Good analysis, James. I experienced this first-hand beginning in 2013 as a new hire at a public school district. We were all sent to “equity” training where we were taught that being caucasian was inherently racist because institutional racism handed power over to us. But the Latinas (pardon me, LatinX) objected, saying the focus on power imbalance left them out of the equation. Blacks attending told us they are not a monolith, which is true. But the experience only served as an exercise in shaming rather than engagement. We white folks were encouraged to become active in efforts to dismantle institutional racism.
A few years ago, I sat through a corporate "consciousness-raising" session on racism at the tech firm where I worked. I walked in with an open mind. In fact, I was arguably the ideal audience.
I am deeply sympathetic to the realities of unconscious bias and systemic oppression. It seems empirically obvious that humans, all humans, are prone to in-group preference. Furthermore, when one examines the compounding interest of historical injustices, such as redlining and generational wealth gaps, it is clear that the playing field remains tilted. I was ready to listen, learn, and discuss how to level that field.
The session began exactly as the cynics might expect. The room was filled with middle-aged, white middle managers—my demographic. Their skepticism was palpable, bordering on defensive. In that moment, their resistance seemed to validate every claim the Critical Theory/Social Justice activists make about "white intransigence."
Seeing this standoff, I tried to bridge the gap. I raised my hand to offer a scientific perspective on why we exclude others. I brought up the research on homophily and cognitive dissonance, not cognitive ease. The argument is straightforward and non-condemnatory: humans prefer people who look and sound like them, not necessarily out of malice, but because shared cultural, linguistic, and historical contexts decrease social friction. We gravitate toward the familiar because it is "easy."
My logic was pragmatic: If we understand that systemic oppression is largely the result of universal human cognitive biases calcified into social structures, we don't need to assume every white person is a mustache-twirling villain. We can simply view ourselves as flawed machinery that needs calibration.
The consultant’s reaction was immediate and telling. She was 100% uninterested.
She offered a dismissive "yeah, okay," and pivoted instantly back to the script: the oppressor/oppressed binary. In her framework, racism wasn't a bug in the human operating system; it was a moral stain unique to the "dominant" class.
This was the moment I realized the chasm between Liberalism and Applied Critical Theory.
I had been operating under the liberal assumption that we analyze systems to understand and dismantle them. However, Applied Critical Theory—the engine behind modern DEI—does not seek to explain prejudice as a universal human phenomenon. It aims to map power. In this worldview, society is strictly divided into oppressors (white, male, straight, cis) and the oppressed (everyone else).
By suggesting that bias is a natural cognitive drift rather than a specific moral failing of whiteness, I had inadvertently committed a heresy. I had removed the "sin."
This is the tragedy of the current discourse. There is a sophisticated way to teach social structures that invites people in to solve a puzzle together. Instead, consultants and activists rely on a crude, reified essentialism. If you are white, you are a racist. If you are straight, you are a heterosexist. You are not an individual with agency; you are an avatar of your demographic, bearing full moral culpability for historical atrocities you did not commit.
This approach relies on what philosophers call a self-sealing fallacy: If you agree with the theory, you admit your guilt. If you disagree (or offer a nuanced alternative, as I did), you are manifesting "fragility," which is further proof of your guilt.
The damage this does is incalculable. I watched the skepticism in that room harden into cynicism. When you tell decent people that they are inherently broken and complicit in evil simply by virtue of their birth, they do not become allies. They check out. They reject not just the toxic binary of Critical Theory, but often the very real evidence of systemic injustice I was trying to highlight.
We need a path forward that holds systems accountable rather than blaming individuals, and that acknowledges our shared fallibility rather than assigning original sin to specific groups. The current approach isn't only intellectually sterile but also pragmatically disastrous for the very people it claims to help.
Yes. Years ago I had to attend a racism training course with my co workers. I left at the end angry at the casual racism, sloppy logic and half truths we were subjected to. Discussing it later it seemed that most who attended left more racist than when they went in.
This is an excellent example and explanation of the difference between actually using a critical analysis approach to understand human issues and accepting an ideology (Critical Justice Theories) with an over simplified victim-oppressor narrative which is what we are seeing now in DEI.
