In Part 1 of this two-part essay I highlighted how utterly strange modern identarian "progressivism" would seem to earlier generations of leftists including, and perhaps especially, those who followed the classical version of Marxism.

In this article I will focus on the weirdest thing of all—the extraordinary success of this ideology in permeating all spheres of modern Western societies through a "long march through the institutions" as prefigured by Gramsci, Marcuse and others, and the even stranger destination of the march with progressives ending up aligned with the very forces they once aspired to challenge.

How should we characterize this ideology, often referred to by figures on the Right as "Cultural Marxism"? Is this description appropriate, and if so what is its relationship with the classical version of Marxism? 

A new birth of the Left?

To set the stage, it is useful to go back to 1965, around the time when the New Left started to emerge, with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement its seminal event. The New Yorker magazine did an interesting retrospective about this movement last year—check out the photo of demonstrators at the top of the article, with the men all impeccably turned out in suits and ties.

Many hoped this new movement represented a clear break with the old-left's worrying support of or at least reluctance to criticize totalitarian communism. Something that might appeal to a new generation of leftists caught up with the libertarianism of the 1960s.

One of the founding figures of the American New Left, David Horowitz, has written extensively about this period. Horowitz was the son of parents who were both secret members of the American Communist Party. In the 1970s he was the editor of Ramparts, one of the most influential radical publications in the country at the time. One of the co-founders, Sol Stern, a close colleague of Horowitz, wrote a retrospective about the magazine a decade ago in which he argued it transformed the nation—for the worse.

Like many others, Horowitz saw the New Left, with its radically anti-authoritarian ethos and seeming commitment to free speech, as just the thing he was looking for—a form of leftism free of the pathologies of the old Left. He was determined to avoid the errors of his parents, who committed their lives to a morally bankrupt cause.

He was to suffer a shattering disillusionment with the Left in the mid-1970s as the result of an incident that resulted in the death of a woman, an accountant named Betty Van Patter, who he had recruited to do some work for the Black Panther Party (BPP), an extreme radical group Horowitz was closely involved with at the time.

Van Patter was brutally murdered by leaders of the BPP, apparently as a result of her uncovering some corrupt financial practices. Horowitz felt terrible guilt about this, feeling implicated for bringing this essentially non-political person into the BPP orbit.

However what really appalled Horowitz, as described in his autobiography Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, was the response to the episode by his colleagues on the New Left. This was the period when the term "radical chic" came into vogue, with elite cultural figures like the composer Leonard Bernstein holding soirees for the Panthers in his Manhattan apartment.

Horowitz found next to no support for his efforts to have the incident properly investigated, and certainly no willingness to criticize the Panthers, which by then had acquired a solid reputation for violence and intimidation.

Just like the modern identarians, what mattered about the Panthers was that they were representatives of the oppressed, and disagreeable aspects of their organizational culture should be politely overlooked. Furthermore, those not prepared to go along with this could expect severe ostracism, prefiguring the age of "cancel culture" that we now inhabit.

The New Left's break with the "totalitarian temptations" of the old Left was starting to look pretty thin, leading to Horowitz (and Sol Stern) defecting to the Right, where he has remained to this day, founding a website that has alongside its banner "Inside every progressive a totalitarian is screaming to get out". I have always thought this was ridiculously hyperbolic, though in recent times it is looking less hyperbolic by the day.

The Long March begins

Also in the 1960s, the German-American political philosopher Herbert Marcuse produced an influential essay with the title Repressive Tolerance (1965) that codified both the totalitarian intent of the New Left, and the long-term strategy to achieve its objectives.

Marcuse was one of the major theorists of the Frankfurt School of political theory and philosophy, the key figures in which migrated to the United States with the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. The Frankfurt School bequeathed us Critical Theory, which Right wing figures often label Cultural Marxism, a term that initially struck me as an oxymoron, though as I will outline below my view about that has changed.

Marcuse migrated to the United States in 1934 and taught for many years at Brandeis University. He was a revered figure in the 1960s New Left, the movement that shaped a generation of radicals, with the activism around opposition to the Vietnam War giving the movement a huge fillip.

Repressive Tolerance can be seen as the founding manifesto of the movement and mindset we nowadays know as political correctness in which he argued for a blatantly selective attitude to free speech.

Arguing from the extreme repressiveness of modern capitalist societies, he insisted that political viewpoints should be tolerated if, and only if, they promote what he deemed to be progressive social change. He stated bluntly:

…liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.

