Taboo E-Book

Eric Kaufmann

• Herausgeber: Forum
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 612

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'Stimulating and provocative' The Times The once-dominant philosophy of the West, defined by free expression, equal treatment of individuals, national solidarity and scientific rationality, is under threat. 'Cultural socialism' – which advocates harsh restrictions on free speech, due process and national symbols in order to reduce psychological harm and bolster the esteem of formerly marginalized groups – is on the rise. Rather than focusing on Marxist revolutionaries or equality law, Eric Kaufmann concentrates on well-meaning left-liberals. He argues that the genesis of 'woke' cultural socialism emerged from liberal taboos around race that arose in the 1960s and came to be weaponised and extended to other areas, such as gender. Using extensive survey data, he shows that this process is driven mainly by values, not fear, and is only going to accelerate as culturally leftist generations enter the workforce and electorate. Its rise suppresses the open debate that makes effective policy-making possible, harming the minorities cultural socialists purport to help. Only if we shift from encouraging minority fragility to building minority resilience, using state power to check institutional illiberalism, can we resist cultural socialism and restore cultural flourishing. This is the authoritative study of the radical shift in values that has turbo-charged the culture wars of our time. No-one concerned with the cultural and political conflicts of our times can afford to miss it.

Leseprobe

TABOO

First published in Great Britain by Forum, an imprint of Swift Press 2024

Copyright © Eric Kaufmann, 2024

The right of Eric Kaufmann to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781800752665

eISBN: 9781800752672

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Woke Is Not Dead

Chapter 1: Toward a New Liberalism

Chapter 2: Big Bang: The Rise of the Race Taboo and the New Public Morality

Chapter 3: Rising

Chapter 4: Punishment

Chapter 5: Prejudice

Chapter 6: Fear

Chapter 7: Deculturation

Chapter 8: Youthquake

Chapter 9: The Politics of the Culture War

Chapter 10: Material Consequences

Chapter 11: What to Do

Chapter 12: Toward a Post-Woke World

Acknowledgments

Notes

INTRODUCTION

WOKE IS NOT DEAD

In 2015, a video of students shouting at Yale professor, Nicholas Christakis, went viral on social media. His crime? Being married to a woman who questioned whether Yale diversity administrators should be telling students what to wear on Halloween. This episode was mocked, yet it marked the beginning—not the end—of a cultural revolution that has since swamped the West. Just as political correctness was written off as a fad in the early ’90s, we should be skeptical of optimists who assert that woke illiberalism is exiting stage left. When Robert MacNeil declared to a young Dinesh D’Souza on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour in June 1991 that political correctness “has already begun to pass” due to its excesses being ridiculed in the press, D’Souza wisely replied that while it was “somewhat on the defensive,” the proponents of PC were “not a handful of radicals” but rather “institutionalized…[representing the] establishment.”1

Yale’s Halloween embarrassment was followed by Bret Weinstein being chased off Evergreen State College’s campus for questioning a one-day “no-white-people-allowed” edict, Black Lives Matter costing thousands of Black lives, and the #MeToo movement defaming numerous innocent men. The number of professors being disciplined or fired soared, establishment papers like the New York Times indulged in a moral panic over White supremacy, and the entire Canadian establishment fell for the delusion that hundreds of murdered or abused native children lay buried in “mass graves” at residential schools. DEI bureaucracies mushroomed and grew more strident in both government and corporations—even the military. The energy of this cultural wave seemed unstoppable.

I should know, as I felt its full force. As a Canadian professor of political science who had lived in Britain for two decades, I had assumed the country was a skeptical, eccentric haven from the blizzards of Canadian political correctness. This was not to be. While I had been wary of PC since the late ’80s, I came to be more openly critical of the cultural left in the 2010s. It was banging the same “racist, sexist, anti-gay” drum that I recalled from my undergraduate days in the late ’80s and early ’90s, only louder—and with a trans twist. Perhaps my newfound willingness to call it out stemmed from a deep-seated reflex to recoil when being forced to genuflect in front of sanctimonious moralizers who use emotional blackmail rather than evidence and logic to make their case.

I’ll never forget my first Twitter mobbing and internal investigation as an academic, the first of several I experienced during what has come to be known as the Great Awokening.2 My sins include: showing insufficient respect to Black Lives Matter, retweeting a video of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau mispronouncing “LGBTQ,” and honestly asking an empirical question of my Twitter followers as to whether a plus-size model in a fitness magazine could best be explained by the leftist desire to tackle oppression or the modernist quest to shock. My prodding of the woke bear may have been more brazen because I had reached a more secure point in my academic career.

Regardless, I soon became a target. Watching the “likes” pour in for an attack tweet from student union radicals was electrifying—and not in a good way. I will never forget the morning an email from my superiors landed in my inbox, claiming I had breached policies around respect and harassment and ordering me to attend a tribunal where my fate would hang in the balance. As administrators sat in judgment, the accusations became increasingly bizarre. For instance, I was charged with metaphorically wishing to kill a colleague when I used the term “slay the dragon” in a 2019 review of Douglas Murray’s book The Madness of Crowds for the Financial Times. (Murray had used the metaphor of a knight swinging at phantom enemies.)

The succession of unspecified punishments and bad faith accusations soon had me worried about the prospect of losing my job, knowing full well that it is virtually impossible for a cancelled professor to reenter academia. Between 2018 and 2022, I weathered four investigations and numerous social media attacks—all for mocking what I term cultural socialism, the hegemonic ideology of Western elite culture.

After 2021, however, the online attacks began to ebb, and those who tried—such as student union activists—got badly ratioed to the point that their faculty allies—some of whom were colleagues I had sat next to in administrative meetings—leapt to their defense, portraying them as emotionally-fragile victims. New collegiate associations like the Free Speech Union and Academic Freedom Alliance sprung up to defend those like myself who were accused of wrongspeak. I no longer worried about losing my job. A growing number of articles critical of progressive illiberalism appeared in the press.

While the British media, across most of the political spectrum, had opposed cancel culture from its earliest days, the so-called Harper’s Letter of July 2020 was the first major blow against the practice from within the liberal American press. Editorials in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic followed in 2022−2023. Many articles warned of the takeover of American media and publishing by young woke activists—graduates of Ivy League universities and expensive liberal arts colleges—who imposed a new race- and gender-based regime of ideological orthodoxy around what could be written and published. Others lamented the transformation of medical and legal education by a social justice agenda that privileged race and gender over facts and logic.