Your post provides an excellent summation of our current intellectual/cultural malaise. I very much liked and appreciated it. However, the following statement…
“This was the moment I realized the chasm between Liberalism and Applied Critical Theory.
I had been operating under the liberal assumption that we analyze systems to understand and dismantle them.”
…requires further analysis, since it demonstrates that Liberalism, at least the way we classical liberals understood it, might be more complicit in its own destruction than you think. Liberalism WAS originally designed to analyze AND dismantle systems. Oppressive absolutist monarchies and ossified and worldly religious bureaucracies were all justly (in my opinion) carved up by its uncompromising blade. But this leveling blade maybe cut a bit too far and eventually took with it the customs and cultural institutions that made Liberalism possible in the first place. Chesterton’s Fence was torn down and, at this point, I’m not sure what can be done to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Which is an issue I've been struggling with lately. Liberalism is supposed to be relatively self-correcting through self-criticism and the disaggregation of power. However, it depends on the assumption of goodwill or at least the common set of foundational values implied by Liberalism. If one doesn't agree with the universalist aspect of liberalism (that rights and responsibilities apply to everyone equally), Liberalism has no defence against your hypocrisy (which, to be fair, one doesn't see as hypocrisy but truth). This is why I have lately started to take both immigration and multiculturalism more seriously as threats to the Liberal project. As a Social Democrat, the ability of the state to provide a policy counterbalance to the power of capital is very important to me, but we can't maintain that counterbalance (or the social safety net needed when that fails) if there are no limits on how many people are being protected by it or benefit from it.
So, I agree with you, this is a problem. However, I also think the answer is fairly straightforward, and neither left nor right is particularly happy about it. Countries should take a measured but firm approach to both immigration and cultural assimilation. Although we must absolutely have systems for the immigration of bona fide asylum-seekers, the idea that "we are a country of immigrants" doesn't mean "if you are an immigrant, you are welcome here." It's a straightforward issue of systemic capacity. The same with culture. While there is plenty to criticize about American (and British and French and Spanish, etc.) culture, the substrate of values that enable Liberalism *must* be a prerequisite for permanent settlement. It's not racist or intolerant to say, "If you want to live here, you must agree to not prioritize your previous culture over ours."
I agree, of course, but the problem is defining who the “we” (who is going to be doing the assimilating) is here. I am a professional academic. My university, in addition to providing degrees to people who end up in high-status occupations, also churns out huge amounts of primary and secondary school teachers. I would say that since the early nineties (when I was still in grad school) through the early 2000s, when I got my first full time job (I am now tenured), I have witnessed whole generations of college graduates unleashed upon the world with an utter disdain, even hatred, for the Western heritage. The reason is simple. The vast majority (+90%) of my colleagues in the humanities/social sciences hate and despise the liberal tradition and have been actively undermining the liberal project that you wrote about for the past (guesstimating) thirty years or so. Not sure there is a way back at this point.
I watched this and endured it off and on for years. I remember sitting in a meeting where the presenters said at first "equality will feel like oppression" and thought, "No one will ever go for that." Most memorably, I found these meetings traumatic for my black colleagues, who were told repeatedly that they were "stamped from the beginning," though not in that exact phrase, and oppressed and under threat from the moment they woke up and engaged with the world.
"It only hardens the opposition, provides endless ammunition to the Right, and makes the accusers feel righteous and powerful."
This is what I don't think the Left gets: the more they Balkanize themselves through purity tests, the more they actually empower the Right by making themselves easier to caricature
Thanks so much. For years I have been struggling to express my horror at CT and its devotees as well as at the fallacy of their identitarianism. As a teen and young adult I was a youth leader on a Jesuist movement in South America which made me able to recognize the techniques CT uses. It is the same in psychoanalysis where every reaction of the patient is either a proyection or a defense- there is no rational escape through argumentation. Therefore, when they started I could easily spot the dishonesty of the DEI workshops of Kendi and DiAngelo so many of my colleagues and clients fell for. I felt very lonely for a while. Unbeliveable: A research appointment for Kendi at Boston University!!! It was then very difficult for me to understand how the Democrats fell into the identatarian trap that makes even people like Martin L. King, a racist. Or how the culture embraced post-modernism. There was a moment when the social pressure was so strong that I tried to understand its appeal, unsuccessfully. Therefore I was enormously grateful to the Grievance Studies (Pluckrose et al.)'s unmasking of the CT parade.
