...This country belongs to the people who inhabit it. Its resources, its business, its institutions and its laws should be utilized, maintained or altered in whatever manner will best promote the general interest...

The Old Parties

Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people.

From these great tasks both of the old parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare, they have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.

To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.

The deliberate betrayal of its trust by the Republican Party, and the fatal incapacity of the Democratic Party to deal with the new issues of the new time, have compelled the people to forge a new instrument of government through which to give effect to their will in laws and institutions.

Unhampered by tradition, uncorrupted by power, undismayed by the magnitude of the task, the new party offers itself as the instrument of the people to sweep away old abuses, to build a new and nobler commonwealth.

A Covenant with the People

This declaration is our covenant with the people, and we hereby bind the party and its candidates in State and Nation to the pledges made herein.

The Rule of the People

The Progressive Party, committed to the principle of government by a self-controlled democracy expressing its will through representatives of the people, pledges itself to secure such alterations in the fundamental law of the several States and of the United States as shall insure the representative character of the Government.

In particular, the party declares for direct primaries for nomination of State and National officers, for Nation-wide preferential primaries for candidates for the Presidency, for the direct election of United States Senators by the people; and we urge on the States the policy of the short ballot, with responsibility to the people secured by the initiative, referendum and recall.

The Progressives were united in their contempt for what they called the "individualism" of the Founding. Instead of a government that protects natural rights through limited, decentralized powers, they envisioned an expansive government, a "living" and evolving Constitution, and the rule of "experts" in nationally centralized administrative agencies...

Whereas the Founders believed the government had a well-defined and limited role to play in the lives of citizens - essentially leaving people alone to lead their lives - the Progressives favored a much more active role for the government in overseeing civil society, regulating the economy, and redistributing wealth.

These two fundamentally different understandings of the role of government grow out of two different understandings of freedom. For the Progressives, freedom is not secured when government protects natural rights and otherwise leaves citizens to rule themselves. True freedom, by this view, demands an active government that provides equal means to self-fulfillment for all. It is not enough to create the conditions that allow people to pursue their own happiness - equal opportunity - since some citizens start with more advantages than others. Government must set out to level the playing field and determine outcomes...

Liberalism can be understood in two very different ways. Liberalism, or what some call "classical liberalism," is a political philosophy based on individual liberty and limited government. Over the last century, however, liberalism has come to take on a different meaning. The contemporary understanding of liberalism is based not on individual liberty, but on the use of government to grant benefits and advantages in order to give everyone the ability to achieve a certain standard of living and reduce inequalities. Therefore, modern liberalism encourages an extensive network of interest groups that receive benefits from government and organize in order to preserve those benefits.

Modern liberalism grows out of the Progressive rejection of American constitutionalism and an embrace of a new conception of freedom, anchored in big government.

...concepts the proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users [that] cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone.

More recently, cognitive linguists have explored contested concepts in the context of frame semantics... That is, we define words relative to other ideas that come to mind when we hear, read, or think about them. Those other ideas form the "frame" within which we find meaning for a word. Both "liberal" and "progressive" exist in the POLITICS frame and - in the U.S. - both imply opposition to "conservative." Add to that the fact that conservatives have for decades used "liberal" as an epithet, and many people have come to believe that "progressive" is simply a euphemism for "liberal." But those two terms have different histories and hallmarks.

Liberalism is a set of ideals grounded in the social contract (rule by consent of the governed for mutual benefit), both negative liberty (freedom from unreasonable interference) and positive liberty (access to basic resources to pursue one's goals), and both equality in law (legal rights and privileges), and equality of opportunity (social mobility). Liberalism is an ideology, and over three hundred years of history have shown that it can be robust and successful. Indeed the past three centuries can reasonably be summarized as the rise and spread of liberal ideals.

Progressivism is a problem-solving method. Historians generally date Progressive Era as 1890-1920, but the progressive method did not end with that date. The progressive method is not an ideology but a pragmatic search for solutions that work, grounded in a healthy skepticism.

Thus, for example, Prohibition was a progressive project and was based on the social science of that era , but 'The Great Experiment' of Prohibition failed in practice and progressives also worked for its repeal. The 20th century can reasonably be summarized as the rise and spread of the progressive method.

In short, it's not enough to practice the progressive method. That method must be applied toward goals grounded in liberal ideals, and it we must recognize when it's time to 'fish or cut bait' and be willing to advocate the best solutions we can find with confidence, even as we recognize that we will need to adapt to new information and changing conditions.

.. But it must be said: the very freedom of the liberal society allows for the destruction of that liberal society, especially via the ballot box. In a liberal democracy, after all, the majority (or rather those who influence the passions of that majority) has absolute power over state and society, and there is no ironclad rule that the majority must vote for liberal ideals forever, making it inevitable that charlatans or fanatics will seek to use the masses to realize their own ideologies...

This growing chasm between liberalism and democracy has been expounded upon, in different forms, by many thinkers far more eminent than myself...

It is through these disparate analyses of conflict that we can make out the form of one liberalism’s most determined and fanatical adversaries, not that of reaction, but rather, leftism. Leftism is not a new phenomenon and has reared its head in countless nations and epochs throughout human history, from ancient Chinese Agriculturalism to the English Diggers to the Jacobins to Lenin, with the common theme of doing away with any inequality by any means whatsoever. The leftist’s claim to legitimacy in all of this is essentially democratic in nature: only he really cares about the people’s well being, only he knows their best interest, even if they themselves have been deceived as to just what that is; he represents the majority. He is the General Will.

