Multiculturalism today exerts considerable influence on the administrative agencies involved with issues of race and gender. It is well to recall, however, that the origin of the civil rights movement predated the rise of multiculturalism, going back to the 1960s or even to the 1860s, and was born of a different spirit. Civil rights legislation developed not out of an abstract ideology, but from an effort to deal with the problems stemming from America's "original sin" of race slavery and its aftermaths. Its aim was to end legal segregation and discrimination and make good on the liberal democratic principle of equal treatment of all individuals. Its theoretical foundation was the principle of natural rights, with added support from biblical teachings. As multiculturalism began to colonize the intellectual left, it also penetrated the civil rights movement, altering its focus. Its agenda today includes boycotts on products from Israel, calls for gender and ethnic studies programs at universities, and plans to establish a national curriculum in American history favorable to a multiculturalist narrative. The spirit behind multiculturalism is captured in the building excitement over the moment in 2045 when, according to census projections, "white people" become a minority of the American population. This demographic shift is already being hailed as a landmark in American history, above all by those who elevate their own racial self-contempt to the status of a high moral virtue. The civil rights movement may have expanded its coalition, but it has lost its soul.
Modern progressivism is suspended somewhere between acquiescence to and approval of multiculturalism. The hesitations come from contradictions that have emerged within multiculturalism in response to its confrontation with real events. The genocide in Rwanda and the chaos that followed the Arab Spring exposed the fiction of solidarity among the oppressed and showed that fanaticism can be constituent of an authentic culture. The most severe regimes of oppression against women and gays are perpetrated by victimized cultures. Progressives in extreme cases have concluded that certain oppressed cultures may need to be condemned or policed. The problem has been to find a justification. Happily for progressives, the quandary is always resolved by the arrival, just in the nick of time, of Puff the Magic Value. Overnight America, the oppressor nation, is magically transformed from being the carrier of the "white man's burden" to becoming the defender, in President Obama's words, of "human dignity" and "universal values." Alas, Puff does not linger, but slips back into his cave in Honalee. The trance over, multiculturalists return to their more comfortable posture of assailing Western privilege.
Postmodernism is the last of the developments on the intellectual left that has influenced modern progressivism. Less directly connected to politics than the New Left or multiculturalism, it entered American thought from the academy. Its main premise is that there are no real or true theoretical foundations or philosophically grounded values. The Declaration of Independence's laws of nature and the theoretical idea of progress, not to mention Nature's God and God's providence, are fictions. In philosophy classes, this premise might be subsumed under the formula that "nothing is by nature, and everything is by convention." Expressed in a more popularized version, as one might hear it today in any course in cultural studies, it is that "everything is socially constructed." Exported from the classroom to the quad, this slogan is deployed to call into question any custom or institution that the left is currently targeting for extinction.
Postmodernism became the leading school in humanistic thought in higher education in the 1980s. In combination with multiculturalism, it helped create new disciplines and programs within the humanities and the social sciences. Thousands of its acolytes entered the professoriate, where they proceeded to spawn generations of postmodern scholars, taking great care to secure their advancement. This clerisy now plays a role in running many universities and is assured of doing so until well into the 21st century. Talk of being on the right side of history!
Postmodernism's influence beyond the academy is considerable but, being indirect, difficult to trace. No major political figure in America boasts of acting under the aegis of postmodernism in the way that many of the Founders affirmed an attachment to natural rights philosophy or many progressive leaders an affinity with Darwinism. With philosophy now occupying a much lesser role in general education than in the past, most in the political class seem to have managed to receive their degrees without having experienced a serious encounter with postmodernism. President Obama, who was long an academic himself, stands out as one of the rare exceptions.
There is a voluminous literature, it is true, connecting Bill Clinton with postmodernism. A pairing of these two terms in a Google search brings up an astounding 270,000 hits. Observers have fastened on the former president's casual relation to what had previously been regarded as moral truths, and on his uncanny ability to evade sanctions that once attached to certain transgressions. All this suggested that Clinton played a seminal role in exposing Americans to a lightheartedness about the deeper strata of things, an outlook that was nicely captured in the phrase "moving on," which made its grand debut in reference to the Clinton scandals. This impression was strengthened by Clinton's unprecedented step of introducing the ontological question into American politics when speculating on what the meaning of is is. Yet to be precise about Clinton's role, the link observers posited between Clinton and postmodernism was based on what they ascribed to this situation. No one alleged that Clinton was postmodern by design, but only that he was so by being there. Postmodernism may have first appeared in the White House with the Clintons, but it only achieved consciousness with Barack Obama.
