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Grandmother, what big teeth you have!
Part 3: Class oppression, everywhere, all the time
(Note: This is the third in a series of posts about parallels between Soviet communism and Western wokeism. The first two installments, on the issues of identity politics and censorship respectively, can be found here and here).
In 1902, Vladimir Lenin wrote,
This passage invokes two themes that would become part of the fabric of Soviet totalitarianism. First, Lenin presents us with an all-encompassing bogeyman -- described here as capitalist exploitation but usually referred to as bourgeois ideology -- that is associated with a particular class of people, who are held collectively responsible for every injustice that exists in the world. Second, the infernal influence of this class enemy is to be looked for and found in every event, no matter how small. Thus, Lenin urges his followers to see the specter of bourgeois oppression, not just events that would normally be seen as tyrannical and oppressive, but also in things that would, to the untrained eye, be seen as innocent and ordinary.
This article will discuss how these themes played out in Soviet communism, and, in parallel, how they are present in the modern "woke" cancel culture. The motivating impulse of both worldviews can be summarized as follows: every problem is class oppression, and everything is a problem, even if it was never a problem before. For Soviet communism, the invisible, omnipresent oppressor was bourgeois ideology, while for the woke it is white supremacy.
Every problem is class oppression
In Spring of 2015, journalist Rod Dreher received a call from a distraught stranger. The caller said that his mother, an elderly immigrant from Czechoslovakia, was warning him more and more urgently that current events in the United States reminded her of the emergence of communism in her home country in the 1940's. Dreher had good reason to be skeptical; if the world had really been going to Hell for as long as old people have been saying the world is going to Hell, we'd have been there by now. Yet, there was something about the caller's tone that stuck in his mind and made him keep asking himself, What if the old Czech woman sees something the rest of us do not? [Dreher (2020): Live Not By Lies. p. xi]. So Dreher decided to follow up. He found out and interviewed several American immigrants who had formerly lived behind the "iron curtain" of Eastern Bloc communism, and asked them if they felt that the United States was moving toward the sort of totalitarianism that they had experienced in their home countries. According to Dreher, every one of them said yes [ibid, p. xi].
Among the Eastern Bloc immigrants that Dreher interviewed, one parallel they noted was radical identity politics: an agenda of collective punishment for an alleged exploiter class, who was held to blame for everything wrong with the world. For example, in the Soviet Union, frequent shortages of food, cloth, and other goods -- which largely resulted from government planning of the economy -- were routinely blamed on bourgeois saboteurs (vrediteli) by the government-run media. In particular, the first three decades of communist rule saw three major famines in the Soviet Union, beginning respectively in 1921, 1932, and 1946. In reality these resulted largely from government mismanagement, and the 1932 famine was engineered by the Soviet government as part of a terror campaign against Ukrainian farmers -- but all three famines were blamed by the government-run media on bourgeois sabotage (vreditel'stvo). The heavy Russian losses in the Russo-Japanese war and World War I were also blamed, not just on the Tsar, but on every member of Soviet society who had formerly owned property -- another manifestation of bourgeois oppression. The outbreak of typhus in the early 1920's was also blamed by the Soviets on (you guessed it!) bourgeois oppression.
The suffering of working-class Russians leading up to the revolution was very real, very severe, and very unjust from a modern perspective. In fact, as recently as 1860 — less than sixty years before the Bolshevik revolution — about 3 in 10 Russians had lived under by serfdom, which was significantly more oppressive than European serfdom and legally comparable to slavery. The hard question was how to move forward. The answer Lenin offered was indiscriminate collective vengeance, enforced by government despotism, financed by plunder, and motivated by group hatred -- and the first step in the plan of collective vengeance and plundering was to blame the historical exploiter class for everything.
The situation in America is in some ways analogous to that in Russia a hundred years ago. Anti-black racism and slavery are moral stains on our American heritage. Moreover, serious de jure discrimination against blacks in America falls within living memory; less than 70 years have passed since Rosa Parks’s famous refusal to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Pockets of de facto discrimination remain with us, and the legacy of past discrimination is broad and deep. Just as it was in Russia a hundred years ago, the hard question is how to move forward. The woke answer is Lenin’s answer. Substitute "white supremacy" for "bourgeois oppression" and you have the motivating spirit of the woke mindset -- and, once again, the first step in the plan of collective vengeance and plundering is to blame the historical exploiter class for everything.
