We live in an age of imperial aggression and intellectual retreat. In a world increasingly homogenized and unequal, with might-makes-right and limitless greed the new commandments and Yahweh's ten plagues replaced by transnational capital flows, triumphalist prophets of the existing order have since the late eighties proclaimed a long succession of quickly failing watersheds--the end of history, the all-sufficiency of the "free market," the "third way," and one info- or bio-utopia after another. We are told we are in an era of stupendous knowledge in which life's mysteries--having been duly reduced to a miniscule fraction of the proportions they seemed to have a few decades ago--will soon, on their new reductive terms, be resolved; the only pitfall remaining, apparently, is "information overload." Yes, but the overload is due far less to quantity than to the tendentious, fragmented quality information acquires after it has been censored and injected with propaganda to suit the interests of the powerful. The study of propaganda, fueled by a glut of new data, is indeed one of the few areas of social thought to escape the prevailing loss of nerve.²²

But what's strange is how so many bright young minds have been inspired to dismiss, along with the dominant propaganda, the messages of its usual targets. The cynicism commonly associated with Generation X labels any attempt by progressives and the dispossessed to provide an alternative to the reactionary barrage as just propaganda with another slant. Acute awareness of PR's pervasiveness thus goes hand in hand with a refusal to acknowledge its overwhelmingly lopsided distribution, letting the predominant propagandists achieve their well-poisoning goals even as their message is purportedly rejected. Intellectually, the long string of abandoned instant revolutions has actually intensified dismissals of the more theoretically oriented inquiry they displaced. Only an obsessive avoidance of a previous generation's idealism can explain these contrived failures of judgment, and the paradoxical capitulation to authority that results.

In parallel, the civil society people rely on as a check on their rulers has adopted institutional values that treat the most blatant subversions of democratic principles to accommodate the powerful as reasonable implementations thereof, any alternative to which is "irresponsible"; malfeasance is a public relations problem to be viewed with sympathy, so long as it doesn't exceed "professional" bounds that have nothing to do with protecting the rest of us. Taking advantage of a naive exaltation of professionals and professionalism that has permeated even progressive circles, the soft elitism of the 1970's world of NGO's and experts-on-behalf-of-the-people gradually calcified into the mid-level institutional despotism under which our society continues to labor, even now that it has enabled a tyranny from the top to steal the headlines along with the elections. Bold posturing by complacent progressive organizations long since defanged by entrenched leadership and corporate donations, producing much fanfare but little effect--followed by right-wing attacks on the postures which cover for highly effective social reaction, rationalized despite its unpopularity as the outcome of a democratic process--such has been the pattern of our times.

There are still rebels, of course, within society at large; but from the 1980's onward the best equipped armies have acquired an increasing resemblance to the very empire they are supposed to be fighting. Far from dissenting from the imperial glorification of greed, they, too, seek individualist utopia, proceeding from a concept of "freedom" consisting of the right to behave with unrestrained selfishness, with personal conscience confined to evading guilt, political conscience to the avoidance of representations that would call "offensive" attention to oppressive aspects of our social order--any actual challenge to which seems beyond the logistical capacity of these armies to mount, let alone sustain. Transcending the great debate between the revolutionists who would free us from our chains and the reformists who would merely, but more feasibly, loosen them, this dinner-party brigade restricts itself to designing pretty slipcovers for the chains so that no one will have to look at the mechanism of their bondage.

