Christian Parenti talks with Class Unity about about the “compatible left”, so-called Wokeness, contemporary politics, and institutions like the CIA. Discussion is based in large part on his article for Catalyst, “The Cargo Cult of Woke”.

Class Unity: Hello everyone, and welcome to another Class Unity Speaker Series event. Class Unity is a Marxist organization that supports class struggle politics here in the United States. We believe in class politics, not identity politics. Our ultimate aim is to build a coalition that would establish a workers party here in the United States. If you would like to support us, please consider giving us a donation or even better by joining us by visiting our website ClassUnity.org. Our political education program is concerned with promoting materialist analysis on politics, economics, and social issues. Part of that program is our speaker series. 

Today we are welcoming back Christian Parenti. Thanks for coming. He’s a professor of economics at John Jay College. He’s a journalist and he’s written numerous books on a variety of topics in politics and economics. Today we will be talking about the contemporary left and so-called wokeness. Christian, you have described wokeness as a cargo cult. You’ve called it the cargo cult of woke. So could you tell us what you mean by that? 

Christian Parenti: Yeah, I probably should have put in that Catalyst essay what a cargo cult is. Cargo cults exist to this day in parts of Polynesia [and the] South Pacific. They’re on the wane, but they were, in their heyday, cults that imagined a return of prosperity. It was a reaction by colonized people to European domination in the South Pacific. And they were magical political movements that sought to kind of summon back the ancestors who would bring ships full of cargo, which is to say, Western trade goods. And it was a kind of millenarian and desperate attempt to make sense of the colonial domination by this larger, more powerful, and, technologically at least, richer society, that had all the commodities of capitalism. There are a few cargo cults around still, but mostly it’s a historical thing. They weren’t political organizations that confronted colonial authority. They were magical in their outlook. And they believed that certain types of rituals would fundamentally transform the material conditions under which the people found themselves. 

So that strikes me, sadly, as an apt metaphor for large parts of the American left. And I was asked to write an article for Catalyst to review these two books about wokeness, and then [I] expanded it, bringing in some of the more right wing books as well as other left wing books. And I did that in part because I found that there was a real prohibition about using the term “woke”, even in pretty sophisticated parts of the left. And I think wokeness is real and it’s not the same as identity politics. It’s not just a synonym for identity politics. It’s more than that. It has as much to do with the therapeutic turn and a kind of therapeutic sensibility creeping into politics. And I listed in that article six features of wokeness, but [it] got way too long, and so about half of it was left out. What was left out was sort of a more complete history of how we got here. So I’ll sketch that [now]. 

The way I see it, the history of what we now call “woke” begins, very clearly, with Taft-Hartley. And this law eviscerates the potential for building class-consciousness in the American labor movement by banning solidarity strikes. Long story short, it undermines the ability of unions to develop class consciousness by undermining the actual practices of solidarity. Unions can’t have sympathy strikes. They can’t have boycotts, these kinds of things. There’s also around the same time the Smith Acts putting communists in jail and the AFL-CIO purge. The CIO purged all sorts of Marxists and socialists from their ranks. And so Taft-Hartley is a material setback for unions, but it’s also an ideological-cultural setback because you’re not going to develop a class consciousness if you can’t practice class solidarity. And so unions are channeled by that law into practices that develop guild consciousness. Where you take care of yours, and the other automobile manufacturers or the other trades, that’s their problem. And you just stay in your lane. 

Then, simultaneously with that, the American occupiers in Europe are confronted with the problem of a very large and very popular left and a very strong left intelligentsia. And it becomes clear to the State Department and to the military and to what becomes the Office of Coordination and Plans – OCP, headed by Frank Wisner, which comes out of the military and sort of has OSS connections, and will soon be brought into the new CIA – it becomes clear that the US occupiers in Europe can’t just crush this left, and they can’t just convince these leftists that America is great. 

They do, of course, use dirty tactics to steal the Italian and French post war elections. They cooperate with the Mafia. This CIA connection with the Mafia goes back, of course, to the invasion of Italy. When they’re planning, they need intelligence and they start coordinating with Italian-American mafiosi to build intelligence networks through their cousins and friends and fellow gangsters in Southern Italy. And so that is continued in the late ‘40s for actually repressing communist parties in these elections. 

But there’s also this soft power side of things, like “What story do we tell to the European left?” And they realize, well, you can’t just tell them to love America. And so what develops is the idea that there has to be a non-communist left cultivated, or what Cord Meyer – who becomes the head of operations in the CIA – called the compatible left and the non-communist left. And so along with repressing, sometimes violently, the parts of the communist left in Europe, there’s this effort to cultivate a different kind of left, an anti-Soviet left. They might be anti-American, but at least they’re anti-Communist. 

As part of that effort, foundations become very important. American philanthropy wasn’t particularly focused on social movements prior to World War II. There was a little bit of philanthropy support for Marcus Garvey and some of this kind of early black nationalism, but there wasn’t that much. And the civil rights movement also didn’t involve much philanthropy. 

But in this effort, this “Cultural Cold War”, they start building connections with foundations, and foundations also come to them. For example, the foundations connect with Welch’s Grape juice, who comes forward and offers its services to the CIA and ends up funding the work of Norman Thomas, who was a former socialist. There’s a lot of ex-Communists who become disillusioned with communism and join up with this. Jay Lovestone, for example, becomes one of these types. Richard Wright actually gets involved in this. He joins the Communist Party in the United States in ’39, I believe, and is with the party for like ten years. And then by the late 40s he’s turned against it. And he’s in Europe and very disillusioned. And he actually cooperates in this cultural Cold War. He gives a press conference shortly before he dies at which he says something like “It’s my opinion that most of these left movements are put up by governments to keep tabs on the opposition.” He died shortly after that. 

So foundations are growing increasingly important in this. When the Church Committee comes out with its findings in the 70s, they find that there’s about 169 foundations that have these cooperative relationships with the CIA. Then beginning in the early 60s, the Civil Rights Movement is gaining momentum, forcing some victories. And another layer of this story emerges with the War On Poverty under Johnson. And with the War On Poverty you have the rise of a new form of funding for social movements and a government-funded move to professionalize social movements and bureaucratize them. And through the War On Poverty this is in the form of community action programs. There’s all sorts of programs aimed at funding and organizing and modernizing and making more effective these social movements. 

This also will lapse into the actual transformation of social movements into small businesses, nonprofit businesses. So in San Francisco, which was one of the vanguard areas of this, all sorts of communities are opposing urban renewal throughout the late 60s. And they almost all end up as small nonprofit housing developers. Many of them still exist. And so the leadership of these movements are given jobs. And the task of this movement is slowly but surely transformed from creating problems for the governing classes to managing a little piece of the pie. 