The fact that many of the complaints against these practices came from the political right led a majority of liberals to dismiss or downplay them. Even physical threats and intimidation by woke activists outside the homes of Supreme Court justices following decisions overturning Roe v. Wade and banning affirmative action in college admissions failed to move the needle for many liberals. But when thirty-four Harvard student groups immediately declared Israel solely responsible for Hamas’s wanton massacre of civilians on October 7, 2023 and pro-Palestinian demonstrators harassed and physically intimidated Jewish students on university campuses—quickly spreading to mass protests in the streets of American and European cities—the dam appeared to break and a broad consensus emerged that something had gone deeply wrong in elite and youth culture.

In the televised hearing that followed, Republican representative, Elise Stefanik, embarrassed university presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill of Penn, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT, who said that students calling for genocide against Jews could be disciplined depending on “context.” Following the backlash, Magill relinquished her position and, after an online campaign led by figures such as conservative writer, Chris Rufo, and centrist Democrat financier, Bill Ackman, Gay also resigned. The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) ethos, which lies at the core of elite culture, came into bipartisan crosshairs for the first time with CNN’s notably cautious Fareed Zakaria inveighing against it in a viral editorial. Mega-donors such as Jon Lindseth and Ken Griffin stopped giving to their Ivy League alma maters.

Meanwhile, Republican politicians were beginning to organize and focus on tackling the nerve centers of woke ideology. After Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show calling for anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) legislation in August 2020, President Trump passed a law banning it in the federal government. Though rescinded by President Biden, the genie was out of the bottle and, as of last count, some forty-four states had introduced anti-CRT legislation, with bills passing in many red states. New bills banning transgender women’s access to women’s sports and gender transition surgery for minors passed. As of this writing, eight states have signed laws banning DEI, or funding for it, in their public colleges. Meanwhile, in a landmark decision brought by Asian-American plaintiffs alleging discrimination, the Supreme Court ruled against Harvard.

The tide also appears to be turning against woke corporations. To date, no fewer than 165 bills opposing Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria have been tabled, with nineteen passing. Anti-woke consumer backlashes have damaged Bud Light, Target, and Disney, among others, for centering LGBT themes. Companies—particularly tech firms—have cut back on DEI. Organizations such as Netflix have explicitly taken a stand against the idea that emotional safety trumps artistic expression. In the corporate media, mentions of social justice terms such as “White privilege” and “unconscious bias” have fallen while the number of cancelled professors recorded by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)’s database has declined. Popular comedians like Bill Maher and Dave Chappelle openly court controversy by mocking the new radicalism.

As a result, many conservatives and free speech liberals believe the tide is turning. They optimistically believe that we have passed “peak woke” and the days of the new McCarthyism are numbered. Normal service will soon resume, it is thought, with edgy comedy, patriotic films, and freewheeling classroom debates on controversial issues coming soon to a campus near you.

To which I say: not so fast.

I have studied the cultural left academically for thirty years—ever since I was a doctoral student in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. My view is that the cultural left has deep roots and is hitting a peak of influence after rising consistently for more than a century. I view “woke” as continuous with an older left-liberalism which fears majorities and cherishes minorities. Hence, like D’Souza in 1991, I remain deeply skeptical of those who suggest that “woke” is a short-run fad on its way out.

Coverage of the culture wars has exploded in the media and there is a plethora of books trying to grasp this phenomenon. These explore cultural Marxism, Civil Rights law, the trans debate, attacks on history and statues, the woke corporation, Critical Race Theory, woke-as-religion, social media and teenage mental illness, the death of free speech and objective truth, the new activism in media, and much more. What Taboo provides is a unified framework that orders and makes sense of these subplots while grounding them in rigorous quantitative analysis.

This book goes beyond other accounts by offering a detailed twelve-point plan of policies to address the problem. It offers a distinctive new first-principles political philosophy: a post-woke vision of full-spectrum human flourishing. Just as we absorbed insights from socialism into mixed capitalism, we can adapt some aspects of cultural equality into a new accommodation based on excellence and cultural wealth.

Taboo revolves around the left-liberal anti-racism taboo of the mid-1960s. Like the big bang, this was a cosmic event; its logic has been progressively expanding, defining our social universe. It has introduced a zone of unbounded Identitarian sacredness around race—a form of social kryptonite which irradiated anyone standing in its way. This powerful magic was borrowed by the feminist and later LGBT movements, weaponized by the revolutionary left, and stretched to new frontiers of microscopic and confected emotional grievance. Along the way, it has eroded freedom, truth, and excellence while vandalizing cherished national identities and undermining social cohesion. Until the taboo is reformed into a proportionate norm like any other, cultural socialism will remain a dominant force in polite society.

While there is no question that the energy behind cancel culture has peaked, my view is that, far from disappearing, the underlying ideology is likely to maintain or increase its power in the years ahead. Its wings have been clipped, but the core myths and symbols from which it springs remain intact. This seedbed stands ready to nourish another moral panic the next time a White policeman kills an unarmed Black man or a whistleblower exposes a high-profile sexual predator.

Young people, especially young women, are much less tolerant of speech which offends historically disadvantaged race, gender, and sexual identity groups than older generations. This is especially true of Gen Z (zoomers) and millennials educated at the best universities. As they become the median employee in elite institutions and attain positions of power, they are likely to upend the country’s classical liberal and patriotic creed. The senior liberals who are behind the modest anti-woke correction in the mainstream media will have left the scene as part of the inevitable generational turnover of institutional leadership.

A key message of this book is that this fate can only be averted if democratically-elected administrations, aligned with the Constitution, implement sweeping and sustained reforms to the country’s meaning-making institutions—especially public schools and universities. At a deeper level, lasting change is only possible if our moral order ceases to revolve around the sacred totems of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups.

Taboo cuts to the heart of our condition in a way others do not. How so? First, it argues against the prevailing view that a cultural form of Marxism or postmodernism corrupted liberalism. Rather than a purposeful Gramscian-Marxist “march through the institutions,” I maintain that modern liberals, not radicals, are largely responsible for our cultural malaise. Incremental guilt and compassion, much more than envy or the desire to overthrow the existing order, have led us down this path.

Second, it uses large-scale surveys and datasets to show that left-liberal conviction, not cowardice, accounts for the power of cancel culture and critical race/gender ideology in organizations. There is no silent liberal majority just waiting to find its courage—many young people and staff in progressive institutions truly believe in the letters D, E, and I are readily swayed by appeals wrapped in the flag of anti-racism and compassion.

