Telos 204 (Fall 2023): Quandaries of Race and Gender Theory is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
Old-style leftists have puzzled over how today’s left-liberals have abandoned traditional left-wing goals such as reducing class inequality and improving working-class standards of living. A key reason lies with the shifting of the politics of class. As Paul Piccone and Fred Siegel argued over thirty years ago in these pages,[1] the problem of class is no longer a question of capitalists against workers. According to a recent Gallup poll, 61 percent of U.S. adults own stock,[2] and such capitalist ownership, while a good way to increase wealth, is no longer the preserve of the ruling class and does not by itself confer much power. Rather, the ruling class that exercises real power consists not of owners but primarily of a bureaucratic class of managers in corporations, government, non-profits, universities, and the media.[3] In spite of this shift, theories developed over a century ago continue to shape current leftist perspectives. Dominated by a socialist perspective, left-wing social policy fails to recognize and address the new contours of class division. As a result, it continues to employ a framework that is based on an anti-capitalist and anti-market agenda that tries to manipulate outcomes to promote socialist goals, precisely the methods of a managerial class.
Instead of addressing directly the issue of class divisions, left-wing social policy focuses in its rhetoric on race and gender because the ideological battles over discrimination have already been won and there is an established anti-discrimination consensus that they seek to mobilize for unpopular redistributionist policies. The 1960s were a time of openly race- and gender-based discrimination that included such practices as segregated bathrooms, discrimination against women in the workplace, and persecution of homosexuals, and such issues were a legitimate focus for left-wing politics at that time. But with today’s established laws and policies against discrimination and in support of gay marriage, for instance, the cause of anti-discrimination, while still popular, no longer has any clear enemies besides the racists and misogynists of the past or fringe groups in the present. The left has consequently resorted to pointing to such statistics as college admissions data, loan approval rates, or incarceration rates, in which racially disproportionate outcomes are taken to be themselves evidence of systemic racism. The proposed remedies involve the weakening or dismantling of standards such as SAT test scores, credit scores, or even penalties for crimes in the effort to create the desired racially balanced outcomes through different forms of affirmative action. The unfairness and perniciousness of such policies is readily apparent, in that they erode the values of hard work, trustworthiness, and lawfulness. By promoting such policies, the left has provided further legitimation for populist perspectives. Through this dynamic, the Republican Party now represents the interests of the working class, while the Democratic Party has become the representative of a managerial elite that attempts to engineer desired social outcomes. This transformation of left-wing politics could not have happened without an accompanying ideology that has justified it. This issue of Telos investigates the theories that have led to the transformation in the politics of race and gender over the last half century.
Hendrik Hansen argues that post-structuralist theory led to the racial identity politics of the left, which today shows similarities with the identity politics of the right. Both left and right end up glorifying conflict and violence themselves and as such. On the left, today’s radical form of identity politics began as a post-structuralist critique of the essentialism of Marxism-Leninism. Whereas Marx and Lenin imagined that there were objective economic conditions that were the basis of revolutionary action, post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard argued that all unifying perspectives were themselves oppressive just from the fact of establishing a hierarchy of values. Subsequent left-wing politics developed these ideas by arguing that today’s political struggles are not oriented toward establishing any concrete utopia but as movements of continual resistance against any attempts at establishing a new order. In this view, every order becomes itself part of a network of oppression. As a result, theorists such as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt support all forms of resistance—even the violence of Islamic fundamentalists—against a globalized system. Meanwhile, Hansen describes how the “Interventionist Left” advocates for killing police as a fundamental strategy because the police are always agents of order.
Right-wing radicalism is similar to left-wing anti-universalism in that right-wing movements are based on an ethnopluralism that treats all cultures equally. The New Right in Germany sees itself consequently as anti-Nazi because it rejects universalist claims to racial superiority. Rejecting what they see as the ethnocentrism of older right-wing movements like Nazism, right-wing ethnopluralism is based on a cultural relativist attitude that is similar to the left-wing repudiation of grand narratives. Armin Mohler becomes the key intellectual figure in the right-wing identitarian movement because, like Lyotard, he rejects all universalisms—including monotheistic religion, Marxism, and Nazism—as totalitarian. He argues for a nominalism in which the basic task of all individuals is to willfully establish their own forms of order amidst the general chaos of the world. Rejecting both liberalism and the idea of human rights, this philosophy sees all human activity as a form of self-assertion against competing centers of power. Hansen sees a contrast between the left-wing liberation of desire and the right-wing prioritization of struggle in the pursuit of individual superiority. But both the focus on desire and the pursuit of individual power seem to be part of the same rejection of shared values.
