On the Tenets of Neo-Maoism: Part One

I'd like to start off this post by explaining what Neo-Maoism is not. Contrary to what you might expect, it is neither a communist ideology per se nor does it feature the rigid dogma or discipline we so often associate with Marxist thought. It has little to do with China today, and has yet to orchestrate mass murder, a fact resented by several of its online adherents.

Rather, I use the term Neo-Maoism to encompass the broad, often decentralized and increasingly violent tendencies of elite, Western (mostly American) university students, protestors and activists to suppress any professor, literature, event, opinion, etc. that could even remotely be construed as out of sync with their parochial worldview, i.e being labeled racist, kyriarchical, transphobic, Islamophobic or some other as of now currently undiscovered synonym for dissenting ideas. I chose to use "Maoism" as opposed to "Marxism" or "Leninism," because I believed only the former sufficiently encapsulated the deleterious obsession with language, historical iconoclasm, special indoctrination towards students and religious zeal I saw transpire on American campuses. So without further ado, here are some broad tenets I associate with Neo-Maoism. Keep in mind that this list is not meant to be any sort of standalone, inviolable or complete list, just like the name "Neo-Maoism" itself does not strictly hew to Maoism proper; they are both meant to help the reader organize their thoughts, draw parallels when relevant across history and navigate our embattled nation.

Tenets

1) Emphasis of liberal thought shifted from class and income, to race, sexuality and gender.

At first blush, this seems like a very puzzling proposition. For years liberal politicians in the United States had carefully cultivated urban political machines, labor unions and at least pretended to advocate for workers rights, in return receiving a fairly reliable voting base in return that still makes up a marked though waning source of their votes. There is certainly more than one feasible answer for why liberals in the US changed tack on this issue and I believe it would be folly to insist on merely one impetus, although the explanation I find the most convincing is that after the Cold War's end and neo-liberalism really took off, it simply was no longer prudent for liberals to focus on class, labor or socioeconomic status or even genuine liberal philosophy. This view can basically be epitomized in the massive sleight of hand that was the Clinton presidency. Bill Clinton's tenure as president saw the privatization of student loans, extreme consolidation of the telecommunications industry (six companies, 90% of total telecom market share), death of cash welfare, sustained assault on the fourth amendment (Waco), personal abuse of young women, obscene deregulation (Glass-Steagall), artificially low interest rates that led to reckless investment (Greenspan) and an Iraqi embargo that led to half a million dead children being explicitly being written off as collateral damage by the SecState (Albright). Any one of these things should in theory enrage any self-respecting liberal, yet most Americans, even and especially most liberals, still can't get enough of the man and he's truly seen as a respectable standard bearer of liberalism in the United States.

Returning to the crux of the first tenet, this was the reason, I believe, that the class-race shift occurred: it was becoming so obvious, even with the appropriate obfuscation, that the leaders of American liberalism no longer stood for and in fact fiercely opposed what their movement originally espoused, that a new central ideology was needed. After all, the intellectuals, politicians and pundits of the American left tend to be coastal SWPLs, disproportionately, though not exclusively Jewish and above all wealthy. Is it really in their best interests to dismantle crony capitalism and resuscitate big labor? Sure, some (Bernie) will actually believe the book matches the cover but as we have seen, the power certainly does not lie with them. To be clear, the leadership of American liberalism proper is not omnipotent here, this is not some cultural Marxist chalkboard rant featuring an insidious puppet master, rather, it changed tactics when the old tactics proved a liability and this allowed for previously fringe activists and professors to proliferate their ideology, unwittingly abetted by the Information Revolution.