Third, it offers a comprehensive liberal-democratic political theory which urges government to intervene in public institutions to depoliticize them.

Fourth, it advances a vision of a post-woke world in which cultural flourishing and resilience replace cultural socialism and fragility as our highest ideals. The equity-wealth tradeoff is as true in culture as it is in economics and our elite institutions must become as skeptical of cultural socialism as they are of economic socialism. A person who demands equal outcomes by race or sex should be treated as every bit as extreme as one who insists that every person enjoy the same wealth, power, and prestige.

Finally, the book provides a high-level unified field theory of the culture war that can be applied to any particular instance of it. Accordingly, I split the literature on this subject into three key categories. The first concerns cultural versus material explanations: Here, I distinguish those who trace the rise of woke to ideological innovations and a “march through the institutions” from those who view progressive illiberalism as a byproduct of Civil Rights law or self-interest. The second separates liberal from conservative reactions: I parse classical liberal critiques of cancel culture (it threatens freedom, equal treatment, and truth) from conservative arguments against statue-toppling, renaming buildings, bowdlerizing the classics, and anti-White shaming. The third typology is a distinction about what to do: Here, I demarcate interventionists who believe government action is needed to break the power of the ideological regime from anti-government libertarians who believe only in voice, school choice, the marketplace of ideas, and lawfare.

Part of what is distinctive about my approach is that I locate the origins of the woke revolution farther back in time than others, presenting a grand theory of social change that reaches back a century—well before Trump or the smartphone. In demography, when fertility rates fall below replacement, it takes decades before total population starts to fall. In biology, it requires a lifetime for a person’s DNA to unfold and express itself. So, too, with woke ideology: the ideas began with left-liberal movements in the 1900s and largely crystallized by the late ’60s. One strand was neo-Marxist, but the more important one was humanitarian and soft-egalitarian. The full working out of their DNA only became clear after 2015. A cultural socialism once confined to campus spread into all of our institutions, with the last vestiges of the old order of cultural nationalism and classical liberalism finally giving way, like a termite-infested tree in a windstorm.

The book’s three parts cover woke’s rise, its impact, and what to do about it. Part I defines woke precisely as the “sacralization of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups.” This powers a woke variant of cultural socialist ideology, namely the belief in equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for totemic identity groups—think of the first as “Diversity-Equity” and the second as “Inclusion.” This section examines the intellectual history and spread of woke. Rather than emphasizing how cultural versions of post-Marxist utopianism or post-modernism took over liberal institutions, as writers such as Francis Fukuyama, James Lindsay, Chris Rufo, Mark Levin, Yascha Mounk, or Helen Pluckrose do, I focus on the evolution of modern left-liberalism. As Shelby Steele notes in his landmark White Guilt (which has influenced my thinking), compassion and guilt—not the desire to overthrow the existing order—established the race taboo in the mid-’60s. This was the big bang of our moral universe, from which taboos around sexism, homophobia, and transphobia were to later spring.

While radical ideas like Critical Race Theory or gender ideology have gained ground, they only succeeded because they resonated with an established left-liberal hypersensitivity around identity issues. This attention to the demand side, or consumption, of ideas, is missing from many books which focus only on the radicals and the ideas they produce.

Left-liberals, not revolutionary radicals, were also responsible for a number of woke innovations. Like water gradually heating to boiling point, their sensibility evolved incrementally from the 1970s through a process of therapeutic “concept creep” in which ever-finer microaggressions came to be declared traumatic. This is how we evolved from “crippled” to “handicapped” to “disabled” to “differently abled.” It also accounts for the ratcheting extremism of a series of Supreme Court decisions between the 1960s and 1980s.

Part II traces the effects of this ideology on society. This section breaks new ground by providing a fully-integrated quantitative overview of our cultural conflict, using numerous surveys to show how institutional punishment plus political prejudice combine to produce self-censorship in elite institutions like universities.

Cultural socialism challenges both classical liberalism and conservatism. Most writers, notably Fukuyama, Mounk, Lindsay, Richard Hanania, Greg Lukianoff, Rikki Schlott, Jonathan Haidt, or John McWhorter, draw attention to how woke impairs merit, equal treatment, and free expression. This critique from classical liberals is sometimes attached to a plea for civic nationalism (i.e., Mounk, Amy Chua, and Fukuyama), but the latter is, at best, a minor chord in this literature. On the other hand, authors such as Douglas Murray, Jeff Fynn-Paul, Mark Levin, Arthur Milikh, Chris Rufo, and Nigel Biggar focus on the threat that cultural socialism’s deculturating thrust poses to national and civilizational identity and cohesion. Finally, gender-critical authors like Kathleen Stock, Abigail Shrier, and Helen Joyce combine liberal arguments defending free expression and scientific truth with humanitarian harm claims on behalf of children and vulnerable women with a conservative inclination to protect women’s traditional identities and boundaries.

Using statistical analyses of my own and others’ surveys and big data keyword counts of millions of books and articles, I explore how public opinion on the two main woke outriders—cancel culture and deculturation—varies by age, gender, partisanship, and other social indicators. The young are consistently more woke than the old, especially in elite circles, which is a major reason for my longer-term pessimism about the claim that woke is in remission. Many were shocked when a Harvard-Harris poll showed that Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four split evenly between supporting Israel and Hamas when those over sixty-five leaned 96−4 toward Israel. This outlook flows from the racial “oppressor versus oppressed” lens through which young people have learned to see the world, with Jews cast in the role of White settlers colonizing people of color. This age discrepancy appears with regard to numerous other questions, such as whether J.K. Rowling should be dropped by her publishers, where young people are evenly split, while barely anyone over fifty agrees. Young women are especially likely to be cultural socialists.

I also show how cancel culture tends to flow from the bottom up rather than the top down, resulting in an “emergent authoritarianism” that largely arises from activists bullying institutions rather than elected officials telling them what to do. Political discrimination falls disproportionately on conservatives. As a result, they self-censor their speech at much higher rates than progressives.

Throughout, I show how the left-liberal majority in cultural institutions like universities is ambivalent about cancel culture but attracted to DEI policies such as diversity statements or broad definitions of harassment, which drive cancel culture. While fear is an important aspect of conformity—as it was during the McCarthy era—left-liberals today, like radicals, worship the totems of equal outcomes and harm protection for minorities. They accept that this is the North Star toward which morality must orient.