“So you want better housing? Here you go, here’s a block grant. You guys can develop nonprofit housing. You’re right. We shouldn’t have cleared the Fillmore. We shouldn’t have cleared these neighborhoods of all of these poor and working class African-Americans. And we shouldn’t have cleared South of Market of all these Filipino and white, single male former seafarers. We’ll give you a little bit of money and you can create some nonprofit housing.” And that just absorbs and transforms these activists into nonprofit business people. And that kind of pattern is replicated all across the country through the war on poverty. 

Parallel to this, foundations also started getting heavily involved, particularly and much more aggressively in the late 60s when McGeorge Bundy goes from being Johnson’s national security adviser to the head of the Ford Foundation. He moves over there in ’68. And an interesting note on this: there were some rich individual families that helped fund the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but mostly it was self-funded and none of the modern big philanthropy groups that we are familiar with on the left today are involved in that. Ford does give one grant to King, and it’s only for a year, year and a half, but they’re not going to renew because King is quote unquote going off the reservation, as it were. He’s becoming increasingly explicit about his class politics. 

It’s around that time, after that grant, that Bundy heads up the Ford Foundation. Ford is, at that time, by far the largest foundation in the U.S.. It was like 40% bigger than the next biggest. In Karen Ferguson’s book, Top Down, she gets into this. And the whole focus is on race. It’s a kind of black nationalism and cultural nationalism that is Ford’s focus. And lots of other foundations do this. So you have these government funded programs in the wake of urban renewal as part of the War on Poverty, the community action programs, all these different programs that are about bureaucratization and professionalization of social movements. Which is to say, the co-optation of the leadership and the transformation of their tasks and the transformation of their discourse, and the foundations steering people away from class politics towards identity politics. 

At the same time, you have repression in the form of COINTELPRO against the more explicitly class-oriented leaders in the New Left. There is also the rise in this postwar era of the therapeutic moment, the massification of psychology and psychotherapy. Prior to World War II, the vast majority of psychiatrists in the United States worked in big institutions, and after the war they’re basically pushed out of these institutions. This is even before proper deinstitutionalization, the emptying of mental hospitals in the 70s. There’s a kind of a turn towards the mass society coming out of the War. And part of the feeling is that psychology, all the various therapeutic disciplines, don’t need to just focus on acute chronic mental illness. It’s just as legitimate to focus on everyone in society and all the routine unhappiness people have.

So there’s that proliferation of this therapeutic culture that informs the New Left in very important and I think pretty destructive ways. One way you see that is coming out of the radical women’s liberation movement, radical feminists, the rise of consciousness-raising. This is something that’s going on in parallel in psychiatry, the rise of basic group dynamics. Group therapy is emerging and the left starts taking this on, and it seems to me that the entrance point is the radical feminist movement – what they call radical women’s liberation movement. They began the consciousness-raising in the late ’60s. Fast forward less than ten years and you’ve got Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers wrapped up with Synanon, which is a kind of a cult that comes out of AA. 

So the idea comes out of the women’s liberation movement is that “the personal is political”. I guess the term was actually coined by someone in SDS prior to that, but it’s really popularized by the women’s liberation movement. And then it pervades the left, that the personal is political and that psychological work is political work. So in an archeology of woke, these are just some of the layers. 

Then in the ’70s, you have the exposés about COINTELPRO, Operation Chaos, the role of the CIA, and as a result the CIA pushes lots more things off the books. They had always done that, particularly its illegal, ultra violent stuff like Civilian Air Transport that comes out of the Flying Tigers and is then the precursor to Air America. From the late ’40s on, that was always just a legit private business that happened to be owned by the CIA and managed by the CIA, but it was off the books. By the late 70s, early 80s, a lot of stuff was pushed off the books. A lot of the soft power influence that the CIA had always pushed abroad was shifted to the State Department. 

The explicitly CIA-connected part of this story is the National Student Association that Gloria Steinem was involved with. The National Student Association was an American student organization that was aimed at engaging with and nudging and helping to build the non-communist left, the compatible left. And it also aimed to disrupt the Communist Youth left. They would go to international youth festivals and they would do almost Yippie-style pranks to mock the “square” Soviets and Czechs and Bulgarians and whoever else. Most of the National Student Association’s work of that sort was internationally-focused, but they were on like 400 different campuses in the US. So they had a pretty significant footprint in the US, and they helped effect, to some extent, the intellectual, ideological, political development of the New Left. 

So then getting back to the late 70s, early 80s, all this stuff is increasingly off the books after the Church Committee and the Pike Committee. And philanthropic foundations that have already been heavily engaged become even more engaged. And in the 80s and 90s, these patterns that have been established by everything I’ve laid out really started to kick in hardcore. And I think that’s the moment when, in retrospect, we can see that this is ripe wokeness, it just takes us a while to name it.

This worldview includes identity politics, but it’s about much more than that. It’s fundamentally anti-communist. It’s highly personalistic and therapeutic in its orientation. In that therapeutic sensibility, it focuses on the micro politics of political etiquette: what you say, what you wear, all this stuff that we’re all unfortunately familiar with. That is what I try to lay out in the second half of all this. 

Something I hinted at in the Catalyst article is that this woke, ersatz-leftism becomes increasingly useful for managing the white collar labor force. And part of what neoliberalism produces is an expansion of the professional managerial class. Whereas the grandfather might have owned a rural general store, the grandson is more likely someone with an MBA who now works at Walmart or Kroger. And that’s the kind of transformation that happens where the old petty bourgeoisie is increasingly absorbed into the professional managerial class. And part of neoliberalism is an intensification of the boom and bust cycle, an intensification of the creative destruction of capitalism. And so this class, even as it expands and even as certain parts of it are doing well, other parts of it are continually being proletarianized, continually facing the decline of their firms, the restructuring of their firms. And so the life of the PMC becomes like a Hobbesian war of all against all. And by the the 90s, these kind of woke tropes have become an armory that this class can use against itself and its struggle for posts. 

Surveillance is the final thing that is important in understanding this. I just finished reading Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley. I should have read a long time ago, but I didn’t, probably because I wrote a book that was published in 2002 called The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror, which was a history of routine, everyday surveillance. For example, how do we get IDs? What’s the history of carrying this card that has a photograph, your biometric information and a number or two that links you to all these databases. I’m not that interested in surveillance right now. 

It took me a while to get that book, but I think it’s a really good book. The story he tells is how the internet was bound up with military programs and military spending from the very beginning. The internet comes out of ARPA and the networking of all these computers together. This is a military project from the beginning, and there’s never a moment when the security state and the Defense Department don’t take an interest in the development of online culture and the internet. 