For the leftist, liberal buzzwords about civility, merit, moderation, and limited government are just constructs created by an immoral class seeking to preserve its privilege in the face of the leveling that is the only just way to order the world. The liberty the liberal so cherishes cannot be allowed by the leftist to persist in any form because it might be used to perpetuate that most odious of sins, inequality....

Conservatives view things along a civilized/barbaric axis, liberals along an oppressed/oppressor axis, and libertarians along a freedom/coercion axis. Conservatives will thus favor things that correlate well with (in particular, Western) civilization, while opposing things that correlate with poorly civilized societies or that would directly contradict salient features of civilization. Progressives, on the other hand, don't care about civilization - they care about defending the oppressed and opposing the oppressors. The "civilized" side can be the wrong side if it's taking on the role of an oppressor. And Libertarians don't see civilization or oppressors - they only want to know if someone is being coerced to do something - that's the wrong side.

Neoconservatism ... originated in the 1970s as a movement of anti-Soviet liberals and social democrats in the tradition of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Henry ('Scoop') Jackson, many of whom preferred to call themselves 'paleoliberals.' [After the end of the Cold War] ... many 'paleoliberals' drifted back to the Democratic center ... Today's neocons are a shrunken remnant of the original broad neocon coalition. Nevertheless, the origins of their ideology on the left are still apparent. The fact that most of the younger neocons were never on the left is irrelevant; they are the intellectual (and, in the case of William Kristol and John Podhoretz, the literal) heirs of older ex-leftists.³

So why did we invade Iraq? I believe it was the triumph of the so-called neo-conservative ideology, as well as Bush administration arrogance and incompetence that took America into this war of choice. . . . They obviously made a convincing case to a president with very limited national security and foreign policy experience, who keenly felt the burden of leading the nation in the wake of the deadliest terrorist attack ever on American soil.³

The conservative’s traditional sympathy for the American South and its people and heritage, evident in the works of such great American conservatives as Richard M. Weaver and Russell Kirk, began to disappear... [T]he neocons are heavily influenced by Woodrow Wilson, with perhaps a hint of Theodore Roosevelt. ... They believe in an aggressive U.S. presence practically everywhere, and in the spread of democracy around the world, by force if necessary. ... Neoconservatives tend to want more efficient government agencies; paleoconservatives want fewer government agencies. [Neoconservatives] generally admire President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his heavily interventionist New Deal policies. Neoconservatives have not exactly been known for their budget consciousness, and you won't hear them talking about making any serious inroads into the federal apparatus.⁵

Conservatives view things along a civilized/barbaric axis, liberals along an oppressed/oppressor axis, and libertarians along a freedom/coercion axis. Conservatives will thus favor things that correlate well with (in particular, Western) civilization, while opposing things that correlate with poorly civilized societies or that would directly contradict salient features of civilization. Progressives, on the other hand, don't care about civilization - they care about defending the oppressed and opposing the oppressors. The "civilized" side can be the wrong side if it's taking on the role of an oppressor. And Libertarians don't see civilization or oppressors - they only want to know if someone is being coerced to do something - that's the wrong side.

... Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution... and usher in a new socialist society.

During the 20th century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million of their own people... In practice, Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.

By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals... came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, where there were large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living...

Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories...

Critical race theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s, built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism...

There are a series of euphemisms deployed by its supporters to describe critical race theory, including “equity,” “social justice,” “diversity and inclusion,” and “culturally responsive teaching.” Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality..

As Americans concerned for the common good of the nation, we reject the following tenets of “Critical Race Theory” as directly opposed to the fundamental principles of American government and political order:

• That any human being simply by virtue of being born in a given racial category (e.g., their “whiteness”) is inherently evil or bears guilt for actions committed by others in the past or present.

• That the principle of the inherent equality and dignity of all human beings insofar as they are human enables racism instead of serving as the firmest bulwark against it.

• That those who oppose replacing the equality of all citizens under the law with a system of “equity” that treats people unequally based on racial categories are complicit in racism or white supremacy.

• That establishing a legal regime of racial hierarchies is equitable or just.

In my own work I’ve called it a “moral culture” rather than a religion, and I think that’s probably more accurate. We could call it “social justice culture,” or as Jason Manning and I called it, “victimhood culture,” but in any case, it’s a worldview that places a certain conception of social justice as the highest value...

Drawing from critical theory, those who embrace this moral culture tend to view various social identities as the most important thing about people, and they see those identities as oppressor or victim identities. To be white, male, Christian, or straight, for example is to have a privileged position in a system of oppression, and to be a person of color, female, non-Christian, or LGBT is to be disadvantaged...

... interpreting everything in terms of oppression and in elevating those concerns above all others seems to have led many of the activists to disregard liberal values such as due process and free speech.

The Left wants a race war in America because they cannot otherwise win the ideological war they are waging.

The former is a cover for the latter...

Today’s Marxists’ ideological pursuit of tyrannical control transcends race, which is merely a stealth bomber in their fleet. This is not a race war. It’s something much bigger.

• Human beings are fundamentally equal insofar as they are human and citizens and must be treated as such by law.

• Blaming groups of citizens for evils they did not commit based on their race, color, or ethnicity is morally wrong and will result in civic disorder and balkanization.

• A system based on “equity”, in which equity means rejecting equality under the law and distributing goods and services on the basis of race alone is neither equitable nor just.

• Government and public institutions must not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to persons on the basis of race, color, or ethnicity.

No longer simply an academic matter, critical race theory has become a tool of political power...

