In the 1990s, the American Left had no political significance, though it was copiously influential in shaping the minds of the young. This story has now been updated in the 2020s, a triumphant period for the American Left when it continues to win the battle for cultural hegemony not only in the classroom but also in the press, American sports, and corporations. Moreover, it now possesses enormous power to affect immediate events.

What has happened?

When the social unrest subsided in the seventies, radical graduate students retreated from the streets en masse and moved into the ivory tower, the very “corrupted” institution said to be responsible for imperialism, fascism, and other evils, that they had previously fought to destroy.

Nevertheless, those veteran militants accepted tenures without even a blush. The belligerent Student Left has now become the Academic Left who quickly dominated an environment that was open to conservative ideas and with a faculty that tended to be well-mannered, nicely dressed, patient, and quiet.

Once within the academy, the Tenured Left has voraciously sought power in a murky universe of oppression. According to their spokeswoman Robin D’Angelo, white men are “oppressors” solely by virtue of being white, as they inevitably contribute to and benefit from a “racist system.” An unemployed midwest coal miner necessarily oppresses while people like Don Lemon (with a net worth of $12 million notwithstanding) are doomed to systematized victimhood. This replaced a system where both liberal and conservative colleagues have been steadfast (for better or worse) in their pursuit of truth. Unfortunately, liberal and conservative professors had conveniently viewed their colleagues on the Left as fellow intellectuals, a profound misunderstanding if we consider the term “intellectual” to mean men of ideas pursuing a life of contemplation.

The American Left as a whole can be historically understood as “brain workers,” an unfavorable term Marxists used to attack a distinctly modern social type emerging between the beginning of the twentieth century and the First World War. They were the intelligentsia who aspired to fulfill their moral idealism in the labor movement. The goal was to infuse the movement with socialist theories, thereby transforming the American working class, which was too conservative to their taste.

But Marxists such as Paul Lafargue, the son-in-law of Marx, refuted the intelligentsia’s self-assigned historical function and questioned their sincerity, warning the working class of those “amiable exploiters” who could betray the movement whenever it served their own interests.

Indeed, as historian Christopher Lasch observes, the American Left is a peculiar social group: it is a class because its members can be identified not necessarily by particular ideas (their idealisms varied across generations) but by their actions—to transcend and transform reality. It is a peculiar class because it has no attachment to the economic base in society. At the same time, it has always (until now) pretended to be the spokesman of the working class which they never understood nor bothered to.

Make no mistakes, the “intellectual” Left are men of action, not ideas. They do not philosophize but occupy themselves in the theorization of actions, which explains blatant inconsistencies, self-contradictions, illogic, tautology, and emptiness that are way too often unabashedly circulated in Leftist “theories.” For example, at the 2019 Aspen Ideas Festival, when being asked by an audience member, Ibram X Kendi (supposedly) defined racism, the core idea that animated his lucrative how-to-be-anti-racist enterprise, as the following: “Racism is a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that is substantiated by racist ideas.”

The New Intellectuals

It is admirable that men of ideas have tried, with utmost sincerity, to engage the men of action in conversations for decades. But I wonder whether the men of ideas have ever paused to ponder who their assumed “interlocutors” really are and what they are really after.

The American Left is an indigenous species whose forefathers can be traced back to the New Intellectuals of the 1910s, most prominently featuring William English Walling, Walter Lippmann, and Max Eastman, whose poems, arts, philosophies, and activism radiated with both upper-class sensibilities and lower-class sympathies, cultural rebellion, and social revolution, as well as poetic passion and collective action.

They were professed socialists, but they were socialists who espoused Nietzsche more than Marx, who were committed not to historical materialism or economic determinism but to idealism, and who sought revolution within the mind as opposed to the factories and fields. They were “pragmatic” socialists. Their socialism was not the economic system but the “will.”

Having read European socialist doctrines, their minds were nonetheless shaped by American pragmatism and their sentiments cultivated by native idealism. Their emotional and intellectual alienation sprouted in Ralph Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry Thoreau. Their intellectual godfathers were two American giants: John Dewey and William James.

