Trans Identity Politics: Antienlightenment Justice

21st century Canada is an opportune place to observe Antienlightenment and Counterenlightenment justice frameworks. Amongst these are Antienlightenment transgender identity politics. One of the main Antienlightenment justice struggles of transgender identity politics consists of an attack on a sports institution reserved for the human development of the majority of humans with very low testosterone, traditionally and commonly identified as women. There is a softer version of this, in which women athletes are assigned responsibility for making room for transgender women, making them feel at home, and being good sports when transgender women win in women’s sports. But the other day a trans-ally academic dove immediately into the hard version (“Cis-women should expect no more access to sports participation than people with other physical deficiencies.”), so let’s analyze how the Antienlightenment argumentation works. The discussion that follows analyzes the rhetorical strategy, expressed last week, of an affluent, Anglo cis-male Canadian Political Science professor and transgender identity advocate. His affluent, Anglo cis-female academic wife is of the same opinion, and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Thus I think we can consider the trans-ally’s reasoning as the politics and rhetorical strategy of the Canadian Antienlightenment.

Transgender identity advocates argue that recognizing a majority human group (women as low-testosterone people) as requiring a reserved field of physical play, whole-body development, sports competition, collective coordination, and endorphin therapy–on top of that “logically” afforded the traditional “model” humans with high testosterone, men–constitutes a priority, fundamental, unjust discrimination against those women whose development was masculine (involving high levels of testosterone), transgender women (0.19% of the Canadian population). Thus in liberal Antienlightenment transgender politics, women’s sports in particular are a violation of the minority individual’s priority right to identity-based belonging.

(Limit: “I identify as capitalist. Yet the capitalists are denying me inclusion. I am therefore owed property.” This logical extension is excluded from Antienlightenment identity politics and justice, indicating that Antienlightenment politics are not logically inconsistent so much as committed to inegalitarianism, inclusive of the inegalitarian privilege of bad-faith argumentation.)

Men’s sports do not violate transgender justice because in the majestic equality of men’s sports, transgender men are free to join men’s sports, to the extent that their low-testosterone physical endowment allows, and to the extent that transgender men prefer to expose themselves to the masculine culture expressed in men’s locker rooms.

As we shall see, women’s sports is perceived by transgender political advocates as a violation of the quintessential Antienlightenment justice, marginal justice, which centers the interest of all marginal identities, from political-economic elites down through their meritocratic management employees and to the marginalized minorities whom elites elect to patronize and protect from the majority. In Antienlightenment thought, revived in the 20th century, expanding elite privileges into democracy is the injustice; expanding upon privilege is unethical, because the majority is essentially the moral problem. Instead, a bedrock of political-economic inequality permits elites to electively patronize other marginal identities to overcome the injustices of the majority. The Antienlightenment perspective is over-represented in academia, wherein people normally have mind-body alienation health issues.

The Olympic committee (IOC) has for decades struggled to develop a fair policy regarding the participation of women who have gone through male puberty and thus have bodies that incorporate high testosterone’s strength, speed, and endurance endowments. While overall humans are not very gender dimorphic (There is not a lot of difference between XX females and YX males in humans.), nonetheless, testosterone reliably endows humans with higher bone density, muscle mass, and oxygen carrying capacity, and the bimodal distribution of testosterone in puberty bifurcates some physical performance within the human population.

Handelsman, Hirschberg and Bermon (2018) explain the particular bimodal distribution of testosterone endowment in humans: “Elite athletic competitions have separate male and female events due to men’s physical advantages in strength, speed, and endurance, so that a protected female category with objective entry criteria is required.

Prior to puberty, there is no sex difference in circulating testosterone concentrations or athletic performance, but from puberty onward a clear sex difference in athletic performance emerges as circulating testosterone concentrations rise in men because testes produce 30 times more testosterone than before puberty with circulating testosterone exceeding 15-fold that of women at any age.

There is a wide sex difference in circulating testosterone concentrations and a reproducible dose-response relationship between circulating testosterone and muscle mass and strength as well as circulating hemoglobin in both men and women. These dichotomies largely account for the sex differences in muscle mass and strength and circulating hemoglobin levels that result in at least an 8% to 12% ergogenic advantage in men.

Based on the nonoverlapping, bimodal distribution of circulating testosterone concentration—and making an allowance for women with mild hyperandrogenism, notably women with polycystic ovary syndrome (who are overrepresented in elite athletics)—the appropriate eligibility criterion for female athletic events should be a circulating testosterone of <5.0 nmol/L.”

The specific, population-wide, discrete bifurcation of some physical performance capacity on the basis of a bimodal distribution of testosterone in human development is at odds with individual and cultural preferences for conceptualizing gender as fluid, gradated, and self-selected. Transgender advocates argue that an absolutely fluid, gradated, and self-selected concept of gender is essential and just in all cases, and that societies must therefore ignore as meaningless the scientific findings of a bimodal distribution of testosterone endowment and its effects. For Antienlightenment liberals, the only justice issue that remains at stake in women’s sports is whether transgender women feel included and affirmed.

To bolster their narrow, marginalist moral politics, transgender advocates sacrifice logical rigor along with scientific validity. Treating testosterone endowment incorrectly as if it were a meaningless quasi randomly-distributed continuum variable (like gender identity, height, or community support for sports in a proprietarian society–Bad luck for you, ladies!), transgender advocates argue that transgender women must be permitted to eschew men’s sports and instead compete with women in any sports that are designated women’s sports (preferentially), where their testosterone-based physical endowment must be celebrated and honoured, or societies should end women’s sports and return to the “ungendered” Antienlightenment institution of sports that are (de facto) for men only, as the species’ carriers of the testosterone endowment.

For transgender advocates, the funding and institution of women’s sports defy the liberal political assumption of randomly-distributed life chances and meritocratic outcomes. As stark socio-economic inequality is legitimate in the proprietarian view of liberals and modern conservatives alike, the only remaining injustice in the liberal worldview is the marginal identity exclusions imposed by a population majority (“the mob” Burke called it).

The transgender advocates of the liberal Antienlightenment consider women’s sports to be, if not an illegitimate mass-society diversion of resources, an idiosyncratic (non-purposive) venue in which transgender women should expect to receive the benefits of women’s emotional support duty, as transgender women deploy their distinctive physical endowment-identity nexus to excel in athletic competition with women.

