I’ve always been proud to be a son of social workers—’60s activists who made good on their idealism. My Dad was a frontline case worker taking his rusted station wagon into some pretty dodgy neighborhoods, while my mother became a clinical therapist.
Aug 29, 2023·edited Aug 29, 2023Liked by The Ivy Exile
Post-60s Leftism—its entire movement and ideology—is written, produced and directed by secular white liberals and is designed first and foremost to meet their political, social, and emotional needs, most especially their deep-seated need to publicly atone for their guilt and "privilege". Thus whatever benefits accrue to their pet victim classes are only secondary or incidental, as they are simply symbols or pretexts for an endless pseudopolitical group-therapy session.
This is why all Left idealistic schemes never achieve any real success or lasting social improvements, as this isn't the purpose of their project, and in fact might threaten it.
I'm constantly shocked by how people can drape themselves in abstractions like "Justice" and "Equality" and this gives them a permanent get-out-of-responsibility card; also, how America continues to subsidize people who work to denounce and unravel it and turn their children into weapons in the Permanent Revolution; and most especially infuriating is how when we at last achieve the equality of living in rubble (the only possible equality), the architects of our dismantling will walk away unscathed. (They always do.)
I do think there are still a fair amount of aging economic populists in the midwest living in the past who don't understand all the modern-day mumbo jumbo but still think voting for higher taxes on millionaires is fulfilling that Woody Guthrie tradition. Though even they are hopelessly addicted to product made by more upscale coastal creatives "to meet their political, social, and emotional needs," as you say. Part of the problem is that a lot of those people are in semi-rural areas where the right-wing conventional wisdom can be pretty lowest common denominator, so if you're someone who considers yourself an intelligent book lover you're very likely to gravitate towards those calm thoughtful sophisticated voices on PBS and NPR et al who represent the promise and dream of somewhere else. The brainier less red meat center-right people that might theoretically reach that audience tend toward the very erudite, and don't compete much in that space.
Regarding people walking away unscathed, it's a hopeful sign that some of the consequences of all the opportunistic recklessness are finally arriving in NYC, in the Hamptons, and in the loveliest parts of the bay area. Quality of life in Manhattan has plummeted to the point that even the wealthy can't quite avoid it, and that's the kind of thing that quietly changes minds. I grew up a dyed in the wool progressive, and truly consider what I'm doing to still be a progressive endeavor, but am not immune to reconsidering issue by issue based on what I experience firsthand.
I was thinking more of the Left leaders as the ones always remaining unscathed, from hateful charlatans like Judith Butler or Noel Ignatiev to absolutely useless Left politicans like Bill de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot escaping the messes they created via golden parachutes, but I see your point and will take what I can get.
All of this (I think) is downstream from "Leftism" (which for the most part is Rorty's "cosmopolitan humanitarianism") being essentially the secular post-Christian religion of all educated urban Americans, and this religion/ideology being somehow both rigid yet unspoken and amorphous.
I am myself part of this class/caste/group (just a congenital skeptic and cranky individualist) and it seems to manifest in repeated applications of vague abstractions like "Justice" and "Equality" and lazy beliefs in the benevolence of state funding (more is always the solution!) and the white guilt–infused etiquette that says (more or less) all Good People take the side of minorities in every issue or dispute. (Really, White Guilt and its twin White Saviorism are the foundations of the modern Left, but that is a whole different topic.)
I'm 54 and having been living in this eternal post-60s zeitgeist my entire adult life, where "transgression" and "liberation" are the last gods left standing and are everyone's favorite pose (no matter how many corporate backers you may have), and I wonder every day if this will still be the reigning ethos of our culture till the day I die, and I'm inclined to think that absent some cataclysm, we'll be frozen here for the foreseeable future.
Not incoherent at all! It's very frustrating to have to navigate what amounts to fundamentalist faith in enlightened technocracy as enforced by unspoken codes of politeness and social viability. And as usual it's not the agrarian populists most able to break down what's gone wrong, but disaffected members of the dominant class/caste/group.
I wouldn't have bothered with this whole project if I didn't still think there's real potential for some pendulums to swing and things to get at least somewhat better. It's become a race between the diverse organic backlash against all the madness and the institutions asserting ever more brute force to entrench their imperatives. But yeah, it can be a challenge to remain optimistic right now!
"I wouldn't have bothered with this whole project if I didn't still think there's real potential for some pendulums to swing and things to get at least somewhat better."
I admire your desire to do this and salute you.
