When I was growing up in the 1980s, there was a galaxy of left-wing, even socialist, intellectual stars such as Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault and Gore Vidal whose works were like an inkwell that politicians and commentators could draw from. Judging from the Munich Security Conference this weekend, that inkwell has run dry.
Take this gem of a comment on global order from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, queen of the democratic socialists: “What we are seeking is a return to a rules-based order that eliminates the hypocrisies around when too often in the West we look the other way for inconvenient populations, to act out these paradoxes.”
Allow me to translate this into English: “The West is bad and mistreats the marginalized rest of the world.”
The use of 25-cent words and highfalutin sentence structure cannot hide the banality of what AOC is saying. Not even the assuring allure of assonance would help, given the asinine simplicity of her word salad.
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Not to be outdone, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, after apologizing for being less well-versed in foreign policy than AOC, offered this take on the war in Ukraine: “Ukraine’s independence, keeping their land mass, I mean, um, the support of all the allies, I think is the goal, from my vantage point.”
There is just nothing here but empty words that paint a picture of the facile progressive worldview, completely divorced, not only from reality on the ground, but from any sound intellectual framework whatsoever.
The American right has a core of intellectuals, from Christopher Rufo to Victor Davis Hanson to Mark Dubowitz and on and on, who can be referred to or drawn on in policy debates both foreign and domestic.
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In fact, about a decade ago we had the Intellectual Dark Web phenomenon with figures like Jordan Peterson and Bari Weiss, who are broadly seen, if not as conservative, as right-leaning. Who are their counterparts on the far left?
Who is the contemporary socialist intellectual who AOC could have referenced to support her claim that what is needed is massive global redistribution of wealth?
I would posit that outside of the very narrow corridors of race and gender, such far-left public intellectuals no longer exist and for two very important reasons.
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The most obvious cause for the current dearth of popular far-left, socialist intellectuals is the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. At least for the next two decades, the game was up, the experiment had failed and nobody wanted to be called a socialist.
The second reason is what took the place of outright socialism, which was cultural Marxism, specifically in the form of critical race theory.
In their brilliant 2013 Harvard Education Review study, “McIntosh as Synecdoche: How Teacher Education’s Focus on White Privilege Undermines Antiracism,” the Midwestern Whiteness Collective, a left-wing group of teachers, argued that centering race and identity in everything was stifling intellectual discourse.
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This was clearly true because the shibboleths of race and identity, what was allowed and not allowed to be expressed, went completely unchallenged. In fact, challenging them was punished.
So, once race and identity became a part of everything, then nothing could be legitimately questioned. It was equity, not equality, over everything else.
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We saw this in practice this month at Sarah Lawrence College, where non-socialist liberal intellectual Ezra Klein was shouted down during a discussion about Israel. The position of the protesters was not that Klein should be disagreed with but that he should be silenced, that his ideas are too dangerous to utter.
Why do AOC and Whitmer sound like babbling idiots when they seek to defend their positions against even the slightest criticism? Because they have never had to. In all the rooms and meetings they’ve experienced, their nonsense is greeted with grins and finger snaps of approval.
The danger here is of the highest order because we may be electing socialists who literally do not know how to make things work. Zany Zohran Mamdani has been mayor of New York City for just over a month. He couldn’t handle the snow, he can’t remove the trash and people are freezing to death on the streets.
The sad bottom line is that the American left, which has taken over the Democratic Party, has no true intellectual underpinnings. Like Seinfeld, it is ultimately a political ideology about nothing and the clearest danger to American values that exists today.
