Dear Jacobin

Your gun is pointed at your own foot

It’s been a while. Playing with a book, so . . . avoiding distractions. (It’s remarkable, by the way, how much better I feel when I take breaks from social media and the “news'“ in general.)

A short while back, I took Jacobin to task over their flirtation with what they would like to perceive as “Christianity.” Today, I’ll address another of their recent blog articles (I’m not a subscriber to their paper publication). This one was promising, at least in the title, “Liberals’ Heated Fascism Rhetoric Sidesteps Self-Reflection.” (Matthew 7:5, eh)

Here’s the paragraph that stopped me in my tracks:

From Biden to the historian Timothy Snyder to the talking head Rachel Maddow, liberals have repeatedly affirmed that the American body politic contains a fascist contaminant that needs to be identified and expelled. Much like the New Atheists before them, who after 9/11 scared the hell out of Americans with apocalyptic rhetoric warning about the spread of Islamist fanaticism, the output of the liberal “anti-fascists” occludes efforts at understanding and addressing actual sources of violent hatred. How does diagnosing “fascism,” which implicitly categorizes millions of Americans as a group to be expunged rather than won over, help us reform our undemocratic political system and attenuate economic inequality, racism, and gender and sexual discrimination? Simply put, it doesn’t.

All that common sense, then what I call the “program fail.”

*Democratic reform

*Economic inequality

*Racism

*Gender

*Sexual Discrimination

What began as a perfectly reasonable—and timely—thinkpiece slammed straight into the concrete wall of cheap, insider polemicism.

What claims to be a political journal is actually published for an ideological niche market. The niche need not be—in fact, cannot be—politically effective within the larger body politic (which the title in this one promised to be). It merely needs to be sufficient to support the livelihoods of the staff.

Taking this thread a step further, it is easy for the staff (and the writers, who also have “followers” and “likes”) to confuse the magnitude of financial and operational success with the threshold magnitudes for political efficacy. Consequently, this insular body, and its equally insular, albeit broader, ideological camp, are auto-bewildered into the belief that they are acting on behalf of “the working class,” the very political subject of socialism (Jacobin is a Promethean socialist journal).

Neither the staff nor most of the writers for Jacobin are working class. Even one of the union activists I cited recently, in fact, holds a graduate degree in sociology. He had parachuted into working class politics (as many of my former Marxist comrades did) from an academic background as a kind of revolutionary sleeper agent (or vanguard, in that hoary Leninist vocabulary).

There’s nothing wrong academic activists, per se. It’s the context that matters. When academics did this during the civil rights movement, they did so openly, and humbly, and took direction from local leadership . . . to great effect. But Jacobin is a journal, with a circulation around 75,000. Regular readers wouldn’t even fill Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge. That’s 0.0004% of the US voting population. By some estimates their site gets 3 million “views.” Of my last Substack post views, 48 percent were opened, with four “likes.” You can transpose the numbers.

Jacobin’s senior editorial staff hail from Harvard (one did secondary school at the elite Phillips Exeter Academy), George Washington University, University of Chicago, McGill University, and Wesleyan University. The two writers for the article under review here are both Associate Professors (University of Washington & Weseleyan University).

When you look at the Jacobin site, these academic credentials are not noted. What stands out is their “diversity” . . . in color and surnames, that is. Again, I’m not cracking on every instance of multi-racialism as “woke,” or I’d have to crack on my own family. This is not, however, a “multicultural” gathering. These are all, to the last man and woman, comfortable urban academics. As a class, they are entirely homogeneous. They inhabit the same restaurants and art theaters.

The problem with “programmatic fail,” returning to that, is the compulsion—entrained and enforced in this particular class of academic “radicals”—to list the program, even when it has fuck all to do with the main point. There really is an un-self-reflective, and frankly idiotic, liberal “strategy” afoot to employ hyperventilatory threat-rhetoric about the “end times” threatened by that Frankenstein invention of the Democratic Party—political Trumpism.

This article about liberal stupidity could have connected with many people who will never identify as socialists. Jacobin’s editorial staff and the two authors of this article, however, have themselves been programmed by their own in-groups and their un-self-reflective groupthink into the ritualistic recitation of their entire contradictory political creed. And in their insularity, they have zero appreciation of how some of these terms fall on the ears of those outside those in-groups, or their class.

The working class associates this verbiage with “woke,” which the right has successfully—with the able assistance of the liberal establishment—turned into an enemy ideology. I realize, from long association with the left (more “left” than Jacobin by a long shot), that academic leftists see their mission—as the vanguard—to wash and rinse the minds of the proletariat and remove the stains of all those “backward” ideas. And because Jacobin lives in a bubble made of sociological treatises and statistics, they don’t realize in how many ways a goodly number of those proles understand (or intuit) the issues of race, sex, and “gender” far better than many self-professed and highly credentialed “leftists.”

This is far from the first time I’ve raised these issues, and done so in language appropriate to academics. We covered essentialist anti-racist scams here. We covered issues of male and female sexuality—that matter most to working class parents—here and here. And we covered—in great depth, and only to be validated recently by the Cass Report, the gender insanity here.

Let me elaborate.

Liberals (and academic leftists) have fed the right one lay-up after another with this kind of programmatic cross-contamination. Let me explain why, using small words. Voters vote based on those things they care about the most. Most voters have children and-or grandchildren. Those children are what they care about most. So when you spout off about politics with the intention of gaining (first) the trust of people you don’t know and the goal of enlisting them in the service of your political program, think of them first and foremost as mothers and fathers of sons and daughters. Maybe stop promoting things like drugs, prostitution, and sterilizing confused pre-teens with puberty blockers. Maybe stop using slogans like “defund the police” and calling it antiracism. Maybe stop trying to justify boys and men competing in girls’ and women’s athletics, when those girls have worked their assess off to compete against other girls, or invading girls’ and women’s bathrooms and locker rooms. (Explain this to the parents of female athletes, of all ethnicities.)

Josh Hawley is supporting striking Teamsters. I promise you he’ll lock in with the consciousness of far more Teamsters, and far more effectively, than anyone from Jacobin or DSA or whosoever.

Of course, Jacobin will continue to do what they do. They are enclosed by class insularity, their academic mindsets, ideology, and those 75,000 subscribers who’ve not only accepted dangerous nonsense like gender ideology—anathema to responsible parents—if Jacobin deviates, it will be shunned and punished . . . and they know it. They’ve lost the ability for sober self-reflection every bit as much as the liberals taken to the woodshed in this article by Daniel Bessner and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins.

Meanwhile, right populism keeps making those lay-ups you feed them.