The Madness of Crowds

by Douglas Murray

  This is a remarkable insight, and also a disturbing one. Because it suggests that there will always be something strange and potentially threatening about gay people – most especially gay men. Not just because being gay is an unstable component on which to base an individual identity and a hideously unstable way to try to base any form of group identity, but because gays will always present a challenge to something innate in the group that make up the majority in society.

  All women have something that heterosexual men want. They are holders, and wielders, of a kind of magic. But here is the thing: gays appear in some way to be in on the secret. That may be liberating for some people. Some women will always enjoy talking with gay men about the problems – including the sexual problems – of men. Just as some straight men will always enjoy having this vaguely bilingual friend who might help them learn the other language. But there are other people for whom it will always be unnerving. Because for them gays will always be the people – especially the men – who know too much.

  INTERLUDE

  The Marxist Foundations

  ‘Credo quia absurdum’

  (‘I believe because it is absurd’)

  Tertullian (attrib.)

  In 1911 a famous poster appeared, entitled ‘Industrial Workers of the World’, depicting what it claimed to be the ‘Pyramid of the Capitalist System’. At the bottom of the pyramid were the brave men, women and children of the working class. With their proud, sturdy yet struggling shoulders they were holding up the entire edifice. ‘We work for all’ and ‘We feed all’ were the captions accompanying this lowest but most fundamental part of the system. A floor above them, wining and dining in black tie and evening dresses, were the well-off capitalist classes, supported by the workers and only able to enjoy themselves because of the labour of working men. ‘We eat for you’ said this tier. Above them were the military (‘We shoot at you’). Above them the clergy (‘We fool you’). Above them the monarch (‘We rule you’). And finally, perched at the very top of the pyramid, even above the monarch, was a great bag of money with dollar signs on the outside. ‘Capitalism’ was the label for this highest tier of the state.

  Today a version of this old image has made its way to the centre of the social justice ideology. Just one of the things that suggest the Marxist foundations of this new structure is the fact that capitalism is still at the top of the pyramid of oppression and exploitation. But the other top tiers of this hierarchy pyramid are inhabited by different types of people. At the top of the hierarchy are people who are white, male and heterosexual. They do not need to be rich, but matters are made worse if they are. Beneath these tyrannical male overlords are all the minorities: most noticeably the gays, anyone who isn’t white, people who are women and also people who are trans. These individuals are kept down, oppressed, sidelined and otherwise made insignificant by the white, patriarchal, heterosexual, ‘cis’ system. Just as Marxism was meant to free the labourer and share the wealth around, so in this new version of an old claim, the power of the patriarchal white males must be taken away and shared around more fairly with the relevant minority groups.

  At its outset this new ideology was not taken especially seriously by its opponents. Some of its claims seemed so laughable, and its inherent contradictions so clear, that coherent criticism was almost absent. This was a mistake. It is an ideology with very clear ideological precursors, but still an ideology that – whatever else may be said for it – provides a lens for understanding the world and a purpose for an individual’s actions and life within the world.

  It is no surprise at all that the academics who spent years tinkering with the ideas that have evolved into this theory of intersecting special-interest groups all have the same historic interests in common. Not one academic involved in the pushing of identity politics and intersectionality has come from the conservative right. And there are several reasons why that isn’t a surprise. One is the ideological bent that exists within academia. One 2006 study of universities in the US found that 18 per cent of professors in the social sciences happily identified as ‘Marxist’. And though there are other departments that have relatively few Marxists in them, any field in which a fifth of all professors were shown to believe in a wildly controversial (to say the least) dogma might raise questions. The same survey found 21 per cent of social science professors willing to identify as ‘activist’ and 24 per cent as radical.1 This is considerably higher than the number of professors willing to identify as ‘Republican’ in any field.

  Even when it does not identify itself as such, the Marxist and post-Marxist trend on the political left can always be recognized by the set of thinkers whom it cites and reveres, and whose theories it tries to apply to any and all disciplines and walks of life. From Michel Foucault these thinkers absorbed their idea of society not as an infinitely complex system of trust and traditions that have evolved over time, but always in the unforgiving light cast when everything is viewed solely through the prism of ‘power’. Viewing all human interactions in this light distorts, rather than clarifies, presenting a dishonest interpretation of our lives. Of course power exists as a force in the world, but so do charity, forgiveness and love. If you were to ask most people what matters in their lives very few would say ‘power’. Not because they haven’t absorbed their Foucault, but because it is perverse to see everything in life through such a monomaniacal lens.

  Nevertheless for a certain type of person who is intent on finding blame rather than forgiveness in the world, Foucault helps to explain everything. And what Foucault and his admirers seek to explain in personal relations they also attempt to explain on a grand political level. For them absolutely everything in life is a political choice and a political act.

  The post-Marxists who seek to explain the world around us today have not only imbibed the distorting prism of Foucault and Marx. From Antonio Gramsci they have absorbed their notion of culture as a ‘hegemonic force’ the control of which is at least as important as the working class. From Foucault’s contemporary, Gilles Deleuze, they have absorbed the idea that the role of the individual is to see through and undo the web that the culture you were born into has wound around you. And always and everywhere is the aim – taken from French literary theory – to ‘deconstruct’ everything. To ‘deconstruct’ something is as significant in academia as ‘constructing’ things is in the rest of society. Indeed, it is one curiosity of academia in recent decades that it has found almost nothing it does not wish to deconstruct, apart from itself.

