Capturing the heart of Main Street

The Left’s historic error of disdain for the people

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     In my February 14 commentary, I concluded with reference to an article by Ed Warren, “Rediscovering Our Shared American Values: What I learned on my journey through small-town America, the military, tech startups, and elite universities,” which maintains that average Americans are decent and honorable men and women who reject the conflictive ideological extremes of the Left and the Right.  I begin today’s commentary with an explanation of why I appreciate Warren’s article.

American civic virtues and their decline

      Warren writes of the influence during his childhood of his mother’s commitment to evangelical Christianity tinged with historical consciousness, and he writes of his subsequent experiences in college, the Air Force, the cleantech private sector, and graduate school at elite universities.  He evolved from conservative to liberal through these experiences, but what struck him most was that there was a shared foundation of practical values: “work hard and take personal responsibility for your actions; contribute to your community; and treat others with respect.”  He writes that “different communities naturally converged on a common value system. They all put in long hours to get ahead in their jobs; they all strove to give something back to their communities; and they were all generally kind to their colleagues and neighbors.  This pragmatic virtue was our common creed.”

     However, by 2015, he “sensed that kind-hearted reasonableness was losing ground to fervent ideology.”  In two subsequent paragraphs, he nailed it.

“My graduate school peers . . . were at the forefront of what would eventually become known as ‘wokeism.’ This passionate subset of students believed that the sins of America’s past necessitated an unsparing and wholesale reinvention of America’s core tenets. It was fashionable among them to condemn an ethos of hard work and personal responsibility as evidence of “White Supremacy culture” or to declare that the American Dream was dead.

“I understood the sentiments behind this movement. America has catastrophically failed to live out its ideals on many fronts, and fully appreciating the lasting effects of these failures is key to achieving progress. But this ideology erred by viewing pragmatic American virtue as the driver of—rather than the bulwark against—America’s worst transgressions. To purport that those who still clung to traditional values and behaviors needed to be defeated—or, at least, re-educated—was a declaration of hostility towards average Americans who saw themselves as decent people just trying to get by. The net effect of the movement was to leave the average person feeling morally condemned.” (Italics added)

Correcting ideological errors

     What, if anything, can be done about the decline of American civic virtue?  Warren maintains that “we should build upon the virtues already integrally woven into our civic DNA” in order to “begin the work of building a more empowering and respectful society.”  I would submit, however, that the nation’s ideological malady is not going to heal itself naturally.  The condition has to named and described by new leaders not yet known, convoking the people to the moral commitment to leave it behind, and basing their call in a comprehensive and unifying alternative political project for the nation.

     In analyzing and curing the condition, we have to recognize that it has various roots.  Some individuals have true disdain for their ideological enemies, possessing a sense of superiority.  Others indulge in angry self-expression, not recognizing that what is psychologically functional in private settings is not politically functional public discourse.  Some have insufficient knowledge of the dynamics of social change, due to a lack of knowledge with respect to revolutions in other lands.  Naming these dysfunctionalities will be important for overcoming them.

     Especially problematic in the current ideological situation is the fact that the most vocal sectors of the Left have a flawed analysis with respect to race.  They do not discern that the central moral evil of our time is not racism but neocolonialism.  And it was always so, in that modern racism emerged as a justification for European colonial domination of the world, which occurred from the 1492 to 1914, and which, like most conquests in human history, was driven by a quest for wealth and power.  Religion was used as a justification at first, but this kind of reasoning lost force when religious tolerance emerged as a central principle of the late eighteenth century democratic revolutions.  The skin color of the conquered, and the falsehoods that could be constructed around skin-color variations among humans, emerged as a convenient pretext for the conquest, which was difficult to justify in the context of democratic values.  Modern “science” was recruited to the cause.

     But racism is no longer functional in a neocolonial world.  In a neocolonial world-system, the great powers intervene in the internal political-economic affairs of nations through alliance with national elites, thereby giving the false appearance of a world community of sovereign states.  It is a great deception, disguising the survival of colonialism through the economic structures that it had imposed on the colonized.  In this world context, the USA, presenting itself as the leader of the supposedly democratic world-system, was compelled to legally abolish its own systemic racism, which it did in 1964 and 1965. The USA could not possibly have pretended to be a leader in a world-system that formally recognizes the sovereign equality of nations, if it had continued with a denial of the equal rights of its citizens on the grounds of race and ethnicity. 

