A thermidorian meditation

International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 9, No. 4, 1996

IV. W h a t ' s Lef t o f Ideo logy?

A Thermidorian Meditation

Dmitry Shlapentokh

HOW "REASONABLE" AND "SENSITIVE" TURNED TO "UNREASONABLE" AND "INSENSITIVE"

Similar to other countries in different parts of the globe, America is on the threshold of change, a move to the right. According to political commentators who have spent much time discussing the issue, one of the more salient manifestations of this shift in the political climate is the so- called "angry white man" and his increasing hostility to "affirmative action." The supporters of "affirmative action," mostly the American Left, have dis- cussed at length the changes in attitude and provided different explanations for the phenomenon. Some say the fears of "angry white men" are unjus- tified, and an effort should be made to educate them so they understand that their fears are ungrounded. Others acknowledge that "affirmative action" has provided better opportunities for minorities, but they argue that America's predominantly white society has a moral obligation to compen- sate minorities for centuries of repression. The argument in this case is that the hostility toward "affirmative action" on the part of "angry white men" is owing to their lack of sensitivity. Here, in their attack on "unreasonable" and "insensitive" people, the defenders of affirmative action jux- tapose the present generation to the more "sensitive" and "reasonable" previous generation. No reason is offered for why the present generation is no longer "sensitive."

What strikes an observer in the midst of all this rhetoric is the lack of a Marxist approach to the problem. This is indeed surprising because of the role Marx has played in the intellectual development of the Ameri- can Left. I lived in Moscow before I emigrated to the United States some time ago, and there the intellectuals of Brezhnev's era often debunked Marxism as a quasireligion imposed from above, an ideological symbol of "Big Brother." In America, however, Marxism was the beloved intellectual

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pet of the sixties and seventies, a battle cry for liberation from intellectual repression. And it is perhaps for this reason that Marxism was embraced with such a passion on American campuses. In the past the supporters of "affirmative action," especially the rebellious generation of the sixties, were eager to apply Marxism to support their political ideology. Thus, it would seem that they would offer Marx's teachings to explain the current changes in the public mood.

Perhaps they do not, because they know Marx would definitely hiss at the idea that entire social groups change their mind because of a "misun- derstanding." Marx would be even tougher on the liberal assumption that for some unknown reason society has become "less sensitive" or lost its ability to reason in the course of one generation. He would state that the interests of social groups are never defined by their ideological beliefs but by their material interests. The generation of the sixties embraced affirmative action not because they were more "sensitive" and "reasonable" but for quite a different reason. Affirmative action at that time was not perceived as benefiting only minorities and women. It was part of a package of broad changes that spread throughout society. This was during the era of the War on Poverty when there were students' loans and Medicaid, money for education and job training, and money for programs that benefited the lower and middle classes of all America--black and white, male and female. A piece of the pie was to be given to all the unfortunate, and society agreed that blacks and females, who had been wronged in the past, were entitled to more than anyone else. And the basic reason why "white males" were not angered by the changes and were perceived as more "edu- cated and sensitive" was that their material interests were in many ways similar to those of the black community. This is the reason why the Left was able to take over the campuses of American universities and exercise a strong influence on the political life of the country.

THE AMERICAN THERMIDOR

The Left were revolutionaries. Yet as is the case with many revolutions, they are not experiencing a Thermidor. In its strictest terms, Thermidor was an event that took place during the French Revolution almost two hun- dred years ago. At that time a new brand of leaders, the Thermidoreans, replaced the brutal, yet basically puritanical regime of Robespierre, and while many of them attempted to maintain their appeal with the populace by referring to themselves as revolutionaries, they actually had no interest in the well being of the populace. Their interests were their own, and they quickly became corrupted and their programs irrelevant to the majority of

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the people. The American Left is now experiencing its Thermidor--it still awaits its historian--and its programs and lifestyles are increasingly irrelevant to the lives of most Americans, and this the reason the American Left is suddenly finding that the majority of the people are "uneducated" and "insensitive."

