23AR28-36

( - previous issue - / - next issue - )

pdf = www.tinyurl.com/AR28-36

chimp = www.tinyurl.com/3avu2k6c

AR 28:36 - Wokeism's 'battle between democracy and autocracy'

In this issue:

WOKE MOVEMENT - its origins, and where it's leading the West

Apologia Report 28:36 (1,633)
October 12, 2023

WOKE MOVEMENT

Apologists value the opportunity to compare complex issue summaries in the course of their studies. An important example is "The China Convergence," in which the pseudonymous N.S. Lyons <www.tinyurl.com/fse5tu4b> explores the origins of Wokeness and where it is leading the West (The Upheaval, Aug 3 '23). <www.tinyurl.com/5e48kfzr> 

   Lyons' intro reports that "A new Cold War is dawning, complete with a global ideological 'battle between democracy and autocracy' ... two fundamentally opposed political and economic systems....

   "Sometime around the second half of the 19th century a revolution in human affairs began to take place, occurring in parallel to and building on the industrial revolution. ... In government, in business, in education, and in almost every other sphere of life, new methods and techniques of organization emerged in order to manage the growing complexities of mass and scale: the mass bureaucratic state, the mass standing army, the mass corporation, mass media, mass public education, and so on. This was the managerial revolution.

   "Rapidly accelerating in the 20th century, the managerial revolution soon began to instigate another transformation of society in the West: it gave birth to a new managerial elite" - and its own ideology. Lyons describes this as "a relatively straightforward descendant of the Enlightenment liberal-modernist project ... a formula that consists of several core beliefs, or what could be called core managerial values." 

   At least in the West, these values can be distilled into: 

   1. Technocratic Scientism

   2. Utopianism

   3. Meliorism

   4. Liberationism

   5. Hedonistic Materialism

   6. Homogenizing Cosmopolitan Universalism

   7. Abstraction and Dematerialization

   After describing each one, Lyons explains: "Combined, the promotion of these seven managerial values served as a convenient ideological means for the managerial system to challenge the existing ethic and values of the middle-class bourgeois order that preceded it. ... Nowhere were these values once more distinct than in America, where they had developed into a recognizable blend ... (as most famously described by Alexis de Tocqueville); 'Protestant work ethic,' and an attention to thrift and self-discipline as moral virtues; an intimate connection to the land, and a very strong attachment to middle-class property ownership ... political realism and a conservative aversion to too rapid and radical change.

   "The contrasting values of managerial ideology were perfectly structured to invert, undermine, marginalize, disrupt, and dismantle every one of these bourgeois values simultaneously...." Lyons says this constitutes the "managerial regime as it emerged in the United States and a number of other Western nations in the 20th century."

   Next, Lyons compares two views of "managerialism" - America's is soft, and China's is hard. Lyons reviews their contrasting approaches and concludes: "Despite these differences, every form of managerial regime shares the same fundamental characteristics and core values....

   "Back in the year 2000, President Bill Clinton had mocked the Chinese government's early attempts to censor free speech on the internet, suggesting that doing so would be 'like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.' By the time [Jack] Goldsmith's take was published in the flagship salon of the American ruling class two decades later, such scorn had been roundly replaced by open admiration." 

   The example given comes from "neoconservative lawyer and former Bush administration Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith in a high-profile 2020 essay on democracy and the future of free speech for The Atlantic magazine. <www.tinyurl.com/yc6jdenb> 'Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society's norms and values,' he explained. 'The private sector's collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future. ...

   "As we now know thanks to revelations from the 'Twitter Files' <www.tinyurl.com/ypy5tbnx> and other reporting, a sprawling 'Censorship-Industrial Complex' was soon created to seize control of internet discourse and manage American minds. ...

   "The most immediate explanation for why the managerial elite decided to hurry up and cast off any tattered remains of the old American values is simply that they panicked. They panicked because they experienced a moment in which they felt they nearly lost control. That moment was 2016, when the socialist Bernie Sanders had just nearly beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party primary, the British people had decided they'd had enough of the EU, and then, most egregiously of all, the thoroughly déclassé Donald Trump won the US presidential election. None of this was supposed to happen....

   "In the West, this underdog public rebellion is not only directed against the ruling managerial technocracy, but, critically, has been conducted by precisely the managerial elite's historic class enemies: the remnants of the old bourgeois middle class. ...

   "'It's Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses,' New York Times Magazine journalist James Traub thundered with an iconic 2016 piece <www.tinyurl.com/2wcms4zh> in Foreign Policy magazine. This quickly became a view openly and proudly embraced among the managerial elite, who no longer hesitated to express their frustration with democracy and its voters." Lyons follows with an analysis of how 'democracy' has been redefined by the Left.