Critical race theorists must be confronted with and forced to speak to the facts...

There are three parts to a successful strategy to defeat the forces of critical race theory: governmental action, grassroots mobilization, and an appeal to principle.

Similarly, in addition to pointing out the dishonesty of the historical narrative on which critical race theory is predicated, we must promote the true story of America...

Strictly speaking, Critical Race Theory is not even traditionally racist; it’s exclusively anti-white. It is pro all races other than white....

Critical Race Theory’s central project is to make whites accept dhimmitude, not socialism....

... Brockell recalls Douglass’s famous July 4 address (pdf), delivered in Rochester, New York, to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. The first part of the speech does indeed support Brockell’s account, because Douglass gives a savage indictment of how American independence looks to a black man...

Already one can see Douglass’s speech as a masterpiece of rhetoric, each phrase building on the previous one, almost like a wave gathering force before crashing down on the audience. Yet as the speech moves on, Douglass makes a sharp and surprising turn. Far from denouncing the Fourth of July, far from scorning the Declaration of Independence as a charter of hypocrisy, far from blaming the Constitution for making an unholy pact with slavery—this is precisely what the critical race theorists do today—Douglass roundly affirms the founding as a “glorious liberty document” that launched “forces in operation” that “must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.”...

Douglass ended his speech on a patriotic note that vividly contrasts with the way he began, and shows why he had no problem, in the end, with celebrating the Fourth of July and what it represented. Of the Constitution, Douglass later said, “Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution needs to be altered.” That’s because the document gives no support, no sanction, to slavery....

America today is dominated by a system of beliefs, attitudes and values that we have come to know as "Political Correctness." For many it is an annoyance and a self parodying joke. But Political Correctness is deadly serious in its aims, seeking to impose a uniformity of thought and behavior on all Americans. It is therefore totalitarian in nature. Its roots lie in a version of Marxism which sees culture, rather than the economy, as the site of class struggle.

Under Marxist economic theory, the oppressed workers were supposed to be the beneficiaries of a social revolution that would place them on top of the power structure. When these revolutionary opportunities presented themselves, however, the workers did not respond. The Marxist revolutionaries did not blame their theory for these failures; instead they blamed the "ruling class," which had bought off the workers by giving them "rights," and had blinded them with a "false consciousness" that led them to support national governments and liberal democracy.

One group of Marxist intellectuals resolved this apparent contradiction of Marxist theory by an analysis that focused on society's cultural "superstructure" rather than on the economic "base" as Marx did. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs contributed the most to this new cultural Marxism.

Among Marxists, Gramsci is noted for his theory that cultural hegemony is the means to class dominance. In his view, a new "Communist man" had to be created through a changed culture before any political revolution was possible. This led to a focus on the efforts of intellectuals in the fields of education and media.

Georg Lukacs believed that for a new Marxist culture to emerge, the existing culture must be destroyed. He said, "I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch.... Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries."

In 1923, Lukacs and other Marxist intellectuals associated with the Communist Party of Germany founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany. The Institute, which became known as the Frankfurt School, was modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. In 1933, when Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled. Most came to the United States and many became influential in American universities. The Frankfurt School's studies combined Marxist analysis with Freudian psychoanalysis to form the basis of what became known as "Critical Theory."

Critical Theory was essentially destructive criticism of the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention and conservatism.

Critical Theorists recognized that traditional beliefs and the existing social structure would have to be destroyed and then replaced with a "new thinking" that would become as much a part of elementary consciousness as the old one had been. Their theories took hold in the tumultuous 1960s, when the Vietnam War opened a Pandora's Box of reevaluaton and revolution. The student radicals of the era were strongly influenced by revolutionary ideas, among them those of Herbert Marcuse, a member of the Frankfurt School who preach the "Great Refusal," a rejection of all basic Western concepts and an embrace of sexual liberation, and the merits of feminist and black revolutions. His primary thesis was that university students, ghetto blacks, the alienated, the asocial, and the Third World could take the place of the proletariat in the coming Communist revolution.

Marcuse may be the most important member of the Frankfurt School in terms of the origins of Political Correctness, because he was the critical link to the counterculture of the 1960s. His objective was clear: "One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including morality of existing society."

When addressing the general public, contemporary advocates of Political Correctness - or Cultural Marxism, as it might just as easily be called - present their beliefs with appealing simplicity as merely a commitment to being "sensitive" to other people and embracing values such as "tolerance" and "diversity."

The reality is different. Political Correctness is the use of culture as a sharp weapon to enforce new norms and to stigmatize those who dissent from the new dispensation; to stigmatize those who insist on values that will impede the new "PC" regime: free speech and free and objective intellectual inquiry.

Adapted from: "Political Correctness": A Short History of an Ideology," edited by William Lind (November 2004).²

...We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it?

We call it "Political Correctness." The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, it's deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.

If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.

First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies...

... the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.

... just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good - feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be "victims," and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.

... both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions...

For the cultural Marxist, it's deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired... So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that we're familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness...

... In the 1920s and 1930s Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who argued that traditional values must be obliterated in order to free "oppressed" social groups, called for eliminating social decorum and glorifying perverse behavior in order to destroy the Western middle class and collapse society from within. Translated into today's terminology, the plan prescribed the commandeering of news and entertainment media, religious and financial institutions, organized labor, health care, and education.