2) Linguistic Nihilism

This is such a broad and intriguing aspect of Neo-Maoism that I'll have to do devote an entire post to truly explain it. In short, the term "linguistic nihilism" means what it sounds like, language ultimately has no meaning in the Neo-Maoist worldview. Although Neo-Maoism is irrevocably obsessed with language, namely how it can be used to control discourse and thus the ideas of others, it is not bound by any type of fidelity to the actual definitions of words and theories. For example, when discussing disparate political movements such as neoreaction, Trump, the alt-right, AnCap, traditionalism, paleocons and basically anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton, Neo-Maoists label them with similar rhetoric, interchangeably using buzzwords such as racist, Nazi, white nationalist, fascist, white supremacist and bigot, regardless of whether the target actually qualifies as a fascist or Nazi. This is because language for the Neo-Maoist is not an instrument to further debate or acquire knowledge, but instead a tool for perpetuating power and social conflict. When deploying this panoply of buzzwords against those who do not share their thought, the Neo-Maoist is searching for a kind of rhetorical Kryptonite, the one slur that will immediately and permanently silence and discredit their opponent without any need for genuine dialogue. And of course this phenomenon is not limited to Neo-Maoism's interaction with conservative groups, it can easily be observed in colleges, newsrooms and literature across the Western world: an atheistic woman of color banned from speaking at a university by hysterical students accusing her of Islamophobia, yoga classes cancelled on the pretext of colonialism, spoiled, elite students lecturing Japanese people on how Japanese culture has been "appropriated" and a neurotic fixation on Halloween costumes. With a kind of sophist alchemy, man is transmuted into woman, activist to journalist, looter into demonstrator, oppressor to oppressed and stranger into friend. Under this system, words only have meaning to the extent that they are so defined by the enlightened Neo-Maoists: the overnight redefinition of racism to require some sort of power structure, thus precluding any white person from every experiencing real racism, the recent revelation that the "color blind" society once so proudly championed by advocates of social justice is now evidence of implicit bigotry and the incisive breakthrough that the formerly unifying phrase "we are a nation of immigrants" is merely cover for white washing slavery. This is hardly a complete summary of the Neo-Maoist approach to language but it should suffice to give the reader a broad framework to observing it.

3) Shibboleths: "a use of language regarded as distinctive of a particular group."

I think I can best explain this aspect of Neo-Maoist thought with an historical analogy. As many of you already know, it was customary in ancient Egypt to bury the deceased with a Book of the Dead, filled with useful spells and tricks to help them navigate what ancient Egyptians believed to be a very real underworld where a single false step would result in total spiritual destruction. Without the esoteric knowledge enclosed in the Book of the Dead, an ancient Egyptian's chances of successfully traversing the many dangers of the afterlife was quite slight indeed. In Neo-Maoist thought, the shibboleth fulfills this same role as an invaluable compass, only here acting as a guiding light through a world not of physical death, but intellectual death. As stated in the previous tenet, Neo-Maoism derives much of its strength from its protean approach to language, constantly changing the definitions of words and conjuring up new concepts to ensure that only its most devoted acolytes have access to the "correct" way of viewing things: what constitutes social justice today may well become bigoted tomorrow, so it is necessary to provide members with a way to negotiate this rhetorical minefield and properly identify friend from foe. Now, shibboleths are of course hardly unique to the Neo-Maoist worldview. One need only to look to the Democratic and Republican parties today to see how a carefully cultivated lexicon can be used to command attention from supporters and shun political untouchables. However, given the particularly special attention paid to words and their impact by Neo-Maoist cadres, it is important they be properly understood. Words such as mansplaining, intersectionality, misogynoir and kyriarchy are not merely used to attack outsiders deemed insufficiently submissive to Neo-Maoist thought, but also identify the user as a valid believer of the faith and creates a bond between adherents that comes at the expense of others.