Traditionally, in conservative Antienlightenment cultures, the bimodal distribution of testosterone endowment has been fetishized and over-extended as a principle encompassing the essence of the individual’s protected human identity (male) or super-exploitable, subhuman identity (female). Thus, one is either male, and naturally worthy of sports and other forms of social support for one’s whole, thinking-body development, or one is female and reserved for exploitation and expropriation. Being a woman in the conservative Antienlightenment tradition is assumed as a curse and shame. Women are treated as a fundamental debtor population in patriarchies, and so woman’s duty is to perform labor for little recognition, credit or cooperation, to others’ aggrandizement. We can recognize this conservative Antienlightenment assumption within the liberal Antienlightenment disposition to assign women and not men the primary duty to make gender transition rewarding.

In either Antienlightenment, liberal or conservative, the human development and welfare of the majority ipso facto unjustly diverts from the True justice of centering the interests of the margins, comprising the elite (including neoliberal capitalism’s meritocrats) and any minority identities that elites in their wisdom may elect to patronize. Thus, transgender advocates join with religious patriarchs in denying that institutions that foster human development across the population, inclusive of the majority–in this case women, contribute to the social good. In the Antienlightenment view, the institution of sports for men and for women is at best irrelevant to –if not harmful to– the social good because they foster human development broadly, which is not an Antienlightenment value. In the Antienlightenment justice telos of a steep and immobile hierarchy (today based on proprietarianism), the dutiful sacrifice of the dishonorable majority for the aggrandizement of the elite few is the social good.

An Enlightenment approach to sports, by contrast, recommends recognizing the empirical impact on athletic performance of bimodal testosterone distribution at puberty, and allocating athletes between two gendered branches of socially-supported sports institutions on the basis of that bimodal testosterone endowment–rather than on the basis of the individual’s gender identity–in order to advance the social good, which Enlightenment justice holds to be the universal (not uniform) promotion of human development, within the necessary context of Earthly integrity. Separate, funded and supported women’s and men’s sports and athletic competition can contribute to maximizing human participation in activities that promote the healthy development of human thinking bodies. This is an important social good.

There is not just difference in kind of justice, but asymmetry between Enlightenment and Antienlightenment’s capacity for justice. While there is no capacity in Antienlightenment justice for protecting the development of the majority of people and life, since the majority is assumed as depraved, debtors, and subhuman sources of injustice to be subjugated, suppressed, expropriated and exploited (Godechot 1971, McMahon 2001, and Moyn 2023), there is by contrast room in Enlightenment justice for additively protecting marginal identities within the justice of protecting developmental life. In extending democratic justice, the necessary limit is not the liberation of the margins but specifically the maximization of elites. Imperial power gives us a slippery justice shift box, always impatiently retreating from progressive liberation back into the sloppy justice groove of elite patronage.

First, to protect individuals’ gender identity, the two gendered sports tracks can be labeled differently–high v. low testosterone sports, for example, instead of men and women’s. The nominal identity of the institution, in this case the dual sports tracks, is inessential to Enlightenment justice, and so identity exclusion is not required by Enlightenment justice. (By contrast, the marginalization of the development of a majority population, women, is logically required by Antienlightenment justice.)

Moreover, Enlightenment justice can protect the identity of transgender people within its expansionary social good logic. In this latter vein, Enlightenment justice would prescribe not transgender exceptions to the human-development purpose of women’s sports or liquidating women’s sports as merely coddling the majority of humanity with testosterone-deficient physiques (Antienlightenment reversions of privilege to the few), but instead reforming and de-masculinizing the culture (as distinguished from the performance level) of men’s sports, so that these high-testosterone sports are transformed into a model gender-identity inclusion institution. Though it might be more of a project because it’s a real intervention on institutionalized inequity, there is no logical reason why sports involving high-testosterone bodies cannot be reformed into inclusive cultures.

To sideline this glaringly obvious path to transgender affirmation is to reveal one’s inegalitarian Antienlightenment bias, calling into question the solidity of one’s commitment to transgender equity, as Antienlightenment patronage, an elite prerogative, tends to be driven (however it is marketed as the purest form of altruism) by elite self-interest, such as removing developmental supports from the majority in order to more aggressively exploit them. This inherent unreliability is why elite patronage is no justice substitute for democratization, and privilege-concentrating Antienlightenment justice is ultimately inferior to privilege-expanding Enlightenment justice.

In the Enlightenment view, justice for transgender identity is not the responsibility of women so much as of men–which would be a far more targeted, effective civilizing reform in patriarchies, and all known societies are patriarchies. Sure, cis-women can perform their traditional duty and defer to trans women; but what if cis-men were more supportive of trans women, cis-women, and other men? Now that’s radical. Indeed, in the dominant, inegalitarian contemporary Antienlightenment culture, precious little effort has been dedicated toward detoxifying boys’ and men’s sports locker rooms and otherwise transforming men’s sports culture into a more welcoming and inclusive culture for people with testosterone endowment but feminized identity. It is certainly remarkable that in Canadian liberal transgender advocacy, detoxifying masculine culture is deprioritized relative to enforcing women’s traditional duty to contribute self-sacrificial care work. This bias, assuming the “Boys Will Be Boys”/women’s duty gender dichotomy reveals contemporary liberalism’s dependence upon the conservative Antienlightenment (cf Moyn 2023).

Antienlightenment justice of course deprioritizes the possibility of transforming exclusionary masculine culture in favor of defending the absolute right of the individual to express identity at the expense of a traditionally-discredited majority group’s (women’s) human development.

Enlightenment justice by contrast centers the social good of widespread whole-human development–including reducing the patriarchal demand on feminized people to sacrifice their own development; recognition of biological science and the practice of logical rigor; the pursuit of substantive social progress–prioritizing the reduction of rampant toxic masculinity as a means of improving the transgender experience inter alia; and stably upon these foundational social goods, consideration for the feelings of minorities.

Acknowledgement: The basis for my Enlightenment argument is that first, my mom’s generation was denied social support for their human development via sports, and that was traumatic for them and as well led to unhealthy lifestyles post-partum. Second, way back in the late 1980s, in a small Midwestern town, occasionally boys who played highschool basketball would play basketball with us girls who played basketball, and those boys who played with us, who really cooperated with us while playing basketball with us (setting up plays with us and passing and soforth), contributed to our mental health. As well, my father regularly played basketball and catch with me, which I came to see is in stark contrast to all the women my age and older whose fathers did not parent them, and who are traumatized by that neglect. If men are inclusive, and given I could practice and learn sports by playing primarily with other low-testosterone people (women), even as a cis-woman I am fine playing the sports I know with men.