Gramsci's cultural Marxism began to reach throughout society when Frankfurt University's Institute for Marxism -- renamed the Institute for Social Research and informally called the Frankfurt School - fled Nazi Germany, took up temporary residence at Columbia University in 1933, and then, during World War II, began using Gramsci-derived "critical theory" to "deconstruct" American society. German-born philosopher-writer Herbert Marcuse and other Marxists carried cultural Marxism beyond Columbia, and progressives adopted the disease as a weapon of "change" to be deployed within the education system...

So camouflaged has been the use of Gramsci's brainchild that most education school indoctrinees -- K-12 teachers -- have never really weighed the consequences of conditioning students to reject a moral and prosperous America...

Critical Theory was essentially destructive criticism of the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention and conservatism.

Critical Theorists recognized that traditional beliefs and the existing social structure would have to be destroyed and then replaced with a "new thinking" that would become as much a part of elementary consciousness as the old one had been...

... the radical feminism, the women's studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments - all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you're tempted to ask, "What is the theory?" The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can't be done, that we can't imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we're living under repression - the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression - we can't even imagine it.

What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s...

Both communism and the New Left are alive and thriving here in America. They favor code words: tolerance, social justice, economic justice, peace, reproductive rights, sex education and safe sex, safe schools, inclusion, diversity, and sensitivity. All together, this is Cultural Marxism disguised as multiculturalism.

Not only has Marxism survived, it is thriving and has in some ways grown stronger. Leftist ideas about Multiculturalism and de-facto open borders have achieved a virtual hegemony in public discourse, their critics vilified and demonized. By hiding their intentions under labels such as "anti-racism" and "tolerance," Leftists have achieved a degree of censorship of public discourse they could never have dreamt of had they openly stated that their intention was to radically transform Western civilization and destroy its foundations.

The Left have become ideological orphans after the Cold War, or perhaps we should call them ideological mercenaries. Although the viable economic alternative to capitalism didn't work out, their hatred for this system never subsided, it merely transformed into other forms. Multiculturalism is just a different word for "divide and conquer," pitting various ethnic and cultural groups against each other and destroying the coherence of Western society from within.

At the very least, the people living in the former Communist countries knew and admitted that they were taking part in a gigantic social experiment, and that the media and the authorities were serving them propaganda to shore up support for this project. Yet in the supposedly free West, we are taking part in a gigantic social experiment of Multiculturalism and Muslim immigration every bit as radical, utopian and potentially dangerous as Communism, seeking to transform our entire society from top to bottom, and still we refuse to even acknowledge that this is going on.

The definition of equity comes from the public administration literature. It was written by a man named George Frederickson and the definition is an administered political economy in which shares are adjusted so that citizens are made equal. Does that sound like anything you've heard of before - like socialism?

They're going to administer an economy to make shares equal. The only difference between equity and socialism is the type of property that they redistribute: the type of shares. They're going to redistribute social and cultural capital in addition to economic and material capital.

And so this is my thesis. When we say "what is woke?" - it's Maoism with American characteristics...

We think that Marx was talking about economics...

If we go below the surface what Marx was talking about was something different.

At the end of history mankind will remember that he is a social being and we will have a socialist society - a perfect communism that transcends private property - is how he put it...

But Marx was never an economist. He was a theologian.

He wanted to produce a religion for mankind that would supersede all of the religions of mankind and bring him back to his true social nature...

We look at this idea a special form of property that segregates society into people who have - the Bourgeois - and the people who do not have - who are in class conflict...

Take out class, put in race. Change out class put in race and watch: we get Critical Race Theory...

Just Like Karl Marx said that in the Communist Manifesto he wrote communism can be summarized in a single sentence - the abolition of private property - well this is why Critical Race Theory calls to abolish Whiteness. Because whiteness is a form of private property. People who have access to this property are Whites or White adjacent or they act White...

If you think of whiteness as a form of cultural capital, white supremacy as they define it is identical to capitalism... It's not believing that white people are superior. It's believing that white people have access to the control of society...

Marx merely believed it was through economic means. Now it's through socio-cultural means. The evolution into this - sometimes called Western Marxism - began in the 1920s.

Today, multiculturalism and its politics of identity pose an existential threat to the American political order comparable to slavery in the 1850s or communism during the Cold War. Once confined to graduate seminars and the ethnic "studies" departments at our nation's colleges and universities, multiculturalism is now the authoritative ideology reigning over higher education, our media and political establishments, legal system, and corporate boardrooms.

If we do not reverse multiculturalism's advance, it will continue to undermine our country and constitutionalism, destroying the possibility of a common good and a life of civic peace. Indeed, multiculturalism threatens to take down western civilization as whole.

By multiculturalism, we do not mean the mere presence of many cultures, races, or ethnic traditions, which are a fixture of modern American life and can be found across our states, communities, institutions, and private associations....

Multiculturalism, on the other hand, is not this benign tolerance of diverse traditions. Multiculturalism is a comprehensive ideology, demanding obeisance to a rigid system of justice, vices, and virtues. It boasts an intellectual tradition that guides its leadership and adherents in the policing of its boundaries and the maintenance of its categories. It keeps a running list of friends and enemies, a roster of praise, shame, and blame.

In short, multiculturalism is a worldview - a regime, in the classical sense; a political and cultural way of life all wrapped up in one. As an ideology, it stands for nearly the opposite of America's national motto. It seeks to divide and conquer Americans, making many groups out of one citizenry. The modern Left, accustomed to running the campuses according to the new social justice diktats of multiculturalism, now wants to run the world that way.

The threat multiculturalism presents to the American regime and our way of life is now urgent.

