The Sociology of Barack Obama - Part 3

The Dinner Party Empire

We left off in part 2 by disputing Yarvin’s strong intellectual genealogy of leftism, which found its origins in Puritanism.

Although I disagree with the genealogy, I agree with Yarvin in a qualified way that low church Protestant ideas are integral to the American civil religion, which means it is integral to the determination of whether the actions of Yarvin’s Cathedral or Modern Structure, including the government, are legitimate. This is at least partially the reason why the policy-making 20th- and 21st-century Americans we considered recently – Talcott Parsons, Strobe Talbott, and Barack Obama – harbor universalist sociologies that see global government as the end of history.

But the genealogy of Marxism in Puritan theology is tenuous. Notwithstanding the various Protocols of the Learned Elders of Puritan Zion Yarvin and acolytes have dug up on archive.org, John Murray Cuddihy’s explanation of Marxism as an ethnic reaction to Northwestern European protestant modernity is more persuasive and objective, in my opinion. (Cuddihy’s account proves to be more practically useful for a reactionary or conservative dissident than theological genealogy, as I’ll discuss in what hopefully is the last instantiation of this article series.)

What’s more persuasive in Yarvin’s historical work is his demonstration that American government was generally very favorable toward Marxist and Leftist movements, both domestic and foreign (notwithstanding some relationships that went sour). But as I said in the prior post, this is not persuasive evidence of a genealogical relationship between Puritanism and Communism, given that the affinity can be explained by the mutual hostility of heritage Americans and Communists to the ancien regime.

Yarvin’s history, much like the history produced by Birchers and individuals like Hilaire du Berrier (whose work BAP has been surveying on his podcast), can have the effect of a Matrix redpill on conservatives steeped in Reagan-era rhetoric about Communism and progressives steeped in Henry Wallace-style progressive conspiracy theories about a secret Nazi America. To discover that the government you believed to be ruthlessly opposing Communism and suppressing leftist liberation was actually promoting these movements for a long time can be jarring for a normie.

Yarvin’s histories are essential for disabusing Americans of these partisan delusions about the nature of the empire they live in and its attitude toward parochial and local concerns. However, just as Marxism becomes counter-intuitive to any person who thinks they should own their small cache of personal and real property, Yarvin’s broader conceptual claims about America being ruled by Communists who were created by Puritans is counter-intuitive.

In this part and the next part of this series, I’m going to offer an alternative theory of American universalism that tries to strip away the counter-intuitiveness of Yarvin’s claim while providing a practical basis for engaging in political reform. This part 3 will first take a closer look at Yarvin’s claim that America is Communist in the ’08 article and provide an alternative explanation. This will lead into my conclusion that Obama isn’t a Communist.

Jewish Dinner Parties

In the entertaining but apparently now-forgotten Strangers and Natives: The Evolution of the American Jew from 1921 to the Present, the Zionist Judd Teller depicts the colorful melting pot of Jewish New York prior to WW1 and through the end of the interwar period. This setting was frequented by assimilated Germanic Jews like Louis Brandeis who put up Christmas trees and got along very well with the WASP ruling elite, and by the more rambunctious and lower class Eastern European Jewish immigrants who adopted and developed the ideological reactions to Northwestern European modernity documented by John Murray Cuddihy in The Ordeal of Civility and No Offense. Specifically, among the Eastern European Jews could be found socialists, Marxists, Freudians, Zionists, and orthodox Jews.

These groups also occupied a range of niche professions, stretching from theater (Eastern European Jews were traveling entertainers even in the old world), to journalism, garment work, law, and of course finance.

Initially there was an enormous amount of hostility between the Germanic Jews and Eastern European Jews (Teller suggests the Eastern European Jews used the semi-pejorative “Yahudim” for Germanics). This animosity was documented by Cuddihy and mostly surrounded the ordeal of civility, as well as the intra-ethnic resentment Americans understand in the Black context as the Uncle Tom phenomenon. What’s more interesting for our purposes is how this animosity was overcome through the intimacy of micro-sociological interactions.

The conversion of Kentucky-born Yahudim Louis Brandeis to Zionism brought other respectable Yahudim into contact with Zionism and then the Yiddish-speaking crucible of New York and its Jewish ideological diversity. This meant that as the Yahudim interacted with socialist garment workers, orthodox Jews, Zionists, and other Jewish groups, a more universal sense of Jewish identity and Zionism emerged while animosity declined (to a certain extent, at least – during BAP’s interview of Yarvin on his Caribbean Rhythms podcast, Yarvin reveals his own anti-Yahudim animosity when he blames them for the Holocaust).