Your essay is insightful and logically states and summarizes where we are and what got us here. Calling the accusation of bigotry a social technology is brilliant!!!
Thanks again for your writing. Keep it up!! ....I am saving your article and distributing it to anybody that can read it.
Glad this made sense to you! If you haven't subscribed to Helen Pluckrose on Substack, you should. She's not only a very careful thinker, but she's very, very funny.
I fear that all of this was inevitable. It goes back well over a century, past Derrida and Foucault through Horkheimer, Adorno, et al, all the way to Gramsci and Lukacs at least. Who knows— maybe it’s been inevitable since Rousseau.
I also experienced this at a lecture at Temple Emanuel in Miami Beach by Alan Dershowitz after the 10/7 massacres . Demonstrators burst into the synagogue screaming unintelligibly. Professor Dershowitz offered to engage in debate. The intruders simply continued screaming. Their goal was to silence debate, which they achieved briefly until police cleared them from the sanctuary. But on campuses, no one clears them, and the professors teach them to scream, and the tenured professors, holding onto power, make sure their hired successors do the same. Changing indoctrination to thinking will be very difficult.
Exactly. I am not Caucasian but agree totally with you. I try to approach intercultural relations from the viewpoint of social psychology and not blaming. But I experience huge resistance from some Caucasians as well as persons of color. The narrative must change.
There is so much here that I never understood. I read day and night, have done all my life, but in all the years I have mourned the liberals, I never understood what happened. This brief article cogently diagrams the abandonment of the liberal mind in a way I never expected to understand. The author has done this old factory hand a huge service with this work.
I feel so grateful for this explanatory from a Professor at that! I have never studied critical Theory or Debate, but I just could not put my finger on what was happening, decided I was being told there is not now nor will there ever be a goal or place to reach and I said bye. It felt degrading to my intellect, sense of right and wrong, and reminded me too much of bullying.
If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend Yascha Mounk's book, "The Identity Trap," which recently had its paperback release. Yascha's also on Substack: https://yaschamounk.substack.com/
Big fan of Yascha. My only complaint is that we agree so often that I sometimes get bored. However, he's much smarter than I am, so I always learn something in spite of our agreement.
Excellent analysis - but its missing one obvious piece of the solution: the teleology.
When you "marched back in the 80s" you were doing it for a reason, the advancement of groups who were genuinely mistreated. Most easily exploitable causes have been delivered, and arguably it is actually this that opened the field for CT to manufacture up new grievances to exploit politically.
The one cause left to fight for is economic inequality, the one conveniently swept under the rug by the modern left. Intellectual deliverance isn't enough, we need a liberal/empiricist revival to renew the social contract.
Thank you for this very helpful and thoughtful article. I have laboriously copied it to my notes so I give it really good attention…but it seems you have helped me to get clarity in a quest to get my head around the problems with Critical Theory, that started with a strong intuition about 4 years ago and has taken me down a few rabbit holes since. I’d had a weird idea since about 1970 that I couldn’t see how the thought of Sartre logically led to a leftist position, rather than a nihilist or fascistic one, other than just preference. Recently, I’ve felt the same about Derrida and especially Foucault….but I worried that I was the mad one. No-one else seemed to be calling all this out!
I will subscribe to your substack. You feel like a bit of a brother…I wonder if we met over a pint we would get on famously or fall out tremendously. If the latter, I believe we would both be respectful and civil!
Good analysis, James. I experienced this first-hand beginning in 2013 as a new hire at a public school district. We were all sent to “equity” training where we were taught that being caucasian was inherently racist because institutional racism handed power over to us. But the Latinas (pardon me, LatinX) objected, saying the focus on power imbalance left them out of the equation. Blacks attending told us they are not a monolith, which is true. But the experience only served as an exercise in shaming rather than engagement. We white folks were encouraged to become active in efforts to dismantle institutional racism.
A few years ago, I sat through a corporate "consciousness-raising" session on racism at the tech firm where I worked. I walked in with an open mind. In fact, I was arguably the ideal audience.