We have decided to use the term "multiculturalism" instead of "identity politics" or a similar term, because despite its limitations and current usage "multiculturalism" is more comprehensive. It is a new system of truth and justice that seeks to revolutionize and transform the American way. Identity politics is the coalitional strategy of multiculturalism and political correctness its enforcement arm....

The failure to apprehend fully and take seriously multiculturalism has also led many on the Right to misinterpret and underappreciate President Trump's virtues and his significance as a political phenomenon. Trump understands instinctually that multiculturalism (and its politics of identity and political correctness) is anti-American. He understands that the unity found in patriotism is the antidote to a politics of group identity that if left unchallenged will irreparably divide and balkanize the American citizenry and lead to disunion....

The American Right's failure to evaluate correctly President Trump, his political movement, and the nature of his opposition stems from a much deeper error. They cannot think prudentially....

There are few categorical rules in politics, but in a republic, public opinion is everything. Public rhetoric and political demonstration can shape the public mind decisively.

Much of the American Right, regrettably, does not think of politics in this way. They are enamored with process rather than substance and do not think comprehensively about the rhetoric of justice. They take too narrow a view of politics. Unless conservatives begin to think about politics as Lincoln did - comprehensively - they will lose to multiculturalism....

The modern multiculturalist Left is intent on proliferating divisions without concern for American unity, cohesion, and stability. The modern Right is confused about the threat to the union posed by this political strategy. We must change course, and soon....

Many conservatives did not see that Trump had framed the 2016 election as a choice between two mutually exclusive regimes: multiculturalism and America. What I call “multiculturalism” includes “identity politics” and “political correctness.” If multiculturalism continues to worm its way into the public mind, it will ultimately destroy America....

I realize the term “multiculturalism” is somewhat dated, but I mean to freshen it up by using it in its most comprehensive sense—as a political philosophy. Multiculturalism conceives of society as a collection of cultural identity groups, each with its own worldview, all oppressed by white males, collectively existing within permeable national boundaries. Multiculturalism replaces American citizens with so-called “global citizens.” It carves “tribes” out of a society whose most extraordinary success has been their assimilation into one people. It makes education a political exercise in the liberation of an increasing number of “others,” and makes American history a collection of stories of white oppression, thereby dismantling our unifying, self-affirming narrative—without which no nation can long survive....

During the 2016 campaign, Trump exposed multiculturalism as the revolutionary movement it is. He showed us that multiculturalism, like slavery in the 1850’s, is an existential threat. Trump exposed this threat by standing up to it and its enforcement arm, political correctness. Indeed, he made it his business to kick political correctness in the groin on a regular basis. In countless variations of crassness, he said over and over exactly what political correctness prohibits one from saying: “America does not want cultural diversity; we have our culture, it’s exceptional, and we want to keep it that way.”...

Most conservatives did not see Trump in 2016 as a man defending America. This was in large part because they did not see that America was in need of defending....

... the impulse for electing Trump was patriotic, the defense of one’s own culture ...

... Multiculturalism, not Trumpism, is the revolution. Trump’s campaign, and its defense by his intellectual supporters, was not a call for a revolution but a call to stop a revolution. Trump’s intellectual supporters did not say things could not get worse; they said without a sharp change in course there was a good chance we shall never get back home again....

The core idea of each of these [Trump's] anti-P.C. blasts, when taken in aggregate, represent a commitment to America’s bourgeois culture, which is culturally “Judeo-Christian,” insists on having but one language and one set of laws, and values: among other things, loyalty, practical experience, self-reliance, and hard work....

Trump understands that “diversity is our greatest strength,” which is multiculturalism boiled down to an aphorism, is exactly backwards. America’s greatest strength is having transcended race, and the one major exception was very nearly our undoing. In light of this history, the history of the world (one “tribal” war after another), and the multicultural car wreck that is Europe today, to manufacture cultural diversity is nothing less than self-immolating idiocy. Trump might not put it in these words, but he gets it. The average American gets it too, because it is not very difficult to get: it is common sense....

From openness to emptiness: Our bipartisan elite wants to replace America with a vapid utopia where anything goes....

Thomas Klingenstein labels this regime “multiculturalism.” That’s as good a label as any. It expresses a dream of porous borders, heroic affirmations of difference and diversity, limitless openness, and life without an authoritative center. The regime is not “left.” It is bipartisan. Addressing the United Nations after the fall of the Soviet Union, the reliable voice of the American establishment, George H. W. Bush, dismissed the antiquated world of partisan loves and consolidating loyalties. He intoned, “I see a world of open borders, open trade, and, most importantly, open minds.” Multiculturalism stands as an ideologically developed version of this bipartisan establishment consensus in favor of ever-greater openness....

Almost the entire conservative apparatus is now captive to a libertarian-inflected political correctness. It promises to protect free speech and (perhaps) religious freedom, but shrinks from any substantive positions on cultural issues....

... In practice, in the United States, identity politics is the atomization of the entire vast and intricate demography of 325 million Americans into dozens of overlapping aggrieved sub-sets, each claiming discrimination. This is the fragmentation of society into victim associations: ethnicities, groups of minority sexual orientations, people with physical and mental handicaps, with career reversals—an ever-broadening range of bearers of attitudes and afflictions. All groups except straight adult white males are endlessly hunted and outed to be embraced as yet another wronged collectivity that American virtue requires to be highlighted, elevated, and compensated; all, of course, in exchange for their votes.

In this seething deconstruction of the ostensibly united American people, political correctness is the iron code of discipline. Every step of the march is a debunking of America, a shaming of its hypocrisy, presumption, and moral turpitude....

