On the Rise of the Moderate Communist
Reviewing How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, by Freddie deBoer
Three years after the George Floyd protests, it’s hard not to feel like we’re at the tail end of whatever it was that movement started. The dust has settled, the “reckoning” has occurred, and now the time has come for the various luminaries of our age to come assess the damage, assign praise and blame where it belongs, and to tell us what it all meant.
If any single event signalled the death knell of the 2020 social justice movement, it has probably been the sudden, USSR-reminiscent collapse of Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University (a short stroll from my old neighborhood in Allston). The Center’s collapse, along with its startling inability to put its $30M endowment and over $55M in donations to seemingly any substantial use, seems to typify an era of activism characterized by a mixture of righteous rage on the one hand and an impotent lack of substance on the other. That the Center is supposed to have failed because Kendi was too busy writing children’s books about antiracism is one absurd anecdote in a movement that always felt at home more between the covers of an absurdist novel than the real world.
The timing of the Center’s collapse couldn’t have been better for Freddie deBoer, who’s book How the Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement nearly coincided with it.
DeBoer is rightly known as one of the most talented writers the modern left has produced, something of a George Orwell figure who has always written candidly and uncompromisingly about the failures of the left, while being an active and long-time foot soldier in it. The balancing act is a hard one to pull off, and to drop the other shoe quickly, I don’t think his new book fully succeeds. While it is to a large degree a necessary dose of sanity for the modern left, and a book every progressive should read and think about, I think something important is still missing from this picture.
The thesis is fairly well delivered in the title. DeBoer wishes to argue 1) That the 2020 social justice movement failed to achieve anything all that worthwhile, and 2) It’s the elites, liberal and progressive, and their approach to political activism which led to the failure. Having established all this, he moves onto more specific policy critiques and suggestions for where the movement should go.
Some version of “critiquing wokeness from the left” has been around for a while, though exactly how long is hard to say. The earliest left critique of what is now often called “wokeness” I’m aware of is Adolph Reed’s paper in Dialectical Anthropology called Antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left, and Reed’s thesis in that paper really isn’t too dissimilar from deBoer’s, in broad strokes: the social justice movement is being distracted from structural changes that would improve the lives of the people it claims to represent. It would do better focusing on issues like housing and healthcare access than on getting racist statues taken down. It should probably focus on broad class-based initiatives more than race-based ones. Reed’s son, Toure Reed, wrote an in-depth and scholarly book called Toward Freedom which made a similar case.
Less sophisticated versions of this narrative have been offered which suggest that wokeness is a tool the ruling class has promoted specifically to prevent such class-based initiatives from taking shape. DeBoer, fortunately, doesn’t engage in conspiratorial speculation of this kind.
What is absent from deBoer’s thesis, however, is any serious investigation of why this “corruption” of the left by identity-obsessed elites mirrors the similar collapse of the New Left in the 1960s.
I would argue that if deBoer did seriously investigate that question, he would end up with problems with the left that cannot be palmed off on “the elites,” problems which go right to the core of the left’s whole project. The elites who created wokeness, specifically in its academic forms as postmodernist philosophy, deconstruction, critical race theory, intersectional feminism and the like, certainly do share the blame. But we also have to ask why people, many of whom really should know better, were so ready to fall so hard for it. And, further still, we have to ask why such ideas have stuck so persistently to the left.
An honest analysis reveals that the real source of wokeness is the mixture of basic human impulses with a certain palliative story—one with clearly defined good and bad guys, a system to be dismantled by the good guys, and an explanation for and means of excusing all the personal failings of its adherents. Having noticed this feature of wokeness, we have to then ask whether it bears any parallels to earlier forms of left politics, as in the form of early 20th century socialism.
Socialism is the modern religion of the secular age, as Dostoevsky noticed as far back as the 1880s. At this point, it’s a trite truism to notice this. Like all religions, it is prone to its absurdities, and wokeness is arguably that absurdity taken to its logical conclusion. In and of itself, this isn’t a criticism—look too closely at most of the things that have propelled history forward, and you find that they are at the very least not terribly rational, and they’re usually surprisingly dumb (take the election of a reality TV show host to the US presidency, for instance). In the case of wokeness, the absurdity is that of a spurned loser. After all, there are plenty of “disadvantaged” people who have no particular use for wokeness, because they don’t feel themselves particularly disadvantaged. The ones who do often have a personal ax to grind, some sense of personal inadequacy which, through this set of ideas, can be explained as the product of a systemic injustice. On the other side, wokeness is endorsed by people as an expression of their power—they’re so powerful, they can actually afford to feel ashamed of it!
This sore loser mentality can, at times, prove very powerful, even “hegemonic”—the term deBoer knowingly repeats in mock leftist-grad-student speak (towards the end of the book, he implores his fellow leftists to “talk like human beings again.”) But it can never yield a rational or sustainable movement. This is why Occupy Wall Street imploded. This is why the activist organizations that formed post-2016 have all imploded. This is why BLM has imploded. Like the New Left of old, or for that matter the communist disasters in Russia and China, or the Spanish anarchists, or all the way back to the Paris Commune of 1871, these movements emerge spontaneously, move fast and break things, and burn out just as suddenly, like a fever breaking (some, perhaps, not as suddenly as the people who have to live in them might hope).
