CANCEL CULTURE, IDENTITY POLITICS
AND THE MERITOCRACY
Part 1 of 4: The growing social crisis
The economic and social system that provides the foundation of our social life together—capitalism—entered into a deepening crisis in the latter years of the 20th century. If it were not for the existence of this economic crisis, and its ongoing intensification, no one would be talking about identity politics or cancel culture – those phenomena would not even exist. But this economic crisis has precipitated the emergence of a deepening political, social, and cultural crisis that has spread out and penetrated all spheres of social activity within the capitalist world.
Working people have been facing deteriorating working conditions, lower income, worsening health, reduced opportunities, and greater pressure from their employers to produce more output in less time. This has been the experience of billions of people in the U.S. and around the world. The global economic downturn of 1974–75 signaled the beginning of a downward trajectory in capitalist profitability and stability, indicating to the corporate chieftains the need to “step up their game” by intensifying all the methods of squeezing their workers so as to restore profitability and prosperity. This meant not only speedup and reductions in wages and benefits, but also greater efforts to weaken the workers’ means of resistance.
Workers began to respond, as they recognized their declining conditions of life and labor, and moods of resistance to exploitation spread more widely and deeply in the late 1970s and 1980s. Coal miners and steelworkers showed renewed combativity, and workers in other sectors of the economy–meatpacking, airlines, textiles, garment, forest products, aerospace, and others—went into high gear in the subsequent years, producing a wave of resistance and the growth of the spirit of worker solidarity throughout the U.S. labor force and internationally.
The beginning of a declining phase of capitalism in the 1970s has been recognized not only by Marxists but by mainstream intellectuals as well. Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, in his book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, observes:
“This book adopts the ‘special century’ approach to economic growth, holding that economic growth witnessed a singular interval of rapid growth that will not be repeated—the designation of the century between 1870 and 1970 as the special epoch applies only to the United States, the nation which has carved out the technological frontier for all developed nations since the Civil War.
“… Designating 1870–1970 the “special century” implies that the years since 1970 have been less special. First, the technological advance started to show its age. With a few notable exceptions, the pace of innovation since 1970 has not been as broad or as deep as that spurred by the inventions of the special century. Second, after 1970, rising inequality meant that the fruits of innovation were no longer shared equally: though those at the top of the income distribution continued to prosper, a shrinking share of the growing economic pie made its way to the Americans in the middle and bottom of the income distribution.”
As labor unrest increased in the 1980s, the billionaire ruling class, ever more conscious of its existence as a tiny fraction of the total population, recognized the need to strengthen its defenses against a possible anti-capitalist movement. The rulers have long been aware that they could not win elections on the basis of their charm and style. Long ago they understood the need to manage the electoral arena so that no group of rivals could snatch the power from them. At least since the Great Compromise of 1877, they have coordinated their efforts on a national scale to make sure that Democratic and Republican parties would firmly control all elections throughout the land, provided that democratic elections continued to be the norm. But if alternative parties were to arise, plans would be in place to severely limit the chances that such parties would be able to gain sufficient strength to interfere with the Democratic/Republican political monopoly. So far, we have seen that alternative parties: Populists, Socialists, Progressives, Bull Moose, Peace and Freedom, Greens, and other campaigns for state, local, and federal offices have not made inroads into the major party duopoly.
In order to protect their power in spite of their demographic minority status, the rulers needed to control much more than the electoral processes at the federal, state, and local levels. They needed to have all the military and police forces necessary to protect themselves from any rivals, domestic or foreign. They also needed to control what was taught in the schools at all levels; they needed to decisively influence the courts and legal institutions, as well as the popular mass media, and (later) the social media. Money was their advantage, and they used that resource to pay lobbyists, bribe politicians, and fund all the ideological, educational, and political institutions that facilitated the retention of their ownership of the sources of wealth, and, contingent on that, their political supremacy.