White supremacy sometimes goes by the seemingly less inflammatory name of "racism" -- but in the woke view, only white people can be racist; so the two are interchangeable from the woke perspective. On the woke view, blacks suffer from high blood pressure and influenza because of white supremacy. White supremacy is also at work in the deleterious effects of climate change. High crime rates in black neighborhoods are caused by white supremacy, and when a black suspect dies in the custody of five black police officers, that's white supremacy, too. The January 6 attack on the Capital Building was fueled by white supremacy, even for members of the mob who were black or Hispanic. Twenty years ago, the existence of a black white-supremacist was a motif for a comedy sketch; today it's an axiom of woke ideology.
And everything is a problem
There didn't have to be a war, or a famine, or a disease -- or even anything palpably wrong -- in order for Soviet communists to heap blame on the bourgeoisie. Lenin urged his followers to look for the tentacles of bourgeois oppression in every event, no matter how small, and they generally obliged. By and by, the Soviet communists would classify anything that offended their sensibilities in the least -- from Christianity to quantum mechanics to kitchens (sic.) -- as incarnations of bourgeois oppression. That's right: kitchens were considered by the soviets to be bourgeois -- because they were emblems of the historical relegation of women to the role of housework (the Soviets planned for everyone to eat in public cafeterias, though the plan was never implemented).
Imagine a person who has been indoctrinated to see capitalist exploitation and police violence in every event, no matter how small -- from a grand catastrophe to a kitchen. If you find that difficult to imagine, it might help to visit a college campus in today's America. The woke concept of "microaggressions" is the new fashion on American campuses -- and if that fashion does not trace its roots directly to the Leninist playbook, it is at least the work of the same demons. For example, official guidelines at UCLA give the following examples of racist microaggressions:
Microaggression example #5 above is a caricatured way of saying that black faculty members receive favorable race-based treatment in hiring and promotion. During my 20 or so years in academia in Texas, I saw this done openly and universally, even though it was technically against state law. At UCLA, it is not only openly done, but evidently required -- since microaggressions #3 and #4 say it would be racist to oppose the policy. On the other hand, example #5 says that it is also a racist microaggression to say that blacks and other minorities receive preferential treatment. This means that at UCLA -- the flagship public university of the largest state in the US -- the only way to avoid being labeled as a racist is to (1) support the policy of racial preferences in hiring and promotion, and, (2) while advocating that policy, deny that it exists. UCLA is not an outlier in this; similar lists (or the very same one) are officially circulated at many if not most major US institutions of higher learning -- including, for example, Harvard, UNC-Chapel Hill, and my undergraduate alma mater Auburn University. Is that crazier than asserting that quantum mechanics and kitchens are manifestations of bourgeois oppression? Hard to say.
... Even if it was never a problem before
Another theme Dreher heard repeatedly from those who had lived under communism was the ever-changing, ever-expanding reach of what is seen as class-enemy oppression. What counted as acceptable speech, vocabulary and behavior changed so quickly and dramatically that one never knew when "Those in power will come after you as a villain for having said or done something that was perfectly fine the day before" [ibid, p. xii].
In the Soviet Union, what counted as loyal party obedience one day might be considered bourgeois subversion the next. Leon Trotsky, who led the 1905 revolution along with Lenin, was himself assassinated by the Soviet regime in 1940. It is not that Trotsky had changed his views; on the contrary, Trotsky's counterrevolutionary subversion consisted of not changing his views fast enough to keep up with the party line. Several other major central figures of the Bolshevik revolution -- including Pyotr Voykov, Filipp Goloshchyokin Alexander Beloborodov, and Boris Didkovsky -- all met similar fates, along with many minor figures, as well as countless ordinary people, all caught in the gears of evolving standards of party loyalty.
Woke cancel culture, while not nearly as deadly as its Soviet predecessor, operates with similarly shifting standards. For example, in 2008, tech entrepreneur Brendan Eich donated $1000 to support California Proposition 8 -- a ballot initiative designed to keep marriage in California only between opposite-sex couples. For context, gay marriage was not yet legal in California at the time, so Eich's view was arguably mainstream. Eich's view had certainly been mainstream four years earlier, when Barack Obama said, in an interview on Chicago public television, that "Marriage is between a man and a woman". Both Obama and Joe Biden were publicly opposed to gay marriage until 2012, and Hillary Clinton was opposed to gay marriage until 2013. Yet in 2013, just as leading Democrats were publicly evolving to a more liberal position on the issue, Brendan Eich was forced to resign from the board of the Mozilla corporation as a result of the sudden outrage against him for supporting the California ballot proposition five years earlier. Gotta’ keep up, Brendan!