Their handiwork includes a version of cultural relativism that, horrified by the far more effective systems of social control that prevail in most of the world, reduces all cultures to the status of emasculated curiosities, which are then heaped with "respect"; the socially mandated use of language whose evident purpose is to obscure, not challenge, social prejudice; and a sexual and marital economy in which the overt patriarchy and hidden hypocrisy that preceded the sexual "revolution" have been replaced by overt hypocrisy and hidden patriarchy--allowing a reconfiguration of marital and family life with barely a skip in the underlying patriarchal logic, though overt mention of it is now chivalrously avoided. The remarkable moral energy expended to achieve these microscopic victories should not obscure the great accomplishment of the 1990's, when--admittedly with considerable help from the right-wing propaganda machine--the rebels managed to provoke a powerful reactionary backlash against a "politically correct" progressive dominance they never actually achieved. But given the Stalinist taint these New Age brigadiers routinely impute to any firm limits the left might impose on people's behavior, what other result could they possibly have been hoping for?²³

Still less can be expected from the ranks of those conceptual mechanics who, having "deconstructed" the social order on paper down to tiny pieces--thus accomplishing their great goal of proving they are no one's fools--consider that their work is done, having indeed left themselves no opening though which to go further. But even the politically engaged have been afflicted by the prevailing conceptual backslide, giving us a detheorized leftism²⁴ focused exclusively on "race, class, and gender." Though we've been assured throughout years of escalating reaction that all progressive critique must inevitably boil down to these three fundaments, they're far from a complete list even of the prevalent forms of discrimination against individuals--where are religion, nationality, and age, among others? And the very inclusion of class--presented, as it nearly always is, without reference to the workplace relations of production and ownership that give the concept its meaning and the accouterments of class solidarity and class struggle that give it its political punch--is largely tokenistic.²⁵

The individualistic focus of "race, class, and gender" renders them in any case quite inadequate for political analysis. For example, if a powerful cartel monopolizes markets, reaps huge profits, manipulates governments, and stokes wars, while obviously the people behind the cartel have a different class status than the victims of its shenanigans--and very likely a different race and gender status too--categorizing individuals in this way can hardly suffice to explain the sequence of events in which the cartel gains and exercises its monopoly, or why one group of upper-class white males prevails over others in power struggles whose consequences are far from neutral for everyone else, or even the specifics of exploitation. The sustained, organized contestations that dominate political life can never get much scrutiny so long as personal identities are treated as the ultimate substrate.

From a rigorous theoretical perspective, there is little reason even to group race, class, and gender together. If gender is based on an important biological difference--one that has always been with us--then race is a centuries-old social amalgamation of unimportant biological differences, while class is a millennia-old social formation with no biological basis.²⁶ Still more glaringly, the three concepts have radically asymmetric relationships to social inequality. While the concept of race is so dependent on racism that eliminating racism would make racial difference as we currently understand it largely irrelevant, the elimination of sexism would only equalize sexual difference, which would inevitably retain considerable social significance. The elimination of "classism," on the other hand, would not be enough even to equalize class difference: if you treat poor people with respect, they're still poor. In other words, race, class, and gender are not three things of the same kind like "red, green, and blue"; they're more like "fire, moss, and sea," and it makes as little sense to discuss them as a series. Racism, classism, and sexism can only seem convergent because they constitute three infringements on the universal equality promised by this society's reigning ideology.

Here is the site of two easy truths no committed cultural warrior, on either side, would dream of saying: that since this promise of equality was quite clearly never meant to be kept, its violation is not a valid yardstick of oppression; and that a critique limited to the standpoint of individual discrimination poses little threat to the real culprits--(post)colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, respectively, as systems which permeate our lives in ways too numerous to mention, discrimination against individuals being merely one of the toxic byproducts. The oppressive everyday conditions of work are another byproduct, more massive but far less discussed, that must be discussed if progressivism is to climb out of the trap it has so busily domesticated. The across-the-board discursive swing towards worker issues that finally began in 2005, fifteen years overdue, though left-driven, cannot hope to avoid head-on collisions with the left's engrained mental and institutional habits.