      The formal legalization of citizenship rights in the context of a neocolonial world made logical a shift in the movement for the civil rights of citizens of color to a movement for the socioeconomic rights of all citizens, regardless of race and ethnicity; and for the abolition of imperialist foreign policies, as violations of universally proclaimed democratic values.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, and he attempted to keep the movement alive on this expanded basis from 1966 until his assassination on April 4, 1968.

    Today, however, the neocolonial world-system is in disintegration.  The USA has economically declined relative to colonial world powers and to emerging economies among the formerly colonized nations.  In seeking to retain its hegemony in spite of its relative economic decline, the U.S. government has resorted to military interventions (either direct or through proxies), to economic sanctions, and to blatant forms of economic coercion.  As a result, the neocolonial deception is exposed; and the decadence of the superpower becomes visible for all the world to see.  The formerly colonized and peripheralized have begun to trade with one another on mutually beneficial terms, proclaiming the construction of an alternative world-system based on cooperation and peace among nations.

     These dynamics are poorly understood in the United States, as the U.S. power elite fights on in a desperate attempt to maintain its hegemony, and it has managed to maintain control of communication.  A social movement with correct analysis would describe and expose these dynamics.  But instead of following the necessary road indicated by King and other historic leaders of the African-American movement, “activists” today claim special privileges for persons of color and “oppressed peoples,” including a special privilege to speak and be heard.  In these demands, they are supported by the corporate elite, which has an interest in confusing and dividing the people as it desperately seeks to maintain its eroding power.

     The mission of social change in a neocolonial epoch requires identification and transformation of neocolonial structures that sustain inequality among nations and that sanction the systemic denial of the socioeconomic rights of citizens of all races and ethnicities.  Social change in a neocolonial epoch does not involve identifying and attacking individuals for alleged expressions of racism, which in reality has declining functionality in promoting inequality.    

The limitations of American civic virtue

     Aside from the confusions of the Left, another challenge before us is that the moral education for civic virtues in America, which Ed Warren rightly appreciates, has a fundamental flaw.  Namely, it is lacking in sufficient historical, global, and political consciousness.  This has serious consequences.

     Above all, it leaves the people vulnerable to ideological manipulations created to defend imperialist wars and policies.  Fundamentally false claims can be made with respect to almost any country, concerning which the people know next to nothing.  Such manipulations are common in the neocolonial order.  As is natural, some nations mobilize the political will to seek a sovereign road, which stands opposed to the structures of the world-system, designed to create further wealth for the wealthy nations and to further impoverish the poorer nations.  Accordingly, the short-term economic interests of the global elite drive it to delegitimate and destroy such governments that seek sovereignty.  Even if the nation in question has resources that are not so important in the global scheme of things, their governments must be destroyed, because their success in attaining sovereignty provides a bad (yet inspiring) example to other neocolonized nations and peoples. 

     In the United States in the late 1960s, the student anti-war and black power movements were beginning to discern the worldwide transition to neocolonialism and its implications for the United States.  However, a superficial, activist-oriented, and intellectually weak Left emerged, unable to educate the people with respect to these dynamics.  The weak Left had no politically effective response to the turn to the Right that began in 1979, provoked by the taking of hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Iran.

      Moreover, when neoliberalism emerged as the prevailing policy in the 1980s, it gave rise among whites to new forms of fascism.  Whites found themselves in a world in which state support for their socioeconomic needs was limited, yet blacks received special treatment with respect to college admissions, especially elite university admissions, and employment opportunities for college-educated blacks.  However, the increase in fascism and blatant forms of racism is not central to the dynamics that drive inequalities today.  The new fascism should not be exaggerated, and it should not be taken to negate the fact that white racism was in continuous decline from 1965 to the first decade of the twenty-first century, as the citizens of the United States adapted to the post-1965 neocolonial reality on a variety of fronts.  Even today, in spite to the dysfunctional comportment of “activists” in recent years, the great majority of white Americans retain their fundamental decency, a phenomenon concerning which Ed Warren is a witness. 

     As noted above, the ideological maladies of the USA will not self-correct.  The people must be led out of them through a dedicated, self-sacrificing vanguard political party that speaks to the people in a manner that appreciates their fundamental decency yet educates them and enhances their historical, global, and political consciousness, through the formation of people’s schools.  I attempted to address this possibility in my last commentary, “The possible taking of power by the people: Possibilities for the USA and the global North,” February 14, 2023.

The possible taking of power by the people

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