In Yarvin’s ’08 article, we encounter the following anecdote as evidence that America is a communist country:

It’s no coincidence, for example, that the ultra-rich were overwhelmingly for Obama. As CPUSA members, my grandparents had a ticket to a social circle at least three rings higher than you’d expect for Yiddish tailors from Brooklyn. Their Party friends (all their friends, as far as I can tell, were Party friends) were film distributors, investment bankers, doctors and lawyers, etc. If you find this surprising, you have a lot to learn about communism.

Being a student of white ethnic assimilation, my first impression here was that Yarvin was describing the class-traversing intimacy of Jewish ethnic identity, very likely of the kind that emerged at the dinner parties Yahudim and Eastern European Jews attended in the 1920s. In other words, the reason all of these groups mingled was not just their shared devotion to Communism but more importantly their shared ethnic identity, which was sometimes represented by a symbolic devotion to Marxism. The reason garment workers and garment bosses can mingle at Communist dinner parties is because they share something universal, which cannot ideologically be Communist by virtue of the attendees’ distinct economic class identities.

Such dinner parties would include people harboring typical emancipated Jewish ideologies like Marxism, Freudianism, and perhaps even some version of the anti-colonialist Zionism espoused by Moses Hess, which I documented in this relevant article. In each of these ideologies you find ethnic resentment (toward fellow Jews and non-Jews) and insecurity refined into a form of universalism that sees hypocrisy and corruption in some of the institutions northern European protestants took to be natural, like capitalist exchange, individualism, and the rituals of civility.

There are of course extreme divergences among these identities and ideologies: Marxism believes everything needs to be overthrown so that everyone, especially Jews and northern European protestants, can finally be socially and economically equal. Freud was more content with a compromise, provided everyone acknowledged that the northern European institutions were imperfect and somewhat pathological. Hess of course had his own version of a mission to the world that saw Jews liberating it from the ancien regime and colonialism while simultaneously preserving the local cultural and racial uniqueness of peoples (with a homeland reserved for each).

But it would be unfair to say that what Yarvin was describing was only Jewish solidarity. I have no doubt that gentiles attended these events. We know, for example, that Brandeis was a close lifelong friend of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and this kind of interethnic comity likely bled into CPUSA dinner parties.

Into these dinner parties entered WASP or “Puritan” elites who were raised to see the American mission to the world much as Parsons and many of the founding fathers did: as a step toward liberating the individuals of the world from superstition and servitude to irrational regimes, chief of which was the corrupt European ancien regime. This universalism initially varied widely in its nature, with some seeing America as a refuge for the world’s oppressed but not a militant vanguard on its behalf, and others seeing America as the bearer of a social-Darwinistic, paternalistic-Teutonic supremacy to be forced upon the lower and sclerotic races in the name of progress.

From a strictly rational perspective, the Jewish ideologies should conflict with each other and the Puritan mission to the world at our dinner party. The sociological processes described by John Murray Cuddihy suggest a reason why they coalesced into a shared universalism instead.

As Cuddihy describes in his two books, the intimacy of the civilizing process causes people to moderate their cold, abstract views of others. This intimacy works both ways, moderating the uncivilized newcomers and the entrenched, civilized elite.

For example, Cuddihy describes how the midwestern Lutheran Reinhold Niebuhr abandons the uncivilized protestant mission to the Jews as he is embraced by the intimacy of the Jewish upper class on the East Coast:

Intimacy was working its relentless solvent. Cool, “objective,” learned typifications of others, as Jews or otherwise, tend to melt when monitored by the warm self-corrective feed-back of reciprocated intimacy.

Niebuhr’s abandonment of the mission to the Jews was reciprocated, with some elite Jews affectionately referring to Niebuhr as their “rabbi.”

This kind of intimacy requires apologetic revisions to parochial dogmas, a sociological phenomenon I described in the context of European antiquity here. Specifically, it requires each of the dinner party participants to find what is universal among them: norms upon which they can predicate the intimacy of the new social space they’ve formed such that nobody gives offense or disrupts the social equilibrium with their fanatical and imperious views.

Returning to Yarvin’s dinner party, we could therefore imagine WASP attendees embracing the left-most parts of their Puritan universalism while abandoning its more exclusionary Christian, and teutonic- and American-supremacist elements.

Zionists and Communists, for their part, would abandon their Jewish supremacism and revolutionary anti-individualistic dogmatism and trend toward the leftist/socialist Zionism of someone like Moses Hess, such that everyone at the dinner party could agree, at a minimum, that the ancien regime was bad and had to go, that individuals and peoples needed to be liberated and given self-determination, and so forth. Simultaneously, the wealth and prestige accumulated by the elite attendees would have to be respected to a certain extent, though the elite attendees would have to make some concession to the garment workers.

