Leftism As A Phenomenon Of Upper Middle Class Magical Thinking

by | Jul 22, 2017

Those on the right, or more broadly, those not on the left, face difficulties when trying to describe what is conventionally called “leftism”.  People use terms like “cultural marxist” or “postmodernist” or “socialist”.  Voices cry from the woodwork: “cultural marxism doesn’t exist,” or, “postmodernism isn’t marxist”.  I’ve come to believe that leftism can be precisely described, but that the inability of some to nail it down is nothing more than a problem of categories.

Leftism is not a political phenomenon.  It is a sociocultural  phenomenon. It is the consequence of the existence of a large upper middle class generating culture in an area.  For example, America has lower, middle, and upper tiers of wealth within the “middle class”.  However, while the lower and middle brackets might represent the majority of the middle class population in small towns, in large cities higher costs cause the middle classes living there to be more exclusively in the “upper” bracket.  That is, in cities there is no middle class culture.  There is upper middle class culture.

Largely speaking, leftism has seemed to have always come from this upper middle class.  That is, the ideas of the left were first championed by disaffected sons of lawyers, shopowners, and rabbis (and if the left has ever had periods of distinct Jewish character, it’s only because of the ceiling placed on Jews historically to keep them from the upper classes of wealth, containing them in the upper middle classes).  Modern urban areas engage in obsessive political self-expression as an expression of culture and meaning – not as an act of political consequence.

Because leftism is a phenomenon of culture and psychology, its core principles are not derived from economic or political theory.  These core principles reflect the social concerns of the upper middle class.  The wealth of the upper middle class is enough that, sociologically, the culture of the upper middle class expects a guaranteed level of safety and comfort – and considers infractions of this basic level of safety and comfort to be an extreme violation of justice.  Not economic justice, but the justice of maintaining cultural expectations.  It is a conservative justice, where the lifestyle of the upper middle class has to be maintained and expanded, and this notion defines the class culture.

Leftism is the political consensus of the modern establishment.  The elites take middle class wealth and pay it out as tribute to the dissatisfied poor.  To facilitate this, they appeal to the conservatism and vanity of the upper middle class.  The upper middle class are the facilitators: the trained expert managers with the work ethic to make the whole system work.  They are the backbone of modern civilization, and modern civilization’s sociocultural norms reflect their worldview.  Outside of America, this class is called cosmopolitan.

The form of leftism is that of magical thinking.  The archetypal form of upper middle class political expression is the white female college student.  Hers is a world firmly set in relative comfort and safety, whose social instincts translate into certain political concretes.  Fairness, equality, maternal care of the less fortunate, harsh punishment of outsiders, deference to constituted authority, a focus on proximate social needs and a frustration with cold abstraction, logic, and analysis.  She is a gatekeeper to sex, and therefore hugely influential to the direction of social interaction among her peers.  The safety and comfort of upper middle class life – fully realized in the college environment (outside of retirement and home equity the great sponge of middle class wealth in American society) – makes room for her voice.  She doesn’t create the culture, but the sociological needs of the culture favor her preferences, because suppressing her preferences would invalidate the core premises of the culture.  Leftism is magical thinking because it is the hope that the rarefied environment of the upper middle class can be magically extended to all people for all time by mere whim.  The horror that this lifestyle is tenuous or rare, maybe undeserved and unjustly gained (the spoils of empire), fundamentally contradicts the premises of upper middle class culture.

Upper middle class culture says that life is supposed to be comfortable and safe.  To show that it might not always be so proves that life might not always be comfortable and safe.  The archetypal upper middle class female college student can’t countenance this.  The city suburbs and college towns become little Asgards and Olympuses, magical paradises which can change the rest of the world by mere assertion of culture.

“We don’t ignorantly believe in Biblical fairy tales, so if we can just convince those other people to be like us, the world will resort to its natural safety.”

The maintenance of upper middle class culture requires the preservation of the illusion that upper middle class privilege is natural and just.  Therefore, this culture is forced to embrace the expressions of that privilege.  Ideas that can only exist where safety and comfort is permanent define the culture of the class that chooses to believe that safety and comfort are inherently permanent.

There is, at this point, a distinction to be made between American upper middle class culture with its puritan/calvinistic worldview, and upper middle class magical thinking generally.  Suffice it to say that the upper middle class culture’s fundamental premise is the magical thought that they deserve the world they live in, and people who suggest otherwise are nothing other than just factually wrong.  All the mental gymnastics combine to uphold this one idea.  That is, leftist ideology is an ideology of privilege.

Categorizing leftism this way, we can contextualize it.  The shopkeepers of the early 19th century weren’t born that way.  They had to suffer through peasant class poverty, and though historical luck and due diligence, eventually rise to a level of relative comfort.  Their children were born into comfort, and resented the hard outlook of their parents.  Marx and his friends were the original millennials of modern civilization.  In university, these children of privilege found independence, free of their dour parents.  Their entire political program was to establish a permanent college environment for themselves and their peers.

