The new faith: the Left has turned its attention from running the economy to managing relations among races

National Review, Oct 13, 1997 by John O. McGinnis

OVER the last half-century the political project of the Left has greatly changed in its particulars. Its celebration of centralized economic planning has been muted as it has become clear that statist economic intervention is more often a cause than a cure for poverty. The Lefts focus has shifted instead to the management of relations in areas where the memory of real injustices offers a better prospect for justifying the expansion of the state.

Nevertheless, the essence of modern liberalisms agenda has remained the same, revealing the underlying ideological and psychological structure of liberal politics. Both centralized economic planning and the centralized management of relations among races and ethnic groups and between the sexes are attempts to seize power under the banner of a secular religion. Marxism and its paler socialist and social-democratic versions justified the enormous breadth of state control over the economy as the only means to realize in this world a paradise of perfect equality without alienation. Similarly, modern liberalism now defends preferences in educational institutions and the workplace as the only means to realize the underlying diversity of humanity itself.

The greed for power and the need to hide that greed under the cloak of a faux religious sensibility have been constant correlates of left-liberal thought since the French Revolution. Politically, formulating a crusade in millenialist terms helps whip up support by tapping into the longing for solidarity that is the marker of much religious feeling. This is the principal reason why an enduring objective of modern liberalism is the extirpation of actual religions from the public square. Real religious sensibility is a fearsome competitor to the ersatz: when people are seized of the possibility that more traditional ideals of transcendence can help organize their personal and social lives, the political agenda of the Left looks both mechanistic and hollow. Modern liberalism is also hostile to the family because it too is an alternative locus of sentiments that the Left attempts to harness in the service of aggrandizing the state.

The displaced religiosity of the Left, however, is a psychological as well as a political phenomenon. The need to understand politics as process for transfiguring a corrupt world fills a void in the hearts of the architects of modern liberalism. Often journalists or university professors, these theorists are generally not religious themselves. But they make a kind of priestly living, providing reasons for actions and analyzing social symbols and portents. To fulfill their own innate need for religious feeling, they must understand their work as providing a compelling route to universal good.

This explains the popularity of the theory of social construction among present-day academics: the social world is conceived as infinitely malleable so that the modern liberal can transform it into a utopia of his choosing with his own symbols and words. It is ironic that the Left rails against creationists, because to defend their ideals of social transformation they too are creationists, except that for God they substitute the far more implausible idea that man is the creator of man. Modern liberalism is thus a political project that is simultaneously perilous and pitiable because it is at bottom an unnatural projection of natural feelings. It makes a religion of secular power and creates secular power by displacing religion.

The regime of ethnic and gender sorting is the logical successor to socialism and centralized planning as a means of creating a state powerful enough to be venerated. Our economy is no longer structured around large corporations with capital and unskilled and semi-skilled workers. Instead, most capital takes the form of human capital owned by individuals with the greatest set of skills the world has ever known. State power thus cannot any longer be increased principally by exploiting the fault lines between employers and employees. Instead fault lines among employees themselves must be developed. In the case of ethnicity and race the strategy has been to take existing ethnic groups and sustain and increase their social distinctiveness by making their legal rights turn on membership in the group. In the case of gender the strategy is first to create newly defined groups genders rather than sexes so as to obscure the distinctions on which many sensible social norms rested, and then to make legal rights turn on membership in these categories.

Sexual and ethnic politics thus replace class consciousness as the dynamo of leftward social transformation. The groups to whom preferences are extended (first blacks, then Hispanics, Asians, and women, and now in some cases homosexuals) promise a seemingly inexhaustible list of new factions that will support state power because they can use it to redistribute wealth and opportunity to themselves. Such a spoils system inevitably creates or exacerbates conflict among groups, but the Left then turns the prospect of such social discord into yet another argument for the expansion of the state. It calls for new initiatives to forestall ethnic strife and bloodshed, just as it called for the New Deal programs as a way to prevent class warfare and revolution. This is what Angela Oh, one of the commissioners of President Clintons new race initiative, was getting at when she suggested that America needs a whole new Cabinet department to manage "unity.