I will try to keep my comments here sane and productive...(emphasis on TRY! ;))
Charles R. Morris's "A Time of Passion" is out of print but you may be able to find a used copy, as I did. Morris ran anti-poverty programs in Trenton for LBJ's Great Society. He finally concluded that the result if not the aim of programs like his was jobs for bureaucrats: "To the profound disappointment of community organization activists, the local anti-poverty agencies were rapidly transmuting into tired civil service organizations, preoccupied with job grades and tenure, hardly the advance guard of a new age of social reform...With a clarity of logic which somehow eluded the antipoverty program designers, poor people readily appreciated that bigger welfare checks were a more direct and certain way to increase their incomes than the confusing self-improvement schemes hawked by Washington."
According to Morris, the social workers in the War on Poverty had overestimated the economists' expertise while the economists overestimated that of the social workers: "Social workers never questioned that economists had plumbed all the mysteries of the economy; and the economists who designed the antipoverty program never doubted the availability of a similarly encompassing social technology." Morris claims the reason both camps were wrong about each other was "a kind of professional courtesy extended among experts in that era of expertise." That era has passed.
That era should be long past (!) but I'd argue that the professional courtesy of the presumption of competence and integrity still lingers on, undeservedly. Somebody on Twitter came up with the pungent metaphor that recent generations of professional progressives have hollowed out respected institutions and then worn them as "skin suits," exploiting the legacy prestige to launder glib talking points into a form that feels more substantive and credible.
Today's typical well-meaning progressive voter assumes prestigious universities are still run by scholars rather than activist administrators, that famous newspapers are staffed with real journalists rather than partisan spin doctors, and that federal bureaucracies are full of public servants with rigorous methodology rather than ideological apparatchiks taking advantage of the spoils system. Even worse, the people inside those institutions who know better (or should) still operate as if they and their peers represent a legitimate intellectual ecosystem rather than a Potemkin village.
Exile, I have an hypothesis as to why those well-meaning liberal voters assume competence and integrity on the part of college faculty and staff, newspaper reporters and editors, and federal bureaucrats. It is because the college faculty and staff, newspaper reporters and editors, and federal bureaucrats are liberal voters. Hence, the well-meaning liberal voters do not care how badly the college faculty and staff, newspaper reporters and editors, and federal bureaucrats botch their jobs. "They're on our side."
That's definitely a huge piece of it, plus there's also a curious ecumenical earnestness to progressive technocrats' self-image. They're on the left, of course, and proud to celebrate that heritage, but as smart data-driven wonks remain reliably non-ideological, so occupy the center as well. When one adds the school of thought that judicial conservatism entails restraint from changing precedent rather than trying to return to obsolete first principles, they're actually really the true conservatives, too, as properly understood. To their left they see Antifa, to their right they see Donald Trump, and thus have zero doubt that they're always the responsible adults in the room.
So the slightest dab of obligatory cynicism that "yeah shenanigans sometimes happen, maybe Joe shouldn't have been on some of those Hunter calls but we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," along with constant reinforcement of feeling generously open-minded from reading token center-righties in prestige media, feels like more than enough throat-clearing to get back to the urgency of masterminding the sustainable, equitable global society so clearly within reach.
I was blogging and researching for Bill Moyers during the Obamacare debate (very depressing then but actually incredibly substantive by today's standards), and young Matt Taibbi was our one lefty guest with the effrontery to acknowledge that the Affordable Care Act was corrupted, convoluted nonsense with precious little to do with the romantic ideal of universal health care. Our core audience hated it--so far as they were concerned they'd already "done the work," and whatever dogfood Dem operatives delivered was better than nothing and would be more than enough to build upon.
The endless complacence of "One step at a time! The experts will fix it!" is endlessly frustrating, but par for the course. Complacent audiences lack enough impetus to change their minds.
Whether one considers the Affordable Care Act a success or failure, it was undeniably presented to the American people on a deceptive basis. The clearest example was President Obama's oft-repeated promise, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. Period. No one can take it from you." That was a lie. The Act required millions of people to change their medical insurance plans. Obama also promised, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." Another lie. You could keep your doctor only if he or she was included in the health insurance policy you had to buy. When Obama wrote a memoir about his first two years in office, "A Promised Land", I read it to try to find out how he justified his double deceit in enacting his signature legislation. The answer is that he ignores it completely. Not a word about the broken promises he repeated dozens of times. Obama apparently believes that no lies he tells require any justification. Exile, do the progressive technocrats you speak of share the same attitude? Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the ACA, argued that "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.” But, Exile, public distrust of government seems to me to be our principal political problem. Do the progressive technocrats realize what they are doing to the republic when they resort to government by deceit--ahem, "lack of transparency."
