A primer in left wing thought in contemporary America

I have for a good while been trying to sort out the classifications of left wing radical thought in the US, a task made more challenging given the proclivity towards schism and fine distinctions. Without being a political science major, it has always seemed to me that there was a lot of overlap between different philosophical groups and yet who also had quite different agendas. What I wanted to understand is how these groups or philosophies are related and why non-adherents kept referring to them all as Communists and Marxists.

The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that each school of philosophy tends to have only a narrow base of informed intellectuals capable of sustaining their core argument but a much larger constellation of intellectual hangers-on who deploy certain slogans and philosophical memes without any comprehension of their history, context, or evidentiary base. At a third remove there is an even larger crowd of the generally vocal community organizers, agitators if you will, who further muddy the waters by dipping into the grab-bag of ideas to use in a piecemeal appeal to authority without any grounding at all. Finally, there is a fourth circle of people, issue advocates, who quite innocently appeal to these ideas in their effort to drum up support for particular solutions to what are generally agreed to be real problems.

For example, while we can all agree that abject poverty is a problem that it is desirable to solve, there are multiple possible approaches to reducing poverty, including many approaches which are empirically based rather than philosophically based. Any approach that requires some redistribution of resources has a natural affiliation with critical race theory, social justice theory, liberation theology, etc. If I am a person who wants to reduce poverty simply by raising taxes on the wealthy and giving that money to the poor, it is perfectly natural to appeal to canned ideas within those philosophies to support the argument for redistribution without actually subscribing to the theories themselves. Historically, these individuals are often referred to as useful idiots by those of the hard left, or more kindly, as useful innocents by those of the philosophical right.

As best I can tell, the current pantheon of schools of left wing thought is a product of the Pre-World War II Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophy fused with post-War French post-modernists and married with John Rawls’ philosophy of Social Justice.

Here is what I have come up with as a working understanding. Caveat emptor - this is not my knowledge domain and this is constructed from the perspective of a curious outsider trying to come up with a ready reckoner.

All the main left factions of thought in the US are broadly descendants of the Frankfurt School of philosophy which relocated from Germany to Columbia University at the time of World War II. The Frankfurt School of philosophers were reform Marxists, wanting to fix the theoretical underpinnings of Marxism through amending errors and filling in gaps in Karl Marx’s works. The main philosophical platform of the Frankfurt School was Critical Theory, the idea that culture and society can be scientifically understood through history, sociology, economics, political science, psychology, geography, etc. and having been understood can then be scientifically refashioned to desired ends. Basically, they share the belief that there is a science of humanity and knowledge of that science allows you to reengineer humanity in the same way one might engineer a factory.

The philosophical offspring of the Frankfurt school are multitudinous and not wholly aligned with one another. Indeed, it is almost like there is philosophical demographic target marketing – something for everyone without consideration for logical coherence or evidentiary integrity between the schools of thought. I think this is in part why outsiders to this Gramscian world are puzzled and disinclined to pushback. They assume that there is logical coherence and evidentiary integrity and they are just not informed enough about the logic and/or are not privy to the supporting data. The reality is that there is little or no logical coherence and there is little supporting data for the central positions and much disaffirming data.

I found this passage by academic Marxist Stephen Eric Bronner in his book Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction to be illuminating.

The Frankfurt School first achieved popularity in the United States by appealing to what Martin Jay, its first historian, termed “the generation of 1968.” Well into the 1980s, critical theory was still considered eccentric in mainstream academic circles and somewhat exotic even among progressive intellectuals. With the collapse of the New Left, however, the Frankfurt School became institutionalized within the academy. Critical legal studies, critical race theory, critical gender studies began interrogating prevailing paradigms and assumptions. As subaltern groups emerged from the shadows of public life, however, the integrated assault upon an integrated system of domination began to erode. New emphasis was placed on contesting master narratives, the established canons of the Western tradition, and even popular culture entered the mix. The critical theory of society, its coherence, was becoming imperiled. Its transformative purpose was taking increasingly arbitrary forms.

New proposals have not been forthcoming for dealing with imperialist exploits, economic contradictions, the state mass media, and the character of resistance in modern society. The negation is casting a pall over critical theory. The intellectual heir of Hegel and Marx now lacks an understanding of power and, as a consequence, the ability to confront the imbalance of power.

