"How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
By Fredrik deBoer
Simon & Schuster, 244 pages, $29.99
Social Justice Fallacies
By Thomas Sowell
Basic, 201 pages, $28
Fredrik deBoer is a radical leftist and a proud Marxist. At present he is best known for writing derisive, occasionally very funny essays castigating the American left for allowing itself to be gentrified into an effete, self-perpetuating ruling class. I find his writing brilliant, puzzling and reprehensible in roughly equal parts. His first book, "The Cult of Smart" (2020), rightly criticized the public education system for ignoring the interests of children who, for reasons of background or inclination, don't score well on standardized tests and can't make it in the "knowledge economy." His prescription, though, was to flood that same system with more money so it can do more of what it already does, only equitably.
Excellent diagnosis, bewildering prescription. But if you want to understand the most salient development in American politics in the past half century -- the Democratic Party's slow transformation from a coalition of working-class whites, racial minorities and disaffected hippies into a party of hypereducated urbanites, well-paid activists and expert-class virtue-signalers -- Mr. deBoer's "How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement" is a fine primary source.
Mr. deBoer describes the "elite capture" of the American left as a "drift from the material and the concrete to the immaterial and symbolic." As he writes in a nice summation of his complaint, "if you're a Black child living in poverty and neglect in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, you might very well wonder how the annual controversy over the number of Black artists winning Oscars impacts your life."
Why, asks this latter-day Bolshevik, did so few significant police reforms emerge from the white-hot revolutionary rage of the George Floyd protests and riots? His answer: Affluent activists and commentators, black and white, co-opted the issue and turned it into a choice between defending the men in blue (bad) and defunding police departments (good). "In statistical terms," he writes, "the status of Black people in twenty-first-century America stands as a national disgrace," but the left's activist class found it impossible to acknowledge some concomitant realities: that the average black American faces little danger of being killed by a cop; that more policing reduces crime; and -- I have to quote his words here, so rare are they from the pen of a leftist -- that "things are getting better regarding race and racism."
The upshot: Everything calmed down and MSNBC talking heads went back to celebrating transgender bathrooms and debating whether so-and-so is a racist for saying "all lives matter." Observers of a world-weary bent might be tempted to think the progressive VIPs and media-savvy politicos who flirted briefly with "defunding the police" -- a ludicrous phrase meant mainly for social-media gesturing by young white liberals -- didn't actually care very much about the plight of ordinary black Americans.
Fifty years ago, a gifted writer such as Mr. deBoer, beholding the facile anti-Americanism of his fellow leftists, would have long since migrated rightward and become a neoconservative. That doesn't happen anymore, for reasons I don't fully understand -- something to do with the post-Tea Party GOP's populist gaucherie, perhaps, or the fact that the typical young political agitator today has publicly expressed so many of his opinions by the time he's 25 or 30 that there is no going back, no unsaying it all.
So Mr. deBoer, 43, persists in calling himself a Marxist. But is he one? He knows his own mind better than I do, but I think he is not. Neither Marx nor his followers cared about meliorist gains of the sort Mr. deBoer mentions in connection with the George Floyd killing -- banning chokeholds, restricting qualified immunity and so on. Mr. deBoer wants an aggressively redistributionist state, but he is fully as much a liberal as those he disparages as "incrementalists." The difference between him and the liberals he despises is one of zeal, not doctrine.
The question Mr. deBoer labors to answer might be put this way: Why are progressives, especially young progressives, so easily distracted by ephemeral cultural issues from sweeping transformations on the order of the New Deal, the Great Society and the civil-rights movement? Mr. deBoer thinks the answer has to do with affluent liberals' control of the country's "discourse." That control is real, but a better answer to his question is that there's nothing much for young radicals to do anymore.