The Left tends to regard "affirmative action" as one of its greatest legislative victories. And as the debate rages in the press about whether its laws should be gutted, I have read and listened to several interviews with people who have remarked on the success of the program and what it has meant for America. When listening to these interviews, I remember the journalists who interview Yeltsin's supporters about the economic reforms. The source of their information is invariably either a banker or successful businessman or government economist, or a Westernized Muscovite with almost impeccable Oxford English who has just returned from some sort of fact finding mission in the West. All of these fellows, also invariably, assure reporters that despite all the problems with its economy, Russia is on the right track and the system basically is working. The journalists almost never take the time to interview workers from Ural metallurgical plants, or miners from Donbas, or even the peasant teacher in the center of Russia. If, in fact, a correspondent did interview some of these folk, he might find that they convey their opinions in language that would hardly be acceptable for publication or broadcast. The vast majority of Russian workers would say that Yeltsin's reforms have led to no salary for months at a time and miserable handouts on which no one can survive. For them the reforms mean abject poverty and no future for them and their children.

Similarly, if the American media want to truly question the workability of affirmative action, they need to address not successful lawyers and professors, but rather people from the urban ghettos. Correspondents might face the same problem that a Russian radio correspondent faced when he asked miners their opinion of the Yeltsin-Gaidar economic reforms. The answers of American blacks might be too rough for a mainstream news- paper, for I believe such a correspondent would probably find that the majority of the people in the ghetto are not concerned with the quotas for minorities in Ivy League schools, but are more concerned with how to get a high school diploma and at the same time acquire some reasonably good skills that translate into opportunity when they enter the job market. As a matter of fact, many of their friends might even have graduated from school, some even from college, without mastering these skills and are un- prepared for life after school. They might also add that they are hardly concerned with the number of blacks at Harvard or Yale, nor are they concerned with jobs bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Their concerns are rather more prosaic: They want a secure job with a salary on

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which they can live and support their families. They look around and there are no such jobs. The existence or non-existence of affirmative action makes little difference for them.

The interviewer might of course tell them that they are forgetting that affirmative action has created "role models," those successful and rich blacks who should inspire them to follow the same road. These "role models" prove that they too can become rich and prosperous in America. I think the residents of the ghetto would look upon such an interviewer with either a smile of disdain or indifference. And right at this instant, their thinking, either consciously or unconsciously, would become Marxist. In- deed, to speak of "role models" as uplifting the lot of the majority would have been the same as Marx saying that the "role models" of J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller should inspire workers and show them the great- ness of social mobility. Instead, Marx made it clear that only one out of millions had the chance to become a Rockefeller or a Morgan, the rest were doomed to live in poverty. The job of the workers was not to try to make themselves into moguls (no society can consist of millions of billion- aires) but to improve the conditions of workers.

Liberals and the Left state that affirmative action has helped not only blacks but also women, including white women. Some even state that it is white women who have benefited the most from affirmative action. As is the case with many successful blacks, middle and upper class white women would state that they indeed have benefited from affirmative action. It is because of affirmative action that many of them have become top administrators, executives, and university professors. Yet the majority of women are neither administrators nor executives. Most of them are engaged in rather humble jobs: hairdressers, waitresses, cooks, nurses, secretaries, high school teachers. Should they be concerned with the number of women at Harvard or Yale, or the quotas for women in the state department? For them, these women "role models" are as far away as Donald Trump is to the average worker. They watch the lives of these models as they do the lives of TV stars on the screen, as something exciting and glamorous--the stuff of fairy tales and fantasies--which has no real relationship to the life of the average working woman.

The average women little worries about whether there is a glass ceiling at General Motors. Instead her focus is on solving her daily problems, and I imagine that she would like those who claim to represent her interests to address them. The average women faces thousands of such problems. Why should she be forced to work, and often long hours for little pay, during the entire nine months of her pregnancy? Why can't she get afford- able child care? Why doesn't society ensure adequate medical care for its children, especially the children of poor women? I believe the average


woman would like to see militant leftist feminists address these problems and pay a little less attention to the glass ceiling at General Motors.

Millions of American women, of all races, receive no succor from those who pretend to be the defenders of their interests. The American Left states that the concerns of these women are misguided. They maintain that the family, at least in its traditional form, is a reactionary institution. In the family model, women are mostly "sex objects" and "baby machines." Children are not all that important when it comes to self-fulfillment. If they want children, there is a way to do this without a husband, or even without a male partner. After all, the concern with family is a ploy of reactionary "male chauvinist pigs."