Dewey’s experimentalism marks America’s departure from the 2000-year Western metaphysical tradition. For Dewey, knowledge is instrumental, meaning that inquiry is no longer an inward, abstract contemplation but an outward and concrete act upon the environment that aims at bringing changes to society. In other words, knowledge is made in practice, not a reflection mirrored in thought. Hence, the New Intellectuals advocated action as much as ideas.

James, an existential philosopher, assigned a mighty weight to man’s will. He advised Harvard students that belief would “create the fact.” His classic essay “The Will to Believe” (1896) essentially makes perennial philosophical rumination about man’s existence appear to be a waste of energy because reality was “unfinished,” and man could be whatever he “willed” to be. James’s existentialism thus transformed society into an object of consciousness.

What Dewey and James bestowed on the New Intellectuals, the first generation of the American Left, and subsequent generations of the Left was a distinct perception of reality and history as well as a profoundly different theory of knowledge. Their worldviews shattered a closed, harmonious, and preordained order in which man’s task was to find his proper place. According to them, the world could be re-made, and reality could be transformed by man’s will and effort. Their epistemology was unmistakably anthropocentric, centered on individual consciousness, feeling, and experience, making it only logical for the American Left to embrace change and flux while rejecting ultimate truth and absolute value. Truth, as far as the Left is concerned, is to be realized only in practice, not in contemplation and abstraction. Truth is to be made rather than discovered.

Given the New Intellectual’s sanguine radicalism and pragmatic mind, it is understandable why they would view Lenin as a prophet of the theory of power. Lenin defied Marxism which taught people to await the objective “inner logic” of history to run its course. But Lenin dared to impose his will on history with his “colossal” brain, as Max Eastman pointed out in his acclamation of his hero. Lenin, in Eastman’s evaluation, was a scientist, and his revolution was an experiment.

American pragmatism engraved itself into the American Left. As John Diggins points out in his book The Rise and Fall of the American Left (1992), the American Left learned from Dewey that “the purpose of social inquiry was political change, and that action, therefore, was the consummation of thought.”

Decades later, the Left Academy has made a clean sweep; they have re-defined education that used to teach, as the nineteenth-century poet Matthew Arnold put, “the best that has been thought and done in the world.”

1960s Radicalism

The American Left’s deviance from orthodox Marxism is markedly seen in the New Left of the 1960s, one of whose esteemed prophets was the sociologist C. Wright Mills. Mills argued that Marx erred in assigning the job of redeeming society to the working class. The possibility of change lay in the superstructure, not the base; the political future of America would be ushered in by students, the “young intelligentsia,” as Mills declared in his famous article “Letter to the New Left” (1960).

Mills awakened his students to the elite domination that was a force imposed upon society from the top down. In Mills’s shrewd mind, consumers of knowledge, such as scientists, engineers, and technicians, are “power elites” as were financers, government bureaucrats, and military leaders. Perhaps the most enduring and potent legacy Mills handed down to the Student Left was the message that all personal and philosophical problems can be translated into social causes. So radical students searched for the meaning of their existence in remedying social injustices: poverty, racism, and sexism. They sought salvation from nihilism in activism.

The New Left assigned to themselves the Herculean task of changing the consciousness of the silent masses. They saw themselves as the midwives of the epoch who were to aid the delivery of the unborn ideals. They were the revolutionary vanguard of an American proletariat that had no existence in reality.

One annoyance that the egotistic and lustful Student Left of the ’60s met in an advanced and affluent America was the public’s “crust of apathy” for radical changes. The people were largely passive, acquiescent, content, tolerant, and oblivious to their own alienated condition. They were “one-dimensional” men, in Herbert Marcuse’s words, who “recognize themselves in their commodities” and who “find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split level home, kitchen equipment.”

What caused this massive and permissive alienation, this “false consciousness”? The current generation of the American Left, the Academic Left, provided an answer that we will examine below.