Postmodernism's impact on politics was initially more tactical than theoretical. Intellectuals, already on the left before they ever became postmodern, discovered in postmodernism a useful weapon to advance their goals. Denying the truth of foundations served to undermine important parts of the tradition, from the claim of natural rights that underlay American exceptionalism to the religious tenets that supported older morality and customs. If all things are socially constructed, there is no reason not to discard any one of them and replace it with something else, it being self-evident that all social constructions are created equal. Progressives employed this tactic selectively, deconstructing only the ideas and practices they disapproved of. Yet since much of the culture at this point still rested on traditional beliefs, it made sense for progressives to embrace the general postmodern doctrine of nonfoundationalism, or what they called "pragmatism." The claim of social construction proved attractive to progressives in one other respect. It encouraged the view that everything is malleable. Reality is what we make it. This liberating notion gave impetus to creating new norms, lifestyles, and genders, with each breakthrough becoming an occasion for celebrating yet another festival of a first.
Tactical postmodernism left open the question of whether this philosophy would continue to serve the cause of progressivism. As progressivism succeeds in wiping out old verities, the culture becomes a product not of tradition, but of the left's making. If postmodernism is an equal-opportunity destroyer, it is the left's creations that may be exposed and subject to hostile makeovers. Wary of this possibility, some leftist thinkers have endeavored to prove that postmodernism is inherently supportive of progressivism. By this account, once pragmatism comes to dominate within the leading segments of society, the result will be a political order, eventually perhaps a world order, of tolerance and democracy. When all give up brandishing their truth claims, which are the source of conflict, people will grow more relaxed and gentle. Relativism chimes with progressivism. This extraordinary view formed the intellectual underpinning of the European Union in the first decade of this century, leading many of Europe's thinkers to laud their new postfoundational democratic order and to contrast it with Americans' primitive insistence on theoretical foundations. The settlement of the world's problems would only come by rejecting the American model and following the European approach. American progressives readily joined in this view.
Reality is now demonstrating the shallowness of this argument, which is collapsing of its own accord. Deeper postmodern thinkers made known in any case that this position had never been intended as anything more than pabulum designed to reassure casual postmoderns of a progressive bent — in other words, most intellectuals — that everyone in the end would think much as they did. Real postmodernism, these thinkers revealed, could offer no support for any particular form of government. Its relativist starting point might just as easily end in a choice to embrace an authoritarian government as a progressive democratic one. What postmodernism can supply is insight for how to prevail in the political world. Postmodernism is ultimately a philosophy of will. After freeing the mind of illusions, it instructs the few, meaning the few who understand, in how to go about imposing their vision on society. Mastery is obtained by shaping the public narrative, that most favored of postmodern words. Narrativicians are the legislators of the world.
Postmodernism's elitist and top-down conception of politics may help account for the progressives' indifference today to the republican dimension of regular citizen participation, especially in state and local politics. Progressives speak of democracy, but it is conceived in terms of an outcome — social justice and liberation — not a process of governing. The only democratic procedure that counts is the mobilization of a national majority for the presidential contest. Postmodern elitism finds its ultimate expression in the technique of linguistic management, a point on which President Obama has shown his true postmodern colors. The administration's strange avoidance of ordinary language— words such as terrorism, war on terrorism, Islamic — in favor of euphemisms and new expressions is a sure sign of a grand strategy of narrative-shaping to further the progressive vision. Even some of the president's prevarications have a strangely postmodern ring, appearing less as ordinary lies meant to hide or get away with something than as attempts to construct a favorable reality. If, as postmodernists like to repeat, "language is the house of being," the president has taken on the task of being its chief building contractor.
This strategy of linguistic manipulation has enjoyed some success in progressive circles, but outside it has fallen well short of what was hoped for. Human perceptions in the face of real conditions may be less susceptible to narrative-shaping than postmodernism has taught. The world is not a field of dreams. The most noteworthy effect of the president's language games has been the emergence of a strong public reaction, arguably stronger than the reaction to the president's policies themselves. Its source is the deep anger of those who sense that they have been treated like unwilling subjects in a laboratory experiment in psychological coercion. It remains now to be seen if this reaction, which parallels the reaction against political correctness, will lead to a curtailment of these methods or, as seems more likely, to the rise of cruder distortions of traditional political discourse.
Progressivism In Practice
The third component that constitutes modern progressivism is made up not of ideas or theories, but of what progressivism has meant in the realm of practice — for life outcomes, mores, and the workings of institutions. Historians and commentators commonly emphasize the realm of practice when offering an overall sketch of progressivism's rival, liberal capitalism. Yet rarely, and then only selectively, do they begin by analyzing progressivism in these terms.
There is a partial historical explanation for this imbalance. Progressivism emerged when liberal capitalism — roughly the Constitution and a free market economy — was in place as the "system." Progressivism was the youthful challenger, not yet part of the system, that aimed to replace the established rival. Viewing progressivism in this light, which initially accorded with reality, became a habit of thinking. It was one that progressives, for political reasons of their own, had reason to encourage. Even as progressivism's actual influence expanded to cover more and more aspects of American life, progressives continued to disclaim responsibility for any of the ills that plagued society. These were all the fault of the system. Like Peter Pan, progressivism will not grow up. By its own self-conception, it cannot.