Sexual harassment, another favorite topic of the Left, emerged as a focus of concern during the sixties, when it was sold as part of the affirmative action package. In a broad sense, the Left should be commended for their concern about women's safety and honor and whether women are truly safe in the country. Yet if future historians approach the information contained in America's newspapers about sexual harassment in the USA with the same naive eyes that American Leftist historians of the Soviet regime approached official Soviet documents, they will be stunned by their discovery. It seemed that once upon a time America was a country of brutal rapists, exceeded by no other country in the world. Russia, for example, would in such a case be a country where women were treated most chi- valrously because the term "sexual harassment" does not exist in the Rus- sian language. These researchers would be even more shocked to discover the strange pattern of rape in the country. It seems that the most dangerous place for women was the Oval Office of the President of the United States. The second most dangerous was the Senate and Congress. Females were also at risk on the campuses of the most prestigious and most expensive universities and colleges. The risk of being sexually harassed declined sub- stantiaUy for members of the working classes and fell to almost nil for those dwelling in the urban jungles of the big cities.

Poring over reports in the contemporary press, future historians will be amazed to discover the high social status of the harassers and that the level of lewdness and amoral conduct correlated with social position and income. The most dangerous men were high level politicians, top executives in business and education and media stars--and their close friends and relatives. At the same time judging from press reports, females were ab- solutely in no danger in the poorest and most heavily populated areas of the big cities. American females were not raped or sexually harassed by truck drivers, blue collar workers, or, God forbid, by the unemployed and welfare recipients of minority origin. Yet, for some strange reason, the most ardent attacker of President Clinton's and Senator Packwood's real or

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imaginary sexual exploits would fearlessly enter the Oval Office or the houses of Congress, but avoid the toughest and poorest neighborhood of the nation's capital, especially at night.

As is the case with most issues on the liberal agenda, the protection of women is a valid one. There is no doubt that some representatives of the elite have misbehaved and deserve punishment. Yet the majority of American females never interact with the elite, with the heads of corpo- rations and presidents of universities. Many of them, still living in the wretched conditions of the urban ghettos, are concerned not with sexual harassment but with violence, brutal and simple, not with offensive innu- endo and pressure for sexual favors but with rape. They demand from those in charge not so much a watch over the mores of the elite, but better police protection and tougher treatment of rapists and criminals. It goes without saying that the victim of rape can hardly be comforted by the Leftist notion that because her assailant is not a member of the elite whose prosecution would be "politically correct" and therefore a matter of expediency, but instead is a representative of the downtrodden masses that his actions will be excused--especially if the attacker is feeling alienation and social frus- tration because of discrimination, or because he has a different set of values from the white male elite. Victims of violence do not care about the social positions of those who attack them and their families.

As in the case with other issues, the program of the Left has over the course of time turned its sights not to the protection of women or reducing the crime rate in the country but to protecting the interests of the well paid and those females without family responsibility. Worse, the Left actually believes that they represent the interests of all women. This perhaps is the reason the majority of women are quite apathetic to the feminist agenda that has become incorporated into the philosophy of the Left.

THE RUSSIAN THERMIDOR: THE POINT OF COMPARISON

Over the last thirty years, then, the American Left has actually under- gone an evolution, one similar to those that can be seen in the history of many revolutionary movements of the past in different countries. The situation is similar to what happened with the Bolsheviks of the czarist regime. Although many of the Bolsheviks were hardly people of impeccable char- acter, most of them entertained a sincere desire to help the downtrodden populace and the persecuted minorities of the Russian empire. Over time their position changed, and by the end of Brezhnev's reign, they were the well paid, arrogant, and often brutal elite. This elite was concerned with itself and did good for the people only when it helped them to maintain


their privileges and power. They still presented their interests as the interests of the entire society, appealing endlessly to the ghosts of the revolutionary past while swearing that they were acting in the name of the workers and peasants, of oppressed people all over the world--many of them, of course, suffered from the self-delusion that this was true.