Who gets to distinguish "liberating" tolerance from the repressive variety? Why, appropriately trained, or rather indoctrinated, academics of course. This would naturally require some changes to what goes on in the educational sphere:

… the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behaviour.

So there you have it. Tolerance is intolerant. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. George Orwell eat your heart out.

Which brings us to the "long march through the institutions", an expression most commonly associated with the German radical activist Rudi Dutschke, which Marcuse enthusiastically endorsed in 1971 correspondence with Dutschke:

Let me tell you this: that I regard your notion of the "long march through the institutions" as the only effective way.

Actually the long march strategy has a longer history than this, including Antonio Gramsci's writings in the 1930s on the importance of challenging "cultural hegemony" by infiltrating and taking control of key institutions. I recently read an interesting blog post that pointed out the idea goes back even earlier to a meeting in 1922 at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.

The meeting, attended by an international group of Marxist theorists, arose from disappointment at the failure of the European proletariat to follow the example of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. How to account for this, and what to do about it? The response was an acknowledgement that the revolution could not depend on economic factors alone, and there was a need to wage a culture war. The creation of the Frankfurt School followed closely after, in 1923.

So the importance of taking over cultural institutions is an idea that has a long Marxist pedigree, but the earlier Marxists seemed to regard it as a complement rather than a substitute for a strategy based on economic class-based antagonisms, with the latter always seen as primary.

Earlier Marxists would have seen the identarian's exclusive focus on culture and identity as heretical, a recourse to "idealist" thinking, a view expressed very strongly by some modern Trotskyists, as I pointed out in the first of these articles. Nowadays, among the indentarian "Left", the only concession you see being made to classical Marxism's focus on economic class is the addition of "classism" to the long list of isms needing to be combated.

Identarian "leftism" does, however, share certain commonalities with old-religion Marxism—the notion that society should be envisaged as divided into mutually and irreconcilably antagonistic categories, economic classes for the classical Marxists, an intersecting plethora of identities on the other, with each category divided by an oppressor/oppressed binary.

Classical and Cultural Marxism also share a common aversion towards the institutions and norms that underpin liberal Western societies, though they rationalize them differently. Classical Marxists see norms like freedom of speech, elections and independent judiciaries as mere manifestations of "bourgeois democracy" that serves the interests of the ruling class, and reject the idea that moral norms have any stand-alone weight.

The identarian "leftists" (aka Cultural Marxists) deprecate these same norms as manifestations of "white man" thinking, as is the case for free and open debate put forward by figures like John Stuart Mill as providing the best heuristic for establishing truth.

For them, there are multiple "truths" applicable depending on someone's "standpoint" based on identity status. Any "truth" affirmed by those who presume to speak for an "oppressed" identity must be respected, irrespective of its correspondence to objective reality (which they deny anyway)—and there are certain "truths" that must be deemed beyond debate, or as "not debatable" in the words of the Australian race theorist Alana Lentin.

From powerlessness to hegemony

Cultural Marxism might not be genuinely Marxist, but in one sense it has achieved a level of influence its founders could not have imagined. The long march through the institutions has conquered outposts that those who first conceived the notion could not have imagined

How? I do not think we need to think in conspiratorial terms to explain this. I think it has more to do with a group dynamic that became established after the radicalization of a large part of the baby-boomer generation by the Vietnam War. In my view, having lived through it, it is hard to overstate the significance of this in convincing a whole generation of the moral culpability of the Western powers, and the United States in particular, with visions of napalm being dropped on Vietnamese villagers etched in the minds of many (including me).

In an important contribution the scholars Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern analyse the phenomenon in terms of "groupthink" theory, an account of organisational cultures that explains how once a an active, pushy sub-group within an organisation achieves an initial level of dominance a dynamic is set in motion that progressively strengthens that dominance through the hiring of like-minded individuals and penalizing of dissenters through social and professional exclusion, leading to blocked career paths.

Focusing on American universities, Klein and Stern stress the key role played by the most elite institutions, since they provide a hugely disproportionate share of the intake of new academics not just in the elite group but also those lower down the academic pecking order. They also have a key role in establishing the ideological consensus in higher education across the board, which then feeds into other levels of the education system, including schools.

We are seeing the result of several generations of the process they describe. They summarize their argument in the video below.