So publicly opposing gay marriage suddenly became politically incorrect — very politically incorrect, to the point where it warrants pressuring someone to resign from their position on a company board — within 12 months after the most prominent progressive leaders first began to publicly support gay marriage. In 2014, saying that all lives matter — a phrase that would have once sounded progressive, and still did as far as she knew — Smith College President Kathleen McCartney felt the need to publicly apologize for having used the phrase in an email (gotta’ keep up, Kathleen!). When NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick first refused to stand for the American National Anthem, it was a bold move for which he received considerable pushback; but in 2020, when fellow quarterback Drew Brees criticized the idea of kneeling for the anthem, not only did he feel the need to issue a groveling apology to assuage the woke mob, but his wife Brittany did too, writing,
Gotta’ keep up, Brittany!
Some authors have suggested that cancel culture -- collective punishment of an alleged class oppressor, over seemingly insignificant things, with rapidly shifting standards -- began in the 1990's. The fact is that it is not new, but, as is sometimes said of a pre-owned vehicle, it is just new to us. On the other hand, the Eastern Bloc expatriates that Dreher interviewed found it eerily familiar. I suppose they were acquainted with the previous owners.
Dreher's anecdotes about the wisdom of Communist East Europeans always reminds me of another group of Eastern Europeans moving to the US from the sphere of a totalitarian regime and suddenly finding themselves fearful about the signs of the same totalitarianism developing in the United States.
Come on, give us some substance so we can actually discuss it, if you find the comparison interesting.
Do they remind you of them in any substantial way or just in being from Eastern Europe, and claiming to be fearful about totalitarianism?
Well, to put it more specifically, the Frankfurt School - insofar as I've understood - was indeed heavily affected in their endeavors by the idea that the American society they had migrated to shared the same underlying problems and processes as Nazi Germany, and this also affected their work, i.e. they felt that they needed to abort these problems and processes from the get-go. This was, for instance, the reason for Adorno's work on the authoritarian personality. Presumably when you later had things like the McCarthy hearings this would only go to strengthen this mission
Of course, the problem is that they were hardly neutral arbiters but heavy ideologues themselves, which not only clouded their view on what the perceived commonalities of the American and German societies were (including what they missed, like the considerably stronger democratic underpinnings in US) and what the solutions would be. Their immigrant status did not really guarantee their expertise or the correctness of their views; in many ways it made them worse observers than those that did not have any personal experience of Nazi Germany at all.
Right, that would be the issue with their analysis, rather than their immigrant status, or aspects of the American culture that they supposedly missed. If you're going to compare someone to the Frankfurt School, I'd guess most people are going to assume that this is what you're trying to say about the group you're comparing them to, which is why these sort of quippy "you know who this reminds me of? winkwinknudgenudge" comments aren't helpful.
And am I missing something or did your extended reply confirm you're only comparing them on superficial things like their region of origin, and complaining about authoritarianism? I don't see you making claims about their analysis, or mistakes they're making being similar.
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What substance? The idea is to simply spoil the claim that ex-Communist Eastern Europeans have any wisdom, by connecting them to a disliked group. By the time anyone researches the disliked group, sees if their similarities are actually substantial or if there are significant differences, and posts a rebuttal of some sort, the conversation has moved on and no one cares any more.
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For what it's worth, having read Live Not By Lies as well as plenty of Dreher's pre-2015 work, I am extremely skeptical of Dreher's claim to skepticism here. Rod Dreher is temperamentally inclined to catastrophism, and even in 2013 or 2014 he was writing about the coming return of the Dark Ages and the collapse of Christian civilisation and so on.
For instance, here he is in 2014 saying that America is facing a "new Dark Age that our fellow Americans embrace as Enlightenment", and here in the same year approvingly quoting MacIntyre to the same effect. Here he is in 2013 asking "are we Rome?" and predicting civilisational collapse.
He presents himself as a naive ingenue who was shocked by what the communist dissidents told him in Live Not By Lies, but I think it is far more likely that he already knew what he wanted to hear, and found a handful of Eastern Europeans willing to tell him.
I don't think he was shocked. If there's anything new in Live Not By Lies (and the several years of blogging prior to it, of which it is a condensed summary), it's the analogy to the Soviet Union, but Dreher's actual diagnosis of the cultural moment has not changed. It's just saying "this is like Soviet Russia" rather than "this is like the fall of Rome".