Those who succeeded the former Soviet bureaucracy have followed the same road. Once dissidents, who lived wretched lives and were the object of persecution by the KGB, they have become the "Democrats" of post Soviet Russia--the corrupt, cynical, well paid, wallowing-in-privileges functionaries of Yeltsin's regime. Although they like to emphasize their con- nection with the "revolutionary dissidents" of the Soviet regime and stress their attachment to the people, at the same time they blame the masses for not "understanding" their good intentions. It is easy to see, however, why the people mistrust them; their good intentions have led to the plun- dering ("privatization") of state property and the impoverishment ("sacri- fice") of the majority to make the transition to a market economy possible. All of these types of oppositionists, would-be troublemakers and fighters for the masses who end by becoming members of the establishment, were well known to Marx, who had studied the political and ideological transformation of the bourgeois revolutionaries of the eighteenth century. Ac- cording to Marx, although the oppositionists claimed to represent the entire nation (and the majority of the idealists sincerely believed this), they actually represented the interests of the well to do, the new post feudal elite.

The evolution of Russian "radicals" (the term has of course a different meaning in the context of revolutionary and post revolutionary Russia) is quite similar to that of many American radicals, and their fears and problems also have some similarities. And a review of recent Russian developments could provide here an important clue.

"SOVKI" AS ANGRY WHITE MAN AND THE POSSIBLE FUTURE

The Russian "democrats" have been in power at least since the abor- tive coup of 1991 and perhaps as early as the last years of Gorbachev's regime. From the late 1980's, and especially after the collapse of the USSR and the sharp decline in the standard of living, the Russian populace has been increasingly dissatisfied with the government's economic, social, and, implicitly, its political programs. Yet both the Western and Russian mass media have ignored this resentment on the part of the people and have reported that an absolute majority of the Russian people are on the side of the "democrats," except for an insignificant fringe of die-hard commu- nists and war veterans, who, owing to their age and lack of education, are

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unable to grasp the new progressive ideas. For the most part, the Western media has supported this view of the situation, reporting that despite some expected problems, the people are firmly on the side of the new order. They base these assumptions, as later would be reported with an air of irony by Russian journalists, on interviews with English speaking, rather well-to-do Muscovites whose views supposedly represent the people's.

The bloody uprising in Moscow during October 1993, when tanks were used to shell the parliamentary building, definitely scared the "democrats," but did not change their perception that the populace basically up- held their programs. The only amendment to their thinking was the presumption that besides the old timers, who were unable to offer much resistance to Army regulars and their tanks, there was a tiny group of fascist and communist desperadoes, an amalgamation dubbed the "red-to- brown" movement. It was they who were causing most of the problems. The democrats also assumed that the Parliament, most of whose members were hardly supportive of their programs, was the legacy of the Soviet past, as irrelevant to present day Russia as Lenin's profile on still circu- lated Soviet banknotes.

Most "democrats," in fact, were so confident that the majority appre- ciated their efforts (polls predicted a sweeping victory) that at the time of the fall elections, which immediately followed the events of October 1993, they had a banquet table laid out with exquisite foods on display on the major TV stations. The sumptuous feast was intended to be a celebration of their inevitable victory. When the votes were counted, however, the re- suits were hardly what those sitting in the TV studios had planned. The majority of the electorate had voted for conservative parties, and a quarter of them had even voted for Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, one of the nationalistic leaders of the "red-to-brown" movement and the Russian equivalent of a "redneck" or "angry white male." As a result of the election, the Parliament became even more conservative than it had been before October, when many old line conservatives had been pushed aside by the barrels of tank guns.

The "democrats" immediately forgot that they had consistently stated that they represented the people's will and that it was this that made them different from the entrenched bureaucracy of Brezhnev's reign. Sounding quite similar to the American liberals and Leftists who greeted the Re- publicans' victory in 1994 with a sense of shock, they proclaimed that for some strange reason Russians had "become insensitive" to their programs, had failed to "understand" the long term benefits to their political design. Some Russian "democrats" changed their approach to the populace com- pletely and decided that democracy would not work in Russia, for the


majority of Russian citizens were nothing but "sovki," a derogatory ab- breviation of the word "Soviet man." What Soviet man needed was dictatorship. Of course this would be no communist style dictatorship, but rather a benign, enlightened dictatorship that would lead to a real demo- cratic transformation sometime in the future. Yeltsin was regarded as the embodiment of this enlightened dictator, a philosopher prince of sorts. And he was a man who knew how to deal with Parliament appropriately, how to lead the people on the true path to democracy until they regained their sensitivity.

