I wouldn’t be giving Hazony this much air time if I didn’t think that it was important to understand what people on the Right like him are saying. He doesn’t fit into most of the cubbies that most Americans put someone who is MAGA friendly. As I said in a previous post, his team that got the jump ball in the last election, and there’s a very good chance they’ll find a way to hold onto it, if not through the regular voting process, then some other way.
I think it’s very difficult for people like me who mostly feel comfortable in a Blue State milieu to understand what’s freaking out the people who live in a Red State milieu—especially the intellectuals. If they are in good faith, and if they’re working with the same facts that the rest of us are, they must see Trump and the people around him the same we we do. If they don’t, they must either be crackpot fanatics like Russell Vought or Steven Miller or cynical careerists like Lindsay Graham.
I don’t think that Hazony is either. As he said in his conversation/debate with Ezra Klein—’we share the same facts, but we don’t share the same frame’. That is, we see the same things, but we interpret them differently. So I think it’s important to understand his “frame”, and whether working within it enables him to interpret what’s happening with MAGA in a way that makes any kind of sense.
From the Blue perspective, the blue team comprises mostly decent folks who want a decent society. Most Blues just want everyone to to try to get along, to be tolerant of difference, to use the political system to redress injustices, especially racial ones, and to make corrections in the economic system so that it doesn’t benefit the super wealthy too much and the poorest too little. Why does the Right find that so objectionable?
And the Blues have good reason to answer that question in thinking that most of the energy on the Right derives from racism, xenophobia, or some other dark, proto- or full-on fascism. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that this dark side of the Right has been growing steadily over the last twenty or so years, and it’s pretty clear they’re playing for the team that Hazony supports.1 And for this reason many on the Blue Team justifiably wonder how any decent person can justify supporting a president who cannot bring himself to repudiate those dark, violent factions in his coalition, or countenance the role he played on J6. That by itself should be completely disqualifying. And that’s not even considering Trump’s compulsive lying, corruption, and sexual predation. I can understand how low-information voters or people who live in right-wing information silos believe that, but not someone like Yoram Hazony. So I was genuinely puzzled by how he justifies his support of Trump and the team he has assembled.
So here’s what I have come to believe: A big part of the explanation for H’s support for Trump lies in that he (and people like him) see the threat from the Left as much worse than whatever risks Trump represents.2 Such fears seem unjustifiable to someone like me, and I would think most people reading here, but those fears are real. The first time I became aware that people thought like this was in the spring of 2016 when I was having a conversation with a very intelligent, well-educated, conservative Catholic who told me with complete earnestness that it was just a matter of time before the Left would be rounding up Christians, putting them up against a wall, and executing them. His saying this left me speechless. But the point is if you believe such threats are real, then that would justify supporting anybody who seeks to protect you. Hazony’s fears may not be this extreme, but it’s clear that he thinks that the country is moving toward chaos and dissolution, and if this trajectory continues, any kind of fratricidal violence is possible.
At the time in 2016, I just dismissed this paranoia as a nutty fringe phenomenon, but when Trump was elected later that year, I began to take it more seriously, and I started then to try to better understand what kind of society makes such fears seem so real. The Blue Team can, like I did, dismiss such paranoia as a form of collective mental illness, but that does not exonerate them from trying to understand the underlying causes of the disease. And when almost half the country suffers from it, you have to take seriously the more thoughtful people who articulate why they feel as they do.
My ideas about ontological dizziness began to form around that time, and it gradually became clearer to me that the cure had to be ontological because the disease was, i.e., that we were collectively suffering from a sickness of Being.3 Most educated Americans don’t think like this. They accept the world they live in as it is. It’s got serious problems, but certainly we live in a better world today than the world our ancestors lived in five hundred or a thousand years ago. Every society has problems. Why should we think ours are unique, much less worse than living in say, 13th Century France? Chill. Everything will all work out. That’s the Continuist position. I used to hold it, but I’ve become a Discontinuist.4
So this persistent concern about our collective sickness of Being, in part, explains why I’ve been spending so much time with Yoram Hazony’s most recent book. His “Re-continuist” argument parallels mine in many ways, and my last two posts were an attempt to stress where we agree rather than disagree, but today I want to talk about how we disagree. This disagreement has two focus points: (1) we have very different interpretations of what the Woke Left really is. (2) I think his hope to restore a quasi-theocratic biblical Protestantism to our public life is quasi-crazy. I address the first of these in today’s post, and I’ll address the second in the future.
Here’s Hazony on the threat posed by the Neo-Marxists:
For a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, most Americans and Europeans regarded Marxism as an enemy that had been defeated once and for all. But they were wrong. A mere thirty years later, Marxism is back. By the summer of 2020, even as American cities succumbed to rioting, arson, and looting, the liberal custodians of many of the country’s leading institutions adopted a policy of accommodating their Marxist employees by giving in to some of their demands: dismissing liberal employees at the New York Times, removing President Woodrow Wilson’s name from the halls of Princeton University, and so forth.