Bolshevik V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the Russian Revolution, understood how a minority class might protect its prerogatives. In his booklet State and Revolution, Lenin explained:
“The centralized state power that is peculiar to bourgeois society came into being in the period of the fall of absolutism. Two institutions most characteristic of this state machine are the bureaucracy and the standing army. In their works, Marx and Engels repeatedly show that the bourgeoisie is connected with these institutions by thousands of threads. Every worker's experience illustrates this connection in an extremely graphic and impressive manner. From its own bitter experience, the working class learns to recognize this connection. That is why it so easily grasps and so firmly learns the doctrine which shows the inevitability of this connection, a doctrine that the petty-bourgeois democrats either ignorantly and flippantly deny, or still more flippantly admit “in general" while forgetting to draw appropriate practical conclusions.”
The popular expression about the golden rule, “the one who has the gold makes the rules,” is familiar to millions and seems to make sense. It reflects the everyday experience of the masses of the population in capitalist society. But it is above all the bourgeoisie itself that truly understands this rule in all its depth and detail. The ruling rich are the ones who developed and refined these rules. And they have all the resources necessary to enforce the rules, at least up to the present time.
But at the same time, the power of a ruling class must be exercised subtly, with a minimum of outright violence, so as not to upset the social stability necessary for maximizing the production of the good things of life. The “law” is not limited to rules that are written and enforced, but is a product of the relationship class forces, as each class strives to assert its needs. Marxist historian Eugene Genovese writes in Roll Jordan Roll, speaking of the antebellum slave owners in the U.S.:
“Since the slaveholders, like other ruling classes, arose and grew in dialectical response to the other classes of society—since molded by white yeomen and black slaves as much as they molded them—the law cannot be viewed as something passive and reflective, but must be viewed as an active, partially autonomous force, which mediated among the several classes and compelled the rulers to bend to the demands of the ruled.”
But as the class struggle evolved in the 20th century in the U.S., and into the 21st, the working class showed itself to be ever more discontented and came to be seen as actively attacking the privileges and prerogatives of the moneyed elite, so the latter took steps to build up their defenses. They funded and strengthened the activities of all those college-educated middle-class professionals who worked in agencies and programs that developed the ideological and intellectual defenses of the capitalist order. These professionals came to be known as the “meritocracy.”
“Meritocracy” is traditionally defined as an especially enlightened and talented sector of society that has the ability to govern due to its heightened capacity to analyze, interpret and judge. In reality, the “meritocracy” that has come to dominate bourgeois ideology, politics, and morality has grown substantially since the 1980s. Jack Barnes, in Malcolm X, Black Liberation and the Road to Workers Power, Pathfinder, 2009, p. 50, explains the composition of this privileged layer:
“… This expanding layer of the comfortable middle classes I’m talking about is composed of the handsomely remunerated staffs of so-called nonprofit foundations, charities, ‘community organizations,’ and ‘nongovernmental organizations’ (NGOs) in the United States; of well-placed professors and top university administrative personnel; of attorneys, lobbyists, media and sports ‘personalities,’ and others. The lives and livelihoods of these growing foundation- and university-centered strata in capitalist society—who, along with bankers and businessmen, cycle back and forth into and out of government positions—are themselves largely unconnected to the production, reproduction, or circulation of social wealth. Their existence is more and more alien to the conditions of life of working people or other producers of any racial or national background.
“The lives and livelihoods of these growing foundations—and university-centered strata in capitalist society—who, along with bankers and businessmen, cycle back and forth into and out of government positions—are themselves largely unconnected to the production, reproduction, or circulation of social wealth. Their existence is more and more alien to the conditions of life of working people or other producers of any racial or national background.”