I remember when Jonathan Gruber blurted that out, I was so grateful that he was finally (briefly) willing to be so honest and blunt. Partisans in their algorithmic bubbles need to be faced with the harsh realities of political sausagemaking.
Yes, as you note it was clear to anyone paying the slightest attention that tons of people would lose their health insurance plans and have to change doctors. I felt at the time that it was a huge political blunder to make obviously dishonest technocratic claims of the numbers adding up rather than directly make the moral case for universal health care regardless of cost. Part of the rationale was that the prime motivation behind Obamacare was delivering endless subsidies to the insurance industry, and also that it was so satisfying to say "make those rich billionaire CEOs pay for the little guys' healthcare!" as if every penny of those egregious corporate pay packages would amount to any more than an infinitesimal sliver of the universe of U.S. health care spending. But the Obama administration had successfully branded itself as the smart ones on Apple computers, and ideologues loved feeling smart repeating lies.
As for the question of careerist technocrats' feelings on deceiving the public, there's again that bottomless complacency of "Well yeah maybe we the good guys had a fib a little to get past the ignorant general public, but it was for their own good and outside of some of the fine print it was really illuminating the larger truth." On the visceral level, they really truly don't remember the Obamacare debate as it actually was, just as they don't remember how bloodthirstily punitive and cruel they became at the heights of COVID madness. They are the good guys, the adults in the room, as their screens constantly reinforce, and to whatever extent things haven't worked out has been entirely due to their fascist enemies. Everyday they wake up to fight the good fight at the cutting edge of progress, utterly insulated from any suggestion otherwise.
"Proper therapy rarely involves quick easy “solutions,” but rather marinating purposefully in uncomfortable truths." I have been trying to put that succinctly into words for years. YES!!!
As a long time support worker/mentor and community advocate I found your article a good read. It's obviously from an American perspective but no doubt there are similarities within the NZ "system."
The road to hell is paved with good intentions: something I am always so wary of when supporting people to live the best life they can.
Thanks! While I was speaking to my experience in the U.S., I would think that the tension between grounded social workers trying to help specific clients versus the tendency of both idealists and bureaucrats toward throwing money at collective abstractions is probably pretty common around the world. Unfortunately, institutional interests almost always override what's actually good for human beings, at least in the American context.
Post-60s Leftism—its entire movement and ideology—is written, produced and directed by secular white liberals and is designed first and foremost to meet their political, social, and emotional needs, most especially their deep-seated need to publicly atone for their guilt and "privilege". Thus whatever benefits accrue to their pet victim classes are only secondary or incidental, as they are simply symbols or pretexts for an endless pseudopolitical group-therapy session.
This is why all Left idealistic schemes never achieve any real success or lasting social improvements, as this isn't the purpose of their project, and in fact might threaten it.
I'm constantly shocked by how people can drape themselves in abstractions like "Justice" and "Equality" and this gives them a permanent get-out-of-responsibility card; also, how America continues to subsidize people who work to denounce and unravel it and turn their children into weapons in the Permanent Revolution; and most especially infuriating is how when we at last achieve the equality of living in rubble (the only possible equality), the architects of our dismantling will walk away unscathed. (They always do.)
I do think there are still a fair amount of aging economic populists in the midwest living in the past who don't understand all the modern-day mumbo jumbo but still think voting for higher taxes on millionaires is fulfilling that Woody Guthrie tradition. Though even they are hopelessly addicted to product made by more upscale coastal creatives "to meet their political, social, and emotional needs," as you say. Part of the problem is that a lot of those people are in semi-rural areas where the right-wing conventional wisdom can be pretty lowest common denominator, so if you're someone who considers yourself an intelligent book lover you're very likely to gravitate towards those calm thoughtful sophisticated voices on PBS and NPR et al who represent the promise and dream of somewhere else. The brainier less red meat center-right people that might theoretically reach that audience tend toward the very erudite, and don't compete much in that space.
Regarding people walking away unscathed, it's a hopeful sign that some of the consequences of all the opportunistic recklessness are finally arriving in NYC, in the Hamptons, and in the loveliest parts of the bay area. Quality of life in Manhattan has plummeted to the point that even the wealthy can't quite avoid it, and that's the kind of thing that quietly changes minds. I grew up a dyed in the wool progressive, and truly consider what I'm doing to still be a progressive endeavor, but am not immune to reconsidering issue by issue based on what I experience firsthand.