But workers will have few options so long as they view their bosses as just human beings like them who happen to have the personal responsibility of telling them what to do--while their own equally urgent responsibility, however unfortunate, is to do it. According to this personalist conception, we're all just people and therefore equal, even if our respective assignments often makes it appear embarrassingly otherwise; first-name basis with hard-working, unpretentious superiors must be the final spoil of the workers' revolution, since any further demands would necessitate reneging on one's responsibilities. We would have no labor unions, no social safety net, and no meaningful labor rights had genuine workers' movements not taken precisely the opposite tack, making their supposed responsibilities the very site of their protest, demanding that the system that imposes them be changed while leaving the asymmetrical personal relations of the workplace largely unchallenged as symbols and reminders of greater wrongs. Nor is student radicalism likely to resurface among those who consider any questioning of the gross power imbalance between themselves and their professors a violation of their chummy relationships. Within the confines of systemic social inequality, the very idea of personal equality is delusional, that of responsibility a weapon of enforcement.

The last fifteen years have borne witness to the logical political outcome of the personalist approach: a progressivism hell-bent on expunging oppressive representations yet blind to the social structures that produce them, and therefore unable to formulate any demand for structural social change. It's only necessary to contrast what radical voices were saying in the 1960's--a now-mythical period, far from devoid of its own reactionaryism, whose very mention has nonetheless become a curseword on establishment lips. Even though progressives have subsequently breached some major blindspots, the anti-hegemonic discourse of that time was vastly more clear-headed than in our own. For people then, believing--admittedly without justification--that revolution was immanent, saw society from a revolutionary perspective: not in terms of conflicts but of contradictions. Seeing, as few do now, a social order not merely obnoxious but unsustainable, not merely riven by discord but made up of it--a society intrinsically at war with itself by its very nature--they perceived far more clearly than we do both how things really work and how it might be possible to change them.

In those relatively unconfused times, before the postmodern withering away of conceptual rigor and political dissent, the idea of change was firmly associated with the left. Not for a moment could it escape the company of its baby sibling: pre-"neo" cultural and political conservatism, with its soiled blanket of tradition and constant whining about anything having the temerity to be "new."²⁷

One of the most persistent moans was that all standards and distinctions were collapsing. This actually meant only that the standards and distinctions favored by conservatives were collapsing--which in turn meant that they weren't collapsing at all, since the moan's purpose was to position the moaner on one side of those very distinctions. The true meaning--distorted by a sort of mandatory ideological exaggeration--was that the other side (nonwestern societies, permissive values, pop culture, etc.) was daring to assert its prerogatives--and that it should stop doing so immediately.

In other words, the complaints of collapse derived their force precisely from their lack of justification. Perhaps, as conservatives wailed, nothing was any longer sacred, but some spaces remained nonetheless reserved. While commercialism pervaded Western society like construction in Manhattan, there was always Central Park. The walls between popular and elite culture, academia and business, news and entertainment, low, middle, and high brow, however dubious in substance, were often crossed but hardly ever really breached where it counted.

The irony is that, now that the modernist "age of the new" is over and the intellectual mainstream is celebrating a revival of nineteenth-century ideology, standards and distinctions really are collapsing. For when the Cold War ended, so did the need to assert virtue against Communist power, to salute the gallant struggle against an evil to be opposed all the more fiercely the stronger it grew. No longer was good required to contest strength, or indeed to be distinguished from it. With a sigh of relief, capitalist ideologues reverted to their natural Hitlerian philosophy of might makes right, abandoning the tedious idealist distinctions that were forever in annoying conflict with the social realities they were supposed to defend. Heavily invested in these distinctions--particularly the opposition between commercial and artistic success--and hostile to the automatic glorification of power, American high culture had thus been unwittingly dependent on Stalinism, or on the fight against it. The global dichotomy between capitalism and Communism had acted as a symbolic plug to hold in sharp, principled demarcations of all kinds, well past their expiration dates, against the relentless erosions of modern life. When that plug was pulled, all previous barriers, all perceived limitations, began washing, just as Marx predicted, down a capitalist drain.