  The process of taking apart occurred in a number of fields, but nowhere did it happen faster or more comprehensively than in the ever-metastasizing offshoots of the social sciences. Courses like ‘queer studies’, ‘women’s studies’, ‘black studies’ and others each in their own field worked always and everywhere to achieve the same goals. Always with reference to the same, apparently indispensable, thinkers. The first priority of this segment of academia over recent decades – the first thing to ‘unweave’ – was to assail, undermine and finally pull down everything that had previously appeared to be fixed certainties, including biological certainties. So the recognition that there were two different sexes turned into the suggestion that there were two different genders. And from there the argument was carefully escorted to what turned out – in the universities at least – to be a wildly popular conclusion: which is that there was in fact no such thing as gender. Gender was not real but merely a ‘social construct’. The work of Judith Butler from the University of Berkeley was particularly popular in this regard. In Butler’s view (especially in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990), feminism has made a mistake in thinking that there are categories such as male and female. Both the masculine and the feminine are ‘culturally presupposed’. Indeed, gender itself is nothing more than a ‘reiterated social performance’ and definitely not the result of a ‘prior reality’. At the same time the same exercise took place in black studies, where the same work was being done – with
reference to the same sets of thinkers – to assert that just like gender, race too was in fact a cultural construct, which was ‘culturally presupposed’ and to do only with ‘reiterated social performance’.

  It was only after this ‘unweaving’ had been performed that a new weaving began to take place. This is where the foundational texts of social justice and intersectionality stepped in. Having cleared the space, they then turned out to have cleared it for ideas of their own.

  In 1988 Peggy McIntosh of Wellesley College (whose research area was ‘women’s studies’) published White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. The work itself is not so much an essay as a list of claims running to a few pages. In them McIntosh lists fifty things which she claims to see as the ‘daily effects of white privilege’. They include claims such as ‘I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time’ and ‘I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.’2 Many of the claims which McIntosh makes in 1988 already seem absurd and dated today. Most are not applicable only to white people and none proves anything like the systemic point that McIntosh would appear to be making. But White Privilege is unusually clearly written and advances a clear claim – which is that people must acknowledge the privileges that can be identified in their own lives. She says that the people who benefit from the existing power structures have not ‘earned’ them. And most importantly she makes the claim that a variety of groups (including people of different sexual orientations and races) suffer from ‘interlocking oppressions’. It is as though all the grievance studies departments have been brought together in one great seminar.

  In the view of McIntosh, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and others who were making similar claims, the nature of these interlocking oppressions needed to be worked out. Always there is the sense that once they are unpicked then something wonderful might happen, though, as is common with utopians, the map of utopia is not included in the plan. Nevertheless, McIntosh urges people to ‘raise our daily consciousness’ on the nature of privilege and attempt to use ‘our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader basis’. This suggests that McIntosh is not against power, just in favour of some redistribution of it along different lines. It is all so ill-defined that in any ordinary times such a list of claims would not have broken out beyond the walls of Wellesley. And for many years it certainly did not breach the walls of academia in general. But White Privilege survived into very unordinary times – times when people were scurrying to explain things again. And it turned out that, simplistic as it was, such a simple call to self-consciousness and redistribution was very effective indeed in a time of intellectual disarray.

  Others were simultaneously doing the same work from a slightly different angle. One leading post-Marxist, the Argentinian-born Ernesto Laclau (who died in 2014), spent the 1980s trying to work out some of the problems which, he recognized, could be said to have emerged. Along with his partner and co-author Chantal Mouffe, he provided one of the earliest foundations for what would become identity politics. In their 1985 work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy they start by nobly admitting that socialism has been challenged by ‘the emergence of new contradictions’. The ‘traditional discourse of Marxism’ has, they say, ‘been centred on the class struggle’ and ‘the contradictions of capitalism’. However, the notion of ‘class struggle’ now needs to be modified. They ask:

  To what extent has it become necessary to modify the notion of class struggle, in order to be able to deal with the new political subjects – women, national, racial and sexual minorities, anti-nuclear and anti-institutional movements etc – of a clearly anti-capitalist character, but whose identity is not constructed around specific ‘class interests’?3

  It should be said that this is not some obscure work but one that is regularly cited. Indeed, Google Scholar shows it to have been cited more than 16,000 times. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy as well as other works, including Socialist Strategy: Where Next?, Laclau and Mouffe are perfectly frank about what they think could be achieved and how.

  The fact that the capitalist system has not yet collapsed is not evidence that it never will. The failure of the project to date merely presents Laclau and Mouffe with yet more contradictions that must be got through. Among them is the fact that ‘The conditions of political struggle in mature capitalism are increasingly distant from the nineteenth-century model.’4 Political struggle in this era must involve other groups.