Continuing developments in the country show that their grand design is hardly off to an auspicious start. Although Yeltsin's leadership has become increasingly authoritarian, especially since the Chechen War, he has not become the enlightened philosopher prince the "democrats" en- visioned. Yeltsin is a shrewd politician, and contrary to his liberal advi- sors, he has a sense for the public's mood. To be sure, he decimated Parliament with the Army's shells, but when he discovered that its pre- vailing conservative philosophy was not going to be cowed, he donned its philosophical and political attire himself. As a result of this political re-alignment, the "democrats" now find themselves facing an almost "red- to-brown" president, whom they helped to elevate to the pinnacle of power.

The author of this essay has just returned from Moscow, where he was at a party crowded with people who had known each other for a long time. Such long term acquaintanceship usually implies that one has reached a certain level of intimacy, an ability to have a conversation free of internal censorship. Most were "democrats." During a lively discussion about the political situation and the prospects for the future, I suggested that those "democrats" most responsible for the current economic and political disasters might end badly. My offhand comment about the possible demise of Gaidar and those close to him was the result of a heated discussion in a convivial atmosphere. My liberal use of vodka, still an essential element of all Russian parties, might have been a contributing element also. In short, it was a turn of phrase that would have gone unnoticed a couple of years ago when the majority of Russian intellectuals of all persuasions were cynical and weary of politics and saw squab- bling at the top as having little impact on their daily lives.

This was not be the case, not on that night. Suddenly my friends were sober. One of the ladies present, whom I have known her for almost twenty years, stood up and stalked out of the room, her features contorted in an- ger. I was surprised by the response of my friends and desperately tried to turn everything into a joke, attributing my prediction about a bloody end for the "democrats" to my research interests. I had spent too much

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time reading about the French and Russian Revolutions and the Reigns of Terror that followed them. As a matter of fact, I was in Moscow right now to research this very topic. But despite my efforts, the conversation re- mained tense for the rest of the evening.

Mulling the incident over on my way home, I came to what I think is an understanding about what the Russian soul lacks. And it is something deeper, more elemental, than a loss of hope, though this would seem to be the answer. Russian liberal intellectuals had been optimistic at the beginning of Gorbachev's reign and the aftermath of August 1991. Soon this sense of elation has been replaced with passivity and the old cynicism. Then after the beginning of Yeltsin's rule they came to the con- clusion that the basic elements of Russian society had not changed. One type of scum, "party bureaucrats," had been replaced with another, "democrats." Democrats were merely party functionaries who had replaced Lenin's portrait with a fashionable icon or pictures of pretty girls in suggestive bikinis.

But hope is not the thing that the Russian soul craves. Hope had been abandoned years ago, even if my friends did not acknowledge it. What their souls are lacking is a sense of physical safety, a feeling that had been nur- tured since the end of Stalin's regime in 1953 with its mass repression. Indeed, despite the meanness of Brezhnev's reign, Russian liberal intellectuals never experienced fear for their safety. They could fear losing their jobs, that their children would not be admitted to the best universities, and so forth, but they were never concerned with their personal security. The response to my small jest was so harsh because it touched on another feeling--a subconscious, or even conscious, fear. My remark had been greeted as if I had reminded a gathering of the Russian imperial family just before the collapse of czardom about the fate of the French king and his wife during the French Revolution.

In America, of course, the position of the liberals and the Left is different than it is in Russia. However, some American liberal beliefs are not out of line with their Russian counterparts. In the wake of the O. J. Simp- son trial, a contributor to the New York Times (October 6, 1995) wrote tellingly about what the level of racial hatred and the shift to right, with its possible disregard for the constitutional rights of criminal defendants, meant to an American society already fearful of violent crime. "Given our penchant for denial, we are likely to underestimate the gravity of these problems. A society split along racial lines, in an overheated atmosphere in which both sides lack confidence in the justice system, is a society headed for catastrophe." This air of fear is quite similar to what I found at the gathering in Moscow.