The main thesis of the present essay is that “cancel culture” is the foundation for the emergence of “woke” policies, whether gender identity, critical race theory, or “diversity, equity, and inclusiveness.” Cancel culture is the central force; the specific policies put forward are only the modes of expression of the obligatory nature of the whole movement. The reason for this is that cancel culture is ultimately aimed at stifling the potential rebellion of the broad masses of working people of all races, all ethnicities, all nationalities. Once cancel culture gained a secure foothold on college campuses, it rapidly spread to the ruling-class political parties, the broader educational system, the main outlets of bourgeois mass media, the entertainment world, and even the medical professions. Cancel culture began as a wide-ranging and multi-faceted offensive to enforce “political correctness” in the university culture. Now it has gained sufficient strength to become the major weapon in the hands of the meritocracy in their efforts to cripple the budding political struggles of the masses of working people and the oppressed.
This does not mean that cancel culture foretells the end of democratic rights in the U.S. That remains an open question. It only means that once a substantial sector of the middle-class forces organizes themselves to defend the power of the capitalist class—a process which is well underway—the battle lines are being drawn between the masses of working people, organized and unorganized, versus the bourgeois forces which have thrown down the gauntlet. First Amendment rights are essential for the workers and farmers as they try to organize their forces, economically and politically, to wage a determined defense against the attacks from the rulers, and in the process, initiate a struggle for establishing their own governmental power.
The universities, mass media, and think tanks are sources of the development of modes of communication to facilitate the goals of social control by the superrich. University administrators and deans adapted their curricula, grading policies, and academic standards to what became known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which became code words for race-baiting and pseudoscientific gender identity ideology. When the meritocrats are preparing to enter these occupations, the universities prepare them. As students, the budding meritocrats learn the techniques of trendy doubletalk, mocking and misrepresenting the existing standards of scientific credibility, flaunting their creative versatility by producing quantities of erudite fluff, which will suffice to earn them a Ph.D. and put them on track for a prestigious position within the meritocratic professions.
But in a period of crisis and cutbacks, the jobs of the bureaucrats of the institutions of bourgeois propaganda become insecure. As the fears of downsizing, redundancy, of losing status and privilege, play a growing role in their daily lives, it feeds into family life and their relationships with their children. The task of protecting the new generation from any and all danger becomes an irrepressible compulsion. This is the context for the emergence of “safetyism,” and “cancel culture” within the meritocracy and for identity politics on campus and beyond. Barnes continues (ibid)
“The meritocracy, to the contrary, is not confident. Dependent on cadging from the capitalists a portion of the wealth created by the exploited producers, these privileged aspirants to bourgeois affluence—a lifestyle they are convinced ‘society’ owes them—nonetheless fear at some point being pushed back toward the conditions of the working classes. … At the same time, and despite their shameless self-promotion, many of them also sense that since they serve no essential economic or political functions in the production and reproduction of surplus value, they live at the forbearance of the bourgeoisie. In the end, large numbers of them are expendable, especially at times of deepening social crisis.” (ibid)
They are allowed to have a parasitic existence because they are performing services to the ruling class that are considered more vital than ever. The capitalists feel they might be losing control of the system that generates all the wealth and power they hold so dear. They feel like someone immersed in a quicksand pit, with muddy water up to the neck, and no one at hand to throw a rope. They must depend on others to save them, and the more useful helpers they have, the stronger they will feel. They are willing to pay a higher price for a large and growing stable of useful supporters. But these supporters, the meritocracy, must be genuinely helpful, otherwise, the bosses are wasting their money.
These meritocrats, as individuals embedded in a competitive social hierarchy, are aware that keeping their positions depends on approval from above, as well as avoiding being called out for misconduct by others in their workplaces. They struggle to preserve their piece of the pie, even when they only function as a compliant cog in a wheel. And they want to insure that their children get what they deserve. These children were, and are, raised by parents who pass their own hopes and fears, and their sense of entitlement, down to their offspring. The meritocrats’ faith in their superior intelligence and social worthiness persuades them that their children, as well, are special, and deserve prestigious professional careers.