I was thinking more of the Left leaders as the ones always remaining unscathed, from hateful charlatans like Judith Butler or Noel Ignatiev to absolutely useless Left politicans like Bill de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot escaping the messes they created via golden parachutes, but I see your point and will take what I can get.
All of this (I think) is downstream from "Leftism" (which for the most part is Rorty's "cosmopolitan humanitarianism") being essentially the secular post-Christian religion of all educated urban Americans, and this religion/ideology being somehow both rigid yet unspoken and amorphous.
I am myself part of this class/caste/group (just a congenital skeptic and cranky individualist) and it seems to manifest in repeated applications of vague abstractions like "Justice" and "Equality" and lazy beliefs in the benevolence of state funding (more is always the solution!) and the white guilt–infused etiquette that says (more or less) all Good People take the side of minorities in every issue or dispute. (Really, White Guilt and its twin White Saviorism are the foundations of the modern Left, but that is a whole different topic.)
I'm 54 and having been living in this eternal post-60s zeitgeist my entire adult life, where "transgression" and "liberation" are the last gods left standing and are everyone's favorite pose (no matter how many corporate backers you may have), and I wonder every day if this will still be the reigning ethos of our culture till the day I die, and I'm inclined to think that absent some cataclysm, we'll be frozen here for the foreseeable future.
Sorry if I rambled incoherently...
Cheers!
Not incoherent at all! It's very frustrating to have to navigate what amounts to fundamentalist faith in enlightened technocracy as enforced by unspoken codes of politeness and social viability. And as usual it's not the agrarian populists most able to break down what's gone wrong, but disaffected members of the dominant class/caste/group.
I wouldn't have bothered with this whole project if I didn't still think there's real potential for some pendulums to swing and things to get at least somewhat better. It's become a race between the diverse organic backlash against all the madness and the institutions asserting ever more brute force to entrench their imperatives. But yeah, it can be a challenge to remain optimistic right now!
"I wouldn't have bothered with this whole project if I didn't still think there's real potential for some pendulums to swing and things to get at least somewhat better."
I admire your desire to do this and salute you.
I will try to keep my comments here sane and productive...(emphasis on TRY! ;))
Thanks!
Charles R. Morris's "A Time of Passion" is out of print but you may be able to find a used copy, as I did. Morris ran anti-poverty programs in Trenton for LBJ's Great Society. He finally concluded that the result if not the aim of programs like his was jobs for bureaucrats: "To the profound disappointment of community organization activists, the local anti-poverty agencies were rapidly transmuting into tired civil service organizations, preoccupied with job grades and tenure, hardly the advance guard of a new age of social reform...With a clarity of logic which somehow eluded the antipoverty program designers, poor people readily appreciated that bigger welfare checks were a more direct and certain way to increase their incomes than the confusing self-improvement schemes hawked by Washington."
According to Morris, the social workers in the War on Poverty had overestimated the economists' expertise while the economists overestimated that of the social workers: "Social workers never questioned that economists had plumbed all the mysteries of the economy; and the economists who designed the antipoverty program never doubted the availability of a similarly encompassing social technology." Morris claims the reason both camps were wrong about each other was "a kind of professional courtesy extended among experts in that era of expertise." That era has passed.
That era should be long past (!) but I'd argue that the professional courtesy of the presumption of competence and integrity still lingers on, undeservedly. Somebody on Twitter came up with the pungent metaphor that recent generations of professional progressives have hollowed out respected institutions and then worn them as "skin suits," exploiting the legacy prestige to launder glib talking points into a form that feels more substantive and credible.
Today's typical well-meaning progressive voter assumes prestigious universities are still run by scholars rather than activist administrators, that famous newspapers are staffed with real journalists rather than partisan spin doctors, and that federal bureaucracies are full of public servants with rigorous methodology rather than ideological apparatchiks taking advantage of the spoils system. Even worse, the people inside those institutions who know better (or should) still operate as if they and their peers represent a legitimate intellectual ecosystem rather than a Potemkin village.
Exile, I have an hypothesis as to why those well-meaning liberal voters assume competence and integrity on the part of college faculty and staff, newspaper reporters and editors, and federal bureaucrats. It is because the college faculty and staff, newspaper reporters and editors, and federal bureaucrats are liberal voters. Hence, the well-meaning liberal voters do not care how badly the college faculty and staff, newspaper reporters and editors, and federal bureaucrats botch their jobs. "They're on our side."