I am deeply sympathetic to the realities of unconscious bias and systemic oppression. It seems empirically obvious that humans, all humans, are prone to in-group preference. Furthermore, when one examines the compounding interest of historical injustices, such as redlining and generational wealth gaps, it is clear that the playing field remains tilted. I was ready to listen, learn, and discuss how to level that field.
The session began exactly as the cynics might expect. The room was filled with middle-aged, white middle managers—my demographic. Their skepticism was palpable, bordering on defensive. In that moment, their resistance seemed to validate every claim the Critical Theory/Social Justice activists make about "white intransigence."
Seeing this standoff, I tried to bridge the gap. I raised my hand to offer a scientific perspective on why we exclude others. I brought up the research on homophily and cognitive dissonance, not cognitive ease. The argument is straightforward and non-condemnatory: humans prefer people who look and sound like them, not necessarily out of malice, but because shared cultural, linguistic, and historical contexts decrease social friction. We gravitate toward the familiar because it is "easy."
My logic was pragmatic: If we understand that systemic oppression is largely the result of universal human cognitive biases calcified into social structures, we don't need to assume every white person is a mustache-twirling villain. We can simply view ourselves as flawed machinery that needs calibration.
The consultant’s reaction was immediate and telling. She was 100% uninterested.
She offered a dismissive "yeah, okay," and pivoted instantly back to the script: the oppressor/oppressed binary. In her framework, racism wasn't a bug in the human operating system; it was a moral stain unique to the "dominant" class.
This was the moment I realized the chasm between Liberalism and Applied Critical Theory.
I had been operating under the liberal assumption that we analyze systems to understand and dismantle them. However, Applied Critical Theory—the engine behind modern DEI—does not seek to explain prejudice as a universal human phenomenon. It aims to map power. In this worldview, society is strictly divided into oppressors (white, male, straight, cis) and the oppressed (everyone else).
By suggesting that bias is a natural cognitive drift rather than a specific moral failing of whiteness, I had inadvertently committed a heresy. I had removed the "sin."
This is the tragedy of the current discourse. There is a sophisticated way to teach social structures that invites people in to solve a puzzle together. Instead, consultants and activists rely on a crude, reified essentialism. If you are white, you are a racist. If you are straight, you are a heterosexist. You are not an individual with agency; you are an avatar of your demographic, bearing full moral culpability for historical atrocities you did not commit.
This approach relies on what philosophers call a self-sealing fallacy: If you agree with the theory, you admit your guilt. If you disagree (or offer a nuanced alternative, as I did), you are manifesting "fragility," which is further proof of your guilt.
The damage this does is incalculable. I watched the skepticism in that room harden into cynicism. When you tell decent people that they are inherently broken and complicit in evil simply by virtue of their birth, they do not become allies. They check out. They reject not just the toxic binary of Critical Theory, but often the very real evidence of systemic injustice I was trying to highlight.
We need a path forward that holds systems accountable rather than blaming individuals, and that acknowledges our shared fallibility rather than assigning original sin to specific groups. The current approach isn't only intellectually sterile but also pragmatically disastrous for the very people it claims to help.
Exactly. I see a parallel to evangelical Christianity: Salvation from original sin only to those who accept the Christ as their personal savior.
And anyone who disagrees is under the influence of the devil (white fragity/internalised misogyny…)
?
The logic of Witch Hunters, Revolutionary Tribunals, and NKVD goons. Purity Spirals are a hell of a drug.
Yes. Years ago I had to attend a racism training course with my co workers. I left at the end angry at the casual racism, sloppy logic and half truths we were subjected to. Discussing it later it seemed that most who attended left more racist than when they went in.
This is an excellent example and explanation of the difference between actually using a critical analysis approach to understand human issues and accepting an ideology (Critical Justice Theories) with an over simplified victim-oppressor narrative which is what we are seeing now in DEI.
Your post provides an excellent summation of our current intellectual/cultural malaise. I very much liked and appreciated it. However, the following statement…
“This was the moment I realized the chasm between Liberalism and Applied Critical Theory.
I had been operating under the liberal assumption that we analyze systems to understand and dismantle them.”