Thus it is no surprise that we see the enlightened “woke” meritocracy on college campuses insist that the faculty and students conform to their ideological dictates. This is their mode of proving their worth to the billionaire class that they serve. They utilize “equity, diversity, and inclusion” policies in order to lay down the law that all others under their authority must follow. In this way, they strengthen their commanding role in the universities, as well as in the mass media and the political parties of the rulers. The more they act as infallible authorities, the more secure they feel in their occupations, and the more income they can demand. It does not matter that they remain scientifically ignorant. The criteria that determine their success in the bureaucracies they inhabit have nothing to do with science, democracy, or justice. Their success is rooted in the degree to which their subordinates adhere to the approved “woke” formulas. In this way, they strive to become immune to all challenges and criticisms.
The meritocratic arbiters of middle-class political culture owe their existence to the needs of the rulers to defend their interests during a period of growing discontent among the workers and youth. But the work of the “woke” cultural standard-bearers must be done in such a way that it creates the appearance that they are entitled to a privileged position and a high income because they know the best way to defend the needs of the most oppressed sectors of society. As Jack Barnes explains (Are they Rich Because they’re Smart? (p. 52):
“… this is a self-designated ‘enlightened meritocracy,’ determined to con the world into accepting the myth that the economic and social advancement of its members is just reward for their individual intelligence, education, and ‘service.’ Its members truly believe that their ‘brightness,’ their ‘quickness,’ their ‘contributions to public life,’ their ‘service,’ their ‘sacrifices’ (they humbly point out they could be making a lot more in business or banking) give them the right to make decisions, to administer society on behalf of the bourgeoisie—on behalf of what they claim to be the interests of “the people.”
The meritocrats follow an ideological trajectory that implicitly favors the continued social and political domination of society by the ruling capitalist class, thus securing their own elevated social status as long as their roles remain helpful in sustaining the authority of these rulers. Since the decline of the civil rights and women’s rights movements in the 1970s and 80s, the improved social and economic positions of a significant minority of Black people and women have allowed them to become estranged from the social movements that created the basis for their academic and occupational advancement. In these positions, they can help to divert or blunt initiatives rising from the working people. They can pose as political representatives of the oppressed, “marginalized,” or “underserved communities,” and put themselves forward as the guarantors of the rights that they need.
The offspring of the “cognitive elite”
It's important to take a look at the changes that have evolved in the home life and child-raising practices of meritocratic families as they feel increasingly vulnerable to the forms of competition that have arisen among them in their professional lives. Jonathon Haidt explains, in an article in the Guardian newspaper, on April 10, 2016:
“In such cultures, there are two main sources of social prestige: being a victim or standing up for victims. But victimhood cultures don’t emerge in the most racist or sexist environments – they tend to emerge in institutions that are already highly egalitarian (such as Emory and Yale) and in which there are authorities (such as deans and college presidents) that can be entreated to step in on the side of the victims. In such settings, political potency is increased by amplifying the number of victims and the degree of their victimization.”
Middle-class students in the early 21st century are often coddled in their childhood and grow up to be anxious and fearful young adults. They feel the need for the university to become their new parent. The infantilization of university students, brought on as much by administrative dictates as by student fragility and plaintive demands, becomes incorporated into the policies of the college administration. This helps to create a cocoon of safety which includes shutting out any critical discourse that might pierce the delicate surfaces of these seemingly endangered student minds.
In any case, the growing gap in living standards between the working class and the privileged middle class (exacerbated by the crisis of capitalist profitability and the downward pressure on wages) has promoted an ever-larger class gap in lifestyles and family dynamics. As Robert Putnam, emeritus Harvard professor points out in his book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis:
“Ultimately, growing class segregation across neighborhoods, schools, marriages (and probably also civic associations, workplaces, and friendship circles) means that rich Americans and poor Americans are living, learning, and raising children in increasingly separate and unequal worlds, removing the stepping-stones to upward mobility—college-going classmates or cousins or middle-class neighbors, who might take a working-class kid from the neighborhood under their wing.”