He ends his book with a discussion of how the privacy movement was, in many ways, controlled opposition. Near the end of the book he’s very critical of Edward Snowden. He’s not critical of Wikileaks, but he’s very critical of Tor. He gets documents through the Freedom of Information Act and shows that Tor is a majority government-funded project, and there is regular contact between the security state and the managers of this independent nonprofit. Tor is “ultra secret”, the “dark web”. And similarly, Signal was supposedly started by an anarchist but Levine shows that the founder is completely mobbed up with government funding. 

The book ends with a sketch of the privacy movement as essentially controlled opposition. I know this will sound crazy to a lot of people. You’re not allowed to suggest that the state has agency, let alone the security system in it. But I do think there’s an element of wokeness which has a lot to do with pushing this pattern of behavior, this world view. And there is a lot of nudging that goes on in that. One thing that was confirmed by the Twitter Files which nobody picked up on, and which Matt Taibbi didn’t make much of, was that, indeed, a lot of Twitter accounts are fake, and nobody knows where they came from. Anyone can set up a business and create fake internet accounts. So it’s not to say, “oh, they’re fake and it’s all like the CIA”. But entrepreneurs are constantly doing this. All this reputation fixing stuff, that’s what they do. They’ve got staff who manage accounts.

The US military does this as well in its cyber warfare in other countries. And private firms do this, where if you’re being bad-mouthed, whether you’re a company or a celebrity, you can hire a firm that crowds out the negative stuff while de-amplifying your enemies. All sorts of characters and institutions are in there creating these fake accounts. 

So the Twitter Files showed this, and there was no discussion about what it means. How much of online interaction is with institutions and with fake accounts? And what does that mean for how the left operates? Something Levine doesn’t get into is an analysis of the ethnography, even social psychology, of social media. What that engagement does to people’s minds is fucked up, right? In the popular press we hear about dopamine hits, and you hardly need to read too many articles about that to just feel it yourself by using these platforms. But it seems to me that this nudging and this herd mentality is only possible in the form that it now obtains due to the internet. And fundamentally, the internet is not only controlled by the state, but it’s fundamentally influenced by the state. So I think that’s the project that emerges from the occupation in Europe, the realization by the state that “Wow, we can’t get rid of the left. We’re going to have to try and nudge them. We’re going to have to try and cultivate the kind of left we can live with, i.e. a noncommunist, compatible left”. 

I think that logic continues through today. It’s probably a specific program that some security agencies pursue, but it’s also just a sensibility that’s out there that people just understand. You saw an example of this when Darren Walker wrote a letter when Bernie was really surging. Head of the Ford Foundation, he wrote this amazing letter where he said “we’re all into social justice too, but let’s not forget that it was capitalism that gave us all this bounty. The task is to make capitalism more humane.” He finally got so freaked out [by the Bernie campaign] that he needed to say, “I just want to remind everybody that yes, we’re here for social justice. Yes, we’re here to right wrongs. But within limits! Remember, the goodies flow from this economic system, so don’t go too far criticizing it”. 

So that’s a genealogy or archeology of woke. That’s a preview of the second half of that article, essentially. And I don’t think we can ignore it. I also don’t think it adds up. As I said in the Catalyst article, the Hansel and Gretel style breadcrumbs-through-the-forest is not going to lead back to class politics. We have a real problem on the left because it is the hegemonic worldview and modus operandi of most of the left today. And I think it’s a major problem. 

Class Unity: Thank you so much. So we have a question from Chicago. 

Chicago Class Unity: Thanks so much, Christian. Really, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the genealogy laid out like that, so I’m looking forward to reading the article. Apologies in advance if this question is a little bit long winded. I’ve been trying to formulate it internally while you were talking. One constant I think everyone acknowledges is that wokeness is extremely unpopular and electorally damaging. But it’s extremely strong in “intramural competition” within institutions. So it has much more institutional control over left parties than it would be imagined to be warranted by its electoral value. As far as I’m aware, the only Western country where an anti-woke left is actually achieving escape velocity is Germany with Sahra Wagenknecht’s new party, which is explicitly anti-woke and seems to be doing reasonably well in the polling. I don’t know if you have read her book or if you have any thoughts on if there is hope for a kind of explicitly anti-woke left breaking through in the Anglosphere?

Christian Parenti: I have not read her book. I didn’t know she had a book. Is it in English? 

Chicago Class Unity: I’m actually not sure if it’s in English. I think it’s called The Self-righteous (Die Selbstgerechten). That’s the translation. 

Christian Parenti: I’ll check it out. Yeah, I’ve not read it. So the question was what’s the hope for this replicating? I think there’s definitely a possibility, but we’re in a really bad situation now. Hopefully we’re at a nadir of this, but there’s all this disinformation stuff. The hegemony of online life is a big problem, and I don’t know how to deal with that. I’m not on social media, but I recognize that that’s not so feasible for most people. And I’m not sure it’s so smart for me either. But in the beginning, part of me felt like, “I don’t want to deal with this shit. This is disgusting.” But that’s where people are at, and one has a hard time connecting with people if you don’t do that.

And there are good reasons to be online. And it’s not like the left online is completely dominated by wokeness. You’ve got people like my good friend Max Blumenthal, who, as far as the system is concerned, is a major problem they do not like at all. The kind of traction he has and the kind of reporting The Grayzone does. That’s all possible because of the whole online ecology, so it’s not as simple as turning our backs on it and getting away from that. That’s not realistic. So when we engage with it, a lot of people are going to be manipulated by it and nudged into this woke sensibility. 

I think if there was a kind of ethnography of life online, it would have to do with the practice of thought and the role of privacy in thinking. I think it is super destructive to have to constantly take a position. Gone in online culture is the space where you can say, “I don’t have a position on that issue because I don’t know anything about it, and I’m going to read about it and I’m going to read with an open mind.” Instead, you have to take a position as if it really matters, like you’re on the barricades here on your cell phone. It’s totally anti-intellectual. 

Chicago Class Unity: Yeah, another interesting point is that there is a distinction between the way individuals behave on, say, Twitter, where you definitely do see this kind of woke swarm emerge. But you can look at the rise of alternative media that’s been facilitated by the internet. You mentioned Max Blumenthal, but there’s also Breaking Points and other alternative media sources out there now, where almost none of them are woke, none of the ones that really take off. Most of them are explicitly anti-woke, which I found to be an interesting dichotomy. 

