June 1, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Newest Essay
Published in Chronicles Magazine,
June 2018: “Cultural Marxists and the Stranglehold of ‘Race’ ”
Friends,
As
promised, I pass on my latest essay published in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture (June 2018 issue), “Cultural Marxists
and the Stranglehold of ‘Race’.” Included in the same issue are major essays by
Professor Claude Polin (Professor Emeritus of Philosophy-University of
Paris-Sorbonne), titled: “Impossible Dreams: The West’s Undying Love Affair
with Marx,” by editor Chilton Williamson on “One Nation Divided” (about the
increasingly unbridgeable ideological divide in this country), several
well-written critical essays about American misadventures in Syria, excellent
pieces by Justin Raimondo, Roger McGrath, Srdja Trifkovic, Taki
Theodoracopulos, Jack Trotter, and others, numerous reviews, and fascinating
cultural perspectives on film and music by James O. Tate and George McCartney.
As usual, Chronicles sets the
standard in the very best of traditional, well-written and well-argued reading;
it is very simply required reading for defenders of our Western Christian culture.
The
June issue is now available on the shelves of major bookstores, and available
via the Chronicles web site [https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/],
and you may subscribe to it at: https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/my-account/subscribe/ and also via Amazon.com. Published monthly since
1976, with support from the Rockford Institute, Chronicles intelligently examines the major issues and challenges
confronting not just the United States but our civilization. And it is almost
alone among major print journals standing foursquare for the beliefs and values
that have undergirded Western society for two-thousand years…beliefs that you
and I share.
I have been a subscriber for around twenty-five
years, and I have found every issue to be of value. I think you would too.
Here, then, is the essay:
CHRONICLES
Cultural Marxists and the Stranglehold of “Race”
By Boyd D. Cathey June 2018
[This
article also appears online at the Chronicles Magazine website, accessible to
subscribers: https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2018/June/43/6/magazine/article/10844583/]
One of the major subjects
that most self-styled “conservatives” seem to find uncomfortable discussing in
any depth, indeed, often flee from like mice before the hungry house cat, is
race. The general feeling always seems
to be that anything a prominent “conservative” might say on the topic, unless
it be to offer some sort of fearful confirmation or slightly nuanced
affirmation of standard Leftist/cultural Marxist arguments, will be construed
and interpreted by the near entirety of the media and our political and
academic culture to be “racially insensitive,” or implicitly (or even
explicitly) countenancing “racism.”
Many
of these accusations are, as we know, blatantly political in their usage. We are now accustomed to hearing such charges,
such intimations and suggestions, trotted out at election time to characterize
and disauthorize a Republican or “conservative” candidate for public office,
even if that candidate has more than paid his due to the dominant and standard politically-correct
views on the subject. Even such Republican
establishmentarians as Mitt Romney and George W. Bush could not avoid the
accusation from the Leftist media and from the professional race inquisitors:
for the new inquisitors, it is not just a question of avoiding embarrassing or
difficult questions, one must actively engage in “combatting racism” to the
point of groveling publicly and expressing regret for centuries of “white
oppression,” slavery, colonialism, and racial inequality. Only then may the penitent meekly seek
admission into the fellowship of the “new elect” of racial Progressivism, and
even then, for whites it always remains an extremely difficult task. “Whiteness” is always a powerful impediment
that must be overcome, if at all.
There
is always someone like the Reverend William Barber (former head of the North
Carolina NAACP who now leads the national “Poor Peoples’ Campaign”) to denounce
the miscreant who is perceived as less than pure, who certainly must harbor
indelible “racist sentiments” down deep in his heart. After all, the cultural Marxist template that
increasingly dominates not just academia but in the public square makes the
assumption before all and any discussion may be had or entered into that
America was, from its inception and founding, a “racist” nation, a country
essentially based in racialist precepts and with a foundation incorporating
racial inequality into the basic law of the land.
With
such a template, such a measuring stick now regulating thought and discourse,
is it any wonder that even such prominent “mainstream” Republicans as Bush,
John McCain, and most of the Neoconservatives, despite their best efforts to
demonstrate their craven fidelity to the essentially Leftist narrative on race,
equality and civil rights, still find it hard to “make the grade” in the eyes
of a Barber, a Maxine Waters, an Al Sharpton, or any of the other racial gate
keepers out there, especially now that their friends are in near total control
of our university campuses and at networks like CNN or MSNBC.
The
goal posts of Marxist Progressivism are always moving forward, the standard and
narrative always advancing further Left.
Even “conservatives” who once believed that all they had to do was
endorse the “civil rights” bills of the 1960s and advocate “equal opportunity”
for all, and, to quote that newly-minted image of Martin Luther King as a conservative
icon - - that people should be “judged on the quality of their character, not
on the color of their skin” - - are now looked at with suspicion. It should be
apparent - - but apparently is not - - to Republicans and conservatives that
you can never really get to the left of a Democrat on race in an election,
especially if he or she is black.
The
fundamental problem is, ironically, that in a certain sense the cultural
Marxist critique of America’s founding and its founding documents has some
validity, but only up to point. The United States was not founded on some egalitarian idea about the equal rights of all men to “life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.” Those words in
the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence were directed specifically at
the British parliament from which the colonists had not received the rights due
as Englishmen, and not at the colonies and the colonists who were attempting to
break from the Mother Country and justify and offer reasons for that break.
