What do DEI, CRT, wokeness, and cultural Marxism have in common?
How to understand the materiality of reactionary politics.
As soon as news broke about the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key bridge on Tuesday everyone knew it was just a matter of time until the American right started blaming its usual scapegoats. What may have surprised some, however, was their introduction of a seemingly new villain this time around.
“Shipping giant Maersk confirmed that the Dali ship [that hit the bridge is] operated and managed by Synergy Marine Group,” Paul Szypula wrote. “Synergy Marine Group promotes DEI in their company.”
“The company operating the ship dedicates a huge portion of its budget on DEI, but not maintenance and training?” Ian Miles Cheong asked.
Maryland Port Commissioner “Karenthia A. Barber…knows nothing about Ports, but she is a “diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) auditor and consultant,” the Young Conservative Federation noted.
I do not think the case that DEI played a significant role in a ship crashing into a bridge is particularly strong. By IMC’s logic, for example, one could also blame this disaster on all that money Synergy Marine Group has been wasting on pizza Fridays at the home office. At this point the most plausible explanation seems to be that if you move 11.7 million tons of cargo through a port every year, it becomes statistically inevitable that one of your ships is eventually going to experience a dangerous mechanical failure. In that regard the situation is identical to road traffic: ultimately, accepting a lot of moving vehicles means a certain number of inevitable accidents no matter how good your regulations are.
There is a certain genre of leftist who is so committed to antiquated liberal ideas about rationalistic discourse that I suspect they are going to spend a lot of time elaborating on the obvious explanation I sketched out above. Instead of understanding the DEI complaint as the endpoint of some path of conservative reasoning, however, I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about how a Marxist might explain what’s going on here.
Language and economic instrumentality
One of the most important contributions that modern linguistics has made to our understanding of language has been to focus on its instrumentality. Historically, words have often been viewed as direct and transparent expressions of meaning. Words had a rational relationship with each other that reflected the rational order of the universe. Man, the rational animal, could thus come to understand the universe simply by confirming the correct meaning of words and how they relate to each other.
This was the view of language that animated what I have called “antiquated liberal ideas about rationalistic discourse.” And though few scientists and philosophers take it seriously today, it remains the implicit foundation of a lot of our ideas about how the discourse and public reason operate. If you’ve heard the cliche “words mean things” in the course of a debate, for example, then you’ve encountered this ideology.
As a matter of empirical description, however, this view of words is simply incorrect. The words we use often vary quite significantly in definition and relationship to other words even among individuals who speak the same dialect, but this does not seem to matter as long as they elicit the expected response. Consider what happens if (say) you want someone who speaks a different language to let you hold their pet cat. You might use gestures, or try to find simple words that they might recognize, or even make little meowing noises; you might do all kinds of things. Clearly what matters in this case is not whether you are adhering to some strict canon of definition and grammar, but rather whether you get the person to hand you their cat. Here, you are using language instrumentally, going with whatever works; and this seems to be a much closer fit to how humans actually use language than the “words mean things” model.
This point about the instrumentality of language may seem far afield from Marx, but it is a crucial bridge between linguistics and Marx’s theory of ideology. Liberalism typically imagines capitalism as economic order that simply expresses the aggregate of individuals acting with absolute freedom. Marx, however, demonstrated that even capitalist economies shape behavior in all kinds of predictable ways. Simple example: capitalism forces most people to sell their labor. If you are not by rare luck one of the few who own the means of production then you have to work for someone who does; if you don’t, you’ll simply die.
From this it follows trivially that insofar as people use language in a capital society, we should expect them to use it to find ways to sell their labor. We should also expect the ruling class to use language in ways that facilitate this transaction — and that justify and defend it, since it is a transaction that works in their favor. In this way, capitalism systematically generates an ideology that facilitates and justifies its existence without any need for coordination or conspiracy theories.
Here is where the instrumentality of language becomes important — and where people who retain old intuitions about language can become confused. If you have a “words mean things” theory of language then you will imagine capitalist ideology as a very specific set of rhetoric that that reflect the specific imperatives of capital. You might for example take for granted that capitalist ideology always involves phrases like “workers should have to sell their labor to survive,” and if you do not see something that looks like that then you won’t think of it as capitalist ideology.