Marcuse wrote his awful Repressive Tolerance screed in the very early stages of the 1960s student rebellion. He acknowledged that his desired totalitarian dystopia would strike his then readers as, well, utopian:

"at present no power, no authority, no government exists which would translate liberating tolerance [i.e. repression of right-wing views and tolerance of left-wing views] into practice".

The sense of powerlessness used to be pervasive throughout the Left. In an article published in Dissent in 2002, the American social-democratic theorist Michael Walzer attributed what he perceived as a lack of commitment by the Left to American society to this sense of powerlessness:

Powerlessness and alienation: leftists have no power in the United States and most of us don't expect to exercise power, ever. Many Left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens, refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as politically incorrect. That’s why they had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of September 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed.

Yet now, we see identarian leftism dominant in all sections of society—the movement has actually achieved the long-sought cultural hegemony. From its origins in the universities, successive generations of graduates have ensured near complete dominance of humanities and social science faculties, spreading out—in a manner that calls to mind the late Australian philosopher David Stove's analogy with a leaky nuclear reactor—to education at all levels, the media, politics, and all parts of the bureaucracy. In America, where things have gone furthest, we even see Critical Race Theory being introduced into military training, recently vehemently defended by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley.

The "Left's" new friends—and new enemies

Most remarkably of all—and this would have caused old-line Marxist's heads to explode—the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world, the internet and social media giants, have taken on the role of chief enforcers and censors of identarian verities. In fact, just about all the major corporations feel the need to at least display obeisance to identarian verities, with most having specialized Diversity, Equity and Inclusion bureaucracies to give effect to them.

In a supreme irony, for Gramsci, Marcuse and their followers the whole point of the long march was to build an institutional platform from which to challenge the main enemy, the corporate behemoths and the capitalist system itself.

What does this tell us? It tells us that these corporate elites see the identarian form of "leftism" as posing no threat, whatsoever, to their power, wealth and prerogatives. This is the moral and intellectual abyss into which modern progressivism has sunk.

So, if not the big corporates, who now fills the role of main enemy of the identarian Left, those battlers for "social justice"? Certainly not the societal elites, and certainly not those deemed oppressed minorities. In fact, it is the social stratum that used to be the bedrock of support for left-wing parties—the working class, or what in America is referred to as the middle class, the denizens of "flyover country".

Or, in Hillary Clinton's immortal phrase, the "deplorables", those benighted multitudes guilty of whole intersections full of isms, with particular emphasis in the present moment on "white supremacism", allegedly now the greatest threat to national security.

A telling episode in the 2016 campaign came when the Clinton campaign declined an invitation to address a working-class catholic club in Ohio [check citation] on the ground that "we are not targeting that demographic", reportedly to the horror of husband Bill.

One problem that is starting to emerge for this narrative is evidence of a growing defection by non-whites, especially some Hispanics, who frankly loathe being categorized as oppressed victims, and detest attempts to ram down their throats absurdities like the "Latinx" designation. We see non-whites increasingly joining whites in standing against the infestation of their children's schools with Critical Race Theory.

An recent article in Tablet magazine documents the dramatically changed profiles of the support bases of Democrats and Republicans that has accompanied the increasing polarization of politics. In terms of income and wealth, the author likens the Democratic party base to an hourglass, whereas the G0P resembles a diamond.

The Democrats have become the party of the super-rich—tech billionaires, CEOs in the finance sector, the managerial class generally, college-educated whites, together with a coalition of minorities, especially Blacks and Hispanics, though the latter, especially, have begun to defect in revulsion at the extremities of the identarian ideologues.

On the Republican side, a new coalition is emerging of lesser business elites in more traditional industries, as well as an emerging multi-racial coalition of working-class voters.

We see similar trends in other countries. In the UK the 2019 election outcome generated much discussion about the class realignment that has taken place. A paper produced under the auspices of the British Election Study demonstrates how significant and rapid this process has been, with a decisive shift to the Conservatives plus UKIP and the Brexit party by working class voters, and to Labour by professional and middle class voters. The authors point to similar trends in other European countries (the Own acct line refers to the self employed).

In his most recent book, the French economist Thomas Picketty describes the identarian progressive's abandonment of the working class in favour of educated elites:

Since the 1970s-1980s …. The "left-wing" vote has gradually become associated with higher education voters, giving rise to what I propose to label a "multiple-elite" party system in the 2000s-2010s: high-education elites now vote for the "left," while high-income/high-wealth elites still vote for the "right" (though less and less so). ie the "left" has become the party of the intellectual elite (Brahmin left), while the "right" can be viewed as the party of the business elite (Merchant right).