This personal experience presents me with the hypothesis that female-identified athletes with bodies built with male levels of testosterone (trans women) would also be fine playing sports with male-identified people who similarly have high levels of testosterone–if male sports culture were welcoming and inclusive.

Of course, it would not be of social benefit or a liberal justice cause, let alone an argument for creating exceptions to the social good of whole-body female development, if the impetus for a male transitioning to a female gender were to dominate women. However bold and innovative, that would just be another version of patriarchy. So, assuming that transgender participation in sports is all about justice and belonging, we must assume that transgender women do not strive to dominate or outcompete women but to embrace female identity. As someone with a long history of female identity, my experience tells me that if masculine culture, including in men’s sports, were more reliably inclusive, that would be a key contributor to transgender women’s well being and sense of belonging. Identity, as we know, is complex and variable, and quite normally out of individual control, including in liberal culture–as anyone who has been assigned an aged female identity knows too well. It is unjust to deploy a fetishized identity to demand widespread human stunting and suffering.

References

Godechot, Jacques. 1971. The Counter-Revolution Doctrine and Action, 1789-1804. Princeton University.

McMahon, Darrin M. 2001. Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Oxford University.

Moyn, Samuel. 2023. Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. Yale University.

Racial-Trauma Education Management

A current Canadian education management growth industry is in racial trauma. Female academics from diverse feminized fields including social work, psychology, and kinesiology align with Human Resources priorities by contributing to a managerial plan for disciplining and controlling educators as the cause of racial trauma. In this managerialist view, race and trauma are the emergent, long-term result of the psychological aggression of White workers, particularly teachers, upon the psychology of vulnerable children and youth.

This current managerial strategy is licensed by the Cold War Antienlightenment assumption that workers and other non-elites are degraded, the source of injustice, and owe a debt to society (Moyn 2023; Graeber 2011), which (preceded and) succeeded the long maintenance of premodern Master-Servant law in the Anglo-American countries (Orren 1991; Tigar 2000; Hay & Craven 2004; Glasbeek 2017).

This psychologizing labor management strategy defies historical work (Malik 2023; Coulthard 2014; Gilmore 2007; Graeber 2019; Murawkawa 2014; Gilmore & Murakawa 2024; Taiwo 2022; Davis 2017; Piketty 2020) that finds race to be the continually-reproduced product of market and state governance managing and otherwise policing a global working class for profit maximization. Racialization accommodates proprietarian ideology and practice proscribing democratic (AKA radical) Enlightenment ideology and organizing (Malik 2023; Piketty 2020).

Thus the direct way to reduce racialization and racial trauma is to reign in management and reduce other forms of policing, and instead permit—ideally encourage–democratic Enlightenment and economic democracy to develop. This grounded structural approach to equity and equality casts concern on proposals to reduce racism’s harms with management-designed and -driven interventions on worker attitudes and behaviour. Such approaches fail to address the generative mechanism behind racialization and the psychological trauma it inflicts, and as they assign blame for inequity in the traditional proprietarian manner, it is doubtful that they can diminish inequity rooted in inegalitarian proprietarianism.

Historical-structural research suggests that such inegalitarian (elitist, meritocratic) virtue governance creates and oscillates with its Antienlightenment complement, as where meritocratic identity politics oscillate with and reinforce feudal-patriarchal identity politics (Piketty 2020; Malik 2023). This is to say that as virtuous and comparatively doable as disciplining teachers on behalf of racialized children is, it is putting the cart before the horse in such a way as to supercharge the identity politics and thus racialization and the traumas it inflicts. As HR and other PMC meritocratic “solutions” to social problems suppress automonous working-class human capacities for organizing, communicating, learning from others, leadership, executive skills and other forms of human development, in favor of shaming, disciplining and constraining the working class on the basis of a tendentious and invalid interpretation of the cause of racialization, we see around the world that Antienlightenment leaders lie in wait to organize rightly-frustrated working class people around another set of distractionary beliefs that essentializes as natural culture the Anglo-American Cold War accomplishment of building rivalristic fundamentalist religious patriarchies around the world. These are the sources of racialized cultures and the only way to integrate populations disrupted and displaced by imperial capitalism is to a) historicize modern fundamentalist religious patriarchies as the manufactured, modern imperial product they are, and b) foster a democratic Enlightenment alternative.

Historical, structurally-grounded research into racialization shows that managerialism, as a form of policing, induces and does not reduce racialization as its elitist framework continues to divert attention from generative mechanisms of racialization and to prescribe and enforce working-class shaming, disorganization, dispossession, and decapacitation.

Historical, structurally-grounded research thus argues that to effectively reduce racialization, including its psychological harms, reliance and expenditure upon managerialism and other forms of policing must be reduced in favor of expanding social citizenship, welfare state supports including education funding, information access, and reducing tax avoidance institutions amongst the wealthy and corporations in order to fund a universal endowment for youth, as a necessary basis for wealth circulation (Piketty 2020; Pistor 2019). This problem-solving approach is based in the recognition that via militarized imperialism, severe wealth inequality generates and reliably regenerates cultural, symbolic, and psychological inequity (Du Bois 1924, 1935, 1945; Coulthard 2014; Malik 2023). This democratic socialist approach is a necessary part of reducing trauma, including racial trauma.

Trauma, the malingering embodiment of violent development suppression, is real and disabling (Maté 2008). Our collective resources should be allocated to recognize and heal trauma, not least in order to restore the capacity to express developmental democratic socialism. Racialization is a fundamental mechanism of imposing trauma. But traumatizing racialization is the crooked collectivism that elites allow the working class as working-class human development is traumatically suppressed.

And further, as experts in trauma know, race is not the only mechanism of imposing rampant trauma. This is why the inegalitarian, meritocratic, PMC (Professional Middle Class) and HR (Human Resources) approach to justice efficiently recreates its bedfellow in misanthropy, Right-wing authoritarianism. Because the origins of race are not in the degraded souls of the White working class (as the Antienlightenment distinctively hypothesizes), but rather racialized people, working-class people, colonized people, imperially-displaced people, and feminized people all are systematically exposed to trauma as they are dehumanized, denied cooperation and quality credit, it is impossible to reduce racial trauma by simply hanging responsibility for trauma on workers, including teachers, as they also carry trauma and crippling trauma is reinflicted by the torturous practice of denial and silencing. Most books on trauma, including intergenerational trauma, begin voicing the story of the author’s own trauma. For example, Oprah Winfrey’s book on racialized, intergenerational trauma starts with the story of how her own loving grandmother tormented her–passed on trauma.