But what initially looked like a temporary policy of appeasement has since become a rout. Control of many of the most important American news media, universities and schools, major corporations and philanthropic organizations, and even the government bureaucracy, the military, and some churches has passed into the hands of Marxist activists. We know that most of these institutions will never return to what they were before. Liberalism has lost its ability to command its former strongholds. The hegemony of liberal ideas, as we have known it since the 1960s, has ended.
…
This is the new reality that has emerged in the United States, Britain, Canada, and some European countries. Now it is being replicated throughout the democratic world. No free nation will be spared this trial. (pp. 311-312)
Is he saying that the DEI guy in HR is working for the eventual dictatorship of the proletariat? Hazony would say No, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a Marxist without knowing it: These Neo-Marxists
… do not follow the precedent of the Communist Party, the Nazis, and various other political movements that branded themselves using a particular party name and issued an explicit manifesto to define it. Instead, they disorient their opponents by referring to their beliefs with a shifting vocabulary of terms, including “the Left,” “Progressivism,” “Social Justice,” “Anti-Racism,” “Anti-Fascism,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Critical Race Theory,” “Identity Politics,” “Political Correctness,” “Wokeness,” and more. When liberals try to use these terms, they often find themselves deplored for not using them correctly, and this itself becomes a weapon in the hands of those who wish to humiliate and ultimately destroy them. The best way to escape this trap is to recognize the movement presently seeking to overthrow liberalism for what it is: an updated version of Marxism.
…The new Marxists do not use the technical jargon that was devised by the nineteenth-century Communist Party. They don’t talk about the bourgeoisie, proletariat, class struggle, alienation of labor, commodity fetishism, and the rest, and in fact they have developed their own jargon tailored to present circumstances in America, Britain, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, their politics are based on Marx’s framework for critiquing liberalism (what Marx calls the “ideology of the bourgeoisie”) and overthrowing it. (pp. 312-313).
So when you frame the threat as coming from Marxist revolutionaries, it takes on an existential valence. These aren’t just well-intentioned Liberal idealists who want a more just society; these are people who seek to overthrow everything that makes America America. The word Marxism conjures up the worst fears in the American psyche, and so to use it has its rhetorical if not demagogic purposes. Be afraid. The Marxists are coming.
But this isn’t any Marxism that Marx would recognize, but H think’s he can call it Marxism because it fits his Marxist paradigm in a way that’s adapted to 21st century conditions. I think It’s phony Marxism, and I’ll explain why, but first let’s hear him out.
In my last post I discussed H’s Liberal and Conservative paradigms. I mentioned then that such paradigm analysis can seem reductive, but it can be helpful if it gets to the core archetypal energy that is animating a political or cultural movement. Here are what H thinks are the fundamental premises that define the Marxist paradigm:
1. Oppressor and Oppressed. Marx argues that, as an empirical matter, people invariably form themselves into cohesive groups (he calls them classes), which exploit one another to the extent they are able. A liberal political order … tends toward two classes, one of which owns and controls pretty much everything (the oppressor); while the other is exploited, and the fruit of its labor appropriated, so that it does not advance and, in fact, remains forever enslaved (the oppressed). In addition, Marx sees the state itself, its laws and its mechanisms of enforcement, as a tool that the oppressor class uses to keep the regime of oppression in place and to assist in carrying out this work.
2. False Consciousness. Marx recognizes that the liberal businessmen, politicians, lawyers, and intellectuals who keep this system in place are unaware that they are the oppressors, and that what they think of as progress has only established new conditions of oppression. Indeed, even the working class may not know that they are exploited and oppressed. …This ignorance of the fact that one is an oppressor or oppressed is called the ruling ideology (Engels’s later coined the phrase false consciousness to describe it), and it is only overcome when one is awakened to what is happening and learns to recognize reality using true categories.
3. Revolutionary Reconstitution of Society. Marx suggests that, historically, oppressed classes have materially improved their conditions only through a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large—that is, through the destruction of the oppressor class and of the social norms and ideas that hold the regime of systematic oppression in place. … There is a period of “more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution” and the “violent overthrow” of the liberal oppressors. At this point, the oppressed seize control of the state.
4. Total Disappearance of Class Antagonisms. Marx promises that after the oppressed underclass takes control of the state, the exploitation of individuals by other individuals will be “put to an end” and the antagonism between classes of individuals will totally disappear. How this is to be done is not specified. (pp. 313-15)
This is more or less right so far as it goes, but it misses that any authentic Marxist analysis must deal with at least two critical themes: (1) Who controls the means of production; and (2) How do you resolve the alienation of labor problem? To ignore these is heresy. It’s phony Marxism. Nevertheless, Hazony is correct that many of the intellectuals who are behind what he calls Neo-Marxism think of themselves as Marxists, but that doesn’t mean that they are. They are a heterodox sect.
Why does the distinction matter? Because Neo-Marxists are not a threat to the system and shouldn’t be taken seriously by anybody who's serious. Their ideological superstructure is perfectly aligned with the substructure of the TCM. Whereas the quasi-theocratic superstructure that the Project 2025 theocrats want to impose on late capitalist societies can never take root unless there is a very serious attempt to restructure the techno-capitalist substructure. And that’s not ever gonna happen though the Republican Party. Ever. Unless some how, some way the oligarchs lose control of it.