Multiculturalism is bad policy when large groups of immigrants decline to assimilate to their new country. Virtuous and sincere and successful immigration need not mean cultural deracination. But immigration requires a conscious, determined decision to assimilate to the society where the immigrant arrives....

Yet, as Klingenstein rightly objects, advocacy of this form of immigration has become the official policy of the Democrats, who have been demographically captured and have sold out, bag and baggage, to illegal Latino immigrants....

Capitalism and socialism are somewhat opposing schools of thought in economics. The central arguments in the socialism vs. capitalism debate are about economic equality and the role of government. Socialists believe economic inequality is bad for society, and the government is responsible for reducing it via programs that benefit the poor (e.g., free public education, free or subsidized healthcare, social security for the elderly, higher taxes on the rich). On the other hand, capitalists believe that the government does not use economic resources as efficiently as private enterprises do, and therefore society is better off with the free market determining economic winners and losers.

The U.S. is widely considered the bastion of capitalism, and large parts of Scandinavia and Western Europe are considered socialist democracies. However, the truth is every developed country has some programs that are socialist.

An extreme form of socialism is communism.

Social ownership may refer to forms of public, cooperative, or collective ownership; to citizen ownership of equity; or to any combination of these. Although there are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them, social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms.

Socialism can be divided into both non-market and market forms. Non-market socialism involves the substitution of an economic mechanism based on engineering and technical criteria centered around calculation performed in-kind for factor markets, money and the accumulation of capital; therefore functioning according to different economic laws than those of capitalism. Non-market socialism aims to circumvent the inefficiencies and crises traditionally associated with the profit system. By contrast, market socialism retains the use of monetary prices and factor markets for the allocation of capital goods between socially-owned enterprises and, in some cases, the profit motive with respect to their operation...

The socialist political movement includes a diverse array of political philosophies that originated amid the revolutionary movements of the mid-to-late 1700s out of general concern for the social problems that were associated with capitalism. In addition to the debate over markets and planning, the varieties of socialism differ in their form of social ownership, how management is to be organized within productive institutions, and the role of the state in constructing socialism. Core dichotomies associated with these concerns include reformism versus revolutionary socialism, and state socialism versus libertarian socialism.

Democratic socialism is a political system wherein there is democratic control of a socialist economic system. It thus combines political democracy with social ownership of significant elements of the means of production. Sometimes used synonymously with "socialism", the adjective "democratic" is often added to distinguish itself from the Marxist-Leninist brand of socialism, which is widely viewed as being non-democratic.

Democratic socialism is distinguished from both the Soviet model of centralized socialism and from social democracy, where "social democracy" refers to support for political democracy, regulation of the capitalist economy, and a welfare state...

That is, whereas social democrats only seek to "humanize" capitalism through state intervention, democratic socialists see capitalism as inherently incompatible with the democratic values of liberty, equality and solidarity; and believe that the issues inherent to capitalism can only be solved by superseding private ownership with some form of social ownership.

Social democracy is the idea that the state needs to provide security and equality for its people and should actively reorder society in a way that is conducive to such developments, but that such changes should be brought about gradually, legitimated by a democratically-elected majority.

It is native to Europe, where social democrats regularly feature as one of the major parties and have led (or at least participated in) governments in most states at some point in time, most notably in Scandinavia (up to being nicknamed the "Nordic model"). Social democrats typically regard government intervention as a force for good, constraining markets and engaging in redistributive efforts for the benefit of the lower classes in order to establish a more equitable society.

As a political theory, European social democracy has its origins in the development of the workers’ movement, inspired by Marxist and utopian socialist ideas, in the second half of the 19th century. This movement spawned political parties with the label “social democratic,” “socialist,” or “labor” in practically every European country...

Social democratic parties went on to establish themselves as mainstream political forces, participating in government or forming the main opposition, in almost every European country. Where social democrats were electorally successful, they were able to promote institutions such as the welfare state and corporatist bargaining in the workplace, and in some countries they brought parts of the private economy under government control.

Social democracy is a political ideology that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a capitalist economy, and a policy regime involving collective bargaining arrangements, a commitment to representative democracy, measures for income redistribution, regulation of the economy in the general interest and welfare state provisions. Social democracy thus aims to create the conditions for capitalism to lead to greater democratic, egalitarian and solidaristic outcomes; and is often associated with the set of socioeconomic policies that became prominent in Northern and Western Europe—particularly the Nordic model in the Nordic countries—during the latter half of the 20th century.

Social democracy originated as a political ideology that advocated an evolutionary and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism using established political processes in contrast to the revolutionary approach to transition associated with orthodox Marxism...

Modern social democracy is characterized by a commitment to policies aimed at curbing inequality, oppression of underprivileged groups, and poverty; including support for universally accessible public services like care for the elderly, child care, education, health care and workers' compensation. The social democratic movement also has strong connections with the labour movement and trade unions, and is supportive of collective bargaining rights for workers...

What might be called "transnational progressivism" is the ideology for an age once thought not to need one. President Obama, for example, was hailed as 'not a doctinaire liberal' and 'centrist and pragmatic'. The truth, as eight sorry years have shown, is very different...

Hoover Institution scholar Peter Berkowitz noted that, in fact, Obama does share similarities with the pragmatist philosophers in the sense that he is, as they were, a progressive ideologue promoting a decidedly ideological agenda (think John Dewey), while masquerading as a rational non-partisan “pragmatist” committed to “what works” rather than to a progressive utopian vision of the future...