This story-telling is not just about relateability. It’s about voice. What well-meaning university grant-seekers are proposing when they propose to impose upon teachers responsibility for racial trauma is to replace the voice of another predominantly traumatized group–workers carrying the intergenerational trauma of imperial displacement (inter alia)–with the voice of the true source of trauma, the interested perspective of elitist positionality. In The Body in Pain (1985) Elaine Scarry demonstrated that this is a definition of torture, which is to say it is re-traumatizing.

Contra today’s elitist consensus, schools and the feminized workers within them cannot efficiently replace all the social citizenship framework. Teachers cannot heal children when teachers are continually traumatized and the competency standard is to perpetuate trauma by kicking down, as inequality researchers Wilkinson and Pickett call the inegalitarian reflex. An approach that was actually designed to reduce race trauma would not only prioritize front and center rebuilding democratic social citizenship ideology and policies, it would recognize that trauma includes racialization as an important form of dehumanizing inequality, and extends beyond racialization as well. It could engage teachers in recognizing trauma and learning how to work with young people and others toward healing it.

But what it would not do is to re-traumatize teachers by denying their own trauma, thus continuing to cripple them, assigning them sole responsibility for racial trauma, and foisting upon teachers alone another, additional job, a healer’s responsibility that also counterproductively reproduces its Antienlightenment negation. Until ambitious, feminized university professors can design real healing supports, granting agencies and grant evaluators should not approve their HR-driven research proposals, as these ill-conceived interventions will perpetuate both racial trauma and the suite of traumas imposed systematically by inegalitarianism. As Frantz Fanon analyzed the barriers to decolonization in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), colonized intellectuals are part of the barricade maintaining inequality-based inequity. All top-down grant incentivization aside, the capacity of colonized intellectuals to perpetuate trauma is a primary problem that must be recognized and addressed.

In Memoriam: Leonard Cure & Fred Hampton

The Republocrats’ militias/militarized police machine murdered another man. This was after imprisoning him unjustly for 16 years. Rest in Peace, Leonard Cure.

In this moment, let us also remember one of the greatest Americans, Fred Hampton, a rising star of the democratic Enlightenment, an internationalist-socialist intellectual who organized the working class solidaristically, and who was murdered in his rise by the FBI and the Chicago Police because he was such an effective democrat. The police are funded to kill democrats and democracy. The point of bottomless policing budgets is to displace democratic development.

In 2019/2020 (Goldhammer translation), Thomas Piketty published a wonderful book Capital and Ideology, in which he called for the restoration of democratic deliberation and egalitarian ideology. In Capital and Ideology, Piketty argued that Twentieth century “social democratic” political parties had failed to protect democratic deliberation and egalitarianism by failing to envision and enact policies and institutions for inter-generational and international wealth transmission, including by failing to institute fiscal transparency and other data transparency. This brilliant book is a must-read, reviewing the contextualized comparative global history of inequality and inegalitarianism in order to distill informed proposals for inter-generational and international wealth transmission and resurrect capacity for reasoned democratic decisionmaking. This is essential in an era of cascading inequality crises.

I suggest a useful ideological correction to Piketty’s important project: While he sometimes allows that these “social democratic” parties were rushed, once again I argue that to restore egalitarian innovation, we must apprehend inequality and inegalitarianism in its true force, including by recognizing policing.

Policing is dedicated to decapacitating and disorganizing the working class. Policing includes of course expensive, armed, professionalized militias, carceral institutions, law, and Human Resources dedicated to killing, torturing, isolating and immobilizing the working class. Policing in America today includes moving their dissolute dependents–the country’s drug-addled homeless, their informants–to disrupt cities with democratic aspirations. Policing also includes a vast network of inegalitarians that police can surreptitiously call upon to litigate against, isolate, exclude, and silence democratic intellectuals, organizers, and organizations throughout civil society. (Do some leftists learn to police themselves into disarray and dismemberment? Yes, that is precisely what liberal politics and policing encourage. Without recognizing policing, socialists cannot develop necessary strategies to elude and eventually moderate policing, so that they can accomplish the abandoned emancipation agenda.) Policing includes political parties and employers promoting the puerile, self-righteous, left- and right-branded identarian politics (lamely “amplified” in corporate universities in lieu of scholarship) that divide and hobble the working class, displacing egalitarianism and working-class internationalism, and preventing the working class from restoring its historical capacity to convene to deliberate and address the global problem festering under our age’s devastating crises: property conflict. This is to say that liberal and conservative political parties are deeply engaged in policing as well.

Most of these parties and governments that Piketty calls “social democratic” were no such thing. All nominalism aside, most of them were liberal parties that surfed on, displaced and eviscerated the working class capacitation that socialists (including communists) had effectively organized. Together, elitist liberal and conservative parties duly dumped the world back into the crisis-breeding cesspool of inegalitarianism.

All the way back to Streunsee in Denmark and up to the 1930s American socialists who organized and capacitated the working class, giving birth to the Civil Rights Era that meritocrats today claim to own, elites deploy policing to kill and silence democrats. Then elitists institute some of the reforms that socialists innovated and with their class enemies murdered, imprisoned, exiled, maimed and silenced, elites claim credit for democratic and economic advancement.

Yet we see in the Gilded Ages such as today that, having crushed working-class capacity, inequality and inegalitarianism reproduce human stunting and intractable economic and environmental irrationality and crises. Elitism, including its meritocracy variant, is the ideology of regression, stagnation, and mounting crises. Its concept of justice is corrupt and based on self-serving, self-flattering lies.

We see over and over again in history that liberal and conservative elitists employ police to kill working-class organizers: socialists; and liberals employ comms to erase the history of socialist organizing: its innovations, including antiracism and internationalism in democratic capacitation. As with every elite, liberals insist on the ideology that all democratic advancements are gifts of their own possessive virtue. To do this, they must suppress, kill, and erase the actual democratic theorists and organizers. As Piketty has shown, what is distinctive about today’s American Gilded Age is that inequality and inegalitarianism are not only the products of capitalists but are further reinforced by their executives. Inegalitarian and unequal education systems serve to reinforce today’s property inequality by infusing elitism with meritocracy ideology. Meritocracy ideology rests on denial, and lies.

