The Death of Left-liberal Intellectual Life

Done in by the Foundation-NGO complex

My first post for Power Line, way back in 2002, discussed a book by Michael Lind about the Vietnam War. For my first post on Ringside, I return to Lind, this time for his article on Tablet called “The End of Progressive Intellectual Life.”

Lind argues that “the centralized and authoritarian control of American progressivism by major foundations and the nonprofits that they fund, and the large media institutions, universities, corporations, and banks that disseminate the progressive party line, has made it impossible for there to be public intellectuals on the American center-left.” According to Lind:

If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star. That’s because, in the third decade of the 21st-century, intellectual life on the American center-left is dead.

Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the “life of significant contention” is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds.

As for magazines, Lind observes:

In the 1990s, The New Yorker, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Washington Monthly all represented distinctive flavors of the center-left, from the technocratic neoliberalism of Washington Monthly to the New Left countercultural ethos of The Nation and the snobbish gentry liberalism of The New Yorker. Today, they are bare Xeroxes of each other, promoting and rewriting the output of single-issue environmental, identitarian, and gender radical nonprofits, which all tend to be funded by the same set of progressive foundations and individual donors.

As for public policy:

In the 1990s, you could be a progressive in good standing and argue against race-based affirmative action, in favor of race-neutral, universal social programs that would help African-Americans disproportionately but not exclusively. Around 2000, however, multiple progressive outlets at the same time announced that “the debate about affirmative action is over.”

Today race-neutral economic reform, of the kind championed by the democratic socialist and Black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin and the Marxist Adolph Reed, is stigmatized on the center-left as “color-blind racism,” and progressives in the name of “equity” are required to support blatant and arguably illegal racial discrimination against non-Hispanic white Americans and “white-adjacent” Asian Americans, for fear of being purged as heretics.

Immigration policy provides an even more striking example of the power of Progressivism, Inc. to crush debate among actual progressives. Up until around 2000, libertarians and employer-class Republicans wanted to weaken laws against illegal immigration and expand low-wage legal immigration, against the opposition of organized labor and many African-Americans—who for generations have tended to view immigrants as competitors.

The Hesburgh Commission on immigration reform, appointed by President Jimmy Carter, and the Jordan Commission, appointed by President Bill Clinton and led by Texas Representative Barbara Jordan, the pioneering civil rights leader who was left-liberal, Black, and lesbian, both proposed cracking down on illegal immigration—by requiring a national ID card, punishing employers of illegal immigrants, and cutting back on low-skilled, low-wage legal immigrants. As late as 2006, then-Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both voted for 200 miles of border fencing in the Southwest.

Then, virtually overnight, the progressive movement flipped and adopted the former talking points of the Chamber of Commerce cheap-labor lobby.

Lind adds two more examples — energy policy and “gender fludity.” He complains that control over policy setting on the left is exercised by the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Omidyar Network, and other donor foundations, an increasing number of which are funded by fortunes rooted in Silicon Valley. “It is this donor elite, bound together by a set of common class prejudices and economic interests, on which most progressive media, think tanks, and advocacy groups depend for funding.”

The donor elite exercises its power “through its swarms of NGO bureaucrats” who “impose common orthodoxy and common messaging on their grantees.” Lind describes this method as “chain-ganging,” by which he means “implicitly or explicitly banning any grantee from publicly criticizing the positions of any other grantee.”

Lind accuses conservatives of the same kind of intellectual bankruptcy he decries in progressives. He claims that the conservative donor base imposed group think in the 1990s and that today “Conservatism, Inc., including flagship journals like the National Review and flagship think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, remains a museum of mummies.”

“Conservativism Inc.” refers to something real, though one can question whether Lind has correctly identified its “flagships.” But Lind is wrong in supposing that it exerts the kind of control he attributes to its left-liberal counterpart.

“Conservatism Inc.” failed to stop Donald Trump in 2016. or even to make a good run at doing so Today, it struggles to cope with Trumpism, or even to figure out what successful coping would mean.

There is lively debate among conservative public intellectuals over a wide range of key issues. They include trade policy, legal immigration, the sentencing of certain kinds of criminals, federal spending and debt, plus major elements of foreign policy and the core question of what is required by our national security interests. And of course, there is vigorous debate over Trump himself.

Conservatives can suffer adverse consequences from the positions they take on these matters, especially on Trump. Longtime friendships can be lost, as can access to certain forums.

But the debate isn’t constrained, as it is on the left, by considerations of who might be “triggered” or what might cause someone to be called “racist.” And there is no true counterpart on the right to what Lind describes as “the major foundations and the nonprofits they fund, and the large media institutions, universities, corporations, and banks that disseminate the progressive party line.”

On the left, though:

[I]n one area of public policy or politics after another, Progressivism, Inc. has shut down debate. . .through its interlocking networks of program officers, nonprofit functionaries, and center-left editors and writers, all of whom can move with more or less ease between these roles during their careers as bureaucratic functionaries whose salaries are ultimately paid by America’s richest families and individuals.

The result is a spectacularly well-funded NGOsphere whose intellectual depth and breadth are contracting all the time.

One result of this contraction is this:

Having crowded out dissent and debate, the nonprofit industrial complex—Progressivism, Inc.—taints the Democratic Party by association with its bizarre obsessions and contributes to Democratic electoral defeats, like the one that appears to be imminent this fall.

Let’s call this a richly-deserved reckoning.