Jean Twenge, in her book, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, points to the psychological characteristics of the liberal professional elite,
“They are obsessed with safety and fearful of their economic futures, and they have no patience for inequality based on gender, race, or sexual orientation. They are at the forefront of the worst mental health crisis in decades, with rates of teen depression and suicide skyrocketing since 2011. Contrary to the prevalent idea that children are growing up faster than previous generations did, iGen’ers are growing up more slowly: 18-year-olds now act like 15-year-olds used to, and 13-year-olds like 10-year-olds. Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more emotionally vulnerable.”
But apart from the formative experiences of the new generations going through the struggles of higher education, the youth being raised in upwardly mobile families are being subjected to special pressures. They are being treated by parents and teachers as “especially gifted” children, future members of the cognitive elite. As such, they must be treated as precious resources, fragile and vulnerable, requiring treatment that far exceeds what is given to children of ordinary people. As Matthew Lesh explains in his review of The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (Quillette, Sept. 2, 2018):
“When you guard children against every possible risk – do not let them outside to play or walk home alone – they exaggerate the fear of such situations and fail to develop resilience and coping skills. Stresses are necessary to learn, adapt and grow. Without movement, our muscles and joints grow weak. Without varied life experiences, our minds do not know how to cope with day-to-day stressors. Measures designed to protect children and students are backfiring. Fragility is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think certain ideas are dangerous or are encouraged to do so by trigger warnings and safe spaces, you will be more anxious in the long run. Intellectual safety not only makes free and open debate impossible; it’s setting up a generation for more anxiety and depression.”
Further, from the unpublished manuscript “Adolescent mood disorders since 2010: A collaborative review,” Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt, first posted: Feb 18, 2019, last updated February 10, 2023:
“Rates of major depressive episodes in the last year increased 52% 2005–2017 (from 8.7% to 13.2%) among adolescents aged 12 to 17 and 63% 2009–2017 (from 8.1% to 13.2%) among young adults 18–25. Serious psychological distress in the last month and suicide-related outcomes (suicidal ideation, plans, attempts, and deaths by suicide) in the last year also increased among young adults 18–25 from 2008–2017 (with a 71% increase in serious psychological distress), with less consistent and weaker increases among adults ages 26 and over. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses separating the effects of age, period, and birth cohort suggest the trends among adults are primarily due to cohort, with a steady rise in mood disorder and suicide-related outcomes between cohorts born from the early 1980s (Millennials) to the late 1990s (iGen).”
The growing sense of anxiety, entitlement, emotional fragility, and intellectual superiority of this layer of students on college campuses enhances their anxious yearning for protection from real or imagined harms. This tends to produce uneasiness when confronted with any potentially offensive expression, or provocative line of argument, which challenges their sense of security and intensifies their knee-jerk reaction against any idea they regard as harmful. This has fed a tendency to demand that the campus administrations provide a guarantee of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and protection from abusive or offensive situations. But these students prefer that the administration collaborates with them to restructure the campus environment, and any intrusion of outside forces, such as the municipal or state police, should be avoided. The entry of outside police into the campus might trigger painful feelings. Instead more campuses are establishing their own, university-only police forces, controlled by the administration. As reported by Melinda D. Anderson in the Sept. 28, 2015, issue of the Atlantic Monthly:
“According to a recent Justice Department report on 2011-12 data, what’s been described as the most comprehensive survey of its kind, the vast majority of public colleges and universities—92 percent—have sworn and armed campus officers. Unsurprisingly, they’re much less prevalent at private colleges: Slightly over a third (38 percent) of them are equipped with their own law enforcement. Since the 2004-05 school year, the percentage of both public and private colleges nationwide using armed officers increased from 68 percent to 75 percent.”