Whether one examines national health care, immigration, racial and gender politics, LGBT rights, executive orders, aggressive “diversity” initiatives promoting “substantive equality” throughout the federal government in education, housing, energy, defence and elsewhere, judicial appointments, and foreign policy openings to Iran and Cuba—after seven years, it is clear that the current American President is the most ideological since Ronald Reagan. After all, the stated goal of the Obama administration is the “fundamental transformation of the United States of America”, which suggests neither a “centrist” nor “pragmatic” agenda.

Obama’s ideology is progressivism, an American branch of a global ideology that could be described as transnational progressivism or global progressivism. The American wing of progressivism (sometimes confusingly called liberalism) shares a broad worldview with the Western Left generally.

At home, global progressives focus on promoting what they call “marginalised” groups, such as women, LGBT people, racial minorities, linguistic minorities, immigrants, particularly Muslims. For example, the Western Left calls for “gender parity” (imposed proportional representation) across the board in all institutions of civic life, by fiat if necessary (violating the tenets of a free society)...

These new (post-1960s) fault lines are based on ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, immigration, language, religion, globalism and other issues that are even more divisive for national cohesion than traditional class struggle...

Abroad, Western Leftists promote (in varying degrees and where politically possible) what they call “global governance”, meaning the building of supranational institutions and policies that diminish the role of the nation-state, including the democratic nation-state. The ultimate goal of this grand ideological project is the creation of an increasingly integrated global order with laws and institutions that are superior to those of the nation-state...

Western progressives appear to approach external and internal politics with sharply different mindsets. International relations are viewed through the prism of “win-win”...

On the other hand, the progressives view domestic politics as strictly a zero-sum game. Their opponents at home, Western conservatives, are often excoriated as racists, xenophobes and reactionary retrogrades...

First and foremost, in the West today, an intense ideological struggle is raging non-stop over the most momentous issues of world politics, including the singular, primary political question: Who should govern? The current migrant crisis and the ongoing issues of mass immigration, multiculturalism and cultural assimilation highlight this ideological conflict throughout Western politics.

Who decides immigration policy: democratic nation-states or hundreds of thousands or millions of migrants on their own? Who accommodates to whom: host nationals or newcomers? What principles determine policy: government by consent of the governed or evolving concepts of global human rights? If the latter, who decides what those universal human rights are?...

...principled democratic nationalists, whether Reaganite-Thatcherite or Gaullist, have more in common with each other than with their leftist opponents who emphasise identity politics...

What is at stake in determining refugee-immigration-assimilation policy (which must be seen as one interdependent issue) is the right of societal preservation and societal reproduction: Does a free people have the right to perpetuate its way of life or not?...

Do the French, British, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Americans and Australians have the right to decide for themselves whether or not to perpetuate their cultures, institutions and ways of life? Or will these questions be decided for them (and against their will) by transnational elites (through ideologically partisan interpretations of global human rights) and/or by millions of migrants from the developing world “voting with their feet” and arriving without the consent of the host nation’s citizens?...

The Intellectuals

There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads... The alternative right are a much smarter group of people - which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They’re dangerously bright...

The media empire of the modern-day alternative right coalesced around Richard Spencer during his editorship of Taki’s Magazine. In 2012, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, which would become a center of alt-right thought.

Alongside other nodes like Steve Sailer’s blog, VDARE and American Renaissance, AlternativeRight.com became a gathering point for an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another. All of these websites have been accused of racism...

Steve Sailer, meanwhile, helped sparked the “human biodiversity” movement, a group of bloggers and researchers who strode eagerly into the minefield of scientific race differences — in a much less measured tone than former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade...

...[LessWrong.com] began a gleeful demolition of the age-old biases of western political discourse. Liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism were all put under the microscope of the neoreactionaries, who found them wanting.

Liberal democracy, they argued, had no better a historical track record than monarchy, while egalitarianism flew in the face of every piece of research on hereditary intelligence...

Natural Conservatives

Natural conservatives can broadly be described as the group that the intellectuals above were writing for. They are mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic.

In their politics, these new conservatives are only following their natural instincts — the same instincts that motivate conservatives across the globe. These motivations have been painstakingly researched by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and an instinct keenly felt by a huge swathe of the political population: the conservative instinct.

Acclaimed social psychologist Jonathan Haidt described the conservative instinct in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind.

The conservative instinct, as described by Haidt, includes a preference for homogeneity over diversity, for stability over change, and for hierarchy and order over radical egalitarianism...

For natural conservatives, culture, not economic efficiency, is the paramount value. More specifically, they value the greatest cultural expressions of their tribe. Their perfect society does not necessarily produce a soaring GDP, but it does produce symphonies, basilicas and Old Masters. The natural conservative tendency within the alt-right points to these apotheoses of western European culture and declares them valuable and worth preserving and protecting...

...they doubt that full “integration” is ever possible. If it is, it won’t be successful in the “kumbaya” sense. Border walls are a much safer option...

It’s arguable that natural conservatives haven’t had real political representation for decades. Since the 1980s, establishment Republicans have obsessed over economics and foreign policy, fiercely defending the Reagan-Thatcher economic consensus at home and neoconservative interventionism abroad. In matters of culture and morality, the issues that natural conservatives really care about, all territory has been ceded to the Left, which now controls the academy, the entertainment industry and the press...

For decades, the concerns of those who cherish western culture have been openly ridiculed and dismissed as racist. The alt-right is the inevitable result. No matter how silly, irrational, tribal or even hateful the Establishment may think the alt-right’s concerns are, they can’t be ignored, because they aren’t going anywhere. As Haidt reminds us, their politics is a reflection of their natural inclinations.

