The Authoritarian Moment

by Ben Shapiro

  By the end of the Jimmy Carter presidency, America had fallen out of love with the utopian government schemes. The Utopian Impulse had waned. “Fixing the world” through government measures had been reduced to gas lines, inflation, unemployment, and a president bemoaning an American malaise, admitting that “all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America.”17 Ronald Reagan took up that baton, declaiming in his First Inaugural Address, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. . . . It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.”18

  In reality, Reagan didn’t reduce the size and scope of government—government continued to grow. But in the minds of Americans, the progressive agenda had failed. By 1996, the Democratic president, Bill Clinton, was mirroring Reagan’s rhetoric on the role of the government, explaining, “the era of big government is over,” sounding almost Reagan-esque in his suggestion that a “new, smaller government must work in an old-fashioned American way,” calling for a “balanced budget” and an end to “permanent deficit spending.”19 In his 2000 Republican National Convention acceptance speech, George W. Bush echoed that language, suggesting “big government is not the answer.”20 And in 2004, a young black Senate candidate from Illinois named Barack Obama suggested, “The people I meet—in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks—they don’t expect government to solve all their problems.”21 A consensus had formed in the minds of most Americans: government was not a panacea, the cure to all human problems. Often, government was the obstacle to human success and flourishing. Yes, Americans were happy to accept taxpayer-sponsored programs that benefited them, and reacted with anger to proposals that would implement change to those programs. But Americans now sounded more like Reagan than Wilson in terms of what they thought government could accomplish.

  THE RISE AND FALL OF REVOLUTIONARY IDENTITY POLITICS

  While progressives argued throughout the twentieth century that government was the solution to all of humanity’s ills—and as Americans were gradually disabused of that notion—another, somewhat contradictory idea began to take root on the American Left. This idea agreed with the progressive thesis that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were past their sell-by dates. But it went further: it suggested that virtually every system in America had to be torn to the ground in order to achieve true justice. Where progressives had believed that the power of government could be harnessed to a redistributive agenda in order to achieve utopian ends, this new brand of radicalism—animated by the Revolutionary Impulse—argued that the American governmental system was itself inherently corrupt, and that it needed to be torn out at the root. Revolutionary aggression was justified, the radicals argued, in order to tear down the hierarchies of power acting as a barrier to the triumph of moral anti-conventionalism.

  An early influential form of this argument came from the scholars of the so-called Frankfurt School, European expatriates who escaped to America to avoid the Nazis. Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), one of the leaders of this school of thought, suggested that since all human beings were products of their environments, all evils in America could be attributed to the capitalist, democratic environment; as he put it, “the wretchedness of our own time is connected with the structure of society.”22 Erich Fromm, another member of the Frankfurt School, posited that American freedoms didn’t make human beings free. “The right to express our thoughts, however, means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own,” he stated. American consumerism, however, had deprived Americans of that ability—and thus made them ripe for proto-fascism.23 To liberate individuals, all systems of power had to be leveled.

  This meant that traditional American freedoms would have to be curbed. Freedom of speech would have to die so that freedom of subjective self-esteem could flourish. As Herbert Marcuse explained, “Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left . . . it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word.” This held true especially for minority groups, who could assert their power only by striking back against the system.24

  While the Frankfurt School thinkers were Marxist in orientation, their argument made little sense as a matter of class. After all, economic mobility has long been the hallmark of American society, and free markets grant opportunities to those of all stripes. But when the argument for American repression was translated from economic into racial terms, it began to bear fruit. America had allowed and fostered the enslavement of black people; America had allowed Jim Crow to flourish. While America had abolished slavery and eventually eviscerated Jim Crow—and done so, as former slave Frederick Douglass suggested in 1852, because of the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution—the argument that America was at root racist and thus unfixable had some plausibility.

  This was the contention of so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT). CRT transmuted the class-based argument that America is rigged into a race-based one. According to CRT, every institution in America is rooted in white supremacy; every institution is “structurally” or “institutionally” racist. This idea was first put forth by Stokely Carmichael, then the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in 1966 (later, Carmichael would become a black separatist and the head of the Black Panther Party). Hot on the heels of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, Carmichael posited that while the federal government had barred discrimination on the basis of race, racism could not be alleviated by such action: inequality in outcome could be chalked up to historic racism and the structure of institutions built in a time of racism. Carmichael wrote, “It is white power that makes the laws, and it is violent white power that enforces those laws with guns and nightsticks.” The predictable result: institutions would have to be torn down to the ground.25