The common element? All are united by the particular philosophical predispositions of the left. If you wish to avoid the conclusion that this is a relevant factor in their fates, you need to find someone to blame. If you’re still calling yourself a revolutionary Marxist in 2023, as deBoer does, the target of the blame is so obvious as to almost be a foregone conclusion: blame the elites! The liberals! Especially the white ones—although black ones come in for a beating too, provided they’re “PMC” (professional-managerial class). Black PMC, if it wasn’t clear, is Marxist-speak for “honorary white person” on the chart of people you’re allowed to blame for things.
It would be fine to continue to hang one’s hat with Marxism—it’s a free country, and Marxism is complex and interesting, if nothing else. But this late in the game, some serious apologetics is needed to make the whole thing hold together. In a more sanitized, dust jacket-ready form, deBoer is relatively toned-down and far more slogan-prone. Those who read his excellent substack will notice a distinct lack of his wry world-weariness, the sense of self-awareness, the despair which is always just on the margins of the page, and mostly the sense of deep alienation from his own movement. When deBoer declares at one point, “I’m all for revolution!”, something I can’t imagine substack deBoer ever writing, it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself almost as much as his purity-testing audience. This is the sort of idiotic thing you have to say if you want to be taken seriously in leftist environments, a shibboleth on par with acknowledging your privilege, or for that matter whatever Indian tribe happened to be on the piece of land you’re sitting on when white people showed up. It’s very hard to imagine a scenario where the man who wrote this white-hot critique of social justice activists would seriously be cheering them on if they had a chance to overthrow the US government. It’s one thing to say this stuff in theory-the existence of revolutionary leftism in the US in the 21st century depends on the knowledge that said revolution is entirely theoretical—but it’s quite another to know what actual, real-life revolutionaries are like, and seriously find the idea of them holding the reins of real power at all gratifying.
Maybe I’m psychoanalyzing, and in that case I’ll only speak for myself: even at the height of my most extreme leftism, I didn’t actually want a revolution. What I wanted—what I still want, in fact—is a left who I would really, honestly want to see holding power, setting aside how that power would be achieved. The painful contradiction of the kind of homeless leftism I still feel an affinity with is a sense of discontent with the present, and with all the seeming alternatives. This is a zealotry, not of the left that is, but (to use the grand-daddy of homeless leftists, Murray Bookchin’s phrase) that of the left-that-could-be.
The thing is, I don’t think that left actually could be, because I know how humans are. We are flawed creatures—specifically, we are spiteful and weird, and we don’t generally know what’s going on. To radically upend our existing systems of government is very dangerous and almost always fails, because we hardly ever have a clear idea of what to do next. The fact that the convoluted and overwrought American system of government works as well as it does is a fucking miracle, and the idea that a bunch of anal HR people who run the DSA as a hobby are going to successfully rewrite the constitution is a weird thing to bet your life on. If deBoer’s writing demonstrates anything, it’s that he understands this. But still, the language of revolution hangs on.
It’s for this reason deBoer has to spend equal parts of his book offering ameliorative, incremental, reasonable, and basically liberal policy solutions to his audience, while also convincing us that he really is a radical, he really does want to overthrow the state, he doesn’t support incrementalism, etc. No, it’s not a conservative position to oppose defunding the police because the black-on-black crime rate is so high. Rather, this is a progressive position that’s merely “right-coded.” Certainly, in the perfect world the socialist revolution will bring to bear, we won’t need cops—but as it is, well, let’s be real.
I’m being harsh, so I should emphasize this is an antipathy of small differences. As far as actual policy is concerned, deBoer and I are mostly on the same page. It’s how we get there that troubles me. A particularly alarming section is the chapter deBoer devotes to political violence, which he does oppose—but not necessarily for the right reasons.
DeBoer is careful-painfully careful, really-not to argue that political violence is morally wrong. No, his arguments are entirely practical, because of course, to be opposed to political violence in principle is a liberal, not a leftist position. Political violence is opposed in principle because one believes in democracy, and believes that the common will must be upheld, even when it’s not what you or your coalition want. But the progressive movement doesn’t actually believe in democracy unless it happens to coincide with their goals; they believe in justice. As such, deBoer has to argue against political violence entirely on strategic grounds. It’s not that overthrowing American democracy and compelling 330 million people to live under the progressive agenda would be wrong; it just wouldn’t work, so it shouldn’t be tried.
The real path to change, he insists, is that of the revolutionary in the sheets, but the compromise-minded center-left liberal on the streets. One wonders why we need the former if we’re going to be the latter in practice. Can’t we just, be boring, sensible liberals until some better idea comes along?
Much of DeBoer’s work involves acknowledging and accepting the inescapable reality of painful and difficult contradictions. This is much of what makes him insightful and interesting. But it feels like the honest and uncompromising tolerance for uncertainty was edited into an unusually articulate, but ultimately uncurious progressive self-certainty that tinkers with the Rube Goldberg machine that is the progressive movement, without ever really questioning why the failure it seeks to debug is so universal to the left, across time and space. Without directly addressing that central question, I am skeptical that the better progressive movement deBoer describes is at all liable to come about.