The university thus increasingly becomes an isolated arena that wraps itself in an inviolable cocoon to protect the campus community from the turbulence of bourgeois society and becomes adapted to perform the function of molding the social attitudes of the offspring of the privileged at a time of growing social and moral crisis. At the same time, the youth of working families have ever-diminishing possibilities for attending institutions of higher learning. Robert Putnam (ibid) states:
“As the twenty-first century opened, a family’s socioeconomic status (SES) had become even more important than test scores in predicting which eighth graders would graduate from college. A generation earlier, social class had played a smaller role, relative to academic ability, in predicting educational attainment. Nowadays, high-scoring rich kids are very likely (74 percent) to graduate from college, while low-scoring poor kids almost never do (3 percent). Middling students are six times more likely to graduate from college if they come from a more affluent family (51 percent) than if they come from a less affluent family (8 percent). Even more shocking, high-scoring poor kids are now slightly less likely (29 percent) to get a college degree than low-scoring rich kids (30 percent). That last fact is particularly hard to square with the idea at the heart of the American Dream: equality of opportunity.”
The increased fragility, neediness, and anxiety among twenty-somethings, has forged the emergence of what is called a “culture of victimhood” and a "cult of safetyism," which have become particularly evident on college campuses, where the majority of students come from economically privileged families. This increasingly anxiety-ridden environment encourages people to define themselves as part of a number of groups surrounded by hostile forces. The world is perceived as rife with ill-defined and subtle threats emanating from people who, perhaps unintentionally, participate in victimizing the members of the oppressed groups by insulting them or making statements that cause them serious psychological trauma.
The growth of these phenomena has given rise to many incidents in recent years that have involved angry confrontations whether students vs. students, students vs. teachers, teachers vs. administrators, or members of the campus community against guest speakers. The university administrators argue that they have worked with the students to establish new rules of conduct that enhance the protection of students from a potentially hostile educational environment.
College administrations increasingly felt the scope of their entitlement expanding. They acted to fortify their exalted positions by creating armies of vice presidents, deans, vice deans, chancellors, program coordinators, etc. Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, in The Rise of Victimhood Culture, document this growth:
“The expansion of administrative authority is a condition conducive to the growth of moral dependency among students. Moreover, many of the new positions were created specifically to deal with the concerns of campus activists and others who share their perspectives, and those who fill these positions tend to be carriers of victimhood culture. Even amid a recession and state budget cuts, for example, the diversity-related administration of the University of California expanded. In 2010, UC San Francisco hired a vice chancellor of diversity and outreach. In 2011, UCLA hired a dean for campus climate. In 2012, UC San Diego hired a vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion. Each of these was a newly created position (Mac Donald 2013). And the tendency is for such positions to proliferate. At UC Davis, there is ‘a Diversity Trainers Institute under an administrator of diversity education, who presumably coordinates with the Cross-Cultural Center.’ [UC Davis] also has: a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; a Sexual Harassment Education Program; a diversity program coordinator; an early resolution discrimination coordinator; a Diversity Education Series that awards Understanding Diversity Certificates in ‘Unpacking Oppression’ and Cross-Cultural Competency.”
Back in the old days of capitalism, some industrialist bragged that if necessary, he could hire half of the working class to kill the other half.
Things have gotten more sophisticated lately, with the rise of the relatively privileged layers that James Miller describes here. This privileged layer has encouraged divisions among working people that discourage solidarity. Varying "degrees of oppression" have been imagined and promulgated into the culture that work against the idea that all working people are expploited and should unite against their exploitation.
Cancel culture has been invented to put working people into a state of fear that they may accidentally express an impure thought and get ostracised by their co-workers.
Social media providers have been infiltrated by censors acting on behalf of the government to stifle Constitutional rights. The government acts on behalf of the real rulers in this campaign against free speech in social media.
For instance, most content on Wikipedia admitedly gets edited by employees of the CIA to ensure that it reflects the version of reality that our rulers want us to see.
One of the most pernicious organizations pushing society in the directions that our rulers want it to go is the World Economic Forum (WEF).