The Academic Left

First, the Academic Left might be a misnomer because, unlike previous generations of the Left, they made no pretense of reaching “the people” to whom “all power” ought to belong. Rather, they insulated themselves by writing esoteric journal papers circulated within small academic circles. Contrary to the common (mis)perception, the Academic Left are not dogmatic or ideologues. They are true pragmatists who share C. Wright Mills’ piercing insight on the power elite. After decades of producing scholarly verbiage, they have ascended to the elite status: a unique “theory class” that has no constituency in society and whose advanced degrees and academic jargon often leave the people perplexed and intimidated because a slew of preposterous accusations such as “misgendering” actually destroyed people’s livelihood by getting them fired from their workplace.

All power to the professors now!

Unlike liberal or conservative colleagues whose varied undertakings are essentially truth-seeking, the Left professors have made the problem of power the center of their work. They derived their understanding of power from Antonio Gramsci’s idea of “hegemony,” which is the deference of the “subaltern” strata of society to the ruling class whose power was more cultural and ethical than economic and political. By “hegemony,” Gramsci suggested the pathway to socialism was cultural institutions, and the “organic intellectuals” had a historical mission to fulfill, which was to awaken those “who do not know.” To do this is not through the mode of production but by means of the mode of communication because as French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida points out, inquiry happens in language, not labor.

Hegemony is a novel redefinition of power that has now lost its coercive and brutal touch while becoming invisible and dormant, insinuating itself into the structure of everyday life. Power is so systemic and omnipresent that oppression exists even when an oppressor cannot be identified. That is why the Academic Left does not believe in freedom. Genuine consciousness is impossible, they conclude, because humans are absorbed into a structure of (mild) domination without knowing it.

Accordingly, the abolition of repression (not truth-seeking) is the primary task of the Academic Left, and liberation means unmasking concealed hegemony. Their task is inspired and informed by French philosopher Michel Foucault, who argued history was not governed by objective laws but “discourse.” There is no essence of things but only opinions of things. What is true, rational, normal, and moral depends on rules that define and classify.

Thus, the Tenured Left refined their radicalism within the academy, an operation that it is hard to believe was authored by the veterans of the Student Left of the ’60s. Those idealistic students truly believed that ideals were born of sacrifice; they were willing to die a martyr’s death when participating in the Freedom Ride and sit-ins in the South. They put their bodies on the line so they could save the nation’s soul. Torrid and also hotheaded, those young radicals embraced combativeness as readily as they did stoic suffering: they adopted violent campus confrontation in 1964, which agitated and eventually paralyzed the academic world throughout the rest of the decade.

The radicalism of this anointed “theory class” paradigm was a sophisticated and calculated re-defining enterprise that came to engulf almost all disciplines within liberal arts. A plethora of new “studies” like women’s studies, gender studies, queer studies, black studies, Mexico-American and Puerto Rican studies, and critical legal studies prospered on campus and have enjoyed a long life.

Compared to other Lefts, the Academic Left drifted even further away from orthodox Marxism because they targeted students, not workers, even though ostensibly Left professors try to convince their students of the “truth” of Marxism. They seek power in classrooms, academic associations, and scholarly journals. “A Marxist cultural revolution is taking place today in American universities,” as Bertell Ollman and Edward Vernoff acutely observed in their 1982 book The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses. The revolution was “fought chiefly with books and lectures, with most of the action taking place on the fringes of the established disciplines.”

Decades later, the Left Academy has made a clean sweep; they have re-defined education that used to teach, as the nineteenth-century poet Matthew Arnold put, “the best that has been thought and done in the world.” The authority of time-honored excellence and greatness has yielded its throne to the living experience of the oppressed and marginalized.

In the 2020s, the Tenured Left has achieved a feat that would make its predecessors turn in their graves with burning jealousy. They are ruling elites endowed with immense power and wealth. They send their “best and brightest” to rule in government. They have become millionaires, peddling their “theories” in campus and corporate workshops. They have won the revolution, and we all now live in their world.