As American Society Crashes and Burns, the Cult of Neoliberalism Marches on

Long after they have set fire to the values of the New Deal and the civil rights movement, neoliberals continue to regard themselves as a bulwark protecting civilization from barbarism. In reality, they have betrayed all the values that the New Dealers and the civil rights leaders courageously and nobly fought for. Indeed, a class that once espoused unions, public education, the Constitution, integration, and freedom of the press, while standing in unequivocal opposition to imperialism and McCarthyism, has been transformed into a cult which speaks in the trappings of a progressive-sounding language, yet which has come to be allied with the forces of reaction on each and every one of these issues.

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The mass media have successfully convinced a vast swath of the population that Obama and Hillary stand in brave opposition to racism and sexism, while Trump personifies Racism and The Patriarchy. This inane view of politics, coupled with the fact that the education system has raised an entire generation on nothing but woke novels and immigrant memoirs that pathologize whiteness, has resulted in a crisis where Western Civilization and the values of the Enlightenment are in grave danger. The videos showing Hillary supporters sobbing as their beloved Class-A war criminal was defeated in the 2016 election signifies this dangerous rift with reality.

Let us posit that a cult is a social structure that embodies the following characteristics:

* A rejection of logic and reason
* A fanatical devotion to an irrational belief system
* A profound anti-intellectualism
* A rejection of history and objective truth
* A relentless vilification of those who are outside of the cult, especially those who attempt to challenge the cult’s dogma
* An Orwellian manipulation of language

That neoliberalism possesses each of these characteristics is self-evident; while all who attempt to question this creed are branded as “racists,” “fascists,” “Nazis,” “bigots,” “sexists,” or “conspiracy theorists;” i.e., mentally ill. Moreover, faux leftists continue to exhibit a blind faith in the holy texts of neoliberalism; and no matter how many times The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The New Yorker lie and dissemble, they refuse to read these publications with even the faintest trace of skepticism.

A critical tenet of neoliberalism is that it “fights racism,” when in fact the opposite is the case, as evidenced by the fact that multiculturalism and identity politics relentlessly foment and exacerbate segregation, ghettoization, and tribalism. And despite the fact that the two parties have been doing essentially the exact same things since (at the very least) the inauguration of Bill Clinton, the cult of neoliberalism remains anchored in an uncompromising belief in the two-party system. The idea that it is “progressive” to dispense with the national identities of the West since they epitomize “racism,” is yet another putrefying pillar of neoliberal ideology. Following this line of thinking, Americans can get along just fine with vocational communities and tribal identities that break down along lines of ethnicity, language, religion and sexual orientation. 

A belief that the multicultural society is a meritocracy where everyone gets the job and income that they deserve; an insistence that “the left” should no longer concern itself with improving the lives of workers, students, patients, and prisoners but with “fighting racism,” are likewise foundational tenets of identity politics doctrine. In actuality, the fragmentation unleashed by the multicultural curriculum, identity studies, the multilingual media, and bilingual education has generated the very racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia that faux-leftists claim to combat, undermining their very raison d’être. In a curious historical irony, neoliberals have even backed the restoration of McCarthyite witch hunts, thereby facilitating attacks on those who remain outside, or in defiance of, this peculiar dogma.

The multicultural curriculum has been specifically engineered to deny black, Latino, and poor immigrant youth an education in American letters, British literature, and classics of Western Civilization. This underscores the sinister and bigoted intentions of liberal academic administrators. Jettisoning these books from public schools which are dominated by students of color has led to staggering amounts of illiteracy, from which sectarianism has arrived to insatiably and inexorably fill the void. Perhaps unsurprisingly, proponents of the anti-working class have birthed an anti-humanities curriculum. 

Multiculturalism subverts class consciousness without which there can be no political literacy, no understanding of history, and no progress. The anarchy, chaos, and atomization of the multicultural society (an oxymoron), turns workers into amoral automatons and interchangeable parts, while facilitating plutocratic pillage and authoritarianism, which its architects know full well.

In many ways, the demonization of Trump serves to deflect attention away from the fact that it is the ideology of neoliberalism which has betrayed the legacies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and Martin Luther King, turning the country into a failed state. Black nationalism and white nationalism are in fact two sides of the same coin. It is not possible to have one and not have the other. Indeed, anti-white bigots are no more interested in the restoration of unions, the Constitution, integration, good public education, demilitarization, and freedom of the press than their white nationalist counterparts. If these critical checks and balances are not restored, and the health care system remains privatized, our democracy will be lost. The political prosecutions of Julian Assange, John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Reality Winner, Daniel Hale, Barrett Brown, and Jeremy Hammond mean nothing to these zealots, as the accused are white, and the reinstatement of habeas corpus is not a part of their agenda.