Christian Parenti: That’s true and that’s hopeful. I think that shows that there is room for it. But you know, NPR is woke. The Pentagon is woke. The CIA is woke. Corporate America is woke, even if they’re now slowly unwinding some of their DEI stuff. Wokeness seems to be peaking, but it’s not over yet. And there’s also just so much money that goes into that. And there’s an institutional basis of that. And as I laid out in that Catalyst article using the odious Richard Hanania, it’s the weakness of the ’64 Civil Rights law that has created the need for this. Corporations defend themselves. They have taken real hits for their discrimination, so part of their response is to invest in DEI training. They say “Hopefully that prevents people from being bigoted pigs and causing us problems, but if it doesn’t prevent it, at least we have a defense. We can say, ‘Look, we’ve got a whole department to deal with this. We’re not a bad corporation. This is an aberrant manager, leave us alone.’” Those dynamics aren’t going to go away. 

Class Unity: Thanks, Christian. Everything that you put out always seems to be really helpful. Two closely related questions. Something that seems to have been very potent in the past in counteracting the entropic forces of identity politics — or earlier versions of the same, or analogs to the same — was the articulation of and the propagation of a well developed theory or way of understanding the world. And one of the great strengths of the Bolsheviks in their time was that people had read Capital and people even read Hegel in order to better understand Capital. But it’s hard to see how we propagate anything of that degree of sophistication and helpfulness when consciousness itself seems to be being sort of meme-ified by all sorts of social media. Attention spans have been shrinking for ages, but now it’s not even just a matter of attention span. It’s almost a matter of attention-content, right? People seem to need pictures or flashing changing images and things of that sort just to kind of hold attention. And against that backdrop, it’s hard to imagine how people will come to understand even, say, the Manifesto, let alone Capital or similarly well-developed theories. The related question is that another strength of the Bolsheviks that enabled their success was that they were able to integrate the national aspirations of non-great Russian subjects of the Romanov dynasty into the liberation, or the liberatory project. In other words, if you were a Kazakh, or if you were Chechen, or if you were a Mongol, or a descendant of the Golden Horde within the Romanov Empire — 

Christian Parenti: Or Kurdish. The only time the Kurds had their own state! 

Class Unity: Yeah, the Kurds as well, right! You could integrate their own national aspirations into the broader liberation that was the Marxian liberation. And when I try to think about what a counterpart to that might look like today, I have difficulty figuring out how to distinguish that clearly and understandably, sort of viscerally understandably, from mere identity politics or wokeness politics. So I’m wondering if you have any recommendations or thoughts about how one might go about dealing with both of those sort of related problems. 

Christian Parenti: Yeah, I don’t have a good answer for you, but one thing is, the United States is very different from the Soviet Union. The US is multicultural, but in a very different way, right? We don’t have nations with geographies, we have this melting pot. And so I think that means that the identity politics of our country is very different, and that it opens room for universalism. The Bolsheviks had to speak to these national geographies in a way that’s not really an issue in the US. 

I think that it’s not realistic to think everyone’s going to read Marx or read the Manifesto, but one thing that is linked to this whole woke triumph over the left is the decline of class consciousness. Part of class consciousness is, “Who am I? Who are we? What are we?” But also, “Who is the enemy?” The ruling class. Rich people. “How rich? What are we talking about here? Who is the enemy?” That’s one of the questions that gets flushed away by the horizontalism of wokeness. There’s a maximalism and a horizontalism that come in with wokeness. So I do think that the American people are primed and totally open to that part of class consciousness about “Who is the enemy?”. 

And that’s part of what drives Trump. There was an article in the Harvard Business Review right after Trump was first elected which tried to understand how his populism worked. And the argument was that very few people know billionaires, they’re not part of your life. They’re part of your life through institutions. They own the phone company that screws you over or whatever, but you don’t deal with them. But the kind of upper echelons of the PMC, working class people deal with them and they really resent them. They feel the oppression coming from these people. And Hillary Clinton embodied that type. So poor people, working people, struggling middle class people, how do they identify with this billionaire? Because “billionaire” is an abstraction. So there is this very organic anti-elite resentment in the American people. And Trump taps into it with his BS version of a kind of anti-elite politics. So I think that’s a real opening. Part of class consciousness isn’t just “think as workers, let’s have solidarity as workers”. It’s also “who’s the enemy?” It’s articulating and continually reminding people who the enemy is. 

I was listening to Bowman’s last rally before he was defeated. They played a clip of Bernie’s comments and then of AOC’s comments, and it was really instructive. Bernie Sanders was talking about the capitalists, the 1%, and talking in class terms. And AOC was saying, “Bowman is running against greed and racism” and these abstractions. And Bernie was talking about the corporate plutocracy and AIPAC. And it crystallized for me, the difference between AOC and Bernie. Bernie always articulated the real enemy in ways that people could understand, and AOC almost does it. But that 1 or 2 degrees of variation is a big problem because it’s not the same, it slips into abstraction. I think that’s important, understanding that part of class consciousness is identifying the enemy, analyzing the enemy. 

Part of why we don’t do this is, nobody studies elites. And I think some of this has to do with the question of conspiracy theory. This is something that animated my father a lot, even more in person behind the scenes than in his writing. All of these questions of the co-optation of the left and of what was the nature of ruling class power. What was the nature of the state? But this whole prohibition, what it comes down to, is that as soon as you start suggesting agency and forethought and planning among elites, you are attacked as a conspiracy theorist. Almost perfectly, the explosion of that term, tracks back to the Warren Commission Report. Which was headed by fucking Allen Dulles. He was the only person who sat for every meeting. Unlike Warren, the Supreme Court Justice, Dulles, who had been fired by Kennedy. Kennedy inherits the Bay of Pigs. It blows up in his face. And he says to people, “When I’m reelected, I’m gonna smash the CIA into a thousand pieces.” He thought these guys were nuts. They were totally dangerous. And he wasn’t into it. 

There’s also a kind of right-wing rereading of Watergate which suggests that Nixon, not for ideological reasons, but just for his own kind of swinging-dick, thirst-for-power reasons, wanted to get dirt on the CIA. He wanted to control the CIA. And he also got rid of a CIA Director. But it’s Allen Dulles who starts pushing that into the media. And I’ve been shocked that nowadays you can’t suggest that there’s such a thing as the “deep state”. Peter Dale Scott comes up with this term, thinking about the permanent bureaucracies that are part of how policy is implemented. And he wrote about how politicians often have to confront these bureaucracies. The policy is one thing, but the apparatus that’s supposed to implement the policies don’t always go along with it. And they will do things that actually undermine the elected official’s ability to impose the policy that they want. 