Mr. deBoer himself, if I'm reading him right, was for a time diverted from the path of radical commitment by the allures of a capitalist economy. After a spell of anti-Iraq War activism in college, he recalls in the book's introduction, "I passed through the next several years in the typical hedonistic style of someone in his mid-twenties, drinking and drugging and hooking up and working a series of meaningless, low-paying jobs." After that, "not knowing what else to do," he got a Ph.D. in English at Purdue. I'm sure we're all very sorry that Mr. deBoer had to endure "meaningless, low-paying jobs" in his 20s, but a country that allows a guy like him to wander around in aimless hedonism and then go to grad school to achieve a stable, fulfilling life for himself deserves, perhaps, a tad more credit for its openness and liberality than he gives it.
In any case, Mr. deBoer wonders why radical leftist groups are so often tempted to perpetrate pointless violence instead of engaging in the "boring, quotidian work of making change." As an illustration of that quotidian work of change-making, he points to Martin Luther King Jr.'s activism and civil disobedience, which resulted in "some of the biggest advances in the history of American civil rights." Well, sure. But that was more than a half-century ago. What are radicals of Mr. deBoer's convictions supposed to be aiming for now? We get a lot of abstract talk about present-day injustice -- "capitalism provides abundance along with abundant injustice . . . the dark genius of our system lies in its ability to pacify even as it exploits" -- but it's not clear to me what sorts of transformations a 21st-century MLK would spend his days working on. And in any case, the civil-rights movement was definitely about race and not class, and Mr. deBoer believes strongly that today's left is obsessed with race and stupidly ignores class.
The cold truth is that the left is out of new ideas, and has been since the last great aims of liberalism were achieved more than a half-century ago. Mr. deBoer grumbles, with ample justification, that all his fellow left-wingers want to talk about are small-bore identity issues and nonsense poses like defunding the police, but he doesn't offer much to the young radical, either.
Three years ago, in a review of Mr. deBoer's book on education, I suggested that he might profit from reading a book published around the same time, "Charter Schools and Their Enemies" by the free-market economist Thomas Sowell. As it happens, Mr. Sowell has just published "Social Justice Fallacies." Although neither author gives particular attention to the term "social justice" -- in both books it stands generally for left-wing ideology on race and class -- again I find some relevance in Mr. Sowell's book for the ideas raised in Mr. deBoer's. Whereas Mr. deBoer laments the ways in which his fellow leftists fixate on small-beer issues of identity, Mr. Sowell explains the real-world suffering caused by their fixation.
The no-nonsense title of "Social Justice Fallacies" captures the book exactly: There is no introduction, no attempt by the author to lure the reader into the subject; just five essays on the dire unintended consequences of trying to make the world "equitable" by handing out benefits and punishments according to racial and sexual identities.
Today's progressives, Mr. Sowell points out, are mirror images of their early-20th-century forerunners. The earlier progressives embraced genetic determinism and believed people other than Anglo-American whites to be genetically inferior; today's progressives, by nearly exact contrast, believe, similarly against all evidence, that any variance in success among individuals of different races must be the result of conscious or unconscious racism.
Among the innumerable follies occasioned by such a conception of racial identity, he suggests, was the housing bubble and market collapse of 2008. The debacle began, Mr. Sowell reminds us, with the widespread belief on the part of regulators that banks were discriminating against black mortgage applicants. It was true that black applicants were turned down more often than white applicants for the same loans, but it was also true that white applicants were turned down more often than Asian-Americans. So were banks discriminating against white applicants? No, the difference had to do with the average credit ratings of whites, blacks and Asians.
Those facts didn't matter to a conglomerate of uncomprehending journalists, indignant academics and outraged politicos. The government responded by pressuring lenders to lower their lending standards, which in turn saddled banks with a lot of loans that weren't likely to be paid off.
"No one who paid attention to the facts of that situation," writes Mr. deBoer of the 2008 crash, "could fail to understand that it was rich bankers who had tanked the economy and forced millions of Americans into financial ruin." Mr. Sowell doesn't say the holders of that commonplace view are stupid; only that they are "impervious to evidence or conclusions contrary to their own beliefs."" [1]
By drawing our attention to the plight of supposedly impoverished minorities, the elite maintains its privileged position among us. Big problems are drowning in the noise produced by the woke using non-existing problems as a trigger.
1. REVIEW --- Books: What's a Radical To Do Now? Swaim, Barton.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 26 Aug 2023: C.7.
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