This renders modern liberals powerless in the face of radicals to their left. Like pious Muslims trying to argue against Islamic fundamentalists who point to passages in the Quran to authorize their violent global jihad, left-liberals are tied into a common moral framework with the fundamentalists, making it nearly impossible to resist their claims. While Patrick Deneen, Yoram Hazony, and other postliberals believe that the entire philosophy of liberalism is to blame, I believe liberal ideas can be salvaged if today’s left-liberals come to understand, question, and control their “minorities good, majorities threatening” emotional reflex.

Our current culture war revolving around speech boundaries and attacks on national symbols overlaps with earlier, and ongoing, cultural conflicts. The first of these—“secular humanist” versus Christian—followed the rise of the religious right in the 1980s, which I covered in my 2010 book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? in which I argued that religion’s demographic advantage undermines the basis for secular liberalism. The second culture war is the “globalist-nationalist” divide over immigration and ethnic change associated with the rise of the populist right which I explored in my 2019 book Whiteshift. Ethnic change, I wrote, is processed very differently by those wired to view difference as disorderly rather than stimulating, and change as a form of loss rather than excitement. It appears that we are entering another cycle of populist resurgence, which portends further polarization.

Indeed, our current (third) culture war was sparked, in part, by progressive reaction to Trump’s populism, while the rise of populism in countries as far afield as Sweden, Britain, and America was made possible by progressive elite speech restrictions around discussing immigration.

Cancel culture, by shutting down mainstream debate over contentious issues, has resulted in policy failures over immigration, crime, education, health, homelessness, and foreign policy. The way speech restrictions silence democratic discussion of immigration is key to understanding the rise of populism, because political correctness created a vacuum which populists like Donald Trump, who were willing to violate taboos, soon filled. As Bernie Sanders remarked, people liked Trump’s willingness to defy elite speech codes even as they disliked his personal and policy flaws.3 Moreover, Trump’s willingness to make immigration—an issue of high concern to many Republican voters—the centerpiece of his campaign contrasted sharply with the reluctance of the sixteen other 2016 Republican contenders to do so. His rise triggered a progressive counterreaction (labelling the populists “racist”), leading national populists to hit back, thus generating a spiral of recursive radicalism and polarization.

The culture war is, in my view, likely to become more important for the politics of Western countries because it is implicated in so many of the key fault lines dividing Western electorates. In surveys, cancel culture splits the far left from the center left while what I term “deculturation”—attacks on national and White majority traditions—elicits strong backlash from conservatives and only mild support from progressives. Overall, the culture war unites the right while dividing the left, providing a political opportunity for conservative politicians. Since there are more conservatives than classical liberals among right-wing voters, the battle over Critical Race Theory and gender issues has been more electorally salient than the fight for free expression.

Most American voters rank culture war issues well down their priority list, but skillful politicians such as Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Glenn Youngkin have been able to leverage them because the public generally leans 2-to-1 against the woke position. In Britain, Nigel Farage was able to successfully convince many voters to care about a low-priority issue, leaving the European Union, by tying it to a high-priority one, immigration. The first politician to successfully link the culture war to immigration, crime, and other high-salience issues is likely to prove a transformative figure. At present, most Western populist right politicians campaign mainly on immigration and integration, mentioning woke as an abstruse unrelated annoyance. We still do not see populist politicians repeatedly connecting what is happening in universities, schools, and other institutions to high-salience issues such as immigration, crime, and educational excellence. For it is only when culture war questions decide elections that the moderate liberals will gain leverage against the radicals to support a post-woke politics of institutional reform.

In the final part of the book, I outline a “twelve-point plan” for rolling back progressive extremism in our institutions to rebalance cultural equality with freedom and national community. Most of my proposed reforms are directed toward conservatives because it is only when they succeed that moderate liberals can win the internal battles against radicals—such as the Democratic politicians known as the “Squad”—who influence the cultural tone in their coalition.

I urge conservatives to use legislation and executive action at federal and state levels to intervene in public bodies and schools. The goal is to enforce political neutrality and introduce new conditions on public funding that require recipients to uphold political nondiscrimination and free speech. Legislation and executive orders are needed to proactively dismantle the DEI apparatus and ethos of the public sector and school system. While the battle of ideas is the only way to ultimately prevail, it will take decades to change public attitudes among younger generations. And while lawfare can protect dissenters’ speech rights in some contexts, this is expensive, stressful, and can be gamed by organizations. Ultimately, most will want to avoid the hassle, choosing instead to self-censor.

Conservatives must upgrade the back end of their operation, relying not just on election victories, but also on mobilizing and organizing between elections. Regardless of what you think of the National Rifle Association, pro-life movement, Straussians, or The Federalist Society, they show that conservatives can be focused and effective. Nurturing a pipeline of elite talent, even where the right is vastly outnumbered—as in Ivy League law schools—is a vital task. For at present, Republican administrations (or conservative ones in other western countries) lack the cadres of qualified appointees necessary to repopulate the bureaucracy and public bodies that have drifted left over time. Politicians lack the grounding in conservative and classical liberal ideas to help them resist the inevitable allure of acceding to progressives in institutions.

The goal is nothing short of a revolution in ethos, from a leftist focus on equity and diversity to a neutral and depoliticized public service concentrating on excellence and serving the country. The cultural left has spent several decades attacking meritocracy because outcomes are not equal across identity groups. They have undermined national narratives and symbols in the name of multiculturalism because the past, like the present, is not equal. People must understand that the future of our civilization is at stake. Changing the flag flying over public buildings from the Stars and Stripes to the Chinese star is, at one level, a trivial act, but none of us question its importance. Why, then, is it so difficult for many to grasp why flying the Progress Pride or BLM flag is so subversive?

Reform of public schools must be the highest priority. Studies show that school indoctrination really works and is casting tomorrow’s leaders and voters to be champions of DEI. Conservative governments need to purge woke politicization from the classroom, making this an overriding goal. School choice can do little more than nip at the edges of the problem. As the example of Twitter/X in relation to would-be alternatives like Gab and Parler shows, reforming the mainstream is more effective than starting separate institutions. This is true for all but the most competitive sectors (such as online podcast media), with most spheres of society involving varying degrees of market power which raise stiff barriers to new entrants while entrenching the power of established players.

Government regulation, not market competition, is therefore vital to taming the power of woke. No politician understands this better than Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who is the policy leader in this regard. However, his activism is an awkward fit with many in the conservative political world. It puzzles fiscal conservatives such as George W. Bush, Nikki Haley, or Britain’s Boris Johnson, whose political instincts were forged in the 1980s during the Cold War and stagflation—or by writers formed in this crucible. They are primarily oriented against government power and have been only too willing to submit to cultural left speech policing and affirmative action in order to placate liberals in the media and well-heeled donors.

