When professional class liberals abandoned universalism

at every single level of thinking and politics

they remade the political landscape and delivered the ideals of the bourgeois Enlightenment and its concomitant revolutions, scientific and material into the hands of the Right. Marxist ideas of the universality of the class struggle along with Lockean ideas of self-possession were marked as “bad” and the subjectivity of the new Human Being, birthed by the New Left, sexy, experimental, transgressive and vulnerable became the new ideal. And the liberals have stuck to this idea that the best world we can hope for is one of managed diversity and inclusion, with equity trumping equality with everything that implies.

Trump’s Executive Order suspending DEI employees in the federal government and effectively banning what it calls “illegal discrimination” and restoring “merit based” opportunities for “all Americans” claims the mantle of the civil rights movement in making DEI forms of selection illegal.

It is a stunning turn of events. From the Left, people have been criticizing the meritocracy, but liberals decided not to undo it, but to socially engineer “improvements” to include inclusion as a value in white collar and higher education workplaces and institutions. These improvements come with a new bureaucracy that offers workshops at my university in “Cultivating Community” through workshops that are supposed to teach “awareness” “courage” and “empowerment.” These qualities or virtues seem unimpeachable, except when you think about how this language of self cultivation is being promoted by your workplace as a form of “accreditation.”

Liberals have long given up on universalism or objectivity substituting first a series of reified responses to oppression that have nothing to do with debate, reason or rationality. At least the libs were coherent. In the academy, radical pluralism, in the form of post-modernism took hold during the speculative financial ebullience of the Reagan era deregulation.

Floating signifiers settled like butterflies on the fevered brows of graduate students and professors, enamored by the cultural turn: they felt liberated from history and meaning. Their success had meaning beyond personal advancement. They and their students took their places in the professional class and its institutions and promoted a disrespect for shared reality.

I tried to show that employer sponsored wellness programs promote compensatory measures for underpaying employees. Study after study shows that increased pay is the best mitigator of stress and anxiety for workers, but employers would rather pay for wellness programs than increase wages — because it’s cheaper and also has the benefit of increasing surveillance of workers’ private lives. At UC Irvine, the Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation has started an Institute for Pedagogical Wellness to promote self care and kindness.

We can’t build solidarity with each other if we go down this path of compliance with this empty language, these empty measures meant to promote the most reified forms of subjectivity, branded now as “kindness” in the workplace.

In leaving the universalism of the class struggle behind, liberals offered people up to the universalism of markets and competition. The libs were also really good at disciplining any kind of criticism of DEI from the Left. Their view of world has been hegemonic, at least since 2008. I didn’t feel particularly courageous criticizing the liberal compliance with socially engineered ideals of social justice. I also knew no matter how good our arguments against DEI from the Left (Jennifer Pan is about to publish a book on this topic with Verso and she has collected research from all angles about the effects of DEI on large organizations), the liberal media would suppress serious discussion of what was happening in the liberal workplace and liberal institutions.

I will write more about this, but I’m teaching this quarter and everything I write here are sketches for the future.

Do check out Trump’s Executive Orders. Send me any good DEI statements from your orgs. The next post will be a survey of the responses of university DEI centers and officers to the new EOs.

Suppression of skepticism about DEI and the institutionalization of identity politics relied on tarring and feathering its critics as racists — this tactic is not working any more. A few libs are trying to jump me as a racist for posting stuff about DEI on X, but their friends have failed them in their hoped for pile on because they have all migrated to blue sky.

Also a reminder about tomorrow’s Discussion about Karl Marx’s The 18th Brumaire.

Zoom invite behind the paywall!