Meritocracy ideology pads today’s ahistorical ideological campaigns to erase the socialist, internationalist working-class capacitation innovating and incentivizing democracy and economic development. If we are to begin to restore egalitarian ideology, and the institutions of democratic transparency, deliberation, and inter-generational and international wealth distribution, we must recover the memory of socialists methodically murdered and silenced by liberals, their police, and their conservative allies; we need to recognize how policing–broadly understood–is built to disorganize and incapacitate the working class; and we need protect the working-class capacitators, socialists.

This means that American socialists cannot be abandoned inside the haunted abattoir. That’s not how solidaristic internationalism starts.

Note: Kenan Malik clarifies that there are multiple contesting Enlightenments, from egalitarian to proprietarian, and that proprietarians use racism and identity politics to manage the Enlightenment. I agree, and think that it would be helpful to acknowledge, like Moyn, that proprietarian liberals have engaged with and forged their own version of Enlightenment. I would also recommend that we name proprietarian Enlightenment, and since proprietarianism doesn’t need Enlightenment–as proven in Cold War liberalism–and the shifts to and away from Enlightenment have been impactful, I would say that naming proprietarian Enlightenment is important, and should be clear and descriptive. Thus I propose that we call proprietarian Enlightenment the Counterenlightenment, because it moves away from core Enlightenment concerns with global nonelite capacitation and knowledge, toward the inegalitarian Antienlightenment. You must admit that Cold Warrior Isaiah Berlin is long dead.

References

Citations Needed podcast. 2017. Episode 5: “Purging Socialists of Color from History.”

Piketty, Thomas. 2020 (2019). Capital and Ideology. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

When Liberal Party Population Governance Tactics Backfire: Identity Politics

“The identity synthesis is a trap. If we collectively fall into it, there will be more, not less, zero-sum competition between different groups. But it is possible to oppose the identity trap without becoming a reactionary.

To build a better society, we must overcome the prejudices and enmities that have for so much of human history boxed us into the roles seemingly foreordained by our gender, our sexual orientation, or the color of our skin. It is time to fight, without shame or hesitation, for a future in which what we have in common truly comes to be more important than what divides us.’ –Yascha Mounk, “How to Argue Against Identity Politics without Turning into a Reactionary,” The New York Times. September 23, 2023.

I was fairly surprised to see the New York Times publish this article, since it seems to me it’s pretty clear that identity politics are a contemporary and traditional mode of population governance. Modern liberal identity politics divide non-elites by the reified identities of race, gender, and sexual orientation, which are deployed by liberal parties in governance and in various campaign strategies including electoral.

Aligned portions of elite universities and Human Resources departments reify these categories and coordinate institutional reforms to reproduce them–particularly to oppose labour organizations. Institutionalized identity politics presumably make settler countries safer for global elites, and secure ties between them and the liberal parties.

This elite constituency-building strategy is quickly seized upon by liberal parties’ rivals in conservative parties, and on behalf of their own identity politics, conservatives like Ron Desantis and the Florida legislature use their political power to expropriate liberal institutions, such as the New College. This is a true pity and also telling, because New College was not a liberal identity politics institution but rather an effective engine for working-class human development and social mobility in Florida. (Recognizing Florida Republicans can’t as easily target it, Evergreen State College in Washington, with its Whites-exclusion day and Saudi DEI administrator, is more the archetypal liberal identity politics bastion.) The routing of New College and its brute overhaul into a publicly-funded Christian football school demonstrates once again that Republican patronage replaces working class capacitation and autonomy, not elitist Democrat Party institutions.

So it’s interesting that a liberal party-affiliated newspaper like the New York Times would publicize Mounk’s thesis, that however soft-pedaled, institutionalized identity politics are too crude and brutish a tool, forcibly and unnecessarily ejecting too many citizens into the right-wing political network. After all, if identity politics are required for access to the security of the liberal network, banished citizens will have to look to some network for social affirmation and economic protection in a Gilded Age like this.

Liberal community expulsions are overdetermined because liberal identity politics are built primarily for rival political party branding keyed to elite prejudices, and have serious validity problems. My democratic colleague, an economist at an Albertan university, recounts his struggles as a union leader with the pitiful political and institutional misreading fostered by the liberal identity dogma his White colleagues feel compelled to subscribe to and parrot. These White academics talk, he says, as if they were lords and ladies, thoughtfully, magnanimously patronizing immigrant colleagues misrepresented as the vulnerable global poor, “when in fact, immigrants at the university are mostly global elites just like me.” Global elites receive the liberal identity discourse quietly with bemusement, and take advantage of the political naivete fostered by the liberal identity dogma, but most immigrants at the university do not consider modest-income, modest-wealth, older-settler White-identified academics to be their social, moral, intellectual or economic equals–let alone overlords, but rather part of the global servant class. This tracks with my findings from the discussions I have with my diverse students about their felt consumer entitlements at university.

It seems likely that as identity politics are keyed–following US finance–to global elite interests, they further an excessive callousness toward nonelite American citizenship and most of the people who carry that citizenship. Like all conservative politics, they propose that justice will be served when an elite elects to patronize a marginalized group threatened by an inhuman mob. (We have the Romantics to thank for sustaining that vision through the democratizing moments.)

While backed by prestigious elites and cemented in institutions by professionalized identity managers, and though they seem neatly symmetrical to conservative party identity politics, liberal identity politics have begun to undermine liberal party strength, Mounk holds. In too-enthusiastically and stridently securing non-elite division, these incomplete but sacred identity brands hazard excessive electoral and intellectual exclusions from the liberal community. For example, having first abandoned rural citizens to the Republicans and now abruptly abandoning rust belt citizens, the Democrat Party’s metropole-surburban-only strategy is vulnerable on many tactical fronts, including via the atavistic geographic distribution of US political power, but as well the new exodus of middle-class human capital from expensive global American cities and the Republican strategy to deport homeless, traumatized, addicted, and impoverished populations to the Democrat cities.

Liberal parties could probably better serve global elites with a bit of independence–using democratic principles to moderate elites’ divisive political patronage strategies and so maintain a wider political coalition. Liberal parties could probably also use a reality check: Global elites are not deeply invested in the viability of liberal parties. The relationship requires more subtle management on the part of liberal parties than the jejeune carte-blanche sponsorship of identity politics. Perhaps low liberal party capacity is an outcome of extreme economic inequality, as patronage and comms come to exclusively select liberal party leadership.