   "Today this vision of 'managed democracy' (also known as 'guided democracy'), is a form of government much lusted after by elites around the world, having succeeded (in its more benevolent incarnations) in establishing orderly regimes in countries like Singapore and Germany, where the people still get to vote but real opposition to the steamroller of the state's agenda isn't tolerated."

   Woodrow Wilson's "old question of how 'to make public opinion efficient without suffering it to be meddlesome' seems to have found a solution.

   "The People's Republic of China has already taken this logic to its fullest conclusion. ... China ... too is still a democracy (it says so right in its constitution!). Instead of elections, the Party (which exists solely to represent the people, forever), rigorously assesses the will and interests of the masses through a process of internal consultation and deliberation it calls 'people's whole-process democracy' - also known as 'consultative democracy,' for short.

   "Consultative democracy has serious advantages over the traditional kind in terms of maximizing managerial efficiency, which is why it has long been so admired by Western elites." Lyons proceeds to discuss, at length, the West's approach to "remaking society along scientific lines. ... 

   "Mao, meanwhile, would embrace the same project with particular gusto. Progressive Americans of the early 20th century like Dewey and Wilson had developed a habit of referring to China and the Chinese people as marvelously 'plastic,' particularly suitable to be shaped at will by the hands of 'strong and capable Westerners,' as Wilson mused in 1914. ...

   "This he set out to accomplish through a process he called 'Thought Reform.' First trialed in the isolated communist basecamp of Yan'an in 1942-43 and then forced on the whole of China in the 1950s following the CCP's takeover of the country....

   "Germany and Japan surrendered in 1945, but World War II didn't end. Managerial liberalism had engaged in its first global ideological war, and once the shooting had stopped the ideological struggle was just getting started. Europe and even the American homeland itself still had yet to be truly liberated. The problem was: fascism continued to lurk in minds everywhere."

   Lyons describes "a spectacular feat of political-linguistic jujitsu: successfully redefining public understanding of fascism [in which] evidence of fascist sympathies could then be discovered all over the United States. ...

   "The US government thus 'took up anti-fascism as a wider mandate of moral and social transformation,' as [Matthew B.] Crawford <www.tinyurl.com/mwrb75hb> puts it. Suddenly, 'The inner lives of Americans were now something that needed to be managed. Anti-fascism in the United States would be a science of social adjustment working at a deep level of the psyche, modeled on the occupation government's parallel effort in Germany.' ...

   "Much as under communism in China and the Soviet Union, dissent became dismissible as deviance.

   "And deviance meant fascism. So, with the bourgeoisie clearly in danger of exploding into the goose step at any moment, a friend-enemy distinction could be established: one was either rationally for progressive managerialism - aka 'liberal democracy' - or against it, and therefore automatically an irrational ally of authoritarianism and a dangerous threat to society. 'Anti-fascism' could now take on the same meaning and function as under Mao: tarring any opponent of the managerial regime's revolutionary project as someone necessary to preemptively destroy, not debate.

   "For if 'the whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger,' as the Frankfurt School's Herbert Marcuse (who worked directly for the OSS from 1943-50) asserted in his landmark essay 'Repressive Tolerance,' <www.tinyurl.com/yehtj5zh> then America's tradition of civil liberties and liberal neutrality could justifiably be revised to head off the threat of fascism's resurgence.

   "A new de facto social contract had been established: the people would offer compliance to being managed, and in return the managerial regime would provide them with ever greater comfort and safety, not only physical but psychological.

   "Today America is hardly alone in this regard. When COVID-19 first emerged, China's managerial regime immediately imposed draconian containment measures in the name of public safety, locking [inhabitants of] entire cities in their homes, shuttering whole economic sectors, and splitting up families while dragging them off to quarantine camps. It continued these self-destructive national policies for three years after it had become scientifically clear that the virus was relatively mild and posed no health risks anywhere near necessitating that level of response."

   From here Lyons describes the "Stability Maintenance," seen in how "Managerial technocracy has a big problem: it doesn't really work. ... 

   "Nonetheless, the managerial regime is capable of only one response to the emergence of such instability, which is to double down...." Lyons provides example after example which reveals an unsettling similarity between China's approach to national managerialism and that of the West. "So, does the United States, or the broader West, have its own united front?" The conclusion: "Formally, no. Functionally, yes." Discussion follows. Lots of it. 

   Lyons' essay amounts to a "small book" in length. He concludes by comparing the transition of the West to the "Total Techno-State" that China has become and the many ways we're on the same course. Important considerations abound, regardless of whether one shares Lyons' conclusions.

   (Note: "N.S. Lyons" is the pen name of "a credentialed scholar and Asia hand in an allied capital with deep knowledge of the Chinese Communist Party.") <www.tinyurl.com/d857s8p7>

( - previous issue - / - next issue - )