Zakiyah Kerr Johnson thinks America isFailed historical modelThis society is so bad, so rampant with racism, misogyny, and patriarchy, that we can no longer try to tweak or improve it. She said “time is up” for America in a blog post that has since been deleted.
In our daily lives, we increasingly hear similar alarming messages from Americans.Pro-Hamas demonstrators again this month told the YouTuber He said the protests he was leading were actually about “getting rid of America and getting rid of the West.”
Today, revolutionaries are no longer workers, but members of racially and gender-marginalized groups.
“Everyone here understands that at some level we need to eliminate America. Completely,” he said, gesturing toward the crowd of demonstrators. Although he was not the only pro-Hamas protester to make such remarks, it gained some attention after Elon Musk reposted the exchange on X (formerly Twitter), where it received over 40 million views. collected.
For Kerr-Johnson, her view is that America is steeped in racism, misogyny, and colonialism, and that “traditional structures must be dismantled at every juncture in order for anything to change.” , which deserves the attention of all 330 people. Million Americans.
After all, Secretary of State Antony Blinken just this month appointed Kerr-Johnson as the State Department’s director of diversity, equity, and inclusion. From this position, she can influence the actions of all diplomats, assistant secretaries, and undersecretaries. She could influence our foreign policy.
Kerr-Johnson exemplifies the new political and cultural warriors we call “the next generation of Marxists.” We hadn’t heard her name before writing this book, but because of her we both sat down to write “.”The next generation of Marxism: what it is and how to fight it”
The idea that this country is systemically rotten (racist, patriarchal, heteronormative — fill in the blank) and that we live under oppressive structures has been around since at least the 1980s. It has been introduced into universities since then. And in the wake of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots of 2020, it has entered every corner of our lives. It affected not only the cultural upper echelons but also the Biden administration.
The only solution, logically speaking, is to abandon all systems and structures. Improvements are clearly out of the question, and eliminating individual racists and sexists who violate civil rights laws will not solve systemic problems.
This is an important point. We both recognize that individual racists and misogynists do exist. But the ideologues who have been proselytizing the word for decades, and I mean precisely the promoters of critical race theory and all other kinds of critical theory; They draw a very bright and bold line in their view that individual sinners don’t matter. The system does.
This is one of the characteristics that makes NextGen Marxists thoroughly Marxist. For Karl Marx, social change had to be systematic and total. His favorite line came from Goethe’s Dr. Faust. “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”
Another important element that the next generation of Marxists shares with their ideological masters is the Manichean division of the world into an epic struggle between the oppressed and their oppressors (“With Unterdrücker Unter Drukte” As written on the first page of the Communist Manifesto of 1848), when the oppressed find themselves in chains, they will emerge victorious from it.
Some things are changing, and for some orthodox Marxists these changes are fundamental enough to make the current ideology no longer Marxist, but for both of us, these changes are It’s more superficial.
For example, there is the evolution of Marx’s maxim that changes in the material forces of production determine the pace of revolution. Cultural Marxists, who emerged in the 1920s after failed revolutions in Western Europe, emphasized culture over economics. Italy’s Antonio Gramsci, the most famous of the cultural Marxist ideologues, quipped in the 1920s that “the beliefs and ideas of the people are themselves material forces.”
To this, American Marxists added race, gender, climate, etc. “Racialization in all aspects of political life functions as a material force in its own right,” says Eric Mann, a former Marxist terrorist who co-opted BLM architect Patrice Cullors. Written in 1996neatly echoing the themes of his two predecessors from the 1840s and 1920s.
This baton passing is what will constitute the next generation of Marxism. Marxism has evolved from the original economic themes of the Manifesto and Capital, to the cultural Marxism of Gramsci and others, to today’s variants of the next generation of Marxists obsessed with race and gender. Today, revolutionaries are no longer workers, but members of racially and gender-marginalized groups, or people who sign up to fight revolutions over climate change, Gaza, colonialism, etc.
That’s why we see climate change activists criticize capitalism for “killing the planet,” and Canada’s deputy prime minister say that democracies may not be up to the task of fighting climate change. Capitalism and democracy can now be fought under any other ploy.
But if, like us, you think that democracy and capitalism may not be perfect, but are far better than the alternatives, we wrote the book for you. . That’s what you need to understand to understand someone like Zakiyah Kerr Johnson.
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo Senior Fellow at E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, and co-author (with Katherine Gorka) of NextGen Marxism (Encounter Books). He spent nearly 20 years as a journalist, 15 of which were spent writing in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Katherine Cornell Gorka is co-author (with Mike Gonzalez) of NextGen Marxism” (Encounter Books).