The statute of limitations on this intellectual anachronism should by all rights have expired long ago. Progressivism has been around now for well over a century and can no longer plausibly present itself as new or young. All of its wrinkles — huge and inefficient bureaucracies, ponderous regulations, and endemic violations of the rule of law — are showing through its makeup. Nor is progressivism the innocent outsider or wayfarer begging at the door for admittance to the system. Progressivism is the system, at least as much as, if not more than, liberal capitalism. And with its vast interests to defend and its clients to sustain, progressivism is also every bit as much constitutive of the status quo. Just as liberal capitalism has bred pathologies like crony capitalism, progressivism has created its dysfunction of crony progressivism.
The vastness and porousness of these two categories make it impossible to parse exactly their relative influence. But much is discernible. In governance, the Constitution still supplies the basic outline of the national government. Yet none would deny that it has been overlaid and modified in practice by the progressive constitution that calls for unlimited federal jurisdiction, a huge administrative apparatus, an expansive domestic presidency, and a jurisprudence of living interpretation. As for which force has run this machine, the contestants have been in constant struggle, often finding themselves in deadlock. But in the three breakthrough political moments since the Depression when one side has held something approaching full political power (the New Deal, the Great Society, and the Obama majority in 2009-2010), it was progressives who were in charge. The closest partisans of liberal capitalism have come to achieving this status was a limited coalitional majority during the Reagan revolution of 1981-82.
Outside the boundaries of government, within the commanding centers of power that shape society and control the manufacture of consent, progressives now fare very well. Higher education, despite the source of much of its private funding, is a bastion of progressivism; the dominant news media, despite corporate ownership, lean decisively to the left; the entertainment industry . . . just watch an Academy Awards show. The moral codes have all been rewritten under progressive guidance, while the influence of religion is declining.
Still playing Peter Pan, progressives conveniently ignore the power of these command centers and insist that decisive control in society lies with the moneyed interests that necessarily support liberal capitalism. The claim is exaggerated. Money can surely buy much, but if it were as powerful as progressives allege, its investments in all of the other social institutions should have netted a much better return. The truth is — just as the progressives' intellectual idol Antonio Gramsci showed — these different sources of command enjoy a substantial degree of independence with the power among them more dispersed than is supposed. Few progressives like to consider the possibility, but it may well be that the upper one percent of the intelligentsia exercises as much overall influence as the upper one percent of the wealthy. And to the great advantage of the left, the members of the intelligentsia are far more homogeneously progressive than the wealthy are liberal capitalist. Wealth in fact is distributed widely between the two contending parties. It can be stipulated that the supporters of liberal capitalism maintain full control over the nation's country clubs, and they no doubt also hold the advantage on Wall Street. Yet a quick look at the largest personal fortunes in America shows that progressives are just as well placed as defenders of capitalism, while in the arena of philanthropic foundations, progressives hold the edge, even without counting the Clinton Foundation.
A major change taking place within the populace today about what constitutes the "system" provides a key for understanding our politics. For a long time, longer than the facts warranted, there was rough agreement between liberal capitalists (known as conservatives) and progressives on what the system was, though not, obviously, on what should be done. Both sides considered the Constitution to be the governing instrument of the political order and the market and free enterprise to be the ordering principle of the economy. Progressives were dissatisfied with this arrangement and wanted it to be changed, while conservatives wanted it to be maintained. Yet both were in basic accord on what the system was.
No longer is this the case. Conservatives look out at the political world today and see it as being run by a progressive establishment. The old system is teetering or gone. Progressives, though surely aware of their enhanced status, elect for obvious reasons to claim that the decisive power lies, much as it did in the past, with the big interests and a capitalist economic elite. Leaving the ideological dimension of the term aside, supporters of which side now think of themselves as "conservative" in the literal sense of being conservers or defenders of the prevailing order? It is not now conservatives, and not yet progressives.
The general public sees problems all around — a loss of opportunity, a low-growth economy, stagnant wages in the middle class, mounting debt, and lingering poverty. Yet who or what is accountable? For progressives the fault continues to lie with liberal capitalism. For conservatives it lies in the new system, progressivism, that was built supposedly to resolve these problems.
Where then is the left today? Gone is the pixie dust that Barack Obama sprinkled over American politics in 2008 that led so many, for a moment, to imagine a new dimension to American politics. The left today is all about the ideology of progressivism. It is fated to blame all ills on the shrinking part of the political order and society it does not yet fully control and to demand more measures to shrink it still further. Progressivism is on a treadmill, running either at a fast clip toward huge new piecemeal changes or at a faster clip toward a change to socialism. The direction is the same.
James W. Ceaser is professor of politics at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His "The Roots of Obama Worship" appeared in our issue of January 25, 2010.