…requires further analysis, since it demonstrates that Liberalism, at least the way we classical liberals understood it, might be more complicit in its own destruction than you think. Liberalism WAS originally designed to analyze AND dismantle systems. Oppressive absolutist monarchies and ossified and worldly religious bureaucracies were all justly (in my opinion) carved up by its uncompromising blade. But this leveling blade maybe cut a bit too far and eventually took with it the customs and cultural institutions that made Liberalism possible in the first place. Chesterton’s Fence was torn down and, at this point, I’m not sure what can be done to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Which is an issue I've been struggling with lately. Liberalism is supposed to be relatively self-correcting through self-criticism and the disaggregation of power. However, it depends on the assumption of goodwill or at least the common set of foundational values implied by Liberalism. If one doesn't agree with the universalist aspect of liberalism (that rights and responsibilities apply to everyone equally), Liberalism has no defence against your hypocrisy (which, to be fair, one doesn't see as hypocrisy but truth). This is why I have lately started to take both immigration and multiculturalism more seriously as threats to the Liberal project. As a Social Democrat, the ability of the state to provide a policy counterbalance to the power of capital is very important to me, but we can't maintain that counterbalance (or the social safety net needed when that fails) if there are no limits on how many people are being protected by it or benefit from it.
So, I agree with you, this is a problem. However, I also think the answer is fairly straightforward, and neither left nor right is particularly happy about it. Countries should take a measured but firm approach to both immigration and cultural assimilation. Although we must absolutely have systems for the immigration of bona fide asylum-seekers, the idea that "we are a country of immigrants" doesn't mean "if you are an immigrant, you are welcome here." It's a straightforward issue of systemic capacity. The same with culture. While there is plenty to criticize about American (and British and French and Spanish, etc.) culture, the substrate of values that enable Liberalism *must* be a prerequisite for permanent settlement. It's not racist or intolerant to say, "If you want to live here, you must agree to not prioritize your previous culture over ours."
I agree, of course, but the problem is defining who the “we” (who is going to be doing the assimilating) is here. I am a professional academic. My university, in addition to providing degrees to people who end up in high-status occupations, also churns out huge amounts of primary and secondary school teachers. I would say that since the early nineties (when I was still in grad school) through the early 2000s, when I got my first full time job (I am now tenured), I have witnessed whole generations of college graduates unleashed upon the world with an utter disdain, even hatred, for the Western heritage. The reason is simple. The vast majority (+90%) of my colleagues in the humanities/social sciences hate and despise the liberal tradition and have been actively undermining the liberal project that you wrote about for the past (guesstimating) thirty years or so. Not sure there is a way back at this point.
I watched this and endured it off and on for years. I remember sitting in a meeting where the presenters said at first "equality will feel like oppression" and thought, "No one will ever go for that." Most memorably, I found these meetings traumatic for my black colleagues, who were told repeatedly that they were "stamped from the beginning," though not in that exact phrase, and oppressed and under threat from the moment they woke up and engaged with the world.
A good articulation of good faith effort to find common ground...and why it can't be allowed to succeed in Applied Critical Theory world.
I struggle with concepts without action verbs… “ Become”. Oh, ok…
"It only hardens the opposition, provides endless ammunition to the Right, and makes the accusers feel righteous and powerful."
This is what I don't think the Left gets: the more they Balkanize themselves through purity tests, the more they actually empower the Right by making themselves easier to caricature
I agree, but I think the "identity deifiers" would themselves identify as "left," even though you or I wouldn't define them that way
Thanks so much. For years I have been struggling to express my horror at CT and its devotees as well as at the fallacy of their identitarianism. As a teen and young adult I was a youth leader on a Jesuist movement in South America which made me able to recognize the techniques CT uses. It is the same in psychoanalysis where every reaction of the patient is either a proyection or a defense- there is no rational escape through argumentation. Therefore, when they started I could easily spot the dishonesty of the DEI workshops of Kendi and DiAngelo so many of my colleagues and clients fell for. I felt very lonely for a while. Unbeliveable: A research appointment for Kendi at Boston University!!! It was then very difficult for me to understand how the Democrats fell into the identatarian trap that makes even people like Martin L. King, a racist. Or how the culture embraced post-modernism. There was a moment when the social pressure was so strong that I tried to understand its appeal, unsuccessfully. Therefore I was enormously grateful to the Grievance Studies (Pluckrose et al.)'s unmasking of the CT parade.
