Culture Wars, Universities, and the Political Unconscious
As I argue in my new book Culture Wars, Universities, and the Political Unconscious, whenever we are talking about cancel culture, identity politics, political correctness, or the alt-Right, we are dealing with a culture war, which often pits two sides against each other in a split world of good and evil. These political representations rely on a set of unconscious processes best understand through psychoanalysis. In fact, my book claims that if you want to comprehend the rhetoric of the Right, the Left, conservatives, and centrists, it is necessary to see how these ideologies rely on unacknowledged defense mechanisms, fantasies, fears, and desires. Moreover, I posit that if we do not employ psychoanalytic concepts to examine our political investments, we will be unable to get to the root causes driving these social productions.
Drawing from my past work on the psychopathology of political ideology, I analyze the roles that conservatives, Leftists, Right-wingers and centrist play in political polarization. One of my main goals is to demonstrate how the people interpreting our current political battles are actually contributing to the problems they detect. I also seek to move beyond political polarization by focusing on the relations among five different political ideologies. In turning to psychoanalytic theory and practice, I offer several methods for countering our destructive political battles.
Part of the solution is to better understand and protect our modern institutions based on impartiality and empirical evidence. This defence of science and democracy seeks to counter the current attacks from the Left and the Right on reason, neutrality, and higher education. As a way of restoring our trust in vital modern liberal practices, I offer a psychoanalytic critique of the replacement of class conflict with culture wars. One of the main objectives here is to show how class and culture always affect each other and why it is so dangerous to separate them from each other. Just as our political system is structured by a set of check and balances, we have to affirm the need to balance social needs and individual desires. Drawing from Freud’s theory of the fundamental conflict between the individual and society, I examine how our culture wars are often shaped by the effort of different ideologies to define and control this unresolvable tension. Part of the solution involves not turning to polarization in order to avoid ambivalence, ambiguity, and complexity. While we cannot place an entire culture on a couch, we can promote different social practices dedicated to replacing the pleasure principle with the reality principle.
Each chapter of this book looks at a specific writer’s or politician’s take on contemporary culture wars. One of the reoccurring themes concerns the way free speech has been weaponized by different ideological formations, and this battle over free expression is often centered on the role that universities play in balancing the demands among competing social interests. It is my hope that this book will not only clarify what universities should be, but it will also help us to move beyond our polarized political world.
Book Outline
The Introduction begins with an outline of how the psychoanalytic theories of splitting, repression, denial, projection, and fantasy can help us to understand some of the more hidden aspects of our recent culture wars. Starting with a libertarian tax revolt and ending with the current criticism of cultural Marxism, I examine how a new form of McCarthyism is shaping American politics. I also outline the entire book and trace the development and transformation of political culture in America and beyond.
In order to analyze all of these aspects of the contemporary culture war, I begin Chapter Two with an analysis of Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, which seeks to provide an historical overview of current political dynamics. We will see how Hartman’s centrist perspective laments polarization as it engages in its own mode of splitting in order to create a clear narrative. While Hartman does provide insight into the ideological conflicts starting in the 1980s, his work tends to idealize the 1950s as a period of American stability, and this idealization relies on repressing the role of sexism and racism in shaping the American economy during this Cold War period. Like many of the authors examined in this book, Hartman’s historical narratives tends to separate culture from class.
Chapter Three reads Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind as an early conservative representation of the campus culture wars. This book is important because it unintentionally reveals many of the unconscious process dominating our current political discourse. As a reactionary text, Bloom attacks diversity and moral relativism in favor of an idealized view of American history. In an effort to promote a secular national religion, he displaces the destructive nature of contemporary capitalism onto minorities and a demonized Left.
Chapter Four seeks to examine the role of money in funding the Right-wing part of the contemporary culture war. Drawing mainly from John K. Wilson’s The Myth of Political Correctness, the goal is to show how the hiding of a tax revolt from above behind a battle over cultural identity has been a coordinated effort reliant on the use of large sums of cash. Although the people involved in this conspiracy often were not fully aware of how the different parts of the political scheme fit together, the result has enabled the use of the political unconscious for very specific purposes.