A country can have different ethnicities, religions, and languages, but it cannot survive competing and mutually hostile curricula, as a nation-state must have a cohesive canon and a common historical narrative in order to sustain itself. As things presently stand, we have one curriculum which portrays white people as the devil incarnate; the other, a conservative curriculum, portrays Americans as the Indispensable Nation, and inculcates its charges with an ideology anchored in jingoism and Manifest Destiny. Both courses of study denigrate American literature, and refuse to educate their students in the history of European and American imperialism. These two curricula are on a collision course, and it would be unwise to dismiss the possibility of serious sectarian violence.

James Madison was acutely aware of the vital importance of having a literate population. As he wrote in a letter to W.T. Barry, on August 4, 1822:

John F. Kennedy reiterated this fundamental truth when he stated at Vanderbilt’s 90th Anniversary Convocation Address on May 18th, 1963, that “Only an educated and informed people will be a free people.” 

Faux leftists continue to be fanatical supporters of illegal immigration and the importation of guest workers, and refuse to acknowledge the many problems this has wrought, particularly with regard to deunionization and the depression of wages, ghettoization, catastrophic overcrowding in public schools and hospitals; and the fact that mass immigration foments destabilization, which in turn facilitates the ruling establishment’s dismantling of due process and the rule of law. 

Are liberals truly “fighting racism” by allowing the poorest and most vulnerable Americans to wallow unaided in a hell of mass incarceration, mass illiteracy, mass unemployment, and appalling unmet health care needs while simultaneously clamoring for more cheap labor to be brought in from abroad? There are also large numbers of Americans with advanced degrees that struggle to find jobs, and yet are forced to compete with a seemingly endless arrival of immigrants that are hired to fill these very positions. Can a society survive if it routinely denies educational opportunities and job opportunities to millions of its young people while incessantly replacing them with indentured servants and more compliant foreign workers?

The taboo placed on criticizing these policies has made it a Herculean task to discuss extremely serious domestic problems with any degree of intellectual honesty. And while liberals have forgotten that the egregious economic inequality of the Gilded Age was inextricably linked with open borders, the ruling establishment has long been cognizant of the fact that this has always been capital’s most effective and devastatingly powerful weapon.

With regard to the nonsensical term “cultural Marxism:” Marx himself understood that mass immigration was used by the ruling elites of the US and UK to drive down wages and pit workers against one another. Furthermore, he would have understood that identity politics atomizes the working class, shattering it into a dizzying array of competing and antagonistic camps. Far from having anything to do with Marxism, the true meaning of “cultural Marxism” is unfettered capitalism. Indeed, there can be no progressive working class movement when the working class has ceased to exist.

For liberals and socialists it has long been anathema to suggest that bigotry can be anything other than a one-way street, yet upon closer examination this argument reveals itself to be mere casuistry. In the ‘60s, “fighting racism” was synonymous with fighting segregation. Today, “fighting racism” has devolved into calls for more “diversity;” i.e. less white people. In the neoliberal cult, the word “racist” has literally come to mean “evil white people,” which has in turn given birth to the idea that only whites can commit “hate crimes.” As towns, cities, and institutions that are predominantly white are denounced as “racist,” it is clear that the goal of multiculturalism is to make whites into a minority throughout the country, burn books by white people, and tear down statues of white people. (We need look no further than London where white British people are a minority in their own capital). Is this not what is meant by the growing calls to end “white privilege” and “white power?” Such an ideology can only lead to a growing state of acrimony between the cult of neoliberalism and the rest of American society. The ahistorical and knavish notion of “white privilege” is contradicted by the fact that there has never been a time in the history of the country when there weren’t significant numbers of poor white people. Furthermore, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that while the white middle class is being systematically dismantled, the white oligarchs are richer than ever. Another mysterious feature of “white privilege” is that roughly 70% of all suicides in the US are committed by white males.

Liberals once fought segregation, ghettoization, and tribalism - now they fight for these things - a turn of history evidently lost on them. Irregardless of whether the multiculturalists succeed, or the political pendulum swings back to a traditional far-right element such as the Christian Right, the road to despotism has been paved by the liberal class. Martin Luther King’s dream, that Americans would one day “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” has met its inversion in identity politics. Hundreds of thousands of white Union soldiers died so that over three million black slaves could be free. Were they also “racist?” 