In other words, the Left can’t language-police and name-call them away, which have for the last twenty years been the only progressive responses to dissent, and the Right can’t snobbishly dissociate itself from them and hope they go away either...

Millennials aren’t old enough to remember the Second World War or the horrors of the Holocaust... Racism, for them, is a monster under the bed... Millennials have trouble believing it’s actually real...

For decades – since the 1960s, in fact – the media and political establishment have held a consensus over what’s acceptable and unacceptable to discuss in polite society. The politics of identity, when it comes from women, LGBT people, blacks and other non-white, non-straight, non-male demographics is seen as acceptable — even when it descends into outright hatred.

Any discussion of white identity, or white interests, is seen as a heretical offence...

The pressure to self-censor must be almost overwhelming for straight white men - and, for most of them, it appears to be, which explains why so much of the alt-right operates anonymously...

...I think it is important to begin with a review of some essential history, a brief exploration of the evolution of what is now called “Movement Conservatism” and its symbiotic relationship to the modern Republican Party. Understanding this background is critical to comprehending what has happened and is happening, politically and culturally, to what remains of the American republic in 2016. The transformation of the intellectual brain trust for the Republican Party has fundamentally affected and influenced the successive evolution of the positions the Republican Party has taken over the past fifty years.

Before discussing this history, I think it is necessary that we recall that the GOP Establishment, in fact, never gave up its virtual control of the party structure, despite Ronald Reagan...

It was my mentor and friend, the late Dr. Russell Kirk, whose volume The Conservative Mind actually initiated what became the older, scholarly “conservatism” in the 1950s. “Conservatism,” as Kirk explained it, encompassed an inherent distrust of liberal democracy, staunch opposition to egalitarianism, and an extreme reluctance to commit the United States to global “crusades” to impose American “values” on “unenlightened” countries around the world. Conservatives should celebrate local traditions, customs, and the inherited legacies of other peoples, and not attempt to destroy them. America, Kirk insisted, was not founded on a democratic, hegemonic ideology, but as an expression and continuation of European traditions and strong localist, familial and religious belief...

Beginning in the 1970s into the 1980s there was an influx of former Leftist and ex-Trotskyite intellectuals and writers, who had become anti-Communists and who began to move to the right into the older conservative movement. These were denominated the Neoconservatives, or Neocons. At first the Neocons were welcomed as ex-Marxists “coming in from the cold.” The problem was, and still is, that the Neocons brought with them not only their welcomed and spirited anti-Communism, but also their intellectual template of across-the-board egalitarianism, internationalism, and an a priori liberal and global interventionist foreign policy, which has, as its underlying principle, an almost chiliastic belief in imposed “liberal democracy” as the “final stage” of human (and secular) progress. And it is that Idea of (irreversible) Progress, which means the destruction of older traditions, customs, and those things considered “reactionary” that stand in the way of Progress, that characterizes most of Neocon thinking. Such ideas, needless to say, run counter to traditional conservative principles.

With strong academic connections and financial sources, the Neocons soon took control of most of the older conservative foundations, think tanks, and publications, and they did so with an iron hand, reminiscent of older days, when their Marxism was readily visible. And, more significantly, through this control of most “conservative” institutions, especially those centered in Washington, D. C., they very soon began to provide experts and advisors to the national Republican Party and its candidates. Their dominance manifested itself in organs such as the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and in publications like Commentary, The Public Interest, and National Review (which shed its previous attachments to the older conservatism). The advent of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, with Fox News television, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and the New York Post as its notable voices, cemented this influence, which manifested itself abundantly in post-Reagan GOP policies and prescriptions...

Thus, in a very real sense, what is commonly termed “conservatism” today has not been truly conservative in the traditional sense for probably three or four decades, at least...

Trump, is not a “movement conservative,” that is, he is not a Republican candidate schooled in the narrative of Neoconservatism (while Marco Rubio wallows in it)...

Trump is the candidate who has been bold and farsighted enough to raise the real issues that are affecting every day Americans, not just “movement conservatives.” Most importantly, there is the supremely significant issue of illegal immigration. Consider, for example, what has happened to California, that up to the 1980s was considered a reliably “conservative” state, but after the 1986 Immigration Act, and three-to-four million new immigrants from Latin America, most illegal, will no longer ever vote for a Republican, much less any kind of conservative. The question is: do we want this to continue to happen? Who will be the candidate who will actually stop—and reverse—this?...

Then, there is the issue of Muslims coming to America. Trump’s plan to temporarily bar them coming in until a proper and secure screening system is put into place, is not only logical, it is completely constitutional and legal...

The case of Ted Cruz is mixed. He has on the Senate floor, opposed some of the measures pushed by the GOP Establishment, and he is not a member of the exclusive congressional “club,” but he is still part and parcel of the GOP/ Neocon “movement” fabric...

The essential question for me is this: as much as I might respect Ted Cruz’s senate career, I sincerely don’t think he would be able to withstand or take on the powerful Establishment in the same no-holds-barred and independent manner as the Donald. I don’t think Cruz would dislodge the Neocon intellectual stranglehold over the GOP policy; I think he would end up accepting and confirming it...

What is needed in this nation now is dramatic, even radical change. What is needed is not someone who will simply raise Hell, but someone who will be more like a bull loosed in a terrified china shop. Half measures and regular politicians, “mainstream conservatives” like Ted Cruz, I don’t think can pull it off. Trump, I believe, just maybe can...