In Chapter Five, I examine the Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation of individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the co-author of The Cancelling of the American Mind who proports to be a liberal democrat who is seeking to protect free speech and the diversity of ideas. However, an examination of the source of his founding and his underlying ideology reveals that he is in actually a center-Right activist seeking to hide his true intentions behind a false narrative and a set of rhetorical tricks. In fact, one reason why Lukianoff is such an interesting example of our current culture war is that he helps to expose the true goals of the Right’s promotion of free speech and criticism of cancel culture. While people like Lukianoff would like us to think that they are just defending the liberal democratic value of free expression, what they are really doing is supporting a well-funded libertarian assault on public universities, the welfare state, progressive politics, and economic regulation. As part of a broad tax revolt from above, Lukianoff receives much of his funding from wealthy, Right-wing donors who are more interested in reducing taxes and shrinking the government than the open exchange of ideas at universities and beyond.
Chapter Six uses a psychoanalytic mode of rhetorical analysis to examine how universities have become the central site for an updated form of Cold War McCarthyism. As I will document, conservative and libertarian ideologues tend to utilize the same unconscious process of splitting, denial, projection, and projective identification, and this mode of the political unconscious reveals many of the inner-workings of the contemporary culture war. In looking at Ben Shapiro’s Brainwashed, I describe how this popular media personality turns to his own educational experience at UCLA in order to produce a conspiracy theory regarding the way professors indoctrinate students into a Leftist, pro-communist ideology.
Continuing the theme of exposing the unconscious aspects of Republican rhetoric, Chapter Seven analyzes Senator Ted Cruz’s Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America. This book elaborates a now-common conspiracy theory circulating on the Right, which is focused on the way our culture has been taken over by a secret Marxist movement. According to this fantasy-narrative, the followers of Karl Marx have realized that they can no longer take over countries through direct political revolutions, and so instead, they are seeking to impose a totalitarian form of Communism by first infiltrating higher education and then spreading out into all sectors of society. According to this story, while the original Marx focused on class conflict and economic exploitation, the new form of Marxism subverts society by engaging in a culture war dedicated to the hatred of white Christian heterosexual males. For Cruz, whose parents came from pre-revolutionary Cuba, Marxism is defined by an emphasis on power relations between the oppressors and the oppressed. Of course, this is a distorted, simplified interpretation of Marx and many of his followers, but the key move that Cruz wants to make is to replace a class war with a culture war through the rebranding of a new mode of anti-Communist McCarthyism.
A major aspect of the contemporary culture war centers on the relations among race, class, and gender at American institution of higher education. As we shall see in Chapter Eight through a close reading of Walter Benn Michael’s The Trouble with Diversity, many Leftist scholars follow the classic Marxist position of seeing economic issues as more essential than cultural ones. This conflict between culture and capitalism often results in a splitting off of one from the other, which in turn, undermines our ability to see how these different social forces interact in a complex manner. One reason for this polarization is that people seek to avoid anxiety caused by ambiguity and ambivalence by splitting and simplifying the world according to groups of opposing characteristics. In response, psychoanalysis tells us that we need to find a way to overcome this defense mechanism by increasing our tolerance for fundamental human conflicts, like the conflict between society and the individual.
Chapter Nine argues that although it is clear that many cultural warriors on the Right exaggerate the level of Left-wing indoctrination in higher education, there is often a kernel of truth to their accusations. Just as the Right has become more extreme in its rhetoric and ideology, some factions on the Left have also become more extreme. In order to examine some of the tendencies of the Left, I will focus on how a focus on race and racism can blind people from seeing the truth about our complicated social reality.
While it is now common for people on the Right to criticize people on the Left for censoring speech and trying to cancel people with whom they do not agree, it is evident that many activists on the Right engage in the very same tactics. As I depict in Chapter Tem, this effort to shame and condemn the other side is structured by an imaginary, split world where political beliefs are presented in a polarized manner. Moreover, by sharing some of the same unconscious defense mechanisms, people on the Left and Right tend to get locked into a dual relationship of demonization and idealization. To further clarify how the Right has appropriated political, psychological, and rhetorical tactics from the Left, I will examine David Horowitz’ The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America and recent debates over the relation between antisemitism and free speech.
The final chapter examines the different ways that psychoanalysis can help us to move beyond the current polarized culture wars. Part of this process involves exposing the underlying dears, desires, fantasies and defense mechanisms shaping the political unconscious. Instead of focusing on the psychopathology of the Right, I examine the differences among five fundamental ideologies: conservative, liberal, centrist, Right, and Left. This more complex analysis of our current political terrain helps us to move beyond polarization and the splitting of the world into a good us and an evil other. It is also vital to understand the core values and ideals shaping modern liberal democracy and science, and this commitment to the reality principle represents a psychoanalytic mode of critical introspection.