The total hostility to that term “deep state”, that phobia, is very detrimental. I think it has done two things. Moving from mass politics to more academic and intellectual thinking, it has undermined the development of the Marxist understanding of the state. Marxist state theory basically stalls out with the Poulantzas-Miliband debate, which is a pretty sterile debate. Pretty abstract. And I think some of that has to do with the fact that if you’re going to really study state power, you have to be able to study the intelligence services and what they do. And if you cannot speak about that publicly without being accused of reducing everything to a conspiracy, you’re not going to understand how the thing works. You’re not going to understand the relationships between the elected officials, mass movements, different branches of government, and not just the various permanent bureaucracies, the public health officials, the military intelligence permanent bureaucracies. You have to understand that. That’s not to reduce everything, you cannot reduce it to that. That’s not the majority force in all of this. But it’s an important nudging, intervening force at crucial times. And the left basically can’t think about that. If you think about that, you’re tinfoil hat and you’re persona non grata because you might contaminate anyone else. 

And everyone’s very concerned with their own legitimacy. Left intellectuals are deeply concerned with their own legitimacy, not because they’re bad people, but because you will lose your job if you don’t do that. I speak from experience. My father was red-baited out of academia,  and he eventually became prominent due to his public speaking and writing. But things were pretty tough for us in the ’70s and the ’80s. And if he wasn’t such a maniac on a certain level, a tough guy, a short kid from a tough neighborhood with an abusive father and a massive chip on his shoulder and a belligerent streak, and just wasn’t going to back down. And that made him actually a pretty difficult person. But he was just like, “fuck it. I’m okay with being disliked, fuck it”. But most people can’t deal with that. And most people don’t want to. Most intellectuals don’t want to then have to hustle and scrape and be out there constantly, trying to make a living on their own. So this concern with legitimacy isn’t just some sort of psychological hang up. It has real consequences for people.

So that’s a problem that is linked to wokeness and this kind of larger phenomenon of nudging the left, controlled opposition. The stuff that goes back to Federalist No. 10, really, that’s in that essay, where Madison says, “you’re never going to get rid of faction. There’s always going to be opposition. So how do you want to live with this? This is a chronic condition. Decide what form you want to live with.” So that’s the basic project. What kind of opposition do the elites want to live with? How can they achieve that? 

Class Unity: I want to commend you for being suspicious. And I think you should be more suspicious. And just to add to a couple things you said. I think Norman Thomas was not a former member of the Socialist Party when he was a CIA asset. I think he was an active member of the Socialist Party, right through the end into the late 60s? 

Christian Parenti: I think so, yeah. 

Class Unity: Yeah. And he was also actually part of the American Friends of Vietnam, of South Vietnam, a.k.a. the Vietnam Lobby, while he was in the Socialist Party. The North Vietnamese were too authoritarian and the US should be helping to rescue democracy in Vietnam. So that’s really shameful history that not too many people know about, but it’s very well documented. It’s in the Mighty Wurlitzer book you mentioned. But I’d also like to add that Martin Luther King got a lot of foundation money from the very beginning. He got Rockefeller money, very, very, very late in his career – 

Christian Parenti: Late in his career? I haven’t researched it too closely, but my impression was that they weren’t even foundations. There were rich people who helped King, but it was only later that he got backing from the Ford Foundation. 

Class Unity: One of his early backers was the heiress to the R.J. Reynolds fortune, the Reynolds Foundation. But I agree with your analysis. He went off the reservation, and maybe that’s why they whacked him. But I just wanted to clarify that he was sort of a foundation creature at the beginning, and I don’t blame him because of course that was the height of the Red Scare. 

Christian Parenti: Maybe I’m misinformed about that. 

Class Unity: So he didn’t have too many options to be an effective activist when there was COINTELPRO and Hoover breathing down his neck.I just wanted to clarify that. 

And also that he turned radical because he had more radical people like SNCC on his other side pushing him. 

Christian Parenti: You know, I’m not as well versed on King as I should be. But my wife, Marcy Smith Parenti, has written some great pieces about Gene Sharp, who was like a guru to this day. Very important. His influence on the Movement for a New Society, which comes out of Quaker peace action stuff. Murray Bookchin referred to them as cynical Quakers. But she’s doing a deep dive on King. And from the books she has lying around, I get the impression that King was reading Marx early on, and in his first book was told to tone down his understanding of Marx and his appreciation of that. 

Class Unity: He wrote a letter to his wife in college praising Marx. 

Christian Parenti: I agree with you. I agree with your take, but if he’s pushed left partly by external forces, there’s evidence that he was reading pretty interesting stuff very early on. 

Class Unity: Yeah. I don’t mean to say it’s not really complicated with him because, on one hand, he had Bayard Rustin and Bayard Rustin had a lot of CIA connections and eventually became a full on neocon. But on the other hand, he had CPUSA people advising as well early on. Or ex-CPUSA people. 

Christian Parenti: So wait, you asked me to speak more about the radical women’s lib’s “personal is political“ stuff? 

Class Unity: Yeah. 

Christian Parenti: I mean, it was ’67. It’s a group in New York. And that’s supposedly where the first consciousness-raising group begins. And it’s women talking about their own oppression. And from the point of view of the radicals, people like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz – who I’ve known for many years – she was deeply involved in all this stuff. You got these kind of old left types and then you’ve got the liberal-now types. And the radical feminists saw themselves as sort of opposing both of these and taking things to a new level. And so the consciousness-raising “personal is political” had a kind of material-life-taught style component to it which was rooted in the kind of maximalist ultra left. And they were explicitly, in their view, inspired by stuff that was going on in the Chinese Revolution among Guatemalan guerrillas. – I actually spent a lot of time in Guatemala, but I never heard about that. But that could be.

And so their feeling was that it’s a micro-politics of practice, obviously influenced by psychoanalysis, that you have to heal, you have to speak about your oppression to overcome it. And so those practices were seen as highly political. And it’s easy for us to criticize, but they achieved a lot of change for women. They were coming out of a pretty oppressive situation. Women, when they were doing consciousness raising, married women couldn’t have credit cards without the permission of their husbands. So I get it. But the legacy reverberates out into something much larger, into what we know, where people say “Wait a minute. I don’t feel good. And I’m gonna hijack this whole meeting. I’m going to destroy this entire project because my feelings need to be centered.” 

Class Unity: Thanks for this. One thing I was wondering is: the sort of wokeness seems to be tailor made for a reactionary backlash. And that serves a useful function as well. And I’m wondering if that backlash is in part channeled as well. 