That's definitely a huge piece of it, plus there's also a curious ecumenical earnestness to progressive technocrats' self-image. They're on the left, of course, and proud to celebrate that heritage, but as smart data-driven wonks remain reliably non-ideological, so occupy the center as well. When one adds the school of thought that judicial conservatism entails restraint from changing precedent rather than trying to return to obsolete first principles, they're actually really the true conservatives, too, as properly understood. To their left they see Antifa, to their right they see Donald Trump, and thus have zero doubt that they're always the responsible adults in the room.
So the slightest dab of obligatory cynicism that "yeah shenanigans sometimes happen, maybe Joe shouldn't have been on some of those Hunter calls but we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," along with constant reinforcement of feeling generously open-minded from reading token center-righties in prestige media, feels like more than enough throat-clearing to get back to the urgency of masterminding the sustainable, equitable global society so clearly within reach.
I was blogging and researching for Bill Moyers during the Obamacare debate (very depressing then but actually incredibly substantive by today's standards), and young Matt Taibbi was our one lefty guest with the effrontery to acknowledge that the Affordable Care Act was corrupted, convoluted nonsense with precious little to do with the romantic ideal of universal health care. Our core audience hated it--so far as they were concerned they'd already "done the work," and whatever dogfood Dem operatives delivered was better than nothing and would be more than enough to build upon.
The endless complacence of "One step at a time! The experts will fix it!" is endlessly frustrating, but par for the course. Complacent audiences lack enough impetus to change their minds.
Whether one considers the Affordable Care Act a success or failure, it was undeniably presented to the American people on a deceptive basis. The clearest example was President Obama's oft-repeated promise, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. Period. No one can take it from you." That was a lie. The Act required millions of people to change their medical insurance plans. Obama also promised, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." Another lie. You could keep your doctor only if he or she was included in the health insurance policy you had to buy. When Obama wrote a memoir about his first two years in office, "A Promised Land", I read it to try to find out how he justified his double deceit in enacting his signature legislation. The answer is that he ignores it completely. Not a word about the broken promises he repeated dozens of times. Obama apparently believes that no lies he tells require any justification. Exile, do the progressive technocrats you speak of share the same attitude? Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the ACA, argued that "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.” But, Exile, public distrust of government seems to me to be our principal political problem. Do the progressive technocrats realize what they are doing to the republic when they resort to government by deceit--ahem, "lack of transparency."
I remember when Jonathan Gruber blurted that out, I was so grateful that he was finally (briefly) willing to be so honest and blunt. Partisans in their algorithmic bubbles need to be faced with the harsh realities of political sausagemaking.
Yes, as you note it was clear to anyone paying the slightest attention that tons of people would lose their health insurance plans and have to change doctors. I felt at the time that it was a huge political blunder to make obviously dishonest technocratic claims of the numbers adding up rather than directly make the moral case for universal health care regardless of cost. Part of the rationale was that the prime motivation behind Obamacare was delivering endless subsidies to the insurance industry, and also that it was so satisfying to say "make those rich billionaire CEOs pay for the little guys' healthcare!" as if every penny of those egregious corporate pay packages would amount to any more than an infinitesimal sliver of the universe of U.S. health care spending. But the Obama administration had successfully branded itself as the smart ones on Apple computers, and ideologues loved feeling smart repeating lies.
As for the question of careerist technocrats' feelings on deceiving the public, there's again that bottomless complacency of "Well yeah maybe we the good guys had a fib a little to get past the ignorant general public, but it was for their own good and outside of some of the fine print it was really illuminating the larger truth." On the visceral level, they really truly don't remember the Obamacare debate as it actually was, just as they don't remember how bloodthirstily punitive and cruel they became at the heights of COVID madness. They are the good guys, the adults in the room, as their screens constantly reinforce, and to whatever extent things haven't worked out has been entirely due to their fascist enemies. Everyday they wake up to fight the good fight at the cutting edge of progress, utterly insulated from any suggestion otherwise.
"Proper therapy rarely involves quick easy “solutions,” but rather marinating purposefully in uncomfortable truths." I have been trying to put that succinctly into words for years. YES!!!
As a long time support worker/mentor and community advocate I found your article a good read. It's obviously from an American perspective but no doubt there are similarities within the NZ "system."
The road to hell is paved with good intentions: something I am always so wary of when supporting people to live the best life they can.
Thanks for a well written article. Jo 😊
Thanks! While I was speaking to my experience in the U.S., I would think that the tension between grounded social workers trying to help specific clients versus the tendency of both idealists and bureaucrats toward throwing money at collective abstractions is probably pretty common around the world. Unfortunately, institutional interests almost always override what's actually good for human beings, at least in the American context.
Empowerment is essential. Disempowerment is extremely harmful.