MARX'S TEACHING IS OVERPOWERFUL BECAUSE IT IS RIGHT

Yet despite the similarities one should not equate Russian and Ameri- can liberals, and not only because the USA is not Russia where tank shells are the most convincing argument in political discourse. There is another important difference--their approach to Marxism. To be sure, all Russian intellectuals schooled during the Soviet regime received a liberal dose of Marxism. It was indeed the staple of the intellectual diet. Yet Russian intellectuals approached their Marxist legacy with disdain, seeing it as an ideology, an opiate for the masses hiding behind another name, that had brought great harm to the country. American intellectuals, though, especially those on the Left, never refuted Marxism. In fact, their advocacy of affirmative action and multiculturalism, their entire political program, was rooted in Marxism, in socialism in general. They justified their platform, directly or indirectly, on Marxism's concern for the poor and oppressed. While it is undoubtedly true that this concern is a major element in Marx- ism, the philosophy is more than a promise of deliverance for the downtrodden into a happy millennium. Marxism is also a philosophy of cold and pitiless analysis, for it requires the scrutinizing of any ideological paradigm from the angle of what social groups the paradigm represents.

If those members of the American Left who still cherish tender feel- ings toward socialism in general and Marxism in particular would use Marx- ism as an analytical tool, they could explain whey the white middle class had once been sympathetic to the plight of minorities, had "understood" the importance of reform. They would also be able to understand why the political activities of a large section of the American underclass, including women and minorities, do not match their sixties' counterparts, why most do not even care to vote today, and why African-American women in a "shelter for battered women (Emphasis in original) cheered when the verdict was announced" (New York Times, October 6, 1995). Marx might also be able to explain why California voters, in an action that most would have recoiled from in disgust twenty years ago, had not only tried to stop affirmative action but also prevent the state from providing food, medicine, and schooling to the children of illegal immigrants and why the Los Angeles police had hired such a man as "Fuhrman, who has never heard of the truth and who believed that all black people should be burned" (Ibid.). Marx would also explain why America is constantly moving further to the right.

Here, my mind drifts back to downtown Moscow, where there stands a huge granite statue of Marx. As a person Marx had a tragic life. Poor and restless he could never find a permanent resting place. He became a wandering Jew, moving from country to country until he found more or

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less a permanent place of residency in England. And for a long while, it seemed as if his spirit had found its permanent place in the great Soviet commonwealth, an empire that stretched throughout most of Eurasia. But beginning in 1991, his memory, and of course his disciples, have been in constant eclipse. Lenin's museum is closed, and the plate on the wall that marked the most important revolutionary events has been removed. Most radical has been the fate of the statues of the revolution's icons. They were either removed from their pedestals and sent to be melted for their metal, or exiled to basements and yards of museums, or thrown in a dump some- where. Some were taken as far away as the United States, when one en- terprising American bought a huge statue of Lenin that he intended to offer for sale. No one bought, and the owner of the statue died in an auto- mobile accident, so it now rests in some American city on the West coast, the object of what some contemporary Russian newspapers see as a deli- cious irony--i.e., V. I. Lenin, the leader of the worldwide proletariat, standing captive in the midst of a bastion of capitalism, a political system which he saw himself as conquering someday.

Yet, for some reason the statue of Marx still stands in downtown Mos- cow. Residents of the city have offered various explanations as to why. I have been told that the monument was too bulky to be removed safely. There was a proposal to dynamite it, but this was rejected as too unsafe, as there is a subway line just beneath its granite slab. An explosion could damage the delicate network of tunnels and communication lines buried beneath it. Still others suggested that it remains intact, as present leaders are too busy privatizing the state, shooting each other, or engaging in love- making and drinking to be concerned with an ideological fossil. Others merely shrug their shoulders, as if to say, who cares.

Whatever the reason, Marx has survived in the middle of downtown Moscow. His effigy is a huge, Egyptian style figure, cut from a single granite slab. Marx's fists are clenched, and his eyes seem to look past the people scurrying back and forth from fancy restaurants and night clubs, past the seductive girls hunting to assignations with the nouveau fiche, past the flashing neon advertisements for the goods of Western capitalists. One imagines Marx's eyes as looking out past this busy scene toward a future time when perhaps his message might be received with a clearer understanding. Chiseled into a slab near him is an inscription, one American and Russian liberals might remember the next time they bemoan their fate and ponder why the masses have become "insensitive," "unreasonable," and, of course, "reactionary": "Marx's teaching is over-powerful because it is right" (Lenin).

A thermidorian meditation

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