Marxisms: Classical and "Cultural"

Are there alternative forms of left-wing politics to the twin abominations of old-line Marxism and modern "Cultural Marxism"? Is it feasible for there to be a "decent Left", a question posed by aforementioned social-democratic theorist Michael Walzer in reply to the strangely masochistic responses of many progressives to the 9/11 attack that was published in Dissent magazine in 2002?

As a preliminary to talking about this, it is worth highlighting a further important commonality between the classical Marxism and its modern mutated form. In both variants, there is a reluctance to define what the desired endpoint of the radical activism they favour might look like.

Both ideological variants stress the need for a comprehensive overhaul of current social and economic arrangements since the ills are "systemic" and therefore require much more than a bit of reformist tinkering. But what is to take their place?

Consider the classical Marxists. The best analysis I have read explaining the wide appeal of Marxism, as well as what is fundamentally wrong about it, is contained in a short book by the late Canadian political philosopher Gerard A. Cohen.

What makes Cohen's take so interesting is that he spent most of his adult life as one of the most intellectually formidable defenders of Marxism in the world—his obituary in the Guardian in 2009 called him "arguably the leading political philosopher of the Left… the most important interpreter of Marx in the analytical tradition".

Like the aforementioned David Horowitz, he was born into a family of active communists. He relates having a discussion as a young man with his Uncle Norman about the moral case for communism, which went as follows:

One evening, I raised a question about the relationship between justice, and indeed moral principles more generally, and communist political practice. The question elicited a sardonic response from Uncle Norman. "Don't talk to me about morality," he said, with some contempt. "I'm not interested in morals." The tone and context of his words gave them this force: "Morality is ideological eyewash; it has nothing to do with the struggle between capitalism and socialism."

In response to Norman's "Don't talk to me about morals," I said: "But, Uncle Norman, you're a life-long communist. Surely your political activity reflects a strong moral commitment?"

"It's nothing to do with morals," he replied, his voice now rising in volume. "I'm fighting for my class!"

Cohen goes on to say that Uncle Norman's comments are a vernacular expression of an attitude deeply embedded in Marxism, the self-conception of which is a "consciousness of a struggle within the world" rather than a set of ideals presented to the world.

Given which, it is hardly surprising that this indifference to morality would serve to justify the world-historic moral abominations that litter the attempts to create communist societies over the course of a century.

This indifference even extends to the quest for equality, a moral norm that is what I found most attractive about leftism, as I suspect it is for most moderate leftists. It sheds light on the bizarre denunciation of egalitarianism as an ideological error at the 16th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. But isn't communism all about equality? You reactionary—off to the re-education camp for you! The very same Congress also praised "entrepreneurship", so it looks like the CCP's fealty to Marxism is rather selective.

So, if Marxist's disdain to offer a moral justification for their program of social transformation, a related rationale enables them to avoid explaining how a well-functioning communist society would actually work. Boring details like, if you dispose of the market mechanism and price signals, what system of resource allocation would replace it?

To be fair, some Marxists in the English-speaking world did have a crack at this in the first half of the 20th century, for example the British Neo-Marxian economist Maurice Dobb, but for the most part adherents of classical Marxism, including the assorted Trotskyist groups that continue to festoon the Western world to the present day, see no need to bother about this.

To explain this, Cohen invokes what he terms the "obstetric motif" in Marxism. He explores this in (maybe excessive) detail, utilizing his skills as an analytical philosopher to the full, but in essence he explains that Marxists see attempts to design a future socialist society as both impossible and unnecessary. Impossible because the solution to the "social problem" will only become apparent once the conditions for a revolutionary transformation have been reached; unnecessary because once this happy state is attained, the problem will automatically resolve itself. Cohen again:

It follows from these statements that whenever a social order has exhausted its progressiveness, has exhausted what it has to give humanity by way of increasing its productive power, then, with wonderful convenience, a new order is available to replace the exhausted order and to take progress further and, moreover, the new order will be found in the old society itself.

And so we get the happy result that, in a phrase from Capital, "the problem and the means for its solution arise simultaneously."

In summary, the new society as envisaged by Marxism is like an organism, no more to be designed than a new-born baby. The task of a revolutionary party, like the obstetrician, is to "ease the birth pangs" of the new society.

The palpable absurdity of this view should be obvious to anyone whose faculty of common-sense has not been eroded by long years of exposure to academic Marxism. Work to tear down an existing social and economic order without the slightest conception of what might replace it? What could possibly go wrong with that?