Your essay is insightful and logically states and summarizes where we are and what got us here. Calling the accusation of bigotry a social technology is brilliant!!!
Thanks again for your writing. Keep it up!! ....I am saving your article and distributing it to anybody that can read it.
P.S. Isn't Substack great? I found you!!!!
Glad this made sense to you! If you haven't subscribed to Helen Pluckrose on Substack, you should. She's not only a very careful thinker, but she's very, very funny.
Fantastic analysis. I’ve been searching long and far for a voice of reason on this subject, Mr. Meacham. Glad to have come across your work.
This is really good. A must-read.
I fear that all of this was inevitable. It goes back well over a century, past Derrida and Foucault through Horkheimer, Adorno, et al, all the way to Gramsci and Lukacs at least. Who knows— maybe it’s been inevitable since Rousseau.
I also experienced this at a lecture at Temple Emanuel in Miami Beach by Alan Dershowitz after the 10/7 massacres . Demonstrators burst into the synagogue screaming unintelligibly. Professor Dershowitz offered to engage in debate. The intruders simply continued screaming. Their goal was to silence debate, which they achieved briefly until police cleared them from the sanctuary. But on campuses, no one clears them, and the professors teach them to scream, and the tenured professors, holding onto power, make sure their hired successors do the same. Changing indoctrination to thinking will be very difficult.
Exactly. I am not Caucasian but agree totally with you. I try to approach intercultural relations from the viewpoint of social psychology and not blaming. But I experience huge resistance from some Caucasians as well as persons of color. The narrative must change.
Absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much. I have restacked.
There is so much here that I never understood. I read day and night, have done all my life, but in all the years I have mourned the liberals, I never understood what happened. This brief article cogently diagrams the abandonment of the liberal mind in a way I never expected to understand. The author has done this old factory hand a huge service with this work.
I feel so grateful for this explanatory from a Professor at that! I have never studied critical Theory or Debate, but I just could not put my finger on what was happening, decided I was being told there is not now nor will there ever be a goal or place to reach and I said bye. It felt degrading to my intellect, sense of right and wrong, and reminded me too much of bullying.
If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend Yascha Mounk's book, "The Identity Trap," which recently had its paperback release. Yascha's also on Substack: https://yaschamounk.substack.com/
Big fan of Yascha. My only complaint is that we agree so often that I sometimes get bored. However, he's much smarter than I am, so I always learn something in spite of our agreement.
For the application of similar sentiments and sensibilities to the climate and energy policy debate, see www.ClimateOfContempt.com
Excellent analysis - but its missing one obvious piece of the solution: the teleology.
When you "marched back in the 80s" you were doing it for a reason, the advancement of groups who were genuinely mistreated. Most easily exploitable causes have been delivered, and arguably it is actually this that opened the field for CT to manufacture up new grievances to exploit politically.
The one cause left to fight for is economic inequality, the one conveniently swept under the rug by the modern left. Intellectual deliverance isn't enough, we need a liberal/empiricist revival to renew the social contract.
I recently wrote an article making this exact point, "Building for Angels," https://uncommondiscourses.substack.com/p/the-secular-ghost-in-the-machine?r=6zipl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true. 100% agree.
Excellent piece James.
Thank you for this very helpful and thoughtful article. I have laboriously copied it to my notes so I give it really good attention…but it seems you have helped me to get clarity in a quest to get my head around the problems with Critical Theory, that started with a strong intuition about 4 years ago and has taken me down a few rabbit holes since. I’d had a weird idea since about 1970 that I couldn’t see how the thought of Sartre logically led to a leftist position, rather than a nihilist or fascistic one, other than just preference. Recently, I’ve felt the same about Derrida and especially Foucault….but I worried that I was the mad one. No-one else seemed to be calling all this out!
I will subscribe to your substack. You feel like a bit of a brother…I wonder if we met over a pint we would get on famously or fall out tremendously. If the latter, I believe we would both be respectful and civil!
Excellent, as usual, James!