Liberal McCarthyism

Do you remember tail-gunner Joe McCarthy?  Howard Zinn did.  In his textbook on American history, Zinn devoted more pages to McCarthy than he did to Thomas Alva Edison.  The reason?  Why it was because for ultra liberals, such as Zinn, McCarthy was the essence of conservative evil.

McCarthy was not a very attractive figure.  The Wisconsin senator wore a perpetually creepy smirk and when he spoke did so in a high pitched voice that was punctuated by nervous cackles.  Yet it was what he did that made him infamous.

During the 1950’s, at the height of the cold war, McCarthy spearheaded a witch-hunt for communist sympathizers in the government.  He would appear before television cameras waving a piece of paper and declaring, “I have a list.”  The list was phony, but it was sufficient to put the fear of exposure into many innocent hearts.

One of them was my uncle Milton.  During the 1930’s, as a teenager, he attended several communist party meetings.  Then he went off to war to serve in General Patton’s army.  Once retuned home, having few technical skills, he sought a job as a bus driver for the city of New York.

The question was; would he be hired if his past became known.  He and the larger family therefore worried on his behalf.  As it happened, he was hired and remained on the job for decades.  Nonetheless, others had their careers ruined by the McCarthyism scare.

Flash forward to today.  The very liberals who denounced McCarthy’s tactics have adopted them as their own.  They have taken to vilifying their enemies on little or no evidence.  They have even taken to getting people fired from their jobs if they disagree with liberal dogma.

Just ask Brendan Eich.  He is the man who had to resign as CEO of Mozilla because liberals revealed he donated money to support the California proposition in favor of traditional marriage.  Likewise, just ask the Koch brothers who are routinely flogged on the floor of the senate by majority leader Harry Reid.

Reid calls the Koch’s un-American, just the way McCarthy called his targets un-American.  Because they funded causes other than the one’s he prefers, they are condemned as trying to take over the country.  Even Condoleezza Rice, a former Secretary of State, it attacked for having supported the Iraq war, and therefore is deemed unfit to sit on corporate boards.

The difference between the old McCarthyism and the new?  Why McCarthy was one man.  For several years, he made a big stir, but then he was brought down by a coalition of Americans who could not bear to see him undermine the fabric of American freedoms.

This partnership included liberals such as CBS’s Edward R. Murrow, but also conservatives such as president Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Ultimately asked by counsel Joseph N. Welch at the Army-McCarthy hearings “Have you no sense of decency? McCarthy could not muster an answer.

Today’s liberals when asked the same thing do not even attempt an answer.  They have no shame because they are convinced of their personal rectitude.  Still living in a time warp where they conceive of themselves as the victims of a McCarthy, they cannot imagine that they are now the victimizers.

And so Harry Reid can accuse Mitt Romney of not having paid his taxes, without providing a scrap of evidence.  Or Barack Obama can accuse Republicans of engaging in a war on women by citing a false statistic about how women earn seventy-seven cents of the dollar, for the same work, compared to men.

Even when these contemporary McCarthy’s are called out for their mendacity, they stand tall because they know they have legions of equally corrupt liberals at their back.  They are confident that the media will not assail them the way they did McCarthy.  Nor will academics expose their shabby politics.

Worse still, voters keep voting for these genuinely anti-American miscreants.  As a result, they keep doing what works for them.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

Marx and Identity Politics

Karl Marx wanted workers to identify as workers.  He believed than only when they began looking after their own interests would they be able to throw off the yoke of capitalist oppression.

Today, liberals purvey a similar attitude with respect to women and minorities.  Women are thus told they must identify themselves, first and foremost, as women, while African-Americans are asked to consider themselves primarily as African-American.  Being American—or human—come in a distant second.

Marx advocated this tactic because he didn’t want workers to side with their bosses.  Liberals likewise do not want women or blacks to support their reputed oppressors.  In the case of women, these are men; whereas for blacks, it is whites in general.

In both instances, the goal is to prepare the way for a rebellion.  For Marxists, this was intended to destroy capitalism; for liberals, it is to totally remake America along neo-socialist lines.

And so women and African-Americans are encouraged to think of themselves as oppressed workers.  If they do, they will surely align with the proletarian cause and help defeat their common tormentors.