(It is also, incidentally, what in my view makes Live Not By Lies such a tedious and intellectually sterile book - most of LNBL is just Dreher describing something in the USSR, then describing something in 21st century America which does not particularly resemble it, and then asserting that they're the same. The Russian famine of 1892 was not actually that similar to covid, for instance - not even in the sense in which Dreher asserts it, as a catastrophe demonstrating the inadequacy of existing state institutions. It goes on and on. There's a criticism of pre-revolutionary Russian aristocracy for being sexually licentious, which may well be true, but given the Soviet comparison that is most of the text, you'd think it would be worth noting that the Bolsheviks were relatively puritanical and banned pornography. But no. Or, say, I agree that the US needs a revitalisation of religion, but the enforced state atheism of the Soviet Union seems qualitatively different to the voluntary slide away from faith that we see in America. The Soviets killing clergy and throwing the rest into the gulags just doesn't seem a great analogy for the way that kids born post-1980 tend to fall away from religion. The situation is meaningfully different. I could go on for a while. At any rate, overall the book is just a series of analogies, none of which are quite successful, because, well, 21st century America is significantly different to the Soviet Union.)
I'm convinced. I changed it to "Dreher had good reason to be skeptical".
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I don't think this characterization of "Most of the book" is accurate. That is what I expected the book to be from review and interviews, but I found that most of it consisted of stories of Eastern Bloc dissidents and their advice to fellow dissidents. Little of the text, after the introduction, refers to concrete events happening in America.
No matter what you agree with or disagree with in theory, I think it is worth reading for the stories of the dissidents alone, and I can't imagine describing it as "tedious" or "sterile". The book actually set me up for a serious change in my worldview. It so happened that I read Dreher's Live Not by Lies and Hazony's Conservatism back-to-back. Dreher's book convinced me that (1) leftist tyranny operates in a certain, seemingly strange manner, and (2) effective resistance to tyranny consists of living out certain principles -- but it did not explain why either of those things were the case. Then I read Hazony, and it was like reading Newton's Principia after studying Galileo's laws of gravity and Kepler's laws of orbital mechanics: Aha! This is the fundamental reason why this is this way and that is that way! I don't think any reading has ever changed (in my opinion, clarified) my worldview so much, so quickly.
On the other hand, I am also skeptical of Dreher's report about how his interviews unfolded, and I toned it down in my secondhand report. For example, where he said he talked to "many" (without saying how many), immigrants I said "several"; and I carefully claim that According to Dreher they all said yes [they see parallels], instead of claiming in my own voice that they all said yes and citing him. My guess is that his report is essentially true in its critical mass, but puffed up. FWIW the two Russian immigrants I know say the same thing.
I feel I have to be careful here - Rod Dreher is an example of a thinker who's on my side, more or less, but who I am deeply frustrated by at the same time.
Some of it might just be aesthetic. I admit that I really dislike his writing style, which to me comes off as a combination of folksy, long-winded, and proud. He is the kind of person who unironically refers to his own work as 'prophetic' and that rubs me the wrong way. It also frustrates me that I think he tends to be oversimplifying and uncharitable, such that even when I agree with him, I can't help wishing that he wasn't the one making the case. At any rate, I say that up-front just to establish that I'm not unbiased, and my instincts probably direct me towards being unfair to Dreher.
So, I read Live Not By Lies in the context of The Benedict Option, and in that context what struck me most was that it makes more-or-less identical recommendations, and the primary difference is that LNBL's historical comparison is Soviet communism, whereas TBO's comparison was the Dark Ages. So I probably focused mostly on that comparison, while paying less attention to things that I felt I had already heard from him.
I am skeptical of his interviews, or the weight he places on 'post-Soviet dissidents'. There are hundreds of millions of people who used to be members of the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact. Many critics of the Soviet Union were religiously-inspired. It does not surprise me that Dreher was able to find a dozen or so people who said exactly what he wanted to hear. I'm not accusing him or his interviewees of being dishonest - just suggesting that he naturally gravitated to people with similar perspectives to himself.
Dreher in my reading doesn't do a great job of distinguishing his own subjective impressions from reality. Chapter eight of LNBL ('Religion, the Bedrock of Resistance') seems like a good example to me. He describes a couple of Christian dissidents in the Soviet sphere, and explains that he felt they had a kind of moral authority to them, a sense of spiritual peace and determination that other dissidents didn't have. A detached reader might be tempted to ask - is this just because Dreher likes Christians? He already had a narrative he wanted to tell, about wise and gracious Christian resistance to tyranny - did that colour his observations?
There's a lot like that, such that even when I agree with the overall point (I'm a Christian! I believe in grace-filled Christian resistance to tyranny!), I find myself retreating from his overall point.