As
the late Dr. Mel Bradford expertly detailed in his volume Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the Constitution
(1993) and Colgate University Professor Barry Alan Shain has convincingly
documented in his massive and annotated study, The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context: American State
Papers, Petitions, Proclamations, and Letters of the Delegates to the First
National Congress (2014), the Founders recoiled and shrank back in horror
that such words might be applied domestically
to the several colonies and those institutions, laws and usages then in place. It was left to each new state to decide for
itself about its domestic institutions, including the continuation (or not) of
slavery, the establishment (or not) of a state religion and religious tests,
the imposition (or not) of property qualifications on the “right” to vote, and
whether to encourage (or not) “public education.” Indeed, this was the very reason for the
adoption of both the 9th and 10th amendments to the
Constitution, to ensure the protection of those inherent rights of the states
and the citizenry. The historical fact
is that inequality was enshrined in our constitutional system, and it was left
up to the various states to decide what internal institutions and practices
they would maintain. And this solution,
which was agreed upon by all the representatives of the states who met in
Philadelphia, served the country well until 1861.
The
ideological assumption posited by the cultural Marxists and the implication
parroted by far too many Republicans and so-called “conservatives,” is that the
original American foundation was therefore, by definition, colored by varying
degrees of racism. And once that
ideological template is accepted, future argument - - its limits and terms - - are set, and it becomes only a matter of
degree and whether the nation must be completely re-made (per the cultural
Marxists), or, in the case of the Neocons, “reformed” in line with their
(faulty) interpretation - - and promise - - of the Declaration.
This
position makes the widely-accepted assumption that the enshrined “inequality”
in our founding documents is equivalent to and a specific endorsement of “racism,” and that it is “race” that is the
central, if not unique, key to all of subsequent American history.
I
would submit that our ancestors viewed the term and the existence of
“inequality” in a much broader and normative sense, reflecting their understanding
of human nature, the laws of nature, and, indeed, of both Biblical teaching and
their inheritance of English law. Of
course, race can be placed into that context; but it should also be noted that,
historically, bondage of one person to another, or of a society composed of
classes, did not necessarily imply universal white domination over or exploitation of blacks because they were blacks. Nearly
all societies in Africa practiced and sanctified slavery from time immemorial,
but black-on-black slavery, of one tribe of Africans over another. Who, then, is the “racist”?
Indeed,
it can be argued that economic issues have been just as important, if not more
so, in our history. And race has usually
receded as a major concern when measured against nationally pressing or
disastrous economic issues (e.g., the Great Depression), or the appeal to
national solidarity and the defense of the homeland or family in times of war
and conflict or national emergency. It
was not just historians such as Charles Beard (in his influential An Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution of the United States, 1913) who forcefully expressed this view
a century ago. More recent writers have taken issue, if implicitly, with the
dominant Marxist historical school (e.g., Eric Foner) which insists that race
and racism are in essence the only
considerations by which to evaluate our history.
Eric
Foner casts the War Between the States and Reconstruction in this context: the War was, simply stated, to free the slaves
and “overturn racism,” a racism implicit in the American Founding and that must
be defeated and erased by continuous - - one could say, never ending - - struggle.
And Reconstruction was the - - temporarily deferred - - attempt to realize the
egalitarian meaning and results of that conflict. His guiding praxis, like that of the
preponderance of present-day American historians, is characterized by a kind of
historical reductionism, shaped by intolerant and dogmatic cultural Marxism. In
fact, historians of the Marxist historical school are governed largely by their
ideology and the supreme objective of not just re-writing and deconstructing
American history, but erasing entire portions of it that don’t fit their
preconceived narrative.
Any
real dissent or questioning, albeit of the mildest and most respectful form, is
forbidden. Thus such recent revisionist
studies as William Marvel’s Mr. Lincoln
Goes to War (2006), John V. Denson’s A
Century of War: Lincoln, Wilson & Roosevelt (2006), Thomas Fleming’s A Disease in the Public Mind (2013), and
Philip Leigh’s Southern Reconstruction
(2017), not to mention the scholarly volumes of Thomas diLorenzo - - all of
which deviate from the Marxist template on race and racism - - are dismissed or
ignored by mainstream historians.
It
would be informative to discover how many of these non-Marxist titles find
their way into modern college courses on the war and Reconstruction: not many,
I suspect.
The
cultural Marxist hyper-emphasis on race and racism now reaches into and pervades
every aspect of our lives, dictating a rigid ideological orthodoxy, an
orthodoxy that continues to metamorphosize and envelope every uttered word we
speak or are allowed to speak.
All
of which comes back to the essential point: until we openly reject the dominant cultural
Marxist template and praxis concerning equality and race as the controlling
forces both intellectually and practically in our society, this utter lunacy
will continue and our very rights and
existence as a people will continue to recede and disappear.
_____________________________________
Dr.
Boyd D. Cathey, retired State Registrar of the NC State Archives, holds a PhD
(Richard Weaver Fellow) from the University of Navarra, Spain, and an MA (Thomas
Jefferson Fellow) from the University of Virginia. He blogs at: https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com
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