4) Cognitive dissonance towards violence

In the context of increasing civil unrest enveloping our country following the unexpected results of the 2016 presidential election, this tenet is becoming more and more salient. The extreme cognitive dissonance regarding violence in Neo-Maoist thought can of course be seen in the division between the movement's opinion of violence committed by its followers and members of so-called marginalized groups versus "violence" perpetrated by everyone else. I say violence in quotations because Neo-Maoists have broadly twisted its definition to include disagreement and simple critique. The Yionnopoulos fiasco at Berkeley is a decent example of this (full disclosure: I'm not very fond of the man and don't really count myself as one of his supporters). Milo is of course controversial and has made a point of aggressively exercising his freedom of speech by denigrating large groups of people, regardless of whether they are the "correct" groups to humiliate according to the elite's consensus. He was, of course, prevented from doing this at Berkeley by an enraged mob that, among other things, pepper sprayed a female Trump supporter, hurled stones at police and inflicted over a hundred thousand dollars in damages. In the significant public fallout over all this, the inverted Neo-Maoist approach to violence once again surfaced. Several people in the media and in the streets attempted to justify the violence against Yionnopoulos speaking by labeling his speech itself as violent and thus any physical violence taken against it would merely be legitimate self-defense. After all, they say, how else can we expect "marginalized" communities to behave if they are victimized this way? The bizarre part of this argument employed by the Neo-Maoist is that it actually places the groups they pretend to help on a lower plane of reasoning, the implication is that these people cannot be held to the same moral standards of "privileged" demographics and are thus blameless if they resort to violence. 

A Brief Introduction

If by some miracle you have stumbled upon this obscure corner of the internet and are prepared to tolerate my writing, I feel it behooves me to explain my thoughts and provide some idea of what I intend to accomplish through them.

I'll start off by asserting that the era we live in is deeply and profoundly broken. Governments view their nations as resources to be plundered instead of peoples to be served, entitling the unworthy and duplicitous to lord over their natural betters. The university, which one must assume at some point fostered a genuine enrichment of the mind, has now devolved into a bizarre hybrid of the Weathermen and a Fortune 500 company, happily accepting money from the elite elements of society in exchange for teaching their children the ideological shibboleths required to navigate and ultimately perpetuate the American kakistocracy. Our self-anointed intellectuals are little better. Despite receiving far more of America's largesse than virtually any other segment of society and contributing only discord in return, the American intellectuals (the professors, the writers, the pundits, talking heads, that dude, you know the one, who re-read and annotated 1984 after the inauguration) have seemingly made it their mission to attack, degrade and consume their host at every turn; finding the time to advocate for wars their children would never fight in in between #ImwithHer fundraisers and Harvard reunions, shrilly organizing for open borders in America while declaring the inviolability of the Jewish state and despising working-middle class whites for reminding them of the values they so eagerly turned their backs on. The media, in which I broadly include our nation's movie industry, also embodies the kakistrocratic culture of entitlement and solipsism that is threatening to consume us today, hysterically pontificating fantasy and glibly massaging reality. The hallowed job creators revered by both neoliberals, establishment hacks and greying virgins in bow ties have effectively been unmasked for what they truly are: juiced up gamblers playing on taxpayer credit. Finally, much of the American public has chosen (both tacitly and actively) to participate in the destruction of their own society, whether it be by voting for political parties that actively work to undermine their country, patronizing media outlets that hate them and their communities, and perhaps worst of all, choosing to accept that subtle bargain of the kakistocrat, that abysmal trade of honor, duty, liberty, pride and motherland for a decrepit amalgamation of self-hatred, atomization, complacency, solipsism and arrogance.

But I write these words to you in the hope that all is not lost for our people, for when I look into their eyes, I see strength, and a quiet, proud resolve that promises a fierce riposte to the crimes committed by those who pledged to defend us. Although I cannot promise success in what I hope is the mutual desire to revive our country and endow it with a more just and honorable society, I can say that it is incumbent on every decent American to struggle for such a society. Indeed, even failure in such a venture would give more face to those who failed with passion and vision, than those who emerged victorious with only cowardice and a silent knowledge of their own inferiority. Thus, I say to you that even at the eleventh hour, it is not too late to change our fate. But our clock runs fast.

For this I write.