Mounk suggests a return to the liberal solidarity of the Civil Rights Era and–if I may reframe this a bit–its forgotten virtue, organizing to expand democracy upon democratic footholds, ideological and institutional (as opposed to identity reification and balkanization. Mounk’s ideal democratic foothold is the US Constitution). I broadly agree with Mounk but, following the abandoned advice of the Civil Rights democrats cut down by policing, I would rather suggest the return of 1930s-style working-class solidarity and its democratic Enlightenment ideological and organizing foundation, because inequality has gone to seed, Anglo-American law is not a democratic foothold, and the democratic footholds have crumbled. Between Mounk’s liberal political intervention and the strong socialist argument forwarded in, for example, Kenan Malik‘s Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics (2023), there may be a rare current opportunity for liberal-socialist coalition to fight out of the dismal antidemocratic corner in which political party identity politics have trapped citizens, the working class, youthful imaginations, bureaucrats, scholars, unions, non-elite universities–and liberal party strategy.

Either way, the confluence of structural opposition is serious, national and international: principally, the financial inequality and undemocratic ruling institutions that both liberal and conservative parties serve, and as well a noxious dose of elitism overlaying Anti-Americanism.

The Impact of the Postwar Counterenlightenment on Sociology

There were many permutations of the Enlightenment, as it captured imaginations–fatefully including elite imaginations–worldwide. But what coheres the Enlightenment as a paradigm is its commitment to an ethos of curiosity and exploration, going out to learn the world–as it is in its diversity and as it can develop–deploying our full human capacities, rather than relying strictly on the knowledge of Great Men–the religion-sanctified descendents of warlords and bankers at the top of the socio-economic and political hierarchy, as well as their court philosophers. Distinctively, Enlightenment knowledge proceeds through science, which is not science’s positivist-mechanist reduction, but rather the methodical, rigorous application of human capacities–including our senses, our cognitive capacities, our communicative abilities, and our sociability and organizational agency–adjusting for our limitations, including our universal non-omniscience and individual positionality and finitude.

Late 19th century, early 20th century Sociology was predominantly an Enlightenment science. The impact of the Postwar Counterenlightenment on Sociology was to introduce an elite agenda. How does this make a difference in Sociology?

Take for example a recent Honours thesis we supervised. The student was researching efforts to ameliorate interactional decapacitation (Woke Call-out culture replacing Abolitionist organizing capacity) within a local hinterlands urban Abolitionist social movement group. As an Enlightenment Sociologist, I labored to get the student to recognize that decapacitation is institutionally reproduced via social movement policing, which has come to diffuse a social movement disposition to self-policing.

But my Counterenlightenment colleagues steered the student toward an opposing emphasis, laying causal responsibility on the individual social movement participants for reproducing the decapacitation culture. This was presented, per usual in Counterenlightenment Sociology, as a “gotcha” argument: Everybody thinks the problem is the long institutionalization of policing, but the real problem is the corrupted hearts and minds of the social movement participants! This is the problem that is within our power to address, the Counterenlightenment urges us to relent. Policing as an institution is intractable–even for a social movement aiming to reduce policing.

Is it though?

Enlightenment ontology and epistemology is geared to analyzing how institutions can vary and be changed to cause (reproduce) different outcomes reinforcing or alleviating inequality and inegalitarianism. When the Counterenlightenment colonizes an Enlightenment science, it redirects scholars to an Antienlightenment (inequality) justice horizon or at least to shoring up absolute private property right as the mechanism for reproducing inequality. So the student is redirected to proposing that individual social movement participants’ corrupted hearts are the cause of their own decapacitation, and the reproductive institution, policing, is decentered and deferred as an agent of…social movement policing. The solution to a better world returns to individual psychological adjustments, responsibilization, extreme inequality and sacred elites to sagaciously judge men’s souls.

…

Today’s police can be lazy-ass slobs: Simply introduce a couple of narcissistic, personality-disordered youth to a social movement group; then sit back with a scotch-and-soda, and watch the little narcissists hunt the social movement organizers on an Antienlightenment morality basis: Goddammit, why isn’t the focus of everyone in this Abolitionist group MY momentary sexuality exploration, inspired by a Tik Tok I watched at 2:30 AM! The flow of emissions from my brain is completely marginal (tangential) to the point of this group; therefore justice demands everyone center it!

You don’t have to pay kids to vent their narcissism, and you don’t have to pay population managers to weaponize youth mental illness and immaturity in adults’ career and political rivalries. If the American police fraternity had not been fueled to gobble up all the tax revenue on principle, the E-Z, super-efficient policing technique of funneling borderline and narcissistic personality- disordered youth into social movement organizations would make policing dirt cheap.

…

Because they are Enlightenment/Antienlightenment-blind, liberals and the liberal-party adjacent (Jacobin) are always denouncing former Hawaii rep Tulsi Gabbard, tossing her in the rubbish heap with Trump, DeSantis, and Tucker Carlson. But contrary to the Antienlightenment kuntz, Gabbard usually made loads of sense, to wit: “Today’s Democratic Party is under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers who are driven by cowardly wokeness.” No lie there. Gabbard is identifying the Dem Party’s indisputable, long-time, unbounded support for global imperialism and domestic policing. Dismissing such critique as enemy discourse is a part of how liberals help build fascism.

Further Reading:

Jewett, Andrew. 2012. Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War. Cambridge University.

Kloppenberg, James T. 1986. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920. Oxford University Press.

Jewett uses a liberal-conservative interpretive framework to make sense of the post-Civil War rise of Enlightenment science advocacy, as well as the imperial, Anglo-Austrian, positivist-mechanist and Romantic-idealist pincher-manoeuver attack on Enlightenment science after WWII. Nonetheless, the historical data is really useful, as are many observations. I recommend this book. You can read around the Weberianism.

On Jewett’s Weberian framework: Viewed through the funhouse mirror of liberalism as well as a time- and space-delimited North Atlantic Procrustean bed, Enlightenment reduces to Protestantism + derivatives. See also Margaret Jacob’s Freemason-centric, English Channel-centric historiography of the Enlightenment. (The pushback on Jacob has been very distorted, however, as where Counterenlightenment and Antienlightenment exponents associated with the European Union project have in recent years attempted to extend from the anchor of Herder a perverse re-writing of the Enlightenment as German Antienlightenment.)