As a result, conservative politicians have heretofore provided little resistance to equity-diversity (read: discrimination to achieve equal outcomes) or inclusion (read: control over freedom of speech). Both the public and an important tranche of conservative intellectuals have been ignored by conservative career politicians. This will have to change if we want our institutions to better reflect the mores of the wider society. This new paradigm is fully in accord with liberalism, but is about defending the liberty of citizens from institutions and private threats more than from executive government. It harks back to an older liberal tradition rooted in the works of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. It recognizes that government is accountable and transparent in a way that institutions are not.

While culture is partly downstream of politics, lasting change can only come from the battle of ideas. The lineaments of the culture complex that nourishes both left-liberals and radicals must, to paraphrase postmodernists, be decentered. So long as our value system is based around the “minorities good, majority bad” reflex, a catastrophizing “fascist scare” approach to cultural conservatism, and race, sex, and LGBT taboos, nothing will change. We must return to where it all began, planing our totalizing taboos down to proportional norms like any other.

This will allow a new, resilient, post-woke society to arise that will lift majority and minority alike. The push for more equal results and better harm protection for minorities has brought considerable benefit to our world. But it has overreached, damaging human flourishing. Just as we defeated communism but absorbed some of its insights to forge a mixed welfare-state form of capitalism, our task today is to defeat cultural socialism and restore cultural wealth while accepting that some attention to equal outcomes and psychological harm protection for minorities is part of the good society.

CHAPTER 1

TOWARD A NEW LIBERALISM

Regardless of pro-free speech editorials in Harper’s, The Economist, the Washington Post, or the New York Times, deeper generational currents are propelling our society away from cultural freedom.4 Modern liberalism has become corrupted, and we are in need of a rebalanced new liberalism. The goals of cultural socialism—achieving equality of outcome and protection from harm for historically disadvantaged identity groups—are worthy aims in moderation but are increasingly crowding out competing human values such as freedom, truth, community, and excellence. Just as economic liberals resisted and moderated the claims of economic socialism, those of us who are cultural liberals must find a way to push back against cultural socialism. The pursuit of cultural equality cannot come at the expense of our cultural wealth. Rather than levelling down successful social groups or trying to abolish boundaries that are vital for group flourishing, we need to find ways of raising up the less successful. We could call this perspective the common good, cultural utilitarianism, cultural holism or, more simply, human flourishing.

Restrictions on speech, reason, and national tradition are set to increase in the foreseeable future because they are the new normal among the rising Gen Z and millennial generations. For instance, by a 2-to-1 margin, Americans and Britons under age twenty-five prioritize protecting minorities from hate speech over defending free speech. Eight in ten American undergraduate students would ban a speaker who claims Black Lives Matter is a hate group from their campus. Young people who don’t go to university differ only slightly from those who do. These more illiberal generations are reshaping the workforce and will be the median voter by the 2040s.

From the New York Times to Disney to Spotify, younger employees are pressuring their organizations to prioritize cultural socialism over our traditional cultural liberalism of freedom of expression, equal treatment, due process, analytic logic, and the scientific method.5 This cultural revolution has rocked institutions from the bottom up, sparking a wider climate of political mistrust and polarization.

Racism should be frowned upon in society, but when one category of human experience becomes sacralized, competing values can no longer be properly balanced. With the “big bang” of the race taboo, the sacredness around race, like a ball of putty, could be stretched to encompass non-racist phenomena like standardized tests or punctuality. It could be transposed to adjacent identity categories such as gender and sexuality. From early activist court decisions to affirmative action bureaucracies, speech codes to cancel culture, Critical Race Theory to statue toppling, the cultural socialism we are living through is the outworking and scaling up of the logic of the sacredness of race. Revolutions in social media and media, along with Trump, acted as an accelerant, but we would have eventually arrived at a similar place, regardless.

Events and emotions arising from 1960s social movements deepened a set of moral intuitions among egalitarian liberals focused on equal outcomes and protecting chosen identity groups from psychological harm. The “strong majorities bad, weak minorities good” pattern of affective attachments—not a Marxist-style theoretical blueprint—guided the movement. It was inductive and empathy-driven rather than deductive and systematizing, resulting in an emergent, leaderless, sacralizing progressivism. While egalitarian liberals rejected communism, they were socialist on identity, championing a logic of quotas, minority hyper-fragility, and systemic discrimination.

In emotional terms, they were attracted by a progressive identity that elevated the ideal of the White savior, defending weak minorities against oppressive majorities. Their sacred values, stigmas, and heroic ideals are anti-majority and egalitarian, not, as in earlier periods, anti-government and liberal-national. While material self-interest and negative feelings toward communism protected them from economic extremism, no similar emotional or material safeguards existed on cultural issues. Here, there was thus nothing to prevent a drift to the extreme left, ultimately embracing the critical race, feminist, and gender theories of cultural revolutionaries. In some cases, as with affirmative action, political correctness and expanding definitions of emotional trauma and harassment, left-liberals spearheaded cultural socialist innovation; in others, such as Critical Race Theory in schools, they eagerly embraced the slogans of utopian revolutionaries. “Wokeness” thus emerges through a symbiosis of the liberal and illiberal left, with the former more important than the latter.

Theoretical justifications—Maoism, Postmodernism, Critical Theory—tried to intellectualize the emotional elephant. But focusing on the production of these theories fails to ask why the ideas of the radicals struck a chord with so many, especially the young and highly educated. Without a large audience of egalitarian liberals emotionally orienting toward their intuitive North Star of equal outcomes and harm protection for sacred minorities, the words of radicals such as Herbert Marcuse or Ibram X. Kendi would be merely howling in the wilderness. My demand-side analysis helps explain why cancel culture, Critical Race Theory, and gender ideology have either been eagerly accepted or gone unchallenged in elite institutions. Some are scared to raise their heads above the parapet, but many left-liberal knowledge workers find it difficult to quibble with an appeal to compassion and equal representation for identity groups. What else could morality be about? Swimming with the progressive tide also allows them to inhabit the attractive role of defender of the vulnerable against an oppressive majority and its “system.”