The "Social Justice" chimera

Now for the "Cultural Marxists". What is their desired societal end-state? The material put out by academic educators specializing in the field typically says something like this:

Social Justice is both a process and a goal. The goal of social justice is the full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs. Social Justice includes a vision of society in which the distribution of resources is equitable and all members are physically and psychologically safe and secure.

Well, who could disagree with that? But how can we judge when that desired end-state has been achieved? If pathologies like racism, which the identarians claim to be pervasive in all "white" societies (the possibility of it arising in other types of society is rarely considered) is "systemic", how would we judge when these systemic barriers have been sufficiently overcome? What would be the structural features of a society where social justice reigns?

The nearest thing to a benchmark is the unattainable goal of equality of outcomes, which presumes that all disparate results between groups are necessarily the product of discrimination. What if different groups have different preferences?

If you followed the case of the fired Google software engineer James Damore a couple of years ago, you would be aware he lost his job for circulating a memo arguing that the lower representation of women than men in software engineering is, at least in part, a reflection of population differences in men and women in the type of work they want to do.

Women, on average have a greater preference for working with people rather than things (physical objects, abstractions), whereas the opposite is true for men. Despite Damore citing robust empirical evidence for this, he was fired because his view was out of line with Google's "gender equity" policies.

Some of the more farcical examples of this kind of thinking in recent times have come from the UK, such as a diversity in cycling report that expressed concern that a lower proportion of blacks and south Asians ride bicycles. Shockingly, lack of diversity is also apparent on the cycle ways of London, an urgent priority for London's first Walking and Cycling Commissioner, Dr Will Norman.

Er… maybe those non-whites prefer to walk, or catch the bus? And what about the revelation that most birdwatchers are white and middle aged or older? Maybe younger people of colour have other hobbies?

Jumping across the pond, we see the shocking dominance of older white women among the volunteer educators and tour guides employed at the Art Institute of Chicago, prompting a decision to fire them all in preference for a paid workforce that better reflects the museum's diversity goal.

Then there is the "appalling racial imbalance" in the makeup of classical music orchestras, leading to a demand for the end of "blind auditions" in the selection of players by the New York Time's esteemed music critic Anthony Tommasini and others in order to help overcome the lack of diversity, a step already taken by the New York Metropolitan orchestra. So musical talent must play second fiddle to skin colour.

As for that Beethoven guy, he only remains as prominent as he is in the classical repertoire because of his whiteness, according to music theory professor Phillip Ewell who has been widely praised for his denunciation of classical music whiteness. Here is a thought—maybe people of colour, or young people, or whatever, are more interested in other musical genres, say Rap music.

Every disparity, at least as it concerns fields that are deemed desirable or prestigious, has to be problematized—and corrected. It is sheer cultural vandalism.

However the worst effects of this kind of "social justice" activism fall on those who are genuinely disadvantaged, such as the inhabitants of inner-urban predominantly black areas beset by poverty, crime and poor educational, health and employment outcomes, shorter life expectancies and lousy life chances generally.

What impact has the Black Lives Matter (BLM) activism that gained traction after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri in 2014, and really took off after the killing of George Floyd last year, had on their circumstances?

BLM is celebrated by "progressives" as the quintessential social justice movement, praised by senior political figures such Vice President Kamala Harris, many of whom acquiesce to their demands for symbolic gestures like "taking the knee", and take seriously even their craziest demands, such as the call to defund the police, actually implemented by a number of local governments in the US with disastrous results.

The upsurge in BLM activity has coincided with an explosion in violent crime, especially homicides, in major urban centres across the US, as police are cowed into walking away from the activist policing policies that aim to pre-empt crime before it happens that have been so successful in reducing crime rates since the 1970s.

The scale of this disaster is finally being seriously discussed in left-liberal publications. For example an article in the 25 January 2022 edition of the New Yorker magazine acknowledges the scale of the crime wave:

All told, more than twenty thousand people were killed by gun violence in 2021—an increase from the record number set in 2020, when homicides spiked by roughly thirty per cent from the previous year, the largest single-year jump since the F.B.I. began publishing the numbers in the nineteen-sixties. As has been true for decades, the vast majority of those killed were young men of color living in low-income communities, but Americans are also dying in confrontations over parking spaces, or because of something they wrote on social media. Bystanders, many of them children, are being killed or injured in rising numbers, too.