  Carmichael was not arguing that the system could be mobilized on behalf of those it had victimized. He was arguing that the definition of racism would have to itself change: from now on, actions would be considered prima facie racist if they produced racially disparate results, rather than if they were actually racist in intent or content. This made disparate impact the test of racism—a logically unsupportable proposition, since literally every policy ever crafted by humankind has resulted in disparate results for some groups. In fact, many of the Left’s favorite policies—see, for example, minimum wage—exacerbate disparate outcomes rather than vitiating them. To treat disparate outcomes as a result obtained only through racist systems is to ignore all of human history in pursuit of a mythical utopia. Instead of arguing that some measures would have to be taken to level the playing field, Carmichael was arguing that the playing field would have to be dynamited.

  This was the Revolutionary Impulse given an intellectual framework: revolutionary aggression, combined with anti-conventionalism.

  Carmichael’s intellectual heirs formally launched the CRT project in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Expositors Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic set out the basic principles of CRT: first, that “racism is ordinary, not aberrational”; second, that “our system of white-over-color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material.” The system, in other words, is designed to create racially disparate outcomes; any proof of racially disparate outcomes is evidence of the malignancy of the system.26

  Critical Race Theory pioneer Derrick Bell wrote that “the whole liberal worldview of private rights and public sovereignty mediated by the rule of law needed to be exploded . . . a worldview premised upon the public and private spheres is an attractive mirage that masks the reality of economic and political power.”27 According to Bell, even purportedly good outcomes may be evidence of white supremacy implicit within the system—white people are so invested in the system that if they have to do something purportedly racially tolerant to uphold it, they will. But in the end, it’s all about upholdin
g white power. No wonder Bell posited that white Americans would sell black Americans to space aliens in order to alleviate the national debt if they could—and suggested in 1992 that black Americans were more oppressed than at any time since the end of slavery.28

  This argument gained little ground in the mainstream for decades. The confidence of Lyndon Baines Johnson–era progressives stymied it. LBJ believed the power of government could bridge gaps between white and black. And the government did engage in effort after effort to level the playing field, spending trillions on anti-poverty programs designed to act as a form of soft reparations for the evils of American racism. Because LBJ believed that the gap between identity politics and utopian progressivism could be papered over by the power of government, he created massive new governmental tools, rewriting the essential bargain between Americans and their government. As Christopher Caldwell writes, “The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution with which the original one was frequently incompatible.”29 The system of law in the United States radically changed, with the federal government given extraordinary power to end discrimination, both real and imagined, both in the public sector and the private sector. As Caldwell writes, there was a successful attempt by government to “mold the whole of society—down to the most intimate private acts—around the ideology of anti-racism.”30 And when instances of racism couldn’t provide a proper pretext for government interventionism, the rubric of anti-discretion was expanded to include any supposedly victimized minority group. Coercion by government—and support for such coercion—became a sign of morality rather than a violation of freedom:

  The civil rights model of executive orders, litigation, and court-ordered redress eventually became the basis for resolving every question pitting a newly emergent idea of fairness against old traditions. . . . Civil rights gradually turned into a license for government to do what the Constitution would not previously have permitted. It moved beyond the context of Jim Crow laws almost immediately, winning what its apostles saw as liberation after liberation.31

  In pursuit of these liberations, trillions of dollars were spent; millions of Americans were made more dependent on government; hundreds of thousands of Americans ended up working for the government directly. Even though the programs did little overall to alleviate the standing of black Americans relative to white Americans, the programs did paradoxically shore up the moral credibility of the American governmental system: it was difficult to claim that systems that had now been turned in favor of black Americans—systems from affirmative action to anti-discrimination law—were designed to make black Americans subservient. The legitimacy of the system, ironically, had been upheld by efforts to overhaul the system in the name of race-neutral progress. The Utopian Impulse had stymied the Revolutionary Impulse.

  Thus, by the early 1990s, the radical arguments had been put aside. While critical race theorists continued to blame “the system” for racial gaps, and called for race-specific discrimination on behalf of victimized groups, Americans of all stripes instead maintained the notion that race-neutral legal systems were indispensable. When hip-hop artist Sister Souljah defended the Los Angeles riots, suggesting, “I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?,”32 candidate Bill Clinton called her out, comparing her to David Duke.33 When crime rates soared out of control, particularly in minority communities, a bipartisan coalition came together in Washington, D.C., to pass a tough-on-crime bill designed to lengthen sentencing. That bill was supported by 58 percent of black Americans, including most black mayors.34 It passed the Senate by a 94–5 vote.