Christian Parenti: Well, I definitely think that some of that backlash is channeled, yeah. I’ve written about that in Compact in terms of January 6th. You know, Enrique Tarrio ends up in prison, but it’s Enrique Tarrio, who headed the Proud Boys, who was a police informant for many, many years. Miami, Tampa police departments and the FBI used him in all sorts of investigations. And it doesn’t mean that he was working for them when he was a Proud Boy, but he openly said, “Yeah, we would always touch base with the cops when we would do actions.” Under him, the Proud Boys’ position was to let the local police department know what you were doing. So we know that much about it. 

And I think if you look at what happened on January 6th, that’s only one event. So maybe it’s not fair to read too much into the rest of that kind of backlash movement from that event. But if you look at that event, it’s very suspicious. To me it’s pretty clear that they were set up. You know, as [someone I know] said – not in print, but because he was there covering it I asked him about his take – he said “it was like a bunch of mentally retarded people being led into a trap.” That was his take. You can see why he wouldn’t say that publicly, because it sounds pretty derogatory. But the chief of the Capitol Police, Chief Sund, is begging for National Guard support in the weeks running up to this event, and he has to get permission for that from both Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi, ultimately, through the Sergeant At Arms in the Senate and Sergeant at Arms in the House. And they refuse to give him that support for fear of what the optics would be.

There was intelligence that the FBI agent – who was in charge of the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping with the Wolverines, a group of down on their luck losers, really, who are cultivated by the FBI. They have, as I recall, at least one [FBI] handler for each member of the Wolverines, and they’re pushing them into this crackpot kidnapping scheme of Gretchen Whitmer. The guys who pleaded guilty all went to prison. And there’s a couple of them who refused to plead, and they won their cases because it was entrapment. They proved that it was FBI entrapment. The agent who was in charge of [the Whitmer kidnapping], Dambrosio, is then Special Agent in Charge (SAC) in Alexandria, Virginia. He’s moved to DC, he’s in that area, and he’s receiving information about what’s planned for January 6th but he’s not passing it on. 

The Capitol Police are relying on other agencies for intelligence, but they also have their own intelligence unit. The guy they bring in is a NYPD guy who had been associated with the War on Terror. And he shows up and supposedly sees that Capitol Police are a total mess. Chief Sund is there to clean it up, and he brings this guy down from New York whose job is to clean up the intelligence, and he basically takes everyone off of January 6th to deal with “backlog”. So there’s like one person doing intelligence in the run up to January 6th. Just by combing through social media, they already know people are saying, “You got to bring guns. You got to be ready to kill. We’re going to go in there.” Blah, blah, blah, blah, all this crazy violent stuff! They knew this was happening. And Chief Sund realizes “We need the National Guard”. And Pelosi and Mitch McConnell say, “No, you can’t have the National Guard.” 

There’s even other weirder shit.

This doesn’t make any sense. So I think that adds up to a lot of circumstantial evidence that indicates that they thought “This is what we want the world to see.” They’re concerned about the optics. They want the optics to be “look at these fascist nuts. They are an imminent threat, and we need to take the gloves off. Let’s not get bound up with the Bill of Rights in how we deal with these people.” So that indicates that, yes, there is nudging of the backlash too. Now, I don’t want to suggest that everything is planned and there’s no room for agency. That’s not what I’m proposing. What I’m proposing is [that] it’s like nudging, right? People are pissed off. Movements are going to arise. You’re never going to have a placid populace, right? So it’s about how do you nudge. How do you blunt, nudge, confuse, and manage this stuff? It’s a chronic condition that has to be managed. That’s what we’re talking about here. 

It’s not, “Oh, and wouldn’t it be great to develop, from whole cloth, a right wing movement and a left wing movement and have them fight?” I don’t think that’s what’s going on because those things develop on their own, and they’re a response by real people who have real problems on both the left and the right. Both have some sense of what’s really going on, where they see “we’re getting fucked. Things are getting worse and we’re pissed off, and we have to band together to do something about it.” That’s real, that’s organic, that’s rooted in lived experience. And descending upon that becomes a kind of management strategy. 

Class Unity: I wanted to ask a question about that specifically. You’ve talked a lot about the class-focused left versus the woke- or the compatible-left. You also mentioned a difference between the working class or professional managerial class.And so these foundations and the CIA are able to drive wedges between the middle class and the working class and the different factions among them. But that implies that there had to have been divisions there in the first place. And so I’m wondering, for a left to be effective in your view, would it need to unite different factions of the working class and the middle class in a universal movement? Or do you think something like that is not possible? What do you see as the best way forward? 

Christian Parenti: I mean, I think the professional managerial class is, at a kind of strict, classical Marxist level – they sell their labor, right? They’re actually just workers and they suffer from false consciousness. But they are a real political constituency that’s distinct from the working class, even if they are basically just the upper echelons of a kind of white collar proletariat. So they can be structurally kind of ultimately working class. But that’s not the full political story. Politics matters. And they’re different politically because they manage people and they’re legally different frequently: they can’t join unions, frequently, because they’re managers. Yes, we know they classify managers all the way down to people who mop the floors at Starbucks. But there are also real managers. And their work, their skills, their concerns are different, even if they are really just salary men. And if the firm goes out of business, they’re out the door. Right? And that’s the moment when they realize, wow, they’re just workers. So I think that a kind of populist sensibility of lots of class factions together, the people, around basic concerns of health care, education, the environment, right to work – I think that’s where we’re at.

I don’t think too much about what the ideal situation for the revolution would be. And I have an aversion to that kind of a Dungeons & Dragons level Marxism we sometimes see in Jacobin, where it’s like, “if you have a Gramscian wizard sword and a 15-sided Lenin dice“, like what!? Come on, read a fucking newspaper, go out and talk to people! That’s not where people are at. 

So one could maybe take issue with a more populist vision, but I think that’s in keeping with American history. There’s these different class factions. There’s a lot of discontent among elements of the middle class, people who own small businesses, people who are professional managerial class. They also face problems. Some of this also has to do with the geography of deindustrialization. I see this in Kentucky, where my in-laws live, that even if you are a person who’s doing well, you live in a region that has been really battered by neoliberalism. You can live in a nice house and have nice cars but still not escape that. If your region is under assault and people are dying of fentanyl overdoses, and there’s a kind of hopelessness seeping in, the amount of money you have or the performance of your little stock portfolio doesn’t fully insulate you from that. 

There has to be the disaggregation that you’re talking about, intellectually, but then there also has to be a kind of mass politics. During Covid, for example, the old school petty bourgeoisie, the shopkeepers, small business people, they were front and center in opposing lockdowns because they were getting screwed by big businesses. There was crazy stuff under Andy Beshear in Kentucky, stuff I almost couldn’t believe when my in-laws told me: they were closing small garden stores, you couldn’t go get your tomato starts, yet they would leave Walmart open. This kind of stuff, was that real?! You guys got to be kidding me. So these small business people were pushing back. 

