Jonathan Chait has been making an even cruder version of this argument for a while, telling us that the “campus left” has borrowed its extremism from Marxism, and would likely drag us all off to the gulags if we ever got a chance. Matthew Yglesias rightly complains about Sullivan’s suggestion that Marxism lurks behind the movements for gender and race recognition. And the political goal is not a post-racial fusion, a unity of the red and the blue, but the rallying of the victims against the victimizers, animated by the core belief that a non-“white” and non-male majority will at some point come, after which the new hierarchies can be imposed by fiat. All the ideas that might complicate this — meritocracy, for example, or a color-blind vision of justice, or equality of opportunity rather than outcome — are to be mocked until they are dismantled. What matters is equality of outcome, and it cannot be delayed. What matters is that nonwhites fight and defeat white supremacy, that women unite and defeat oppressive masculinity, and that the trans supplant and redefine the cis. There is no arc of history here, just an eternal grinding of the racist and sexist wheel. And in this neo-Marxist worldview, fully embraced by a hefty majority of the next generation, the very idea of America as a liberating experiment, dissolving tribal loyalties in a common journey toward individual opportunity, is anathema.
What matters before anything else is what race and gender you are, and therefore what side you are on. And the animating goal of progressive politics is unvarnished race and gender warfare. The idea that African-Americans have some responsibility for their own advancement, that absent fatherhood and a cultural association of studying with “acting white” are part of the problem — themes Obama touched upon throughout his presidency — is now almost a definition of racism itself. A couple of days ago, Andrew Sullivan delivered a blast against “neo-Marxism”:
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