WHY ALL THIS STUFF MATTERS—AND PAY ATTENTION AT THE BACK, BECAUSE THIS IS IMPORTANT
In the past, the Left were champions of blue-collar workers against the managerial, big business classes. Jobs, pay, and decent living standards for ordinary citizens were the priorities. A few leftists (Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain) continue this tradition. They are, notably, significantly older than most other left-wing politicians. They are also loathed by much of the establishment in their respective parties.
Why?
Because the mainstream Left today has very different priorities.
There was no reason why the Left had to abandon its old blue-collar base. The industries that employed their voters have largely disappeared, but the voters themselves didn’t go anywhere. Indeed, as voters in old working-class heartlands entered economic crises, the Left should have been more attentive to their concerns.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, leftists chose to ignore the former working class, and turn to a very different electoral coalition: latte-sipping metropolitan voters, fairytale dwelling antiwar activists, ugly women (sigh), and minorities.
The fact that minorities were only a small section of the electorate didn’t bother the Left; they could always import new voters. Zero fucks were given about the rapid influx of cheap labor or the deluge of new welfare recipients. Both of these obvious consequences only added further pressure to the already-beleaguered, long forgotten, working class base.14
This reminds me of the movie Scream, when Sidney (aka Neve Campbell) finds out it was (spoiler alert) her boyfriend who was trying to butcher her and all her friends the whole time. Sidney didn’t let him get away with it, however. She shot him in the head. After they were so wantonly betrayed, it’s remarkable to me that millions of former working-class families still remain loyal to the Left.
As their electoral coalition changed, so too did the Left’s politics. They became less concerned with pay, more contemptuous of old industries, and venomous towards the cultural values of their old voters. Barack Obama’s infamous 2008 quip that former working-class communities “cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment,”15 epitomized the new attitude of the Left.
Leftists have always been well practiced at turning social classes against one another. But the working classes can prove frustrating to socialists intent on class warfare. Marxists were particularly perturbed when, during World War I, the European working class (with the exception of Russia) chose to fight for King and Country instead of rise up against their masters. This is understandable to a certain extent, socialist leaders like Marx had never done a day of work in their life.
In the 1920s, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci had an idea for a new form of revolution—one based on culture, not class. According to Gramsci, the reason the proletariat failed to rise up was because old, conservative ideas like loyalty to one’s country, family values, and religion, held too much sway in working-class communities.
If that sounds redolent of Obama’s comment about guns and religion, it should. His line of thinking is directly descended from the ideological tradition of Gramsci.
Gramsci argued that as a precursor to revolution, the old traditions of the West—or “cultural hegemony,” as he called it—would have to be systematically broken down. To do so, Gramsci argued that “proletarian” intellectuals should seek to challenge the dominance of traditionalism in education and the media, and create a new revolutionary culture. If you’ve ever wondered why you’re forced to take diversity or gender studies courses at university, or why your professors all seem to hate western civilization, blame Gramsci.
In the 1950s and 60s, a group of European expatriate academics known as the Frankfurt School married Gramsci’s idea of cultural revolution to the idea of a new revolutionary vanguard: one made up of students, feminists, and minorities, many of whom felt excluded from mainstream western culture and sought to change it. Their ideas would provide much of the intellectual ballast for the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, and the subsequent transformation of the Left. Andrew Breitbart wrote about them extensively in his bestselling book, Righteous Indignation.
The New Left, as they came to be called, were responsible for the early stages of the Left’s pivot away from traditional class politics and towards the divisive, politically-correct world of gender, racial, and sexual politics we know today. They were the ones responsible for making issues like abortion, the reversal of gender roles, “racial justice,” pacifism, and multiculturalism into major platforms of the Left. If they could keep their “rainbow coalition” acting and voting as a bloc, and focus all their hatred on the weary white male working class, then political dominance would soon be assured. Thus began the reign of identity politics.
These sneering students who joined the New Left in the 1960s became the professors who are teaching you today, rebelling against the over-protective, military-minded, and somewhat austere World War II generation. Novelist and former noted liberal John Updike wrote of the disdain he saw from “Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children… privileged members of a privileged nation… full of aesthetic disdain for their own defenders… spitting on the cops who were trying to keep the USA and its many amenities intact.”
Cultural Marxism, nurtured by the Frankfurt School, struck a chord—even though, for the most part, these young baby boomers didn’t realize where their ideas were coming from. Rock musicians, the standard-bearers of young boomer culture, became fierce advocates for pacifism, feminism, gay rights, and all the other causes of the New Left.
There is, of course, another reason the New Left was so successful in the 1960s: a lot of their arguments made sense. There was racism to be fought, structural, institutionalized and legal racism. Sexism in the workplace was rampant—even worse than on Mad Men. And gays were oppressed, by conservatives and liberals alike.