  Naturally they recognize that these new movements may bring their own contradictions. For instance, they suggest that ‘the class political subjectivity of white workers’ may be ‘overdetermined by racist or anti-racist attitudes’ which are ‘evidently important for the struggle of the immigrant workers’.5 The authors are both exceptionally verbose and wholly unclear about how to find a way through such complexities. They write constantly of ‘certain activities’, ‘organisational forms’, and at times every word appears to be ‘partly’.6 Although Laclau and Mouffe are distinctly vague about a whole array of conclusions, one thing they are clear about is the utility for the socialist struggle of ‘new social movements’ such as the women’s movement.

  The utility of such groups is obvious: their ‘highly diverse struggles: urban, ecological, anti-authoritarian, anti-institutional, feminist, anti-racist, ethnic, regional or that of sexual minorities’ give purpose and drive to a socialist movement that needs new energy. What is more, unless they cohere together these groups might just pursue their own agendas and their own needs. What is needed is to bring all these movements under one umbrella: the umbrella of the socialist struggle. Laclau and Mouffe write of ‘what interests us about these new social movements’ and explain how it ‘leads us to conceive these movements as an extension of the democratic revolution to a whole new series of social relations. As for their novelty, that is conferred upon them by the fact that they call into question new forms of subordination.’7

  In the Marxism Today article that Laclau and Mouffe wrote in the run-up to their book they were even clearer about the utility of these movements. Because although they may be opposed to the same thing that socialists are opposed to, these ‘new political subjects’ (‘women, students, young people, racial, sexual and regional minorities, as well as the various anti-institutional and ecological struggles’) have an obvious immediate advantage. The primary one is that:

  Their enemy is defined not by its function of exploitation, but by wielding a certain power. And this power, too, does not derive from a place in the relations of production, but is the outcome of the form of social organisation characteristic of the present society. This society is indeed capitalist, but this is not its only characteristic; it is sexist and patriarchal as well, not to mention racist.8

  Laclau and Mouffe were explicitly setting out to try to find, or create, a new class of ‘exploited’ person. The working classes may have been exploited but they had been unable to recognize the fact, had let down their theoreticians and had generally failed to follow the path of progress that had been laid out for them. For Laclau and Mouffe this progress was obvious, winding through the Second International, the Leninist breach, the Comintern, Antonio Gramsci, Palmiro Togliatti and the complexities of Eurocommunism. But not everyone had followed them on that. In any case the disappointing workers could now be, if not replaced, then at least added to.

  By the time they were writing, Laclau and Mouffe were aware of the demoralization that had struck much of the left. The legacy of Budapest, Prague, Vietnam and Cambodia (just a few of their own examples) had left many socialists reeling. But in this ‘whole series of positive new phenomena’ a new energy could be harnessed. Although for Laclau and Mouffe it obviously first needed an urgent ‘theoretical reconsideration’:

  The rise of the new feminism, the protest movements of ethnic, national and sexual minorities, the anti-institutional ecology struggles waged by marginalized layers of the population, the ant
i-nuclear movement, the atypical forms of social struggle in countries on the capitalist periphery — all these imply an extension of social conflictuality to a wide range of areas, which creates the potential, but no more than the potential, for an advance towards more free, democratic and egalitarian societies.9

  The point is that these new groups of people could be useful.

  Of course those who took the advice and attempted to bring all these groups together found a number of problems in all of this. Aside from the assumed racism of the working class, the practitioners of 1980s and 1990s deconstruction provided new tensions of their own. For example, after critical race theory and gender studies had done their work, was it not hard to explain why some things that seemed fixed (especially sex and race) were in fact social constructs whereas other things that may have seemed more fluid (not least sexuality) had become viewed as completely fixed?

  If these questions did detain anybody, they did not detain them for long. One of the traits of Marxist thinkers has always been that they do not stumble or self-question in the face of contradiction, as anybody aiming at truth might. Marxists have always rushed towards contradiction. The Hegelian dialectic only advances by means of contradiction and therefore all the complexities – one might say absurdities – met along the way are welcomed and almost embraced as though they were helpful, rather than troubling, to the cause. Anybody hoping that intersectionality would dissolve amid its own inherent contradictions cannot have seen the myriad of contradictions a Marxist can hold in their head at any one time.

  Their ideological children in identity politics and intersectionality seem content to inhabit an ideological space littered with contradiction, absurdity and hypocrisy. For example, one of the foundational notions of women’s studies and feminist studies was that victims of sexual abuse should be believed. Discussion of rape, abuse, domestic violence and inappropriately wielded power relations lay at the basis of all women’s and feminist studies. Yet when a student of Avital Ronell of New York University filed a Title IX complaint against her in 2017, accusing her of sexual harassment, the alleged harasser found Ronell’s academic colleagues coming out in support for her. Along with Slavoj Žižek and others, Judith Butler was among the signatories to a letter condemning the investigation of Ronell, testifying to her own character (‘the grace, the keen wit’) and attempting the equivalent of a drive-by shooting against the reputation of her male accuser. Specifically they demanded that Ronell ‘be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation’.10 All of which suggested that allegations of abuse are indeed always to be taken seriously, unless the victim is a man or the accused is a professor of feminist literary theory. In all matters, such contradictions merely have to be got over.