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Yes, another top level comment about The Origins of Woke from me, in the same thread on the same week. But this is about something else. I had an epiphany while reading the book.
I've wondered for many years why Marxism is more socially acceptable than racism when it's responsible for even more deaths than the Holocaust. It's because companies are (de facto) legally required to fire racists, but they're not required to fire Marxists. In fact, firing a Marxist for merely being Marxist would be illegal in California.
California has a state law against firing people for their political beliefs, but it didn't protect James Damore, who was fired in compliance with the law against creating a hostile work environment for protected groups.
It all adds up.
So you think that if open Marxists were fired - or racism became a protected political belief - the two would equalise or outright invert in status/acceptability? This doesn't explain why intellectual elites in the West leaned Marxist since well before any sort of social sanction against racism materialised, or why right-coded beliefs (Gun rights? Car culture? Millenarian Christianity?) are low-status in the US even when they have no obvious connection to anything giving legal cause for termination or themselves protected.
I think the explanation is much simpler: the utopian end point of racism registers as evil against mainstream Western morality, while the utopian end point of Marxism registers as good. Doing evil for the sake of evil is just evil, but doing evil for the sake of good is at most misguided and tragic. You can dispute any of these judgments, but holding out for the One Weird Trick (abolishing workplace civil rights regulation) to let you skip the hard work of persuading people to change their moral calculus does not seem to serve much of a purpose.
This is a wonderfully pithy explanation. And what you say applies not just to contemporary Western morality, but to American morality from its founding. America was always a forward-looking country - a new society, a better society, a society that smiled on all men in their individual pursuits of happiness. Racialists always sought to portray their policies as being consistent with this goal - slaveowners, for example, argued that slavery was not a barbaric form of mistreatement, but a necessary process of education for the African race, and and nativists argued that immigrants were genetically incapable of learning self-government. But racialists ultimately lost, because they could not convince society that these arguments were factually correct. Not many believed that being a slave was the best way to learn. And genetic ability was (and still is) impossible to measure.
Racialists also sought argued for slavery on the grounds of material interest, and immigration restriction on simple mistrust of the other. Unlike the arguments mentioned above, these arguments have the advantage of being factually true. But ultimately they failed as well, because they were too pessimistic. Americans wanted to believe that all men could achieve prosperity, that there was no need for some men to subjugate others, and that men from all parts of the world could be assimilated and taught the American way of life.
So on one hand, Marxism is totally incompatible with the American way of life, in that it is collectivist and statist, which is why the majority has rejected it. But there has been a sizable minority, overrepresented in positions of power, who are sympathetic to Marxism because it is consistent with American optimism - the belief that we really can build a better society in which the ever-present defects of human societies can be eliminated.
“Racialist” ideas were very much the mainstream worldview for nearly all Americans well up until the 1930s. The first major immigration legislation in the country’s history, the Naturalization Act of 1790, limited the granting of citizenship to “free White persons of good character”. This law was passed with overwhelming support by both houses of Congress - not just by slaveholders.
The bulk of the abolitionist movement was strongly against any insinuation of racial “equality”, and many of them opposed slavery precisely because they believed that it maintained the presence of a mass of inferior people, fundamentally incapable of productive coexistence with white Americans, within this country. The frequent jibes and insinuations that prominent slaveowners, such as Thomas Jefferson, were siring mulatto bastards with their slave women was not simply meant to portray slaveowners as hypocrites, but also to tar them with the disgusting taboo of race-mixing.
Even during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator” himself, met with a delegation of black leaders and fervently attempted to persuade them to accept the mass deportation of blacks back to Africa. The issue of “colonization” - meaning the establishment of an independent state in Africa which would receive all of the freed slaves once they were deported - had been a policy goal supported by a great many Americans, including some of the most prominent Founding Fathers, resulting in the founding of the American Colonization Society. It was logistical issues - mostly problems with funding and a few inauspicious early test voyages - which ultimately led to the underwhelming and half-assed conclusion of the project - not a widespread failure to convince ordinary Americans that “racialist” ideas were “true”. Beliefs about the inferiority of non-whites and the necessity of racial separation - especially sexual segregation - were, again, the mainstream beliefs that held overwhelming support in this country well into the 20th century.
It was top-down and very coercive efforts by the federal and state governments which forced America to racially integrate. Your story of Americans just never really buying into racialism is total bunk. You can say Americans were wrong to accept racialist ideas as common sense, but you simply can’t credibly argue that Americans as a rule have not accepted those beliefs.
I don't know about this. As the old saying goes, the Supreme Court follows the polls. This Gallup poll from 1957 found 66-33 support for school desegregation. Support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was 59-31 (ie, 65% of those expressing an opinion), and 61-28 among Whites in the North. And, of course, by 1948 both major political parties had planks in their platforms calling for federal anti-segregation legislation. That would not have happened if it did not enjoy the support of voters; appealing to voters is the whole point of a platform.
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