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Wayne Karol's avatar

If I can indulge in some "identity politics" of my own, as a survivor of childhood trauma it infuriates me when the language of trauma is hijacked to try to shut people up.

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Steve Stoft's avatar

Who’s Foucault!? When Yang defines his “successor ideology” he says “It comes from a transition, or succession, from a liberal account ... to a more Foucauldian account.” Yang is spot on. But how did a half-crazy French philosopher who died 36 years ago become be the key to wokism today?

First, thanks to the Persuasion Staff for distilling and posting this important interview. And thanks to Mounk and Yang for their incredibly perceptive discussion, and to the commenters below. I agree with them all.

But let me fill in some background that I discovered a year ago when I decided to include a chapter on identity politics and ended up with eight chapters and a whole new perspective on left politics. Connecting the backstory to the present was not easy without Pluckrose and Lindsay’s “Cynical Theories” (July 2020).

The Persuasion Staff introduces the discussion by pointing to “microaggressions” and “denunciations of whiteness.” These are the entry points. Dr. Derald Wing Sue, the utterly dominant theorist of microaggression theory cites (in his massive text for teacher training), as his first two ideological influences, Antonio Gramsci and Jacques Derrida. Robin DiAngelo, of “White Fragility” fame emphatically bases her analysis of “social justice” on the Frankfurt School’s “critical theory,” and mentions first of all, yes, … Michel Foucault, and second Jacques Derrida.

Gramsci co-founded the Italian Communist Party in 1921 and, while imprisoned by Mussolini, developed his version of Neo-Marxism. Dr. Sue’s microaggression theory was developed from Critical Race Theory, a special case of the Frankfurt School’s “critical theory.” The “Frankfurt School” developed the German version of Neo-Marxism.

What about Derrida, mentioned by both Dr. Sue and DiAngelo? Both Derrida and Judith Butler (the most prominent founder of queer theory) have received, in Frankfurt Germany, the Adorno Prize. Adorno was a leader of the Frankfurt School, and a co-developer of “critical theory.”

Butler is a postmodern professor at U.C. Berkeley, where she founded the Critical Theory Institute with a $1.5 million grant from Mellon Foundation. In her famous third-wave feminist book Gender Trouble, the first person she cites is, yes again, … Foucault.

All this fits Yang and Mounk’s discussion perfectly.

Yang’s Successor Ideology is Neo-Marxism filtered through postmodernism. (Yes, I’m aware that Neo-Marxists claim there’s no such thing, and postmodernists, claim postmodernism is dead. These are good cover stories.)

Mounk correctly notes that that Successor Ideology is saying, “it’s all one huge interlocking scheme of domination.” Exactly. That’s Gramsci’s “cultural hegemony.” And it’s Adorno’s “culture industry” and “false consciousness.” All of these are said to be ways in which the establishment dominates society’s world view for its own benefit. The goal of Neo-Marxism is to awaken the masses (that’s like taking the “red pill” in “The Matrix” — a deliberately postmodern film). Those who see through “false consciousness” and have taken the red pill, are already woke.

Of course, the far-right and Qanon, love the red-pill idea just as much — since they too hate liberalism and the Enlightenment,

According to Gramsci, awakening the masses is a matter of building a “counter-hegemony” to challenge capitalist power. That counter-hegemony — basically counter-thought-control — is exactly what Yang is describing when he says, “people have to be silent, .... repeat loyalty oaths, ... scourge themselves in public.” More broadly, as he explains, it is about “dismantling reason, about dismantling individualism.”

Dismantling reason and individualism is of course, as Mounk, Yang, and the Persuasion Staff say, an attack on liberalism. Or, you could say, an attack on the enlightenment. The Neo-Marxist Culture-Industry concept is described by Adorno in a chapter called “Enlightenment as Mass Deception." That’s the essence of Neo-Marxism — the Enlightenment and liberalism are mass deceptions.

Jean-François Leotard who, along with Derrida and Foucault, was part of the holy trinity of postmodernism, first defined it. He said postmodernism is the unwillingness to believe in grand narratives. And his primary example of such a narrative was … the Enlightenment.

So we see that the Neo-Marxists developed theories of “cultural hegemony,” “the culture industry,” and “false consciousness” in order to attack Enlightenment liberalism, reason, and science. And postmodernism introduced this attack into Western academia. From there it spread throughout society in the form of woke identity politics.

This explanation leaves out many other important ideological currents, but it sketches the path of the most enduring and powerful current in the tide of wokism. Understanding this can help immensely as we fight against it. After all, Neo-Marxism has such a bad reputation that even Neo-Marxists shun its name.

A simpler, quicker introduction to postmodernism than provided by “Cynical Theories” can be found in Part 5 of my book “Ripped Apart,” available as a free PDF here: https://zfacts.com/ripped-apart-v1/

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