By delegitimizing the value of merit and thereby the social success of certain groups, affirmative action policies threaten to exacerbate anti-Semitic and anti-Asian sentiment. As John McWhorter has argued,[4] a new form of “woke racism” has created a set of dogmatists on the left who hold their views with a religious conviction, leaving them impervious to rational argument. Their dogmatism feeds into what Manuela Consonni describes as the mythic conceptions of the world that have fostered anti-Semitism in the past. She distinguishes between genuine myths and false myths. Community bonds and a sense of belonging are inevitably based on shared genuine myths. But myths can also be manipulated for political reasons, leading to a set of false myths that suppress historical facts. The spreading of such false myths became a primary means of promoting anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For example, accusations of ritual murder led to the unjustified condemnation for murder of Jews in Damascus in 1840. Similarly, the publication of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion fed into a myth of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. Consonni argues that these myths were designed with a political purpose. The condemnation of the Jews became the form in which an anti-liberal and anti-modern worldview expressed itself.
In his analysis of the continuing relevance of Michel Foucault’s work on sexuality, Mark G. E. Kelly points out that our sexual mores have undergone a thorough transformation in the last half century. Whereas our discourse of sexuality used to be oriented around the defense of the normal against the abnormal, today this distinction is no longer relevant. Instead, the focus is on the affirmation of the consensual against the nonconsensual. This shift brings with it a focus on individual will and desire as opposed to their subordination to social needs and constraints. The primacy of individual agency in performing one’s gender and sexuality coincides, however, with a sense that there is an inner truth that the performance is meant to reveal. Though gender is held to be independent of biological sex, it is also somehow just as immutable. This truth of gender is now thought to be something that the individual must discover and express. Since one’s inner desires are given free rein to develop in any way possible, constraints no longer come from society but rather seem to originate as a secret truth from within.
The consequent focus on self-discovery leads to conflicts when coupled with the primacy of consent in the case of minors, who are considered to be incapable of consent. Incest, pedophilia, and necrophilia remain out of bounds due to the inability of minors (or corpses) to provide consent. Yet the idea of a fluidity of gender requires minors to engage in sexual experimentation to determine their true gender amongst the growing panoply of choices, even though they are still judged to be incapable of consent. This contradiction has led to debates over whether minors can and should be asked to choose their gender identity rather than being constrained by it. Since minors are both required to attain self-knowledge and yet unable to consent, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine the role of schools and parents in this process. These contradictions and conflicts reproduce in today’s world the kinds of incitements to confession as well as the state-based monitoring that Foucault originally analyzed in his history of sexuality.
Kevin Amidon describes a parallel set of contradictions that result from queer theory’s relentless dissolution of categories. The question of ontogeny in this context, i.e., whether homosexuality arises from biological determinants or sociocultural factors, requires queer theory to choose between agency or descent as the foundation of individual identity. Queer theorists have generally preferred to focus on agency while suppressing descent as a definer of categories. Agency, grounded only in the subject’s desire rather than the limitations of predetermined categories of identity, leads to a suspicion of and opposition to all forms of constraint. In discussing the question of whether ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, Amidon poses the question of the limits of our agency, that is, of whether our own individual development will always follow a pathway that is determined by our existence as part of a species and thus of a larger history. The focus on agency denies this history, leading in the end to a foregrounding of wildness, dissolution, and the death drive as the basis of queerness. Homosexuality itself, as a fixed category, becomes a source of stability that is opposed to queerness as a continual dissolution of categories. Because such categories always become obsolete in the face of particular events, Amidon sees this dynamic of queerness as part of an essential contradiction between the universality of theories and the particularity of phenomena. It is also part of the conflict between the influence of the past and our wish to create a new future. Queer theory is faced with a particular conundrum to the extent that it insists on a fundamental queerness that dissolves all categories, leading to the glorification of dissolution and violence that Hansen also describes.