It is clear that the minions of multiculturalism have no more understanding of the historical significance of these events than the squirrels of Central Park. Nevertheless, it is also conceivable that the oligarchy understands this totalitarianization all too well, and that these events are part of a deliberate strategy to destroy the working class. 

The fiendish nature of identity politics is underscored by the fact that statues of Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Hans Christian Heg have been toppled, while a statue of Matthias Baldwin has been defaced. While none of these individuals fought for the Confederacy (paradoxically, they held quite radical views), they all have one thing in common: they were white. That the marauders do not differentiate between Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee, on the one hand; and Jefferson, Grant, and Heg on the other, signifies that this is a wicked movement hell-bent on the destruction of our civilization. Moreover, it is from precisely this very anarchic environment that a Mussolini, Pinochet, or Franco could seize power - and save the country from “the left.” 

The book burners do not even distinguish between The Scarlet Letter, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Mein Kampf. White authors are simply racist authors, and they are all alike. Thus have children of color been taught to internalize a variation on the very white supremacist ideology that was hegemonic in the antebellum South, where in addition to being kept in a state of abject ignorance, slaves were taught to be subservient to their masters, but antagonistic towards poor whites.

Speaking at the unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument (also known as the Emancipation Memorial) in Washington, DC, on April 14, 1876, which was paid for by freedmen, and which woke barbarians are champing at the bit to destroy, Frederick Douglass said of Lincoln:

The multiculturalists are now denouncing this memorial as “a monument to white supremacy."

Were it not for Lincoln and Grant, it is highly probable that the Confederacy would have successfully seceded. Heg was slain at Chickamauga, and gave his life fighting against the Slave Power. The iconic statue of Theodore Roosevelt in front of the Museum of Natural History, which I once gazed up to in wonder as a young boy, is also slated to come down. That Roosevelt was a complex individual who fought for things both progressive and reactionary means nothing to these philistines. Even Augustus Saint-Gaudens' exquisite Shaw Memorial, which took 14 years for the artist to complete, and which honors the all-black Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, has not escaped the wrath of the mob. 

The rise in racial diversity and diversity of sexual orientation has coincided with an unprecedented demise in diversity of thought. As historian James Oakes said in an interview with the World Socialist Web Site on November 18th, 2019:

More dangerous than racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia, are those who use these words in intellectually dishonest and disingenuous ways.This is exemplified by the vitriol heaped on those who maintain that all public school students should be required to read American letters, British literature, and classics of Western Civilization. Denying these books to students of color isn’t “fighting racism;” but conversely, its quintessence. (Note how the euphemisms “respecting cultural differences” and “protecting diversity” serve to glorify segregation). Once these students are inculcated with the pernicious sophism that all white authors are racist they become unteachable. It is as though they have been injected with an anti-literacy vaccine.

There is little difference between students at an elite preparatory school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the sons and daughters of medieval kings, dukes, and barons. In this same vein, the polyglot rabble that are warehoused in the New York City public schools have much in common with the children of medieval serfs. The only difference is that the multicultural serfs are so dehumanized that they have been taught to despise the very books that they so desperately need, and without which they are destined to become second-class citizens. 

International students who hail from high schools where English is not the language of instruction should devote their time in the US to earning bachelor'sdegrees in American or British literature. Alternatively, they are destined to learn nothing more than the English language jargon of their field; an arrangement deemed advantageous, both for the for-profit universities, as well as to their future exploiters. The idea that it is “anti-racist” to sell an international student a graduate or undergraduate degree when they struggle to read John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, or write an essay with a single grammatically correct sentence, is indicative of what Gad Saad has called “an idea pathogen.” Again, this begs the question: who is the real racist here?

Arguing that foreign-born students should, at the very least, always be less than ten percent of any student body K-12, and that they should not be allowed to arrive after the sixth or seventh grade, is nothing more than basic common sense. This would help protect not only the integrity of the public schools, but also foreign-born students themselves, who frequently fail to become literate and articulate in English, either because they arrive too late, or because they are educated in schools where ghettoization has relegated academic standards to the lowest possible level. What are immigrant children to integrate into when they are literally hanging from the chandeliers? 