  In the battle over whether to utilize the government to pursue utopia, or to tear down the government in the name of radicalism, the utopians had won. Calls to destroy the system from within were rejected, not merely by the political Right but by the political Left. Identity politics had been roundly defeated.

  In fact, in 2004, a young Barack Obama confirmed that thesis in his Democratic National Convention speech rejecting the central tenets of identity politics and Critical Race Theory. “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible,” Barack Obama stated, to wild cheers. He would go on to chide the myth, pervasive in inner-city neighborhoods, “that says a black youth with a book is acting white.” And he would conclude with his most famous dictum, one he repeated—in increasingly hollow fashion—over the course of his subsequent career:

  There is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.35

  HOW BARACK OBAMA FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED AMERICA

  This general consensus—that right or left, the government could not solve all problems, but that the American system was inherently good—held through 2008. Barack Obama campaigned on that promise. He promised hope. He suggested that Americans were united by a common vision, and by a common source.

  But simmering under the surface of Obamaian unity was something philosophically uglier—something deeply divisive. As it turned out, Obama was no devotee of either founding ideology, LBJ-style government utopianism, or even a Clintonian Third Way. Obama’s philosophy was also rooted not in the racial conciliation of Martin Luther King Jr., but in the philosophy of Derrick Bell, a man Obama himself had stumped for during his Harvard Law School days. It was no surprise that Obama gravitated to Jeremiah Wright, attending his church for twenty years, listening to him spew bile from the pulpit about the evils of the United States. Furthermore, Obama was a believer in his own messianic myth—that he was the embodiment of everything good and decent. Michelle Obama summed up the feeling well during the 2008 campaign: she suggested that “our souls are broken in this nation,” and that “Barack Obama is the only person in this race who understands that . . . we have to fix our souls.”36 Obama himself said his mission was to “fundamentally transform[] the United States of America” in the days before the 2008 election.37

  That combination led Obama to a revised political position, after his overwhelming election in 2008: all criticism of him, it turned out, was actually racially motivated, because Obama—as America’s first black president—represented the best hope of transforming America’s systems from within. To be fair, the signs of Obama’s racially polarizing stance were clear even in the 2008 race. Early on in that race, Obama explained his lack of working-class support in Rust Belt areas by referencing their supposed racism: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”38 Throughout his 2008 campaign, Obama made reference to his race as a sort of electoral barrier, despite the fact that but for his race, he never would have been nominated; he even said that his opponent, John McCain, was scaring voters by suggesting Obama didn’t “look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.”39

  But that racially polarizing undertone didn’t fully surface until after the election. In Obama’s view, the only reason for Americans to oppose any element of his agenda was subtle—or not-so-subtle—racism. As Obama revealed in his memoir in 2020, he believed “my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted . . . millions of Americans [were] spooked by a Black man in the White House.” Obama saw McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, as an avatar for this viciously bigoted America: “Through Palin, it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party—xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward Black and brown folks—were finding their way to center stage.” Obama even wrote that he deployed Vice President Joe Biden to
Capitol Hill to negotiate with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) instead of doing so directly because of his awareness that “negotiations with the vice president didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of cooperation with (Black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do.” Obama and Michelle both chalked up Tea Party opposition to Obamacare to racism as well.40

  Given Obama’s personal rejection of opponents as benighted racists, it was no wonder that in 2012 he charted a different course than in 2008. Instead of running a campaign directed at a broad base of support, Obama sliced and diced the electorate, focusing in on his new, intersectional coalition, a demographically growing agglomeration of supposedly victimized groups in American life.

  Practically speaking, this was a strategy long used by community organizers—as Obama well knew, since he had been one. Obama was trained in the strategies of Saul Alinsky, himself the father of community organizing—and as the Marxist Alinsky wrote in 1971, “even if all the low-income parts of our population were organized—all the blacks, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Appalachian poor whites—if through some genius of organization they were all united in a coalition, it would not be powerful enough to get significant, basic needed changes. It would have to . . . seek out allies. The pragmatics of power will not allow any alternative.” But while Alinsky encouraged radical organizers to use “strategic sensitivity” with middle-class audiences in order to “radicalize parts of the middle class,”41 newer community organizers spotted an opportunity to jettison the lower-middle class—people Alinsky himself disdained as insecure and bitter (language Obama himself echoed in 2008). They would focus instead on college graduates, on the young, as potential allies.