their representation in the population at large. But discrimination against minorities is already outlawed, and there are no identifiable racists to blame for the alleged "exclusion" of some minorities, or some elements of minority communities from jobs or university admissions. The left's insinuation is that those minority elernents who have fallen behind are locked out by invisible powers. "Institutional racism" is responsible.

But "institutional racism" is a radical myth. It is merely the discredited marxist idea that an alien power separates the citizens of democratic societies into rulers and ruled, the dominant race and the races that are oppressed. No one seriously contends, for example, that the admissions officers of America's elite colleges are racists. In fact, admissions officers are usually desperate to locate as many eligible minority applicants as they can, while offering large financial rewards to those they find. The University of California — one of the few institutions that has been compelled to eliminate its racial preferences — is still spending 160 million dollars, annually, on outreach programs designed to increase its minority enrollments. Since this is the case, it is hard not to conclude that any deficiency in minority admissions is the result of individual failures to meet universal standards.