Woke is more mythos than logos: an identity like nationalism or religion more than a philosophy like liberalism. Thus, while modern liberals are at pains to philosophically distinguish themselves from the woke left, their affective attachments are, in fact, very similar. Figure 1.1 encapsulates the argument, illustrating how the race taboo (bolded) fits within the broader left-liberal symbol complex. This coalesced in America in the early 1900s as a pro-European immigrant, anti-WASP majority orientation. By the late 1910s, the majority was being stigmatized by intellectuals and, by the late thirties, it was painted as a threat. The pluralist left-liberalism of mid-century intellectuals subsequently overreached, from the mid-1960s, to become woke cultural socialism.

I distinguish beliefs about society (located on the left half of the chart) from self-identity (on the right side). The vertical society/self dichotomy is horizontally bisected by positive ideals across the top half and negative reactions in the bottom half. In short, the subjectivity of modern—though not classical—liberals is based on the same myths, symbols, and moral intuitions as the radical left. The difference between modern liberals and radicals is only a matter of degree. Having said this, liberals’ principled commitment to free speech, reason, and incrementalism is also important, preventing them from endorsing cancel culture and rogue statue toppling.6

The Left-Liberal Mythos

Figure 1.1

A Dystopian Future?

In his 1961 short story, The Handicapper General, Kurt Vonnegut portrays a futuristic America in the grip of a noneconomic form of socialist totalitarianism:

“The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.”7

In this brave new world, smart people are required to wear handicap headgear which emits sharp noises to prevent them taking “unfair” advantage of their intelligence. Beautiful people don disfiguring masks. The hero of the story, Harrison Bergeron, rebels by breaking free of his cumbersome handicaps and liberating a pretty ballerina from hers. The duo enjoys a brief moment of glory on stage before being executed in a grand finale by the handicapping authorities.

The Handicapper General is a cautionary tale about the excesses of a cultural form of socialism. That is, an ideology which believes in engineering equal outcomes defined on the basis of social and biological characteristics other than economic class. In the story, Vonnegut focuses on intelligence, athletic prowess, and attractiveness. These are objective traits that are not the basis for subjective identities. In our day, cultural socialism is preoccupied with the woke traits of race, gender, and sexuality, and attuned to the subjectivity of those who identify with these traits. Thus, the Handicapper is a cultural socialist, but not woke because he is neither concerned with subjective identity nor the woke trinity (note that I exclude weight or disability from my definition of woke). Vonnegut’s story was a flight of fancy at the time, coming as it did prior to the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. Yet it no longer seems quite as far-fetched. Indeed, cultural socialism is the ethos that underpins both Vonnegut’s nightmare and our present-day predicament.

Economic socialists bridle at the term “cultural socialism,” and I have some sympathy for them, but the similarities between the two creeds are greater than the differences. As I show, people who identify as being on the left—especially the far left—are significantly more likely than others to support limits on speech and the removal of “problematic” proper names and historical figures. While Marxian socialism is intellectual where cultural socialism is emotional, is materialist rather than idealist, and contains a concept of majoritarian community (“worker’s state”) that cultural socialism lacks, the defining feature of socialism is its egalitarianism, linked to a worldview which explains inequality as the result of social relations and coercive power rather than talent or hard work. An oppressor-oppressed, power-centric worldview is integral to both economic and cultural socialism. In short, cultural socialism shares much of its DNA with its socialist ancestor.

The second half of the twentieth century was defined by the Cold War, a struggle between economic liberalism and economic socialism. Socialism was viewed by many as more advanced and progressive than capitalism—especially prior to the 1930s—with some perceiving socialism to be economically superior as late as the 1960s. Communism was ultimately defeated, and a moderate form of egalitarianism absorbed into capitalist societies, as liberty and equality reached an accommodation. In the present day, some voters favor more taxing and spending than others, but the debate oscillates within a relatively narrow band. No serious Western politician, even those who use the phrase “socialism,” proposes a command-and-control economy.

Today, we face another epochal collision between liberty and equality, though the terrain is now culture rather than economics. Identity groups, not class, are the coin of the realm for the new socialist challenge, and the cultural socialist blueprint is to use institutional power to enforce equal outcomes between groups defined by race, gender, and sexuality rather than class or wealth.

As in the twentieth century, an extreme form of egalitarianism is challenging the liberal order. This is not top-down Marxist-Leninism, but rather a bottom-up moral awakening that relies on peer-to-peer cultural influence and coercion (often via social media) and the capture of institutions that mediate between individuals and the state. For over fifty years, society has functioned without an antibody to the cultural socialist idea, but its recent surge means we can no longer delay this task. What Matthew Yglesias terms the “Great Awokening” of progressivism is producing a second Cold War, between cultural liberals and cultural socialists. 8

Optimise, Don’t Maximise

The cultural socialist worldview focuses on race, gender, and sexuality, arguing that past discrimination warrants present discrimination. As applied critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi puts it, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”9 Kendi calls for a constitutional antiracist amendment which would create a fourth branch of government whose task would be “preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity” as well as “monitor[ing] public officials for expressions of racist ideas.”10 In Kendi’s worldview, racial equity is the overriding value. In line with his thinking, the goal of cultural socialism is to maximize outcomes for historically disadvantaged racial minorities and women, even if that means discriminating against Whites, Asians, or men. Attacking national heroes and recasting national narratives as tales of racist shame should be viewed as an attempt to undercut the pride of White majority groups, levelling them down.

In contrast to this maximalist approach, a cultural liberal perspective based on individual rights and equal treatment within a utility-optimizing system urges us to reach an optimum outcome across all groups. Thus, utilitarian optimizers must continually search for positive-sum solutions rather than punitive, zero-sum ones. In practice, this means eschewing racially discriminatory quotas in favor of unobtrusive egalitarian strategies like broadening recruitment pipelines, building minority confidence and talent, and modifying practices such as interviews which may be subject to “fast-thinking” bias.11 It means accepting that different groups may have different interests, values, and geographic locations and may arrive in a country in poverty or great wealth, resulting in a naturally uneven distribution of groups across professions. If Jews are overrepresented in lucrative Mergers and Acquisitions law, or in academia, that is generally not the result of structural discrimination.12

Patterns of ethnic stratification can persist or change relatively quickly, as with the ascent of non-Protestant “White ethnics” (such as Italians or Jews) in America between 1945 and 1980.13 While an attempt to facilitate equal representation is desirable to some extent, this can often prove counterproductive even for the groups concerned, and societies need to find an optimum between resisting and accepting inequality, much as we do with the distribution of wealth between individuals. The goal should be to identify a “natural” rate of group inequality at a given point in time. Even if we push against it, we accept that something short of proportional representation is fair. We should seek to ameliorate inequality, but only by an optimal amount.