Out of this social ferment would emerge a universalism that mirrors Patrick Bateman’s dinner party-moderated political policy speech from American Psycho: a universalism that permits wealth accumulation, seeks the liberation of individuals from parochial constraints and the liberation of peoples from the ancien regime, while simultaneously respecting the right of peoples to self-determination and acknowledging the pitfalls of capitalism by providing some measure of redistribution:

PRICE

(Wired on coke)

Oh ho ho. That affects us? What about the massacres in Sri Lanka, honey? Doesn't that affect us, too? I mean don't you know anything about Sri Lanka? About how the Sikhs are killing like tons of Israelis there? Doesn't that affect us?

BATEMAN

Oh come on. Price. There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about. Sure our foreign policy is important, but there are more pressing problems at hand.

PRICE

Like what?

BATEMAN

Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. But we can't ignore our social needs. either We have to stop people from abusing the welfare system. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women but change the abortion laws to protect the right to life yet still somehow maintain women's freedom of choice.

The table stares at Bateman uncomfortably.

BATEMAN

We also have to control the influx of illegal immigrants. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values and curb graphic sex and violence on TV, in movies, in pop music, everywhere. Most importantly we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.

The reason American universalism mirrors Patrick Bateman’s speech is because social intimacy requires the appearance –- the social appearance -- of non-zero sum compromise.

Note that Bateman’s speech resembles the rhetoric of an Obama speech, which tries to seek “win-win” situations by seeing global integration as inevitable, promoting individual and group level liberation from authoritarianism, striving to reduce inequality created by global integration, and trying to come up with a paradoxical universalism that accommodates parochialism. All of this has to be maintained while not impinging upon existing material interests, including those of the wealthy. Consider these excerpts from Obama’s 2016 Athens speech:

“[we must] ensure that our diverse, multicultural, multiracial, multi-religious world and our diverse nations uphold both the rights of individuals and a fundamental civic adherence to a common creed that binds us together”

“we affirm…[f]reedom of speech and assembly – because true legitimacy can only come from the people, who must never be silenced…[f]reedom of religion – because we’re all equal in the eyes of God.”

“We think that people should be rewarded if they come up with a new product or a new service that is popular and helps a lot of people. But when a CEO of a company now makes more money in a single day than a typical worker does in an entire year, when it’s harder for workers to climb their way up the economic ladder, when they see a factory close that used to support an entire city or town, [we need distributive alternatives]”

“We cannot sever the connections that have enabled so much progress and so much wealth. For when competition for resources is perceived as zero-sum, we put ourselves on a path to conflict both within countries and between countries. So I firmly believe that the best hope for human progress remains open markets combined with democracy and human rights.”

In his speech, Obama only excludes from win-win scenarios peoples who want to seek exclusion from global integration, especially those who premise their demand for exclusion upon declarations of racial, ethnic, national, or religious exceptionalism. This means, in other words, that anyone who wants to, and can, achieve some sort of inclusion can “win” in some rhetorical sense.

A convergent nebulous universalism borne of the sociological process described above is why America has a global mission that often enthusiastically embraces foreign and domestic leftist movements while persecuting reactionary movements and nations. This mission simultaneously retains traditional liberal values like high levels of wealth concentration and the explicit goal of liberating individuals through the differentiation process, while also encouraging certain kinds of local group identity, self-determination, and wealth redistribution. This universalism reflects what is common among the increasingly heterogeneous elite that make up our leadership class and remains compatible with the goal of global government guided by American elites.

This latter point further allows the emergent universalist ideology to accommodate cynical material interests and Machiavellians, such as Oil Men, unreformed Zionist/Evangelical/Catholic or other nationalist and religious supremacists, and American world dominance ideologues like the Dulles brothers, who care little about the ideological justifications for imperial domination and only seek to aggrandize their individual or group will-to-power by attaching their interests to imperial goals.

American universalism therefore reflects the unity of social and material interests that coalesce under empires, which includes a form of ideological legitimacy that springs in part from particular ethnic beliefs like Marxism and Social Gospel puritanism (each of which nonetheless remains distinct).

I propose the following formula to supplement the microeconomic/Jouvenelian aspect of Yarvin’s program and replace his Puritan genealogy: Empires bring diverse peoples, interests and belief systems into forced proximity, forced proximity causes peoples to compose apologia on behalf of their people, material interests and customs, and apologia elevates what is universal and common among diverse peoples, thereby creating the universal “political theology” that every Empire -- Christian, pagan, or otherwise -- eventually embraces tacitly or explicitly to justify its actions. America is therefore not communist but rather universalist, with a universalism deeply influenced by Puritanism, the Enlightenment, Rome, and modern ordeal ideologies like Marxism and Zionism.

SO IS OBAMA A COMMUNIST?

Believing that he’s established Puritanism as the origin of Marxism, Yarvin moves to demonstrating Obama’s Marxist pedigree in the ’08 article.

Obama’s Marxist pedigree is well-known but also hardly unique for anyone with any connection to progressive Chicago politics or the University of Chicago (which has a global footprint).