This makes false consciousness, that is, identifying with men or whites, a serious transgression.  Men, particularly Republican men, they are repeatedly told, are waging a war on women, while whites, particularly conservative whites, are obviously trying to reinstate slavery.

 These arguments would be risible—except that many young women and most blacks seem to buy them.  They do not appear to understand that identifying with liberal causes today constitutes the true false consciousness.

Consider the situation of women.  If men are the enemy, does marriage make sense?  And if marriage does not make sense, does having children make sense?  “Sleeping with the Enemy” made a wonderful movie title, but it is a terrible way to create a family.

Married women know this.  They are therefore more likely to vote conservative.  A majority of single women do not.  They fail to realize that they are being encouraged to become old maids and/or unwed mothers.  As a result, they are prepared to sell out their own interests for the sake of free birth control.

No!  Women and men are not enemies!  To the contrary, they ought to be allies.  Yes, some men are abusive, but this is not the norm.  If it were, we would all be doomed.

Consequently, young women must learn that this business of men earning more for the same work is a liberal canard.  They instead need to discover that success and intimacy are not necessarily inconsistent.  They must likewise realize that when men win, they also win.  This is not false consciousness, but reality.

With respect to African-Americans, don’t they remember that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, that Republican votes helped pass the civil rights laws, and that Richard Nixon started affirmative action?  Since when have conservatives been pro-slavery—except in liberal propaganda?

Conservatives insist that blacks learn to help themselves, but how is this anti-black?  Has helpless dependency somehow morphed into the contemporary version of freedom?  Successful parents demand that their children perform so that they too can be successful.  Shouldn’t we, as a society, make similar demands of blacks so that they can be successful?

So what has the liberal parody of false consciousness delivered in the way of benefits?  Not much!  The sad fact is that women are discovering a bad economy is bad for everyone—not just men.  After all, women too are losing jobs, and women too are suffering under ObamaCare.

As for African-Americans, they may cheer at rhetoric that castigates conservatives as their nemesis, but they are doing even less well on the job market.  A black president is a wonderful symbol, yet symbolism alone does not put food on the table.

No, women and blacks are Americans and should be proud of it.  They must also realize that because we are all in the same boat, hurting the whole hurts them too.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

False Consciousness--American Style

Karl Marx sought a revolution.  He wanted workers, whom he called proletarians, to rise up and overthrow their capitalistic bosses.  Instead of passively allowing themselves to be exploited, they needed to take control of the government and institute a dictatorship of the proletariat in which fairness would prevail.

The trouble was that the workers were not aware of their plight.  Rather than recognizing how badly they were being exploited, they tended to identify with their employers.  Many actually accepted pay to serve in militaries and police forces dedicated to defending the very people who were misusing them.

This had to stop.  The workers had to become conscious of their own interests.  They needed to realize that they constituted a social class to which they owed allegiance.  Accordingly, someone was required to help them pierce their false consciousness.  Someone, such as Marx, with an objective perspective, had to educate the masses.

Fast-forward to today and liberals continue to regard themselves as a social vanguard dedicated to waking the working classes from their political slumber.  In their view, workers must understand that the “one percenters” are not their friends and hence that wealth must be transferred from the top to the bottom of society.

Contemporary liberals are not as militant as Marx, but they too intend to remake society.  Obama called this “hope and change,” and its cat’s paw is ObamaCare.

The difficulty with this strategy is that today’s exploitation is primarily lodged in the public, rather than the private, domain.  It is now the government that is controlling workers and limiting their options.  It is a bloated governmental bureaucracy that is standing in the way of prosperity and freedom.

Who now sets society’s rules?  Washington.  Who collects the confiscatory taxes?  Washington.  And who calls the tune in Washington?  The liberals.  Consequently if there is today a false consciousness, it is a lack of awareness of who is exploiting whom.

Once capitalists sought to convince their employees that they were on their side.  Among other things, these bosses used religion to pacify the proletarians and convince them they would get their just deserts after they died and went to heaven.

Nowadays, it is the liberals who are trying to convince voters they are on their side.  Just you wait, they tell them, and ObamaCare will provide everyone with quality medical care at lower costs.  Just be patient and raising the minimum wage will pull everyone out of poverty.