Eventually, Marxism worked its way into other classes, and through a wide variety of thinkers from different cultures.  Marxism is now a discrete ideology, a thing apart from the “leftist” upper middle class culture from which it originated.

But Marxism – an ostensible scientific theory – was invalidated by history, and discredited by economic theory.  It had to evolve, and it did, but leftism itself needed new political expressions.

I support the idea that postmodernism isn’t itself a leftist ideology.  Rather, I think that the phenomenon of leftism has discovered postmodernism and favored it.  This is because leftism is magical thinking.  And postmodernism allows for leftism’s unreality more than other perspectives.  That is, leftism cowers under the umbrella of postmodernism.  It is intellectual cover for an anti-intellectual socio-cultural phenomenon of the privileged middle.

It’s why any new ideas – even perhaps boldly radical and “left-wing” ideas – are rejected if they don’t follow the basic pattern of extending the New Deal along the original pattern.  Big government agencies that employ the upper middle class to manage them, which offer jobs and benefits to the lower middle classes, and are meticulously planned to guarantee equitable comfort and safety for all.  We can’t solve any problem in any other way – according to the normative America left – because – I swear to God it’s always this – “what about the poor blacks in Mississippi, they’d get screwed”.

What about the upper middle classes in America?  Wow, would meaningful economic changes push them out of their comfortable communities where they might even have to share neighborhoods with “poor blacks from Mississippi?”  Leftism in America can’t allow that! (although, there is a hardcore element of leftist culture which is created by it rather than the other way around, who embrace discomfort and poverty, but this Berkeley/Takoma Park culture exists in the margins of the broader left.  Where are the hippies now?  Commune life was hard work.  “Equalist” males raped “equalist” females.  Reality hit unreality and the drugs couldn’t keep up.)

Since this analysis is fairly radical, if not completely original, I have to offer a couple preemptive rebuttals.  First, the idea of privilege in the upper middle class is distinguished from upper class privilege.  The upper classes have existed for a long time.  They have interacted with the rest of society in evolving ways.  Their cultural ideology is quite different.  They came from a historical background of pedigree.  The upper middle classes vaguely remember their less privileged past.  The uppers are fewer in number, the upper middles much greater.  The upper middles have safety and comfort, but they don’t have “f&%^ you” money.  These and other differences explain why upper middle class privilege just isn’t the same as upper class privilege.  In the modern era, the phenomenon of nouveau riche has created some overlap between classes.  Also, the notion of the bourgeoisie is ironic in that they represent not the rich, but those among the upper middle classes who have broken through to the lower upper classes as far as I can tell.  Thus, they are the envied traitors who have broken past the utopian limits of the upper middle class culture.  Many modern upper middle class leftists are very very wealthy.  They’re bourgeoisie and basically “the rich”.  But by voting and supporting “the Democrats” they are attempting to remain loyal to their cultural background.

As for the idea that poor comprise the body of leftism, this is a joke.  The poor have historically only ever wanted just to not be poor.  They are the parents and grandparents of the Marxist college students.  They might march in the street riots, but as soon as they have food on the table and a trip or two to Disneyland, maybe cable TV, they have historically abandoned leftist politics completely.  American unions have been conservative and anti-marxist.  The proletarian industrial workers of the world have hardly supported communism.  The revolution has always seemed to spread due to other factors.  All the cultural things American leftist intellectuals have bemoaned and critiqued: cruise ships, Nike shoes, McDonalds, television – these have been called “bourgeois” – these have all been embraced by the lower classes most.  Desperation seeks less desperation, not revolution.  Revolution is hard work, and for people with time on their hands.

To conclude, I will put this into a libertarian context.  Libertarianism is the one modern paradigm which can invoke classical liberal class theory.  We can look at the class phenomena of modern life and point out how much it sucks.  But we’re also aloof, disinterested, good analysts.  We just want everyone to do whatever they want without violence or coercion.  That’s the source of our disinterest.  Maybe, by way of self-diagnosis, libertarians are the disaffected upper middle class.  We’re of the culture but for some reason haven’t fit into it.  All for the better.  Upper middle class culture’s sin is magical thinking.  The desire for realistic comfort and safety is pretty close to a universal – an idea which gives leftists false confidence.  Libertarians, classical liberals, are closer to the parents of the Marxists.  We appreciate the comforts of economic advancement, but we also appreciate them enough to not take them for granted.  We want these advancements, we want to celebrate and expand and extend them.  We know this isn’t guaranteed.  We see the violence of class interest as the great stumbling block in the way of the miracle of progress.  We must rail against it, against all quarters.  Violent assertion of class interest, in the preservation of class privilege, is a nasty form of conservatism.

We oppose the oligarchic interest behind mercantilism and stilted economic progress.  We oppose the frenzied madness and consequent violence of the desperate poor.  We oppose the smug unreality of left, in their comfort and safety, constantly sabotaging the progress of humanity in the name of preserving the familiar.

 

Zack Sorenson

Zack Sorenson

Zachary Sorenson was a captain in the United States Air Force before quitting because of a principled opposition to war. He received a MBA from Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan as class valedictorian. He also has a BA in Economics and a BS in Computer Science.

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