And in other places I just find Dreher... rather hypocritical? Perhaps this reveals me as a Christian liberal, but after reading Dreher for a long time, I find it hard to escape the conclusion that he doesn't dislike ideological totalitarianism as such - he just dislikes when it's the wrong ideology. For instance, in LNBL he writes:
But back in TBO, he wrote about the medieval worldview in rhapsodic terms, and concluded:
What's the difference between "defining and controlling reality" and "[construing] reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually"? Both examples seem like descriptions of an integrating ideology that interprets all of reality for the subject, and which was made compulsory for the masses through the carrot and stick of education and persecution. Setting aside the part where medieval Christianity is ex hypothesi correct, and Marxism-Leninism false, what's the difference?
Or to pick one other example, when Dreher describes the totalitarian social pressures and persecutions that he expects Christians in America to face (and to be fair to him, many of which they do face, in many if not all parts of the country), his examples are things like needing to meet in secret, fearing blackmail, negative gossip among colleagues, needing to discuss their lifestyle and convictions in secret because the rumour of their lifestyle could lead to job losses, reputational damage, being ostracised in public, and so on. It surely can't fail to spring to mind that up until a few decades ago (and still now, in some parts of the US), all those pressures were faced by gay people. This never comes up.
Again, this is frustrating because I am technically on Dreher's side here. I'm not actually pro-LGBT. But I would have liked to see more perspective in the way he made his case. I don't think his banner conclusions are wrong, exactly. On the contrary, I find them almost banal - Christians should resolve to practice their faith together strongly in community, supporting and building each other up, and resisting pressures to abandon their convictions, while maintaining a deep cultural memory. Who's going to disagree with that? Overall I think I rate Dreher as a demagogue rather than a thinker. His arguments aren't particularly good, and aren't going to make much headway with anyone who doesn't already agree with him. But he writes with a lot of passion and verve. Maybe that's enough, for some.
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I want to say that I appreciate you laying this all out. There’s certainly some continuity to be found, and you’ve done a better job elaborating on it than most people who make the attempt.
With that said…doesn’t this argument work a little too well?
The Reds made a near-perfect bogeyman. As a result, the American immune response had an obvious rallying point. Compare our wartime propaganda against the Germans or Japanese. After all, they really could have been infiltrating or at least sympathizing.
Rallying the home team against outsiders is tribal psychology 101. That rather takes away from its predictive value. Were our wartime ancestors right to be suspicious? Were the wartime Soviets? How about today’s anticommunists, looking for the ghosts of our old enemies? And what about the progressives?
The shoe fits. It fits enough different movements that you’d need to narrow it down.
I guess I look forward to part 4.
As an aside, when I checked on the Julianne Hough thing, it appears she was immediately attacked and released an apology. While the pushback looks tame by 2020s standards, it’s not exactly ignoring the event, is it? Leaves me a little skeptical of your other links.
ah, darn. I did not see any stories about that prior to 2021 but couldn't find the date of the actual apology. I will have to replace that with another example when I have time. In the meantime, I just deleted the paragraph. Thanks for the catch.
I don't think so. Every tribe, indeed every person, does that a little, and a few fundamentalist members of every tribe do it a lot -- but some tribes do it more often, with more severity than others. When the frequency and severity are categorically greater in one case than another, it makes for a categorical distinction. There was a real surge of this in the McCarthy era, which can be compared qualitatively to what Marxists themselves do -- but you would have to multiply the intensity of McCarthyism at least 10, and maybe 100, get something comparable with the Soviet version. Note, for example, that Lenin actually said to look for the action of the class enemy in "every event no matter how small". It's hard to imagine Reagan, or any other American president, saying any such thing.
At the fringe, there exist people who see the communist menace everywhere (as Bob Dylan wrote, red stripes on the American flag!), but I don't think there are enough of them to put that tribe in the same category with Soviet communism or wokeness in that regard. Dylan's satire is humorous precisely because real (right wing) Americans have never been that silly in any significant numbers; but it's hard these days to write satire that is crazier than SJW's actually are (or the Bolsheviks actually were). Hence, The Bee or Not the Bee.
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Well shit, man. War fuckin' Eagle!
coughs
Uh, just kidding, I went to Stanford everyone.
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I'm guessing you meant "opposite sex couple" above?
The gayest possible agenda.
Definitely an unexpected timeline.
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Nah, you can restrict it to same-sex n-tuples with n>2.
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Aye. Fixed now. Thanks for the catch.
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