Jewett credits STS for signalling that “science” is a linguistic category, which Jewett more usefully takes to mean that it has long been contested–an insight actually in contrast to STS fetishism, which tends to myopically presume and record only an ahistorical, positivist-mechanist scientific consensus, whose Neoliberal de-naturing ipso facto constitutes an act of universal political justice, per deconstructionist Antienlightenment marketing. Jewett shows that this Neoliberal intellectual strategy depends on tactical methodology: “To be sure, historians of science, like their counterparts elsewhere, have generally assumed that the story of objectivity claims and their impact is the story of science and politics in the twentieth century. Revealingly, the leading long-range histories of objectivity and quantification ignore American developments before World War II, whereas Cold War America often appears as the culmination of the political transformations associated with modern science” (Jewett 2014: 5).

Jewett:

“(A)n ethical and ultimately political reading of science strongly conditioned the rise of the scientific disciplines and the modern research universities” (Jewett 2014: 3).

“The value-neutrality narrative does not include the whole range of claims about science’s political meaning…the ideal of engagement with public discourse and normative questions remained central in the human sciences until the 1940s” (Jewett 2014: 4).

They didth protest too much: There was much smoke-and-mirrors, but no quarter for real scholarly value neutrality (that is, clarifying one’s assumptions and justice telos) in the Cold War. Much as there was a bad-faith Cold War effort to mischaracterize Marx’s positions, painting Marx into his own opposition, in the late 1970s-early 1980s neoliberal turn, there was a bad-faith academic effort to mischaracterize John Dewey’s positions (Jewett 2014: 6).

Imperial science is not Enlightenment science: “(T)he current equation of the term science with a strictly value-neutral conception of knowledge, along with the narrowing of its boundaries to include only the natural sciences and related technological pursuits, stem from mid-twentieth-century intellectual transformations. But that is not the science earlier thinkers had in mind” (Jewett 2014: 9). Nor does it constitute the majority of the contemporary science presented in the brilliant Big Biology podcast.

Elites & Collaborators: The Chamber of Commerce and their Legal Tools in Sweden

Studying the perpetuation of fear as a form of governance in his 2004 book Fear: History of a Political Idea, Corey Robin offers a useful typology of unequal agency: elites, collaborators, bystanders, and victims. His conceptualization allows us to recognize that all four types of agents have power and choice, even if unequal. His examples are how the German Nazi government (elites and collaborators) used Jewish neighborhood leaders (victim collaborators) to mobilize Jews for the work prison and gaschamber (per Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem) and how governance through fear was conducted with collaborators in American civil society during the Cold War (and beyond).

Two important contemporary collaborators in the capitalist elite’s attack on remnant social democracy are the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce (SCC), which provides the SCC Arbitration Institute, one of the world’s top vehicles for private legal challenges to democratic law around the world (See this article by B. Choudhury and this article by A. Mohlin examining how the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce Arbitration Institute guts human rights. Lawyers are collaborators, see inter alia the analysis by legal scholar Katharina Pistor, 2019, The Code of Capital, on the neoliberal-era innovation of private capitalist legal tribunals.); and conservative law academics such as Lund University’s Mossad Mohammed Ali Mossad, whose Masters Thesis in the Faculty of Law reviews international law in order to suggest ways that entrepreneurs can cynically game stats on the labor market outcomes of refugees to challenge Swedish labor rights and universal (not uniform) human development goals.

Mossad presents one instance of the international Plutocracy Law strategy, which has plagued Sweden throughout at least this century. As in Mossad’s conservative-idealistic account of immigration outcomes, think tank entrepreneurs in Canada are currently trying to dispute the empirical finding that migration can entail significant cultural capital loss. Even if we buffaloed, contra social science evidence (and contra to the experience of every Canadian or Australian Arts professor who has to perform immigration services in lieu of teaching their expertise), that cultural capital was universal and not proper to institutionalized social relations, Sociologists also find that migration entails significant social capital–network–loss, which is highly determinative in the labor markets of social humans. This is as true in liberal-conservative regimes as in social democratic. Law is infamous for wielding invalid elite-perspective assumptions and claims at odds with valid social science. The Canadian think tank assertion that humans are monads employed per readily-measured human capital (merit) may be empirically incredible, but it has a hallowed place in securing elite interests, and thus it is replicated not only shamelessly but sanctimoniously. Surely, they insinuate, this approach provides the only true path to justice.

In this Antienlightenment justice project, compassion for immigrants is reduced and conflated with accepting the invalid premise that immigration imposes no substantial losses upon immigrants. This reductive conflation primarily serves economic and political elites, who have the most to gain through global imperialism and labor mobilization. It denies immigrants social citizenship supports and other rights beyond property right and the right to work; and it absolves elite policy makers of the responsibility for recognizing and reasonably ameliorating institutional selection by cultural and social capital, misrecognizing and ad-hoc prosecuting cases of these as mere individual discrimination. This permits elites to prioritize the maintenance of low trust, discipline, and bureaucratic procedural rationality in labor force governance.

It is the imperialism of liberal-conservative regimes that primarily causes migration. Since migration entails the debilitating social and economic loss of social and cultural capital, migration is aversive to non-elites who are poor in fungible capital. Spurring migration–the expensive job of the imperial military and the state representatives of capital–relies on imperialism making life uninhabitable in people’s home countries. Divided populations and mystified, debilitated migrants are useful to elites.

Conservative liberals flog an anti-sociological, jaundiced liberal myth, illegitimately universalizing a painful level of elite PoV, when they posture that all migration is cosmopolitan optimization (toggled manipulatively with the morality of refugee migration). Rather, most of migration is coerced. Incipient increases in climate crisis-based migration are not triumphs of individual optimization. Nor are they merely moral imperatives. They are failures of global inequality and elite governance, failures which we collaboratively reproduce in accepting anti-scientific elite assumptions and claims.

Empirically, refugees also have inferior labor market outcomes in conservative and liberal regimes without robust labor rights. In 2002, prior to the Somali clashes with police in Minneapolis, liberal Swedish academics were attempting to claim that Somali refugees to Minnesota have better labor market chances than Somali refugees to Sweden, and thus, these conservative liberals argued, American Somalis are better integrated across the board. This false claim relies on neoliberal idealism and prevarication, and at best must be limited to less-unequal regions like Minnesota, with its more robust economy as contrasted to high inequality regions throughout the US. Even in Minnesota, a conservative legal community and national police ensured that Somalis have faced discrimination, harassment, and repression–all the more because some, like Ilhan Omar, are democratic socialists. That Mossad is reproducing at Lund the myth of comparatively smooth American Somali integration suggests that the conservative comms machine and Plutocrat Law rage unchecked in Sweden.