The Frankfurt School begat Critical Theory. Critical Theory then begat:

Postmodernism
Critical Race Theory
Critical Legal Studies
Deconstructionism
Multiculturalism
Rawlsianism (Social Justice)
Liberation Theology
Feminist Sociology Theory
Post-structuralism
Post-colonial theory

It is certainly possible that some of the above, for example, Liberation Theology, may be direct descendants of Marxism rather than through the branch of Critical Theory. As an outsider, it is difficult to tell the direct lineage distinct from parallel lineages. Likewise, it is quite possible that the work of John Rawls is not really so much a descendant of Marxist philosophy as it is a parallel development of a philosophy which happens to have shared traits.

Leading lights in these movements include

Martin Heidegger
Jacques Derrida
Michel Foucault
Jean-Francois Lyotard
Richard Rorty
Jean Baudrillard
Fredric Jameson
John Rawls

Catch-phrases, tropes, techniques and concepts common within these philosophies include:

Hegemony
Identity Politics (Race, Class, Gender, Orientation, Religion, Regionalism, Ethnicism, etc.)
Diversity
Patriarchy
Oppression
Privilege
Trigger Warnings
Microaggressions
Structural Bias
Disparate Impact
Ethno-centrism
Intersectionality
Systematic Oppression
Poverty breeds crime
War on Women
War on Blacks
People of Color
Determinism of the institution of slavery
People are a product of their environment
No free will
People are a product of their society
All whites are racist and only whites can be racist

The list of such concepts and tropes is extensive and the above represents just a sampling.

The taint of these different schools of thought are deepest in Ethnic Studies and Gender studies programs with strong representations in Sociology, Psychology, Philosophy, and Anthropology departments. History and English departments also seem prone. Education programs in particular have been a very successful vector for conveying the general ideas of Critical Theory out into the general world via new teachers in K-12.

To people who subscribe to natural law, natural rights, individual agency, rule of law, consent of the governed, and other integral elements of the Age of Enlightenment, these various offspring of Marxism seem, in their essence, to be racist, despotic and coercive. And they are. Even more critically, the ideas and ideals of the Age of Enlightenment are broadly incompatible with the various aspects of Critical Theory.

Why has Critical Theory (and its progeny) continued for so long with so little logical consistency or evidentiary integrity? I suspect that because at their heart, most of these schools of thought have some element of truth to them. Is race simply a social construct as is argued? Of course not, there is a biological and empirical basis for differences between races and ethnicities. However, it is also very clear that how those differences are processed are very much influenced by assumptions and shared social beliefs. For virtually every one of these schools of Marxist thought, there is a hard claim and a weak claim. The hard claim (ex. race is only a social construct) is always wrong and yet the hard claim is what is most central to the school of thought. The weak claim (ex. there is a social element to the concept of race) is usually true but either immaterial or irrelevant.

What I have seen in numerous left wing philosophical arguments is a classic motte and bailey debating technique. They will advance the hard claim (race is a social construct), which is also the weakest to defend (the bailey). When debated on that claim they will first seek to shame the questioner, then obfuscate through arcane terminology, and then use ad hominem attacks. If all that fails, then they retreat back to the motte of their weak claim (“OK maybe it is not purely a social construct, but there is a social element to the concept of race.”) Once out of the debating arena, they then revert to their strong claim which remains as indefensible as before.

This left wing debating style presents a challenge for those on the center and right. For the pragmatist and someone of the right, the challenge is that you are essentially arguing with a religious belief based on faith. All the basic claims of the left have been disproved over the past century. But over that time frame, the liturgy and language of left religion has become increasingly arcane and complex. This is strictly a product of intellectual evolution. The clearer an argument, the easier it is to determine whether it has any useful truth. If there is no useful truth to the argument, then obfuscation and thin distinctions and refined definitions become the rhetorical defense mechanism. A person not sharing the religion of Marxist belief has to acquire an extraordinary dictionary of terms and definitions to engage in useful debate. In doing so, they have immediately conceded the high ground. You are arguing on the field they have constructed and therefore are always going to be disadvantaged.

I think the challenge to non-left wing dogmatists is to bring the debate back out into the parlance of the citizenry. Make it clear, specific and simple.

So your argument is that if we raise taxes on the rich and give the proceeds to the poor, we will eliminate poverty? How will that work? How soon will it work? What will happen after the poor have spent their proceeds? Has this been done successfully anywhere before? Why will it work this time? How will we know if it has worked? Etc.

The less you buy in to arcane concepts and language and the more you keep it clear, specific, and simple, the more obvious it becomes just how dreadfully bereft much of the history of left wing philosophy is of good outcomes for people.