As I pointed out in the Cathedral Lectures, the Marxism of Deleuze and Guatarri is Phony Marxism because it sees itself as undermining the capitalist system without realizing how it has been coopted by it and how they serve its interests in promoting its consumerist objectives and metaphysical nihilism. Anti-Oedipus Marxism, which is the Marxism of educated elites, is an ideology that is perfectly fitted to the architecture of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix.
That’s why what Hazony calls Neo-Marxism in its Woke forms has been so easily adopted by establishment public and private institutions—it poses no structural threat to the system, and at most it is a nuisance they are willing to tolerate if it keeps the kids happy. “Our bright, new young hires want Woke DEI policies.” say the TCM principals. “Sure. Whatever. It doesn’t cost much to put up Black Lives Matter poster in the lunch room or to hire a few more Black or Hispanic kids from the Ivies.” They understand that It won’t affect one bit how wealth and power are distributed in their system. Nothing structural changes.
This Neo-Marxism is the Phony Marxism of educated elites who benefit both in economic and social-status terms from their position in the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. The more aggressive among them are Jacobins, not Marxists. The French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. It sought to replace an aristocratic elite with a bourgeois elite. Marx wanted a revolution that worked from the economic bottom up, not imposed by bourgeois elites top down.
Phony Marxism, not real Marxism, freaks out Hazony and others on the intellectual Right. Should they be? I don’t think they’re the threat they fear. Annoying, yes. Fatal to democracy, hardly. Other things pose a much more severe threat, and they come from two sources—the fascist right and the TCM oligarchs. And he is delusional if he thinks his Conservative Restoration project can succeed. At best it will be coopted to serve the TCM one way or the other. And so when push comes to shove, that’s all Hazony’s attack on Neo-Marxism achieves—to fan the flames of culture war that neither side can decisively win—and leaves the oligarchs in control.
So sure, I share his distaste for the bullying illiberalism of Jacobins on both the Left and the Right, but the real violence derives from profound structural causes, and nothing that I’ve read by H addresses this. He seems to think if we can just get prayer in the schools again and people back to reading the bible, all shall be well.5
I am not a Marxist. There will be no dictatorship of the proletariat ever. There will be no disappearance of class antagonisms ever. I do not believe in violent revolution because it only leads to the replacement of one set of elites with another. But I do believe that structural change toward a more just political economy is possible. And I do believe that some Marxist ideas are helpful in thinking about how to achieve that.
But I do not believe that such change is possible until first there is a fundamental shift in the culture. That’s the only cure for ontological dizziness, and no sane politics is possible until this fundamental problem is addressed. I can understand how many people might find Hazony’s argument for a restored Conservatism appealing. But the real question is how you get there. If Hazony supports the kind of social engineering that is driving Project 2025, he’s as much a Jacobin as the Neo-Marxists he’s condemning.
Notes
1. Hazony acknowledges this dark side to the MAGA movement, and it concerns him, but he blames Liberalism for promoting a society whose dynamics produce atomism and social dissolution, and he believes that the only solution is to create a Nationalist Conservative (NatCon) society that promotes cohesion and solidarity through mutual bonds of loyalty. He insists in the Klein podcast that his NatCon movement is free of such dark influences.
2. The threat posed by Liberal Globalism is perhaps equally dangerous for H.
3.. Hazony would probably agree with me about the ontological roots of the problem, and he would argue that his vision of a restored Conservative America offers an ontological cure. If we could just restore Protestant biblicism to our public institutions, all shall be well. Well, to use one of his favorite phrases, “It just isn’t true.” Explaining why needs more space than I can give it here, but the short answer is that American Calvinist ‘paradigm’ is at the heart of the American sickness of Being for several reasons, but mainly two: (1) its ideological cross-fertilization with Capitalism, and (2) its Jacobinism—as I’ve argued in other posts, without Geneva in the 1550s, there’s no Paris in the 1790s. The Woke he rails against is a form of secular Calvinism that is just as toxic as the Calvinism of Christian Nationalists. Both want to ram their brittle, symbolically impoverished, soul-shrivelled, moralistic truth down everyone else’s throats. Tolerance is not their brand. There’s a reason why almost all the Puritans who were captured by Indians didn’t want to go back to their families.
4. See “Theorizing the Discontinuity”.
5. Am I being unfair? Maybe a little. But what people want most deeply is a sense of connection to a living tradition, and for reasons suggested in Note 3 above, American Calvinism does not provide rich soil to grow a thriving society. It’s largely responsible for getting us into the fix we’re in. The solution lies in finding deeper sources from which to develop living traditions. I’d much rather hang out with Hazony and the Torah scholars of his tradition than Jerry Fallwell and his lot. I address the underlying problem in "Dying Traditions", and will address this problem of theocracy in more detail in the future. It's important to me that my "Rescuing Aristotle" project distinguish itself from what Hazony is proposing. We're addressing the same problem, but with a very different imagination of how to solve it.
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