But the change was not merely a new way to make money but a new moral compass in which integrity's needle has been mysteriously demagnetized, making any lie plausible, any usurpation palatable, so long as it comes from a big enough fish. Transgressions that used to be thinkable only behind a veil of secrecy now take place in the light of day and are publicly defended as "reasonable," whether it's torture as public policy, legal nullification as an executive right, candidates who own the firms that count their votes, scientific studies altered at the demand of the government, "experts" who throw their opinions to the highest bidder, product placement presented as entertainment, or entertainment as news. Elite journalists have almost dismissed fact checking in favor of achieving a "balance" of opinions, thereby promoting spin doctoring to a level superior to actual events, and politicians have not surprisingly elevated "perception management" from an enhancement of track record to a replacement for it. Television pundits have made a blithe disregard for accuracy and logic seem as normal as commercial breaks, while even more informed defenders of the military-corporate orthodoxy have long since ceased to distinguish sneering from refutation or sophomoricness from sophistication.

Meanwhile, as attested by The Matrix's resonance, many of our young people seemed afflicted throughout the nineties by a nagging post-apocalyptic mass delusion--suggesting that these perennial barometers of the leading edge of prevailing discourse were experiencing a symbolic collapse they could only assimilate in the real. When 9/11 arrived, it was as if the conquistadors had fulfilled Mayan prophecies for the youth of America--despite the eminently non-apocalyptic scene outside a portion of Manhattan.

To anyone not caught up in the prevailing mindset, the scene reeks of a bizarre decay of rational discrimination--to such an extent that distinguishing rationalism from irrationalism has come to be widely regarded as merely one partisan bias among many. What with liberals for whom truth is relative, and conservatives for whom the belligerent assertion of its absoluteness is accompanied by a painstaking insistence on always lying, to assert the truth as true now takes a revolutionary defiance.²⁸

The breakdown has inspired an endless succession of bad-ass sheriffs to ride into town, promising to restore order and impose law on everyone but themselves. Thunderous applause often greets the performances of these postmodern practitioners, from Judge Judy to Alan Sokal to Karl Rove, who by flagrantly disregarding every restraining principle gain power and prominence undreamt of by their customary targets, the postmodern theorists, who, by verbally undercutting all principles, are able to achieve impotence with ease. It is noteworthy that while most of the theorists are at least vaguely leftish, the practitioners invariably serve reaction. That "life without principles" thus leads to right-wing dominance is neither ironic nor coincidental; far more effective than COINTELPRO, a "left" doctrine that firm principles are intrinsically reactionary, by reducing disputes to the level of personal conflicts, leaves no compelling way to adjudicate them beyond the fact that some persons loom larger than others--a criterion hardly calculated to elevate the subalterns.

Meanwhile a posse of "posts-" has invaded the increasingly contorted social landscape, from postfeminism to post-dot-comism to postmodernism itself. The received explanation for this "postitis"--that we've seen it all--fails to explain the parallels with early twentieth century, high-modern ennui. How many today would accept that people had already seen it all in 1925--and how likely are people a few decades hence to be any less amused by our know-it-all pretenses?

During the 1960's and ‘70's, when there was an enormous pace of social change, folks didn't talk much about "posts-": they were far too interested in the new that was emerging--even when they opposed it. But, the world wide web notwithstanding, our own era has up until very recently been strikingly devoid of major social innovation--unless you count the long line of unabashed chauvinisms empowered by the deterioration of any commonly accepted standard of fairness.

"Post-" means after, not beyond. We descend like carrion upon previous inspirational insurgencies and artistic high points, lacking anything with which to replace them, trying to capture a gleam of a bygone creativity, plagued by a nagging feeling that we ought to be moving forward. Postitis then, far from the curse of the oh-so-advanced, is a disease that breeds in cul-de-sacs--and world-weary smarminess is no more than a particularly gruesome symptom.

With an energized new left finally waking up to the assorted hangovers I've been describing, it's high time to reconsider the historical choices that drove us into these narrow straits. For it is all too clear we cannot get out if we're too proud of being "with it" to use reverse gear.

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