The excess deaths caused by this crime wave exceeds by orders of magnitude the miniscule number of unjustified police shootings, under 20 in each of the past few years for the whole country according to figures compiled by the Washington Post. Furthermore there is no evidence that police are more likely to shoot a black person than a white in comparable circumstances.

The left-wing online magazine Vox recently reported on a five-year study of the impact of 1,600 protests across the country, focused on bigger cities, with nearly 350,000 protestors. While the study found some reduction in lethal police use of force, this was massively outweighed by "somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests."

Yet the rioting, the mobbing of police, the vilification has been consistently defended and promoted by social justice activists for years, legitimating conduct that has rendered parts of cities wastelands, directly killing scores of black people, and destroying the businesses and livelihoods of many others.

It is impossible to conclude that the activists are anything but indifferent to these consequences, the effect of which is to seriously darken the life prospects of the very people they claim to champion. Instead, they promote obviously counterproductive nostrums like defunding the police that are opposed by large majorities of black people according to all polling.

Conclusion: Can there be a decent Left?

I mentioned above the American political theorist Michael Walzer, one of America's most prominent intellectuals of the social-democratic Left. His seminal book Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (1984) prompted a productive debate about the meaning of equality among progressive circles at the time of publication and since.

In his theory of "complex equality" Walzer notes that there are a range of social goods that people value, some of which are inherited (health, innate intelligence) and others to which some social distribution mechanism applies, with different distributive principles applicable to each. For example, wealth should not determine access to the justice system, or the educational opportunities of a child, or to essential health services.

This strikes me as a plausible way of looking at equality, a view supported by empirical research by the British political philosopher David Miller. Miller's research confirms that people think different principles should apply to different kinds of goods, with desert the operative principle for some, need or equality others. It depends on the significance attributed to each.

The key point for Walzer is that dominance in one "sphere" should not provide the holder with a dominant position in all other spheres. An obvious example—possession of money should not allow someone an excess of political or media power. Unavoidable perhaps, but policy should seek ways to constrain this transference of power to the extent possible.

What, in my view, gives this insight added relevance in our own time is that with the internet and social media we are seeing a phenomenon that goes well beyond the old "money power", as huge corporations with near-monopoly dominance of digital media are increasingly able to control access to the "social good" of access to information.

Not only do they possess this power, in the last few years they have shown a growing willingness to use it to censor content they deem inappropriate, or "conspiratorial", often on utterly dubious grounds. In deciding what deserves censorship, the corporations rely heavily on what some have described as a "new clerisy" of people and organisations thoroughly suffused with the identarian worldview.

A stark example was the concerted action to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020. By preventing sharing on social media, the story was effectively blacked out to a large section of the population. Since these are private corporations, even the US First Amendment cannot prevent this increasingly blatant censorship of the digital public square, where most political discourse now takes place

Most disturbing of all, key figures in these corporations, and the media more generally, are willing to enforce the dictates, or at least exhibit excessive concern, for the sensitivities of the CCP regime in China on which many depend for manufacturing and access to the huge Chinese market. The suppression of the theory that the Covid-19 virus could have originated in a Wuhan laboratory exemplifies this problem.

This is extraordinarily serious given the CCP's openly expressed intention to become the global hegemony, dominant in all major areas of power: industrial, technological, military, and control of information.

In the face of this unprecedented concentration of wealth and multi-faceted power, what nowadays passes for the "Left" is missing in action, utterly useless, much more concerned with fretting about trivialities like gender pronouns or searching for white supremacists under every bed than addressing a real civilizational challenge.

With its relentless deprecation of the norms and institutions of our liberal civilization, it functions as a kind of mind-virus that depletes resistance to the CCP's bid for global power. Contrast the hysterical response of staff and students at Australian universities to the Ramsay proposals to set up a few university centres to study Western civilization with the complete silence about the Confucius Institutes now operating on thirteen campuses, run by an organization affiliated with the communist party and openly described by regime officials as part of their global propaganda apparatus.

Walzer, a lifelong committed leftist, was prompted by the perverse response of prominent progressives to the 9/11 attack, with some saying it was America's just desert, to ask "Can there be a decent Left".

I believe there can be and there should be, and there are antecedents in the moderate, social-democratic Left that joined forces with liberals and conservatives to defend the democratic world during the Cold War. In coming weeks I plan to try and initiate a debate on this website about what a decent Left, free of the pathologies described above and attuned to the civilizational challenges we now face, could look like.