In economics, the equity-efficiency trade-off nicely encapsulates the tension between people having an equal share of the pie and the pie growing larger.14 The more equally one divides the pie, the less it grows, so the goal is to optimize between the values of equality and growth. So too for culture: Beyond a certain point, trying to engineer equality of outcome between groups leads to a shrinking of the cultural “pie,” namely reducing the wealth of a culture as measured across the full range of human values, including freedom, excellence, and cultural authenticity.

Just as markets and capital accumulation are engines of economic wealth creation, social categories, rules, and performance hierarchies drive cultural wealth. Cultural socialism takes aim at categories such as male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, or White and Black. Viewing the first in each pairing as oppressive, it seeks to level the “oppressor” side down while redistributing esteem and power to the “oppressed” category. In some instances, such as gender, it seeks to abolish the binary in favor of fluidity. For race, it reinforces boundaries but reduces rich minority identities to one-dimensional caricatures defined by the political currency of oppression and resistance. The result is a poorer culture.

If equal outcomes and safety are our only values, then everything else—freedom, excellence, beauty, community, identity, and reason—can be sacrificed in the service of the overriding socialist goals. Likewise, if preserving human life were all that mattered, we would set a speed limit of two miles per hour, lock ourselves at home in perpetuity, and jail all men between the ages of fifteen and forty-five. Instead, we weigh the protective impact of these measures against their costs in terms of freedom, community, economic production, and other values to arrive at what we hope is an optimum at any given moment. However compelling the stories of those who die at the hands of viruses, cars, or young men, we need to factor in the loss to society overall, across a range of values, in order to establish optimal policies. The location of the optimum is something that needs to be openly debated the way we debate the balance between the tax burden, public services, and economic growth.

A rule-utilitarian must also consider the number of people affected. Making all toilets gender-neutral greatly reduces the number of people that may be processed per hour (because men are faster in urinals than cubicles) leading to longer lines for all, and creates a messier and less comfortable environment for women. It is inconceivable that the egalitarian gain for trans individuals in not having to choose between gendered toilets is large enough to offset the loss in human welfare across society, so gender-neutral toilets should not replace single-sex ones.

Similarly, we might not like the fact that some are prettier, more athletic, or more intelligent than we are, but cultural liberals believe it is generally better to let these talents express themselves than to truncate them the way the Handicapper General would. Likewise, it has been scientifically proven that suicide decreases during wartime.15 Yet no one suggests we should immiserize ourselves to cater to the moods of those who are most prone to kill themselves. Some accommodation is warranted if it can improve the mental health of the worst off, but the wider picture of societal wellbeing, or cultural wealth, should guide our thinking.

Excellence, Freedom, and Community

Three main crunch points that an expanding cultural socialism collides with are excellence, freedom, and community. Using Vonnegut’s example of unequal intelligence, should we adhere to the illusion that everyone is equally smart, and design society accordingly? This is the premise of Lionel Shriver’s new novel, Mania.16 It would mean that everyone gets the same grade on a test in order to avoid making less intelligent people feel bad. Top jobs and income levels are allocated in such a way that IQ does not correlate with occupational status. Jokes, instruction manuals, organizational communications, intellectual arguments, advertisements, and movies must not to be too difficult for the least intelligent person, lest they experience a microaggression or even “trauma.” The unintelligent must be sensitized to their plight as a social group, to move, in Marxist terms, from being a “class for itself” to a “class in itself.” The slow must both be recognized as an identity and be accorded equal or greater status than the intelligent.

On the flip side, the intelligent must not express their identity or their affection for the achievements of smart people in the past. This could rekindle memories of the bad old days of “smart privilege” and domination, making slow people feel emotionally unsafe. The nation itself must reject common symbols and memories because these are associated with a time of cognitive inequality—to do otherwise would be to reproduce the subtle narratives of “systemic smartism.”

Difference, not commonality, is the watchword in an “intelligence-conscious” rather than intelligence-blind society. To fail to “see” intelligence would be to disguise the structures of smart supremacy that reproduce cognitive inequality through unconscious bias, and to overlook the nasty policies which reproduce disparate cognitive impacts over time. Clever remarks, puns, or jokes exclude the cognitively slow, so these or any other form of “quick” culture must be erased. Though “quick” and “slow” intelligence are social constructs, those who “present” as quick must confess their privilege to those who “present” as slow. Friendship groups must not discriminate against the unintelligent, though the reverse need not be the case because the oppressed require a safe space. In the name of equity and inclusion, “punching down” is not permitted while “punching up” is positively encouraged. Finally, any policy, such as tax rebates, cannot have a “disparate impact” on those of lower IQ.

The implications of cultural socialism in Handicapperland are that levelling the most gifted intellect down to the lowest common denominator takes a wrecking ball to what society can achieve and create. Those in the most important jobs will often be unsuited to their task, resulting in economic, political, and cultural stagnation. Second, forcing people to suppress their esteem for the intellectually talented, and to desist from making clever arguments, impedes human reason and violates people’s right to freedom of speech and conscience. Third, railroading smart people into having cognitively inclusive social groups while asking them to suppress their identity, culture, and memory is deculturating. It impoverishes smart culture and, through it, the wider national culture. In addition, the Handicapper ethos is likely to spark tense social divisions, impeding a social solidarity already decimated by the gutting of a common national memory and the constant emphasis on difference over commonality.

A final point concerns inequality and injustice. While equality of outcome has been achieved in Handicapperland, this has only come about through treating the smart unequally and attacking their identity. There is also severe discrimination against anyone calling for an end to the cultural socialist regime, so we find political intolerance alongside discrimination against the gifted.

While all but the most zealous cultural socialist would reject the world of the Handicapper General, many are willing to buy into it when the categories are rotated from quick/slow to White/non-White, male/female, or cisgender/transgender.

While most progressives balk at quotas based on intelligence, many support affirmative action on the basis of sex or race. Thus, unequal results are permitted for most, but not all, social categories. Though intersectional lip service is sometimes paid to the very short, unattractive, overweight, or neurodivergent, these don’t excite today’s cultural socialists. Instead, their attention rests on the small range of categories—race, gender, and sexuality—which have been politically selected, elevated, and sacralized.