You had these PMC types on the local Board of Health and suddenly this was their moment to thrive. They were just starting to throw their weight around, telling stores that they couldn’t have people in there if they didn’t have masks on. And the stores finally started pushing back, saying, “by what authority are you doing this?” I’m thinking of conservative Catholics who have a little hair cutting salon. They started engaging in a kind of class struggle, not because they had class consciousness, but because they said “Hey! Get this oppressive stuff out of here”. So even as we disaggregate intellectually, there’s got to be a kind of politics where there is a coalescence of different class factions when the crises present themselves. 

So that’s what I would say. I’m not particularly good at theorizing what social movements should do. But I do know that they shouldn’t do this woke nonsense of turning every political meeting into a therapy session. And [they should be] getting beyond this horizontalist antagonism of the oppression Olympics, frankly. In terms of thinking, you should be as absolutely ruthless and as unbounded as you want to be and need to be. Read anything, think anything. And then, what do you do politically? You can never allow [the question]  “what do we have to do politically?” to influence how you’re going to think and what you’re going to read. You have to be totally free intellectually. And then you have to make smart, strategic decisions. And the strategic decisions probably won’t be like “let me tell you what I really think. It’s all over the place. It’s crazy, but it connects for me.” People will be like “Whoa?” 

It’s gotta be like: “The billionaires, they’re fucking us over. And their friends in the deep state, these scientists at Anthony Fauci’s NIAID who get to fucking make money off of the fucking drugs?! And some of these guys who even approve these drugs, get to make money off of them?! I mean, come on, that’s a racket, right!?” Like this. Like “that’s the enemy right now”, right? There’s got to be like – those two registers have to happen. 

I do think that one of the problems of wokenes – and this has to do with some of the culture online – is this question of “What should I think? What are the political implications of what I might think or what I might say?” I find this with my old friends, particularly out here in California, all the time. Conversation has become very constrained, particularly around this question, because I’ve noticed – some of you probably read these articles, some of you haven’t – I think there’s very clearly a campaign against Trump. 

Doesn’t mean I like Trump. And I’m like, why is that? Trump gave the ruling class massive tax cuts. He was like the Koch brothers, like, wet dream with his deregulation. Like why? Why are they giving this guy such grief? And I think it has to do with his foreign policy. Because he was a vandal. He was a wrecker of American empire. Not because he was an anti-imperialist. Not because he has some sophisticated agenda. Not because he’s a Russian plant. But because he –, partly because he’s a racist. In one meeting where he said  “Why do we get all these immigrants from these shithole countries?” That meeting where that famous, infamous phrase comes from. He actually says, like, “we should look into closing all our embassies in Africa.” You know, he’s like, “I want someone to look into that. Draw up a plan.” You know? And you can imagine if you’re at the State Department or the CIA or the DoD, like, “This is insane. This guy is completely out of his mind. He doesn’t understand.”.

I think I’ve talked to you guys about this before. They bring [Trump] in six months into the whole thing. The Joint Chiefs have a meeting with him at the Pentagon, and he interrupts them. They’re trying to explain how the American empire works and he interrupts them. He’s like, “where’s the fucking oil?” You know, “we should be getting free oil. We spent $6 trillion on these wars. You guys are losers.” Right? He hates these people and they hate him. They’ve gotten into this dynamic, and that’s why I think there’s this thing with Trump and the establishment. 

I can’t discuss that with most of my old friends because they get triggered. They get panicked like, “What? Are you supporting Trump?” It’s like, “No. We’re here, closed doors, having a drink. We’re talking politics the way you used to, where anything’s open to discuss. Right? We’re not in a meeting. We’re really old friends. We can say anything politically to each other, right? So let’s just think about it.” No. The response is, “No, I will not think about — I will not accept any of this evidence. This is totally freaking me out.” 

And that is the result of life online where people can’t take position X because “the political implications of that are such that I don’t agree with them”. So there’s all sorts of self-censorship [that] happens which doesn’t even appear [to be] self-censorship. It’s just “correct thought”, the pursuit of “correct thought”. And it’s deeply anti-intellectual and hobbles the left. 

So at least that part of your question, We think, however, as creatively as we can, and as voraciously. And then we have politics that are not as freewheeling. 

Class Unity: We’re getting to the end here, and I don’t think we’ll have time to get to every question, unfortunately. Thank you to everyone who did ask a question. I want to call on one more, this is a member who has written a question who has been studying religious cults and sees the parallels with those and woke that you mentioned, Christian. There’s social manipulation, there’s ostracization and the therapeutic mindset. Also, this member wanted to bring up the idea of the construction of an alternative persona that somehow gets required of people, but [it] is denied that it exists. And so their question is: you have substantial knowledge of communist societies. Maybe you know about political cults. And the question is: do you see any connections between woke, as a cult, and political cults? 

Christian Parenti: Yes. And I actually wrote about that to some extent in an essay for Nonsite called The First Privilege Walk. And so when I moved out to California from Vermont in 1989 at age 19, hitchhiked out there, and enrolled in this crazy college called the New College of California, and participated in one of the early privilege walks, which are also called — I think there’s some other name for it — but [it’s] where everybody stands in a line, [they say] “if you’re white, take a step forward”. “If you’re man, take a step forward.” You know, “if you’re a person of color, take a step back”. “If you’re gay, take a step back”. You know, “if you’ve ever been to jail, take a step back”. You know, whatever. “If your parents have advanced degrees, take a step forward”. “If your parents have ever been arrested or been to jail, go back.” These kinds of questions, I forget what they are. But, years later, people would tell me, “Oh, we did this exercise, it’s so amazing!” I was like hmm, “Yeah, I did that back in California.” And I started thinking, “I’ll bet that’s like kind of the origins.” Sure enough! 

So the article is about Sherover-Marcuse. I’m forgetting her first name, but she was Marcuse’s third wife, and she was the daughter of a guy who, I think — someone should write a biography of this guy Miles Sherover. I think he was some sort of deep Soviet agent. Not like a spy, but like a kind of political actor. He comes over from Poland, I think, and then makes his way up. And long story short, he goes over to the Soviet Union and helps, he’s an industrial engineer for them. And then he’s involved in supporting the Spanish Republic’s purchasing agent in the U.S., and he’s involved in circumventing the embargo against the Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War. And eventually, right wing forces in the Air Force and in the aircraft industry get hip to what he’s doing when he’s trying to buy too many planes. And he’s actually working with FDR’s brother in law,  and FDR was actually kind of tacitly accepting this. And then he ends up in Venezuela, starts a huge steel company. Then he ends up in Israel, and, long story short, along the way he abandons his family. And then his brilliant daughter, she becomes a student of Marcuse’s. She ends up marrying Marcuse, and she invents the privilege walk. And she’s one of the early kind of anti-oppression, anti-racism trainers. And, so check out that article, The First Privilege Walk at Nonsite. 