In Britain, faith-based schools continue to have a deleterious impact on native and foreigner alike, as this greatly exacerbates the problem of parallel communities. How can a Muslim child growing up in Luton become a literate British citizen if his education is predicated entirely on Islamic texts? Those who raise this issue are invariably met with accusations of “racism,” “xenophobia,” and “Islamophobia” - or most preposterous of all - “hate speech.” The first casualties of any cult are logic and liberty of thought.

The American canon has always been dominated by the so-called “dead white men.” Getting rid of these books cannot be done without destroying the entire society. (Do I have the right to go to Pakistan and complain that their education system is dominated by “dead brown men?”) The poor academic performance of many Americans of color is rooted in the fact that they have the black or Latino nationalist in one ear and the white neoliberal in the other, two Iagos essentially spewing the same venom: don’t have anything to do with white teachers, white students, or books written by white people. Indeed, all the great black writers and orators in the history of the country: Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes, to name a few, would never have accomplished anything intellectually without having attained a solid foundation in classics of Western Civilization. Did Martin Luther King martyr himself so that black children could read Amy Tan, Edwidge Danticat, The House on Mango Street and be railroaded into African American studies departments?

Here is Du Bois from The Souls of Black Folk:

Above all, an education system must maintain and safeguard a particular national identity, as manifested by its unique humanities curriculum. Once this sacrosanct mission has been abandoned, education deteriorates into a collection of soulless vocational institutes that become technocratic factories for illiteratization. No multicultural curriculum can exist, because it is not possible to make children literate and articulate in hundreds of different languages. Notwithstanding neoliberal protestations, the multicultural curriculum is a psychopathic, nihilistic, and deeply reactionary curriculum. Nevertheless, it does what it was designed to do: foment tribalism and ignorance, while deflecting anger away from the oligarchy’s destruction of the country and towards white people. 

As Frederick Douglass said in his “Our Composite Nationality” speech on December 7, 1869:

If white power is wrong, black power must also be wrong. If misogyny is to be denounced, misandry must also be denounced. It is unconscionable for the cult of neoliberalism to continue to indoctrinate American youth with extremist ideologies.

In the cult of neoliberalism white nationalism is everywhere, yet anti-white bigotry - even when it is at its most spiteful and vicious - is nowhere to be found. Black nationalism is romanticized, as it “fights racism;” while misandry is extolled, as it “fights sexism.” Identity studies and the multicultural curriculum (where classes are taught by demagogues and not by academics), have fomented unprecedented forms of sectarianism, and fueled the free market jihadis of black nationalism, Latino nationalism, and Feminisis, along with other anti-intellectual and anti-Western hordes which are tearing apart the cultural fabric of society. The absence of a legitimate progressive alternative to endless wars, austerity, book burning, the medical industrial complex, and mass incarceration, where one may choose only between a white right and a colored right, has straitjacketed us into a paralysis of analysis. Irregardless of who is victorious, there can only be one winner: the kleptocracy.

The Yellow Vest movement, presently crippled by the Covid-19 pandemic, is a traditional working class movement which seeks to protect social services, unions, and middle class jobs, and whose supporters understand that endless ranting and raving about race and gender is divisive and self-destructive, as this can only enhance the power of a rampaging bourgeoisie increasingly hostile to democracy. They also understand that the triumph of identity politics would constitute the triumph of alienation over camaraderie and solidarity.

Ultimately, multiculturalism is rooted in the idea that our national identity is illegitimate, a form of self-flagellation that is increasingly popular in Europe, notably Sweden. This humiliates and dehumanizes Americans of all ethnicities, and degrades and sullies the credibility of the left, while emboldening traditional reactionary ideologies.

Theodore Roosevelt was acutely aware of the dangers of tribalism. Speaking to the Knights of Columbus at Carnegie Hall on October 12, 1915, he warned:

If the multicultural cancer continues to metastasize unchecked our civilization will disintegrate, leaving the younger generation with nothing but a desolate wasteland enveloped by amnesia, where those who cry “extremist” are the real extremists, and where the citadel of reason lies in ruins, as Old Abe’s “mystic chords of memory” fade into a broken hourglass forever.

Ever hubristic and increasingly deranged, the cult of neoliberalism continues to maintain that the multicultural society constitutes a revolutionary movement comprised of integrationists, whose disciples are the heirs to the civil rights movement and the New Deal, when these crusades are diametrically opposed to one another. That the acolytes of identity politics fail to see this is lamentable. Yet cults require only emotions and blind obedience - not cognition. As Paul Craig Roberts writes in “Education Is Offensive and Racist and so is America:” “The elite have worked long and hard to acquire a divided population that cannot unite against them. They have succeeded.”