But don’t look behind the curtain to see how much money we are wasting.  And don’t notice that we are funneling your tax dollars into the pockets of our political cronies.  And for goodness sake, don’t realize that the rules we are instituting to protect you from yourselves are actually intended to enhance our power.

The radical feminists, who were gender Marxists, sought to arouse women to overthrow their male oppressors by making women aware of how badly they were abused.  One vehicle for doing so was “consciousness raising” sessions in which the sins of men were enumerated in gory detail.

Political liberals, however, favor use of the media and educational systems.  These routinely publicize the alleged transgressions of business leaders, while whitewashing the deceits and power grabs of Democratic politicians. 

The object is to divert attention away from the real oppressors.  We are thus to believe liberals when they tell us they care about our welfare.  We are instead to aim our indignation at the Koch brothers for funding conservative causes.  Who is actually helped and hurt does not matter.

And so the poor continue to be hurt.  They are driven into a hopeless dependency from which they may never emerge.  And the middle classes are hurt.  They are tied down with bureaucratic shackles that limit their entrepreneurial aspirations.

As for the rich: they are doing just fine—especially if they donate to liberal causes and are allowed to feed at the federal trough.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

E-Core Madness

Many years ago, when I was a real Yankee as opposed to a damn Yankee, we Northerners looked down our noses at Southerners.  We understood that people who lived below the Mason-Dixon line were ill-educated louts who could barely count to ten.

Back then the quality of southern schools was, in fact, far lower than that of their northern counterparts.  At both the K-12 and college levels, what was demanded of students and learned by them did not compare favorably with even their mediocre competitors.

But times change.  Over the last several decades the New South has become the engine of national development—which includes its academic institutions.  Thus, where the University of Georgia was once a parochial backwater, today it is in the front rank of state universities.

Meanwhile, Kennesaw State University has over the course of fifty years grown from nothing into one of the best regional universities in the land.  Starting as a tiny community college nestled in the Georgia pines, it is today a favored destination for even international students.

Yet now, for some unfathomable reason, many Georgia politicians want to turn the clock back.  In the name of progress, they are proposing to tear down what has been accomplished and replace it with high-tech ignorance.  Intoxicated with promises of a brave new computerized world, they mean to substitute electronic dazzle for genuine knowledge.

Let me explain.  Currently on the fast track toward implementation is something called the “e-core.”  This is intended to allow lower division students to take their first two years of college strictly on line and then transfer to any University System of Georgia school for their junior year.

Standardized on-line courses are to be taught, not by old-line professors, but curriculum specialists.  Because the materials imparted are to be homogenized, and simplified, all that will be needed to deliver them are the equivalent of teacher’s assistants.

Why is this problematic?  Why are my objections something more than sour grapes coming from a professor attempting to save his job?  The answer lies in the nature of on-line teaching.

One of the things we have learned about this medium is that it works best with well-prepared students.  Yet this is exactly what many recent high school graduates are not.  Likely also intimidated by entering college, they are to be thrown into the deep end of the pool, struggling, in isolation, to cope with unfamiliar demands.

On the other hand, at schools like KSU, younger students are allowed a period of orientation.  They are initially introduced to the studying, writing, and research skills that will be required of them as they proceed into more arduous scholastic territory.  With this foundation under them, they are subsequently prepared to succeed.

But what of the e-core learners who arrive on campus with an inferior preparation?  When they fail, and they will fail in large numbers, what will be the response?  Will the curriculum be further dumbed down to accommodate their needs?  And if it is, will they later be prepared to meet the needs of the modern economy?

The politicians want to save money.  They assume they can do this by cutting back on brick and mortar institutions.  This, however, is penny wise and pound foolish.  It saves a few dollars today only to ensure than many more will be lost down the line.

This is why we at KSU are adamant in our rejection of the e-core.  Our faculty and administrators are on record as nearly unanimously rejecting this demonic innovation.  This may sound self-serving, but we believe in higher education and do not wish to see it sacrificed on the alter of false economies.

So I have a modest suggestion.  If the politicians want to return to the bad old days of southern parochialism, why don’t they just shut down the state’s university system entirely?  This will save a lot of money in the short run.  Come to think of it, closing down the high schools would save much more.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University