Topic: Liberal Fascism
Sadly, Karl Marx is still with us—no doubt he’s the most-read political philosopher on campus. It wouldn’t be correct, though, to muster all present-day leftists under the red flag, though some of them undoubtedly belong there. But the abject failure of scientific socialism has been too glaring to deny, and with the exception of a few zealots the broad Left—BL for short—had to move on. By broad Left I mean liberals, progressives and leftists: three groups which, though they have their differences, share a common outlook and set of goals. Liberals are represented mostly in the institutional Democratic Party and its auxiliaries, such as the mainstream media. Progressives are found there as well and they form the bulk of the non-formal Democratic Party base. Leftists, particularly numerous on campus, tend to reject the party label and quite often they may be heard reviling the Democratic Party. But when push comes to shove—say, in a presidential election year—almost all of these people can be relied upon to vote Democratic.
Today’s BL is the child of crisis. The crisis of contemporary conservatism—the rise of Trumpian populism—is reminiscent of the trauma inflicted on the BL by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of classical scientific socialism. The Radiant Future having been thoroughly discredited, what then could the BL be said to stand for? But politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. The salvation of the BL turned out to be postmodernism, which supplied the foundation for a relativistic ideology by which facts, evidence and reality itself can be disregarded in favor of the BL’s preferences. Better still, causes and crusades could now be manufactured out of thin air.
Perhaps the most obvious example of postmodernism’s contribution to a post-socialist leftism is the ideology of gender, marketed as the current chapter of the civil-rights movement. Gender ideology is based largely on the claims of academic gender feminists that something called "gender" exists independently of biological sexual differentiation, e.g. that a human being, biologically male, may yet be female in terms of gender. But these tendencies are, supposedly, stamped upon by an oppressive, sexist, patriarchal society which demands and enforces conformity to an arbitrary binary gender regime. Thus gender identities are socially constructed and, therefore, by overthrowing the present oppressive society, gender can in some sense be liberated from biological sex, with every individual free to assume any gender identity that can be imagined.
None of this theorizing is supported by a speck of scientific evidence. There may be, indeed, a biological basis for the gender confusion to be observed in some few troubled individuals but the overwhelming majority of human beings, regardless of sexual orientation, experience no conflict between gender preference and biological sex. A gay male, that is to say, remains a male and has no particular desire to feminize himself via wardrobe choice, makeup, drugs or surgery. And when you think of it, the concept of socially constructed gender rather contradicts another item of leftist dogma: that homosexuals are "born that way." So you can choose your gender but not your sexual orientation—a strange situation indeed!
Because it has no basis in reality, the concept of socially constructed gender can be expanded virtually without limit. New gender identities are constantly being added to an already long list, accompanied by learned dissertations on the challenges of pronoun use in this brave new world of liberated gender identities. The absurdity of it all no doubt explains the fascistic bullying by which the cause is advanced. Were I an academic, composing an email of this kind and broadcasting it to the campus community would lead to furious denunciations, violent riots, death threats and, no doubt, my prosecution before some Stalinist-style university tribunal.
Nor can the ideology of gender be dismissed as ivory-tower theorizing, with no implications for the real world. The push is on to mainstream transgenderism and the cause has been embraced the BL as a whole. The Democratic Party is now the party of gender-neutral restrooms, even in public schools. Biological males who identify as female are being permitted to play on female sports teams in many schools, to the accompaniment of much doubletalk such as this, courtesy of the National Federation of State High School Associations:
There is no research to support the contention that enabling a transgender girl to play on a girls [sic] team creates a competitive imbalance. In reality, the overlap in skill and performance in sports among biological males and females and the wide variance within each gender group are important considerations to remember in addressing concerns about competitive equity. Concerns about competitive equity also perpetuate a gender stereotype that assumes that anyone with a male body will outperform anyone with a female body. As girls and women take advantage of increased opportunities to participate in sports, performance gaps between girls and boys have decreased.
Now if it’s true that there’s no research bearing on the point at issue, then everything following the first sentence of the extract quoted above is mere speculation. But of course the whole transgender concept is no more than a speculative premise, so intellectual rigor is perhaps too much to hope for. But however scanty the evidence, however, dubious the reasoning, the ideology of transgenderism is opening the door to the girls’ restrooms, locker rooms and showers in schools across the country, and ushering in biological males who, in their heads, are female. And to question the probity or wisdom of such policies is held to be a heinous act of bigotry and hate speech.
Thus by a different route—postmodern relativism instead of Marxism—the contemporary BL is heading in the same direction as its predecessors: toward totalitarianism. Already on college campuses the atmosphere is alarmingly reminiscent of Paris in the days of the Terror. And things are bound to get worse, for the virus—a kind of ideological HIV—is spreading as well through corporate America, where the price of admission to an upwardly mobile career path demands a pledge of allegiance to the dogma of the broad Left.
Whether the individual liberals, progressives, leftists actually believe in such absurdities as the ideology of gender is a vexing question. One’s instinct is to say no, that such things are just political weapons: new ways to smear the opposition as racist/sexist/ homophobe/etc. and so forth. But there’s a real and disturbing possibility that many of them do believe it—or discipline themselves to believe it. The fervor they demonstrate in their support of such absurdities as the ideology of gender seems unlikely to be fake. And after all, postmodern relativism rests on the premise that there is no such thing as objective reality. So perhaps, for the BL, it’s really not so hard to believe the unbelievable.
