More on Matt Taibbi's strange take on Herbert Marcuse (1 of 2)

There's another entry in the Taibbi-Marcuse discussion I mentioned in an earlier post. This piece by Benjamin Studebaker on his own website is called Misreadings of Marcuse and the Confused Cancel Culture Debate 02/17/2021.

Katie Halper invited Studebaker and Taibbi onto her YouTube show to talk about Marcuse. (Marcuse Debate w/ Matt Taibbi... 01/26/2021) Studebaker clearly understands the constellation of problems Marcuse was addressing in his "Repressive Tolerance" essay in particular much better than Taibbi does.

I hope the visibility this discussion has had in left-leaning media will encourage some people to actually read more of Marcuse. His books don't make easy reading. But he has a very informed and nuanced view of capitalism, fascism, and authoritarianism.

Studebaker thinks as I do that it's pretty superficial for Taibbi to try to portray Marcuse as a predecessor of an establishment-liberal, elitist "cancel culture." And given that Marcuse is one of the best-known figures of the Frankfurt School of thinkers which is portrayed in the current far-right theory of "Cultural Marxism" - very influential among the hardcore radical right in American and Europe - as an evil Jewish conspiracy to create multiculturalism/"political correctness"/"cancel culture", I would really like to hear how Taibbi would distinguish his own claim that Marcuse created "cancel culture" from that of the poisonous Cultural Marxism theory.

Dave Neiwert explained that concoction several years ago in How the 'cultural Marxism' hoax began, and why it's spreading into the mainstream Daily Kos 01/23/2019. As he puts it there:

It’s become a common reference in recent years as conservatives have increasingly attacked multiculturalism in the public square. From Fox News to Breitbart to pop philosophers such as Jordan Peterson, “cultural Marxism” is increasingly identified as the source of everything wrong with modern liberal democracies.

The problem with these claims, however, is that they are fundamentally groundless. The only place that “cultural Marxism” actually exists is within a very narrow and relatively minor faction of academia, and in the fertile imaginations of the right-wing ideologues who see it as the wellspring of a nefarious conspiracy to undermine and eventually destroy Western civilization.

The whole concept is essentially a kind of hoax, a conspiracy theory concocted by radical white nationalists in the 1990s to explain the spread of multiculturalism, and nurtured by a combination of neo-Nazis and nativists over the ensuing years, as it gradually spread to mainstream conservatism through the activism of a handful of key players. It is also deeply anti-Semitic at its root, offering essentially an updated version of the classic “Protocols of the Seven Elders of Zion” conspiracy theory, postulating a scenario in which a cabal of elite Jews conspires in secret to inflict all the ills of modernity onto society for their own benefit. [my emphasis]

It's a whackjob conspiracy theory. But it has long since spread well beyond the horned-hat-shaman crowd. Does Taibbi really not know that his column on Marcuse echoed a favorite theory among today's radical right? Since he clearly doesn't seem to understand what he read from Herbert Marcuse, maybe he doesn't know. But he should really bring himself up to speed on it.

I don't know exactly how to characterize the brand of politics that people like Taibbi and Halper currently represent. Taibbi sounds to me like he's trying to articulate a kind of socialist left narrative that also tries to incorporate some of the right's brand of anti-elitist rhetoric into his viewpoint.

Part of what we hear in the video is a criticism of what has lately been called the "woke" liberal viewpoint, which they associate with the anti-Bernie, Clinton-ish argument that not only does the left not recognize the importance of identity issues around race and gender, but that arguments that even stress the importance of economic redistributionist issues alongside those concerns is itself bad, or reactionary, or un-woke.

To me, this is a strange turn in the longterm cycle of American politics, In the 1960s, the impetus for Great Society programs like Medicare and Medicaid and urban renewal was part of a Democratic viewpoint that in significant part identified itself rhetorically and often practically with racial justice concerns. In the 1970s with the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, a prominent concerns for women's rights also became identified with economic-redistributionist issues in mainstream politics.

The left tended to criticize the general liberal approach as being inadequate to the structural problems producing racial discrimination and economic inequality. (And they were right about that, BTW.) The left in addition took a very critical stance toward US military interventions and the promotion of coups in countries like Chile and Argentina in the 1970s. By today's standards, many liberal Democrats were also strikingly critical of many of the same issues, though they were allergic to calling their position "anti-imperialist." Because Russia and China claimed to be anti-imperialist, or whatever.

By 1992, when Clinton was elected President and the Soviet Union had fallen apart, those mainstream constellations had changed. Republicans and Democrats had largely embraced neoliberal economic approaches, and military adventures had come to look a lot more benign to many liberals. There's some irony in the fact that in 1992, Clinton's centrist messaging tended to downplay the racial justice and equal-rights aspect and emphasize something that sounded more like old-fashioned Keynesian economic stimulus policies than what the Republicans had on offer. Clinton's Administration actually wound up being more defined by more-or-less conservative/neoliberal austerity thinking and a messaging that celebrated diversity - even though his actual policies stressed more draconian prison sentencing, the drug war, and "welfare reform" that actually had seriously bad effects on African-Americans, especially.

We even saw a later echo of the 1992-tpye messaging in Hillary Clinton's 2008 primary campaign against Barack Obama, in which she tried to contrast her emphasis on economic issues and national health care to the diversity issues with which Obama was so associated. But now we're emerging (I hope!) from a stretch in which concern for good wages is mocked by establishment Democrats as excusing racism, sexism, and xenophobia by blaming them superficially on "economic anxiety".

Taibbi seems to be articulating a view aimed at stressing a leftie, even democratic-socialist economic criticism together with a rejection of superficial "woke" rhetoric, a rejection that may also involve some disdain for the real social problems with which "wokeness" is concerned. And he mixes this with an antiwar attitude that in my mind borders more on an actual conservative isolationism than on a well-worked-out, left-leaning peace policy.

(Continued in Part 2)