Curiously, most readily accept inequality when it comes to within-race ethnic difference. We don’t hear much in Britain about the achievement gap within Whites between the Gypsy/Traveller and Jewish communities or within Blacks between American slave-descended Blacks and immigrant-origin Blacks, or even the light- and dark-skinned. These disparities are not seen as caused by structural ethnicism, yet race gaps give rise to immediate charges of structural racism.

The problem for cultural socialism is that different cultures, for historical reasons, do not emphasise the same values. Some are more materialistic, others more artistic. Indeed, cultural socialists are often critical of the materialism of Western cultures—which may be an ingredient in the West’s economic success! In addition, the results of cultural socialist policies—a.k.a. affirmative action—have been disastrous. In societies as disparate as Fiji, Zimbabwe, South Africa, or Malaysia, the effects have generally been similar to those of economic socialism: sapping economic growth, encouraging violence and discrimination against disfavoured minorities, and stoking political unrest.17

Why do woke cultural socialists today fixate only on equal results and harm protection for the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality while largely ignoring the numerous other ways of categorizing human beings? The answer lies in the history of how the left constructs its ideology, making choices in response to events and the unfolding logic of their ideas.

Cancel Culture and “Critical Race Theory”

Cultural socialists take an absolutist approach to equal outcomes and psychological harm protection, resulting in steep costs to other social values. While cultural socialism damages excellence, defenders of excellence and beauty are not a powerful political group. But those whose free speech is being censored or whose identity is being suppressed—conservative parents, gender-critical academics, cancelled employees—are politically important and resisting the new cultural socialism. There are two major vectors of conflict. The first concerns progressive illiberalism (“cancel culture”), the second progressive deculturation (“Critical Race Theory”).

Classical liberal values such as expressive freedom, reason, equal treatment, and due process have been eroded in universities, and this has now spilled over into other sectors such as health care or policing, and online, where “cancel culture” is eroding free speech culture.

On a separate front, communitarian values such as national belonging, cohesion, and identity are under assault due to cultural socialism’s deculturating thrust. That is, forms of culture or historical narrative that are perceived to be offensive, or associated with historic harms or inequality, must be erased even if they are important sources of identity for many people. Where decontextualized negative portrayals of a country’s history and society are forced on a captive audience—as in schools or with mandatory “diversity statements” in universities—cultural liberal principles of freedom of conscience and equal treatment are violated. In this case, cultural socialism violates both liberalism and national tradition at the same time.

I don’t take an absolutist view of free speech or national tradition, but rather a rule-utilitarian approach which accepts trade-offs. This may mean a statue has to be removed, but the decision will involve consideration of the positives and negatives of an individual, as well as the multiple meanings attached to the statue by different constituencies now and in the future. Rules which erect a high bar to removal, and encourage adding plaques or new statues will tend to benefit societies more over generations. Proper legal and democratic processes should be followed and positive-sum solutions favored. The problem is that cultural socialism takes a narrow maximalist approach, sacralizing equal outcomes and harm claims along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality, which renders nuance and trade-offs impossible.

The culture has evolved toward progressive maximalism. Metaphorically speaking, this means twisting the egalitarian-humanitarian dial from a position of 2 out of 10 in 1950, with too little race, gender, and sex equality and sensitivity, to an optimum of 5 out of 10 (reached at different points on different issues, earlier on race than on homosexuality) to an illiberal overshoot of 11 out of 10 today. I’m not saying that the problem of race or gender inequality in the economy has been solved, but I’d argue that in the realm of culture (language, narrative, symbol, performance) we have overshot the optimum.

Does the culture war matter? Surely this is a sideshow when people are worried about paying their bills and getting health care! Not so. First, culture itself is important to human beings: Hong Kong may be prosperous under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but protestors are willing to risk imprisonment or worse to fight for their right to free speech and democracy. Changing Britain’s flag to that of China may not have any material consequences, but it matters greatly to many people.

Second, even if you don’t care about culture, cultural socialism has a plethora of negative effects on issues you probably do care about. With a narrow window of acceptable debate, it may be impossible to optimally reduce crime, address the breakdown of the family or low birth rates, control immigration, tackle the homelessness problem, or improve education and health for historically underperforming minority groups. Excellence, innovation, and economic productivity will then take a hit.

The downstream effects of wokeness go even further. Cultural socialism is fuelling populism and polarization. When progressive taboos remove issues like immigration from democratic debate, discontent with unresponsive elites and institutions creates a vacuum which populist insurgents fill. The rise of populist phenomena such as Trump or Brexit, in turn, elicits progressive backlash, resulting in a feedback loop of recursive radicalization that can be measured in content analyses of media terms. This vortex of polarization sucks in other issues such as vaccination or climate policy, hampering our ability to reach optimal solutions to issues such as covid or global warming. While right-wing figures such as Trump drive division with incendiary statements and actions, cultural socialist politicians such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau have likewise fuelled record levels of political polarization.18 In other words, across numerous policy areas, the rise of cultural socialism is contributing to failure, mistrust, and division.

Today’s Handicappers

Unequal biological inheritance is the currency of Vonnegut’s handicapper world, but there is no suggestion that talent and beauty are illusions: emperor’s new clothes imposed on naturally equal human beings. The talented and beautiful are not conspiring to spin myths that “socially construct” beauty or intelligence out of nothing. By contrast, the often blank-slate outlook of contemporary cultural socialism leads it toward pseudo-scientific “critical” theories of structural racism and patriarchy which hold that race and sex are actively “constructed” into hierarchies which reproduce themselves unconsciously from one generation to the next, benefitting oppressors at the expense of the oppressed.

A second difference from Vonnegut’s account concerns the influence of psychotherapy and the human potential movement. Robert Putnam reports that in 1950, just 12 percent of survey respondents agreed with the statement, “I am a very important person,” compared to 80 percent in 1990. This was a period of rapid expansion in single living, divorce, personalized mix-and-match religiosity, and other forms of individualism.19 This rise of expressive individualism, sometimes tipping into narcissism, focused people inward, boosting the growth of the psychotherapy industry. While Bohemian intellectuals lauded the benefits of Freudian psychotherapy in the interwar period, the spread of this sensibility from the ’60s onward gave radical ideologies a makeover. What psychologist Nick Haslam terms “concept creep” took hold from the ’60s, resulting in an egalitarian-liberal expansion in the remit of terms such as bullying, trauma, and prejudice.20 Bloated definitions of psychic fragility, self-esteem, and psychic harm came to be layered on top of a substructure of increasingly radical cultural egalitarianism. None of this stemmed from cultural Marxism.