Yarvin details Obama’s organizer roots in his training under Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, a sort of Machiavelli’s Prince for middle class college students (the Rules are so derivative of Machiavelli that they even plagiarize the Florentine philosopher’s archery metaphors). Yarvin then describes Obama’s connections to the violent Marxist activist Bill Ayers, and argues that Obama ideologically is rooted in the Maoist New Left (Axelrod is more CPUSA old left than Maoist but we’ll allow it). These demonstrations are intended to underscore Yarvin’s assertion that the country is ruled by evil Machiavellian leftists.

While Obama undeniably has those roots, his sociology is, as we saw in the first part of this series, only Marxist to the extent it is globalist and universalist, in the same sense as the “communism” of Parsons and Talbott, each of whom is clearly non-Marxist.

Obama’s views today can hardly be described as workers of the world unite-ism. In fact, his is an abstract vision heavily oriented toward a global government which will remain compatible with massive wealth concentration, having a fratbro staycation at billionaire Sir Richard Branson’s private island, buying various dachas in Washington D.C., Martha’s Vineyard, and so forth. This is hardly Maoist liberation of the brown lumpenproles, either, though it may be in a relative sense, since the empire now includes all peoples.

Obama’s vision is indistinguishable from postwar American globalism and seems content with a mostly peaceful equilibrium that has the appearance of moving things toward the universal liberation of mankind from status inferiority, but which only seems to achieve movement toward the globalization of power, with the simultaneous social levelling of people who aren’t fortunate enough to attend the dinner parties, or if they are, are too incompetent to merge their interests into the empire’s.

How could Obama go from Alinskyite fart-ins and Ayers-style murder activism to Branson staycations? The easiest answer is that Obama represents the neoconservative moment for nonwhite Maoist-activists. Just as Irving Kristol, Judd Teller, and Cuddihy documented how Jewish Marxists underwent the ordeal of civility, moved to the suburbs, and became “neoconservatives,” so nonwhite Maoists are now undergoing the ordeal of civility, buying dachas, and becoming whatever Obama is ideologically.

Obama himself describes part of this transition in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. First, Obama is the Maoist who mocks the hypocritical civility of white civilization, just as the Marxist Jews once mocked the hypocrisy of Northwestern European modernity:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints.

Obama will eventually come to terms with the limitations of brown resentment politics as he begins working and socializing with whites:

It was this unyielding reality-that whites were not simply phantoms to be expunged from our dreams but were an active and varied fact of our everyday lives-that finally explained how [Black] nationalism could thrive as an emotion and flounder as a program.

Of course, Obama vows to continue to “work” toward his old goals (he can’t sell out!) but what this really means is letting the intimacy of civilization moderate his views and integrate them into the increasingly abstract universalism that undergirds American empire.

Yes, Obama’s goal is some sort of nebulous global integration and the erosion of your local autonomy, but operationally speaking this is little different from the fealty demanded by a thoroughly non-Christian, non-Jewish pagan Greek or Roman emperor. The distinction is that Obama’s imperialism is justified by appeal to moral claims that pay lip service to values shared by modern global elites and the peoples whose sovereignty they depend upon for legitimacy.

Obama’s imperialism is arguably less hands-off than ancient imperial rule in that it seeks to force universal social policies like “wokeism” and economic redistribution down its subjects throats, but this can be seen as an analogy to the fanaticism of individual emperors like Antiochus IV Epiphanes and Caligula, who sought to impose their moral supremacist ideas and personalities onto their subject peoples (we’ll explore this analogy more when I resume my Why We Remain Blacks series and discuss the apologia of Martin Luther King Jr. and Philo of Alexandria).

It’s likely that all of the participants at these dinner parties harbor some conviction about what will happen after their shared goals are met – Star Trek AI communism for Obama, total Parsonsian individual liberation for moralizing Puritans, Anglo world domination for Oil Men, the Parousia for Evangelicals, Jewish world power status for some Zionists – but these are all distant parochial convictions that everyone keeps private out of concern for social decorum.

Just as the Peace of Westphalia civilized creedal competition between Christian denominations, and America’s two-party system civilizes competition among American ideologies and material interests, so America’s civil religion civilizes the fanaticism of Marxists, Puritans, Zionists, and other ideological and theological groups.

Knowing that this is how groups and individuals advance their public interests today, and knowing that this is how America’s universalism is defined, I think we’re now in a better position to talk about conservative or reactionary reform than if we simply believed that the origin of leftism is solely Puritanism and that America is irreversibly “communist,” just as we’re in a better position than if we believed that the origin of leftism and American universalism is solely Jewish or Neoliberal or whatever else is a popular genealogy online.

In the next and hopefully final part of this series, I’ll look at Yarvin’s analysis of failed reactionary movements, introduce the lesson of Israel which he overlooks in his book, and critically assess his suggestions for reactionary or conservative activism.