Ronald Reagan quipped that Democrats had declared a war on poverty, but poverty won. Could the same be true of racism?
Could it be that the more progressives demand anti-racism, the more racism they end up with? That racism is winning the more the left wages a war on it?
I think Kristol’s maxim holds. Consider two arguments. First, that anti-racism generates a demand for racism for which a supply must be found. Second, that while inspired by some very good motives, anti-racism is prone to radical capture. As we have become more anti-racist we have become, ironically and but not accidentally, more anti-Semitic.
The first argument shouldn’t be controversial: anti-racism needs racism. It finds it where it might not actually exist or exaggerates it where it does. We have a Keynesian supply and demand situation. In the Anglophone West today, demand for racism is high. Careers dedicated to its eradication and to its study, both of which have grown exponentially, must find a ready supply of it.
It is as if anti-racism is a radar, calibrated with ever greater sensitivity to what it seeks. It used to spot macro-aggressions; now it pings for micro ones.
To put this another way, we have seen a rise in racism because we have employed more people with an interest in finding it. And, as Upton Sinclair wryly noted: “No man has an interest in knowing something that will put him out of a job.”
The University of Michigan was a prolific spender on anti-racism strategies. Its diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy was huge. Its 142 DEI staff (“diversicrats”) cost more than $US18m ($27m) in annual salaries. And yet, as the liberal New York Times reported, race relations on the Michigan campus got worse.
Anti-racism has become a required opinion across the Australian public sector. Universities can’t get enough of it. It has become a cure-all for all sorts of discrimination, real and imagined. It is a pristine form of American cultural imperialism, honed on US campuses, and absorbed on ours. Michigan was evidence that it does the opposite of what was intended.
The second argument follows the first: anti-racism invites extremism. It is inspired by some of the finest ambitions and animates decent people who abhor the scourge of racism and want to end it. I am on their side. The problem is how far this kindness doctrine gets co-opted by a much more radical conception of anti-racism.
A UK government report this month revealed what we already knew: British universities, where anti-racism is increasingly a belief required of its staff, have become hotbeds of protest against the world’s only Jewish state.
Many academics see opposition to Israel as modish. Racism gets you fired; intellectual Israelophobia gets you hired.
Australia is not immune. As The Australian’s Natasha Bita has reported, when Hamas killed 1175 Israeli and foreign nationals and took 251 hostages, an academic at the Queensland University of Technology described it as an “anti-racist practice”.
The more anti-racist we are trained to be, the more anti-Semitic we seem to have become. Campuses that have prioritised “cultural safety” find their Jewish staff and students have never felt less safe, culturally and physically.
In Melbourne, the NTEU did not support a Jewish professor attacked by anti-Israel students; they backed the attackers. The most insidious opponents Jews face in the West today are not neo-Nazis but those who self-identify as anti-racist. Why?
A great failing of the university response to anti-Semitism is to think that its solution lies in so-called anti-racism strategies. In both theory and practice, anti-racism is anti-Semitism. We have tapped a deep stream of the latter because of a well-intentioned embrace of the former.
Israel was once a poster child for liberation. The Holocaust had shown the consequences of government-sponsored anti-Semitism. Zionists were seen by many on the left as heroes of a struggle against European racism. The socialism of the kibbutz was applauded.
What changed? Two things. First, Israel became successful. While newly decolonised countries in the Middle East and Africa dabbled in Marxism, the tiny Jewish state, sitting atop zero crude oil, developed into a vibrant liberal democracy.
None of its Arab neighbours has ever gotten close to this achievement. Jealousy became an unavoidable component of Israelophobia.
Second, the intellectual left, confronted with Israel’s success, began to construe the state not as a brave experiment by a long-oppressed people, but as a racially exclusive and capitalist power.
Some of the developing world’s worst dictators learned their Marxism in the lecture halls of Western universities. The African elites that took over when the British and French quit the scene quickly adopted anti-Zionism as their mantra. The United Nations became a global forum for it.
Israel jumped from the oppressed into the oppressor column. It has never been forgiven for winning the wars started by its “oppressed” enemies. A Zionism that was meant to give Jews a security denied them everywhere else was redefined into a racism that must be opposed in the one place it had a chance of survival.
If this meant a progressive alliance with Israel’s Islamist enemies, so be it. The logic of identity politics turned the victims of the Holocaust into the agents of a new genocide.
Anti-racism does not tempt Islamophobia as it does anti-Semitism. If we follow the logic of identity politics, there is no reason why it should not. Muslims control some of the wealthiest real estate on earth. There are 1.8 billion Muslims (a quarter of the world’s population) and almost 60 Muslim governments. (None presides over a significant Jewish population.)
But Western anti-racists do not translate the advantages of the ummah materially or demographically into a claim against Muslim power. They do with Jews. Muslims are recurrently made to fit their oppressed status. University professors are not trained to call out Islamic homophobia – the Christian varieties we are.
Campuses in the zone conquered by Islamic imperialism do not face demands to decolonise. Israel and the wider West does. This is the logic of anti-racism and the identity politics that drive it.
Irving Kristol and Ronald Reagan began their ideological journeys on the left. Kristol was a Trotskyist, Reagan a Democrat. This gave them a crucial insight into their subsequent opponents. It was not the malevolence of progressives that made them dangerous, but their good intentions.
And so it is with anti-racism. A strategy that wants us all to get along is, in practice, dividing us racially. Rather than check racism, it has, accidentally and on purpose, helped rebirth its most ancient form.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
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