But if you have an instrumental view of language, you’ll appreciate that the specific rhetoric at work is less important than the function it plays in our politics. Thus while capitalism creates an ideology that justifies and defends precarious labor markets, it need not rely on any particular rhetoric to do so. Capitalism does not need words to mean specific things, or for them to relate to each other in a web of meaning that follows principles of sound logic and reasoning; it can rely on popular fallacies, semantic incoherence, and pre-rational quirks of human psychology. Whatever works works.
It is only by grasping the economic instrumentality of language that we can develop a rigorous understanding of capitalist ideology — but accepting this means accepting radical changes in how we usually talk about the discourse. Instead of viewing it as a neutral marketplace of ideas where individual speakers are the main actors, we see it as an evolving web of contested meanings and rhetorics that follow no reliable logic other than political convenience. The bourgeoisie leverages its control of communication infrastructure and communication jobs to consolidate its power and expand profits through language. As workers develop class consciousness, they combat the bourgeoisie’s language of domination by developing their own ideas and their own ways of talking about them; and so the bourgeoisie, in turn, develops new ways to legitimize itself. This back-and-forth may have the appearance of a rational dialogue, but just as often it may look like an endless game of ideological whack-a-mole, with the ruling class advancing and then dropping rhetorics and ideas without any logical rhyme or reason.
The DEI rebrand
So we return to the right’s latest scapegoat: DEI. Since this explanation, I have argued, seems senseless on the merits, it is only natural to wonder why we’re suddenly hearing so much about it. This is particularly true since the right has so many equally senseless scapegoats at its disposal that could play this role perfectly well. Less than a year ago when the OceanGate submarine imploded while attempting to tour the ruins of the Titanic, conservatives blamed something called “wokeness”. A year before that, reactionaries like Senator Ron Johnson blamed wokeness and “critical race theory” for the mass shooting in Uvalde. And that same year, a whole roster of conservative intellectuals blamed the Covid pandemic on “cultural Marxism”.
So why the change? Let’s look a bit closer at one shift in particular: the move from Critical Race Theory to DEI as the villain-of-the-day. Just going by the numbers, it’s clear that there has been a dramatic shift:
If a ship had crashed into the Key Bridge three years ago, there is not a doubt in my mind that conservatives would have hunted for a way to relate it back to Critical Race Theory. This was, recall, the central point of that entire argument: to trace all kinds of problems and alleged problems, no matter how disparate and seemingly unrelated, back to first cause of the CRT mind-virus.
But that’s precisely what has made the shift away from that so senseless. Particularly because DEI does in fact have an intellectual relationship with CRT. If you really think that the CRT discourse really did express some widespread concern that it was the wellspring of liberal-left pathology then you would expect everyone talking about DEI to make that connection right now; but as the graph above shows us, that just isn’t what people are doing. I’ve managed to reliably blame everything on capitalism for a few decades now; the Catholic Church has maintained a consistent critique of pride for about two millennia. So why, after only a few years, has the right already lost interest in blaming everything on CRT?
If one thinks about language and the discourse as a progression of ideas that emerge and become discredited through the power of rational argumentation, this shift is very difficult to explain. If you think of language and discourse as instruments of power, however, then the answer is pretty straightforward. The ruling class disseminated anti-CRT rhetoric simply because they decided it would be a useful tool of domination. The intellectuals who popularized this rhetoric were quite open about this: they saw it as an effective weapon against Marxism, and not even for rational reasons, but because of its vague semantic connotations. Chris Rufo:
We’ve needed new language for these issues… ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain…Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’
But just as we’ve seen with wokeness, and Cultural Marxism, and the scapegoats that came before that (like “political correctness”), new language eventually gets old. The ruling class develops a language of domination, but eventually the working class finds a language to resist it; perhaps through rational critique, perhaps through social shaming and norm-setting, perhaps in other ways. But this has not been a final ideological victory, of course, because the ruling class that creates these rhetorics is still in place.
And so we now face the existential threat of DEI. If you like, you can spend an infinite amount of time arguing with guys like Ian Miles Cheong or Rep. Phil Lyman about how the Key Bridge probably didn’t fall into the Baltimore harbor because of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. If this new boogeyman sticks around long enough I’m sure the left infotainment complex will give us all kinds of epic debates about it. But whether you defeat the attack on DEI through logic or through ridicule, the same ruling class will still be in place, and it will generate a new language of oppression just as easily as it came up with all the others.