Gal Gerson analyzes the conflict between populism and liberalism by looking at the debate between Christopher Lasch and Jessica Benjamin about how gender and family relate to social and political life. They both attempt to rethink family relations in order to support a more equitable division of gender roles and responsibilities. In contrast to Freudian accounts in which paternal authority represents reason against the pure feeling of maternal nurturing, both Lasch and Benjamin imagine a less gendered approach to the opposition between rationality and feeling. The populist Lasch differs from Benjamin in the way in which he emphasizes the tragic situation of human mortality as the basis of rationality and responsibility. As opposed to a therapeutic state that seeks to obscure such a sense of the tragic, Lasch views a consciousness of the tragic as essential to a full human life. By contrast, Benjamin sees this focus on the tragic as an excuse to allow power relations to replace caring human connections. Their debate revolves around whether human relationships should be organized as a way to face the tragic inevitability of death or as a way to provide comfort in the face of such tragedy. As with the development of theories of sexuality and of queerness, there is an opposition between a consciousness of external constraint and a promotion of inner desire.
In our special section on the end of affirmative action, J. E. Elliott argues that the dissent in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision relies on the idea of structural racism to justify the continuation of racial preferences. Because structural racism manifests itself not in any intentionally racist behaviors but through a set of inequitable outcomes, the proponents of structural racism need to manipulate these outcomes on a group level, even if that means discrimination on an individual level. This logic can only lead to an endless process of group discrimination that replicates the discrimination it is supposed to be correcting. Elliott surmises that universities are still nevertheless committed to this social engineering project and will continue to try to implement backdoor racial preferences at the risk of new lawsuits in a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the courts. At the same time, the goal of inclusivity supports the overall goal of the higher education sector to maximize its revenues by bringing in more students.
John K. Bingley lays out the way in which the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision has not just rolled back racial preferences in college admissions but also reversed a more general restriction of the deference that the Supreme Court has shown toward universities. The key issue has been the belief by universities that they should be able to engage in a manipulation of admissions policies to create racial diversity, even if it means discriminating against specific racial groups in order to achieve the outcomes they desire. Both the Constitution and the Supreme Court have consistently denied that universities have a right to do this, but the Court has allowed an exception for universities based on the argument that there is an interest in diversity as a goal in itself. By using the argument that they are promoting diversity, universities have tried to portray their racial preferences as a way to prevent the exclusion of certain minority groups. Yet maintaining exclusivity is one of Harvard’s main goals, and it is not interested in having a random admissions process. In maintaining a merit-based exclusivity while providing preferences for certain groups, Harvard ends up excluding certain groups solely because of their race. Putting a stop to this practice will promote equality of opportunity and also reduce the power of managerial elites.
In my essay, I argue that affirmative action has not only increased racial discrimination against Asians but has also been a counterproductive policy for improving educational outcomes for Blacks and Hispanics. As the majority opinion emphasizes, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard was long overdue as a return to the letter and spirit of the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act in their outlawing of racial discrimination. Yet affirmative action has also harmed the students it was meant to benefit. Rather than directly addressing poor outcomes in the primary and secondary education system, affirmative action distracted from those problems by focusing attention on college admissions. For the vast majority of low-performing students of all races, though, the key is not so much the college admissions process. Rather, the underlying problem has been their failure to develop the basic skills that would allow them to even apply to college. Without the distraction of affirmative action, it may now be more possible to focus attention on individual merit rather than race to improve primary and secondary education for everyone.
Finally, in a review of Timothy Stacey’s Saving Liberalism from Itself, Andrew Wender describes the extent to which community groups in Vancouver have developed new forms of collective action and spirituality that seek to reverse the anomie fostered by the state’s administration of everyday life.
1. Fred Siegel, “Is Archie Bunker Fit to Rule? Or: How Immanuel Kant Became One of the Founding Fathers,” Telos 69 (Fall 1986): 9–29; Paul Piccone, “The Crisis of Liberalism and the Emergence of Federal Populism,” Telos 89 (Fall 1991): 7–44.
2. Jeffrey M. Jones, “U.S. Stock Ownership Highest Since 2008,” Gallup.com, May 24, 2023, https://news.gallup.com/poll/506303/stock-ownership-highest-2008.aspx.
3. See Joel Kotkin, The New Class Conflict (Candor, NY: Telos Press Publishing, 2014); and Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2020).
4. John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2021).