Empirical validity normally has a tenuous relationship with courts, an elite-idealistic holdover institution from feudalism. In the economistic philosophy of conservative-liberals, as are privileged by conservative-idealist courts, labor market inequality is caused by labor rights rather than, per the comparative empirical record, institutionalized capitalist relations and capitalist political, policing, and militarized mobilizations. This is one of the many examples of how legal authorities eschew valid empirical social scientific evidence in favor of elite idealism, all the more sanctimonious for its lack of substantiation.

The Reproduction of Inequality: Mechanism + Altruism

There are two important moments in the reduction of Enlightenment science to positivist-mechanism:

1. The founding of the Royal Society in Britain. (See Margaret Jacobs)
2. The rivalrous alliance between the US military and the US Anglo ruling class that emerged from WWII. See Michael J. Hogan (A Cross of Iron) and Mark Solovey (Shaky Foundations, MIT Press; Social Science for What, podcast part 2).

Characteristics of imperial Anglo-American positivist-mechanism include:

1. Jettisoning of autonomous scientific community; military and business assume direction over scientific agenda. This dependency relationship is transformed into a patriarchal moral virtue.
2. Rigorous focus on simplified mechanisms in isolation qua science tout court.
3. Austro-Hungarian Empire inegalitarian governance expertise is relocated to AngloAmerican empire. In the US, this Antienlightenment infusion gives new wings to slavers.
4. TBD

These reductions violate scientific epistemology in the following ways (TBD):

1. Per Varoufakis 2011, there is no path forward from paradigm limits. Discipline is toggled between hard and soft premises, depending on whether evidence of limits is prominent.
2. Compare Econ with Biology, which did transcend anti-epigenetics paradigm through pursuing that paradigm to its limits. Is the difference the degree of top-down disciplinary control? As well, there is still moral policing around a positivist-mechanist version of epigenetics, confining epigenetic knowledge to Mother-blame.
3. Revisit Kuhn in light of Varoufakis 2011. Was he studying a specific form of scientific revolution, based in discipline & context?
4. No knowledge goal internal to discipline (tasks and paradigm set by military and business) means Enlightenment science’s rigorous comparativism (with context, presuming scientific knowledge development across positionalities) is dropped in favor of closed equations as knowledge (See Varoufakis 2011).
5. TBD

TBD: Interwar to Cold War history of American engineering: social composition, politics, academic politics.

Per Solovey, engineers including Vannevar Bush and Hungarian fascist/H-bomber Edward Teller worked postwar to exclude the social sciences from state funding (both the NSF and the military). The concern was that traditionally, the social sciences had formed to pursue egaliberte knowledge; under the military-finance alliance, the US was positioning to attack and reverse democratic socialism. Sneaking into NSF funding with Alpert’s quiet assistance, the social sciences worked around the engineers’ exclusionary organization, by excluding traditional Enlightenment research into comparative equality and inequality.

1. Economics organized like engineering as a top-down fraternal hierarchy (cite). Their collective goal, per Clara Elisabetta Mattei, 2015, was to produce an inegalitarian positivist-mechanism, proving their worth to the US’s 20th century capitalist-imperial consolidation.
2. Elite universities established an elite Sociology, modeled after Austrian empire philosopher Simmel’s intellectual agenda, and aiding the state in urban population surveillance.
3. Area Studies, Security Studies, Anthropology: foreign population surveillance.
4. Psychology: assisted military with foreign population control and domestic population control, military employee optimization.
5. History: Novick 1988
6. Creative Writing:
7. Biology: Erik Peterson 2017, The Life Organic; Lucy Cooke 2022, Bitch.

Excluding Enlightenment science produced Counterenlightenment social sciences: Where the aim was not to help engineer inequality, the complementary goal was to manage the distribution of affliction across the working class–to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable” (as Ed Yong recently described his post-lockdown communication goal at The Atlantic). As women have entered the social sciences (and been excluded from Engineering and Economics), affliction management has been seen as patriarchal feminine moral virtue (See Elsie Parsons Clews’ and Virginia Woolf’s sociological critiques of this division of patriarchal labor).

Together, patriarchal engineering and feminine population management institutionalized inequality and reproduced inegalitarian dispositions. A key tool and virtue in inegalitarian engineering is isolating and immobilizing the population.

Case study one: Militarism (Hogan, Schrader); Carceralism (Gilmore, Davis, et al), including drugging of the incarcerated (Anthony Hatch, UMinnesota 2023).

Commonwealth Counterenlightenment

The Residential Schools were sold with the Commonwealth Counterenlightenment melange of authoritarianism and patronizing moral righteousness. It’s as Canadian as Canola.

Here’s the contemporary version of emotional politics, or Counterenlightenment Romanticism: A Sociologist becomes a born-again EDI manager 2 years ago, is recruited into management, pays an Elder to run a long blessing ceremony at the start of an employer-union negotiation meeting, harangues the union negotiators about Morality (Counterenlightenment), and then announces that the employer is not negotiating today.

Like other inegalitarian cultures, Canadian “civility” is a particular style of saying “fuck you.”

Linda Gordon on the Evils of Inegalitarian Altruism (Chivalry)

In this essay/speech, Linda Gordon reviews historical evidence from the US, revealing how, in an inegalitarian society, even altruism comes out all wrong (not unlike egoism). She commences by condemning the modern reification of childhood innocence.

In addition to the shock doctrine and Policy Drift (Hacker & Piereson), pimping out victimhood (here feminism) is a third pillar neoliberal strategy in coordinating the advancement of conservative policy.

People’s desire to “do something” altruistic with their feeling of victimhood (which they are groomed to misread) meets their timid desire to do something reassuringly “close-to-home”–producing righteous, cowardly energy, easy fodder for neoliberal elites cultivating hoi poloi-screwing neoliberal crises.

Cancer & environment: Government acknowledges

Cancer is produced by commercial toxins introduced into the environment, according to a 2010 government cancer panel.

The very interesting tidbit in this short article is the public role the American Cancer Society takes on: In response to the government panel’s recommendation, the American Cancer Society’s director steps up to the microphone to maintain that cancer is only caused by individual sinful lifestyle choices, the sun, and hormones; he insists the government should stay out of supporting research into pollution’s effects on human health. Now we know the American Cancer Society is a psuedo-altruistic, distractionary front for polluter industries. Don’t support it. Don’t credit it.