Conservative Leninism

 Jon Chait runs through the latest "idea" from the Rightists in America. The basic idea is that the "Woke Mob of Leftists" has subverted America through a "Long March through the institutions". For those with a passing familiarity with world history, the Long March was the Chinese Communist Party's wandering struggle through China that created a hardened cadre of leaders and soldiers who would ultimately win the Chinese civil war in 1949. Linking the fact that you can see same sex and interracial couples in Volkswagen ads with Maoist revolutionaries makes a certain amount of sense, if you think that treating minorities with decency and equality is the same as communism.

The "idea" is that the Cultural Left has burrowed its way into power via the college educated and then proceeded to poison America with ideas like "lynching is bad, actually" and "LGBTQ people deserve equal treatment." There is a superficial plausibility to the theory, as the culture really has moved away from patriarchal, Christianist white supremacy. (Insert Barbie reference here.)

The chilling implications of this theory can be seen in Florida. If - as these bigots with bid vocabularies believe - the institutions of the Deep State, Hollywood and Corporate America are corrupted by the Long March of Leftism, then the only proper recourse is to use the power of the state to destroy "Cultural Marxism" in all its forms. This leads to DeSantis' jihad against Disney and it makes up the chilling plan to use a Trump second term to hollow out the federal government.

Chait acknowledges that they have a point that many institutions no longer cater to conservative beliefs, but he also points out the basic flaws in the theory.

The first is that they dramatically overstate the extent that institutions have re-ordered themselves to become "woke". There was a lot of caterwauling by conservatives in 2022 that Putin's military was butch and macho and would destroy America's woke military. Of course, then Russia face planted in Ukraine and America's JV weapons were a big part of that. So the fact that Raytheon did a DEI statement isn't exactly the end of the fucking world.

The second flaw is that a lot of the stuff that people like Christopher Rufo and the Claremont Institute scream about was a direct result of the George Floyd protests within the context of the Trump presidency. Yes, there were some voice that talked about "defunding the police" but they were typically fringe, and Democrats have largely abandoned those positions.  

All those DEI statements and training were actually pretty pointless. I remember going through them, and for the most part, they were preaching to the choir. I can think of very little that I experienced or was taught that would change the mind of an actual bigot. There was some interesting stuff on non-binary and non-gender conforming stuff that I wasn't really clear on, but the 3-4 hours of training could've been 30 minutes. I was already sympathetic, so I was receptive to learning about it, but if you were resistant to thinking about gender that way, this training wasn't going to change your mind. 

So much of DEI stuff - including things our school did in the face of actual acts of racism - is just window dressing. We had the n-word scrawled in various places over the past few years, usually around MLK Day. We do the same things every time and it doesn't move the needle much at all, because a year or two later it happens again. But, hey! We did the stuff you're supposed to do! The same is obviously true for corporations that create a DEI position, do a weekend retreat and then promptly forget about it. Is this really a Long March through the Institutions?

The final flaw is that in accusing the Left of being on a Maoist Cultural Revolution/Long March, the Right then adopts flawed Leninist modes of thinking. I'll just let Chait lay it out:

Both tomes brim with militant sloganeering language exhorting their allies to take merciless, decisive action against the enemy. “We like to say that one must govern, but a truer expression is that one must learn to rule,” writes Milikh in one essay.

Rufo displays even more clearly Leninist thought patterns. Politics is a struggle of willpower, and the forces of his side (the counterrevolution) “must ruthlessly identify and exploit the vulnerabilities of the revolution, then construct its own logic for overcoming it … The task is to meet the forces of revolution with an equal and opposite force.” Having convinced himself of the success of the Marxist left, he believes the right must fashion itself as a mirror image.

Rufo’s self-conception as a reverse Leninist, agitating for his anti-revolution, even extends to constructing his own dialectical analysis. “The working class is more anti-revolutionary today than at any time during the upheaval,” he posits. “Their quality of life has plummeted into a revolving nightmare of addiction, violence and incarceration.” The proletariat in Joe Biden’s Amerika, immiserated into radicalization, is ready to take to the barricades.

By starting from a presumption that this is an existential threat to American values, authoritarian assholes like Rufo and Milikh can justify their own existential threat to America. There is no political figure more steeped in this thinking than Ron DeSantis. As a former Freedumb Caucus asshole, DeSantis is already neck deep in lunatic theories about Joe Biden being a closet Marxist.

What I think we might be seeing though is a retreat from the effectiveness of this sort of politics. I'm more optimistic than most on the Left.

I believe that this sort of state intrusion on people's lives that we see in DeSantis' Florida is tremendously unappealing to a sizable majority of Americans. Sure, there's a hard core of about 35-40% of American voters who eat up this nonsense, but for a lot of people, the idea that Trump was going to try and end American democracy in 2016 seemed hysterical. It's not so far fetching after 1/6 and Dobbs and the rhetoric that emanates from the fever swamps of the Right Wing Noise Machine.

There is a theory in American politics about "thermostatic elections". The basic idea is that after Democrats win, Republicans win the midterms and vice versa. This has largely been true since the 1980s, but it wasn't always true. From 1896-1932 there was a long period of Republican dominance and from 1932-1980, there was a long period of Democratic dominance.  This thermostatic process is, I believe, a product of the increasingly ideological nature of the two parties. Prior to the 1970s, there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. No more. 

With the adoption by the Right of the idea that "Cultural Marxism" (not a thing, by the way) is an existential threat that must be met by rolling back LGBTQ and women's reproductive rights and weaponizing the state against Disney etc., they will hopefully continue to reinforce the idea that they are authoritarian threats to the very idea of democratic governance. If that happens, the GOP could be discredited at least at the federal level for years to come.

In which case - hilariously - the sort of deep cultural change that Rufo and DeSantis dread will cement itself further into American life.