And, interestingly, she was very wrapped up with, very involved and very influenced by Re-evaluation Counseling. Re-evaluation Counseling is the methodology that’s associated with Harvey, Harvey Jackins, who was on the original board of directors for L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology. He’s there. And then in ’52 he breaks off and starts his own thing. And Re-evaluation Counseling has been and still is popular on the left. It was very, very important to the Movement for a New Society. They were heavily influenced by Gene Sharp and they live in these collectives. They’re big in the Bay area, Philadelphia, parts of New England. And they were very influential on the anti nuke movement, the peace movement, and I would say very destructive. A very, very proto woke destructive influence on the left. I think Stephen Zunes, who’s out at SF State, was with them.

So yes, that’s one example of a connection to a political cult. I mean, Re-evaluation Counseling is very, very cult-like, and Harvey Jackins traces back to Scientology. I think there might have even been a lawsuit, maybe, that L Ron Hubbard accused Harvey Jackins of stealing his whole “playbook”. And of course, Harvey Jackins strips out the kooky stuff, the really kooky stuff, or at least the kooky — I don’t know that much about Scientology, but I did watch like two minutes of that Tom Cruise tape where he just sounds totally nuts. So there’s that connection and there’s a great book on this also. 

Another part of this is behavior modification. A lot of that’s just hidden in plain sight. There’s a great book I just read called Revolution’s End about the Symbionese Liberation Army and the kidnaping of Patty Hearst. And how that stuff tracks back to Vacaville State Prison, where – it’s not a secret – they were doing all sorts of behavior modification experimentation on prisoners. And that’s what Cinqué, who — I forget his, his, his original name, whatever — he comes out of that program. 

But anyway, lots of weird stuff going on in the ’60s with cults and drugs and all that kind of stuff. It’s a big river, it’s not like “That’s it! It’s The Cause!” No, no, no. But it influences the main flow as a tributary does a river. The denial of biology, which I mentioned briefly in the beginning of the Catalyst article. That’s an important test of where the left is at. I mean, it’s like, you know – I mean, I support any adult’s right to do whatever they want with their body. I’m kind of a libertarian like that. I believe that you have the right to commit suicide and do all sorts of crazy things. But I don’t think children should be getting puberty blockers. And I don’t think they should be getting cross-sex hormones. And I don’t think they should be getting surgery. And you’re not allowed to say that on the left. You’re a bigot if you say that about children. I mean, that’s nuts. 

And then it’s also like the example I gave in that article. The American and the Canadian Anthropological Society executive committee shuts down, unilaterally, a panel that was scheduled for like nine in the morning on Sunday, which was going to argue for the importance of biological sex in anthropology. I mean, that’s where we’re at. It is cult-like in that it requires that you turn your back on your experience.. 

Class Unity: Thanks so much. I really appreciated this today. It’s been a really great session. I feel like maybe I’ve saved a punchy question for the last. There might not be enough time to get too deep into this, but I think one of the things that the – if we can use the broad term, the “anti-woke left – I think one of the things we all agree on almost unanimously is that, as Adolph Reed puts it, one of the big problems here discursively is the notion of essentialism, right? That a lot of these identity groups speak as if the experience of injury to an identity group is what allows them to speak the truth of who and what they are. And I suppose the convoluted term for this would be sort of standpoint epistemology. But you can park the convoluted language. That’s basically what it boils down to. 

However, I’ve noticed a bit of a split in the anti-woke left when it comes to the question of Gaza. Because some say the protests for the Palestinians are mostly coming from a college-educated middle class, PMC, and they reflect a kind of identitarian reflex which blinds them to – I suppose you’d put it something like – blinds them to the dark side of Hamas, and so on. And I do think it’s true that a lot of these protests have been from PMC backgrounds, and they have used a lot of grad school terminology, and I’m critical of that. But I think there’s also a sense in which this issue transcends that. And I just wanted to ask your thoughts, and I appreciate it’s the last few minutes of our session here today, but, you know — to make it a little more targeted, there’s a lot of anti-woke audiences that I would say, with working class targeted media, especially like Joe Rogan, Judge Napolitanio, Glenn Greenwald stuff that seem to be quite comfortable talking about this issue and in very kind of non-woke ways. I mean, they just used universalist language. Maybe I can just pass the mic to you here and just see where you weigh in on it. 

Christian Parenti: I mean, I read all the New Historians. I’ve been to Israel and Palestine briefly years ago on my way out of Iraq. I’m not a fan of Hamas. I’m not a fan of political Islam. I guess it’s how I was raised – bringing my old man – he never supported [it], and so I kind of inherited that, never supported terrorism. So like, that’s terrorism. It’s not good. IRA: Terrorism. Don’t do that. You know, terrorism is not good. It’s not good politics, and there were a lot of guerrilla movements that didn’t go in for that, that fought unbelievably vicious, intractable foes: the FMLN in El Salvador. I mean, ARENA, the right wing, really kind of fascist party, had a lot of support. A lot of grassroots supporters for ARENA. The FMLN never ran around killing them, being like, “Hey, you support these fascists? We’re going to cap you”. Nobody can think that, so they didn’t do that, they tried to win them over. So I’m not a fan of Hamas.

What Israel is doing is utterly disgusting and outrageous and vicious. But what worries me on this — and I’ve been quiet on this and not particularly involved — but I see a kind of cynicism and a kind of desperation at the heart of a lot of this. And the situation is really, really intractable and crazy, but the demand for divestment, this is a canard. This is highly problematic. I wrote years ago about this with fossil fuels, and people don’t understand this. It wasn’t that important to apartheid. What was important to ending apartheid was when activists started pressuring banks not to make bank loans. And when trade unions started refusing to unload cargo. And then when the British and Canadian and American governments imposed trade embargoes on South Africa. It was like economic warfare, it was important. 

But it wasn’t this divestment thing. It wasn’t like the university had to sell its stock. And the problem with that is that it has no effect on the target. If you’re interested, you can find my critique of this in The New York Times, I did a little thing, and in the Huffington Post many years ago, like in 2013 or something. What’s happening when you sell stock is it’s happening on a secondary market. The firm gets some money when it issues stock, but most of the stock is trading on secondary markets. So if the university dumps its ExxonMobil stock on a secondary market, it doesn’t do anything to ExxonMobil economically. 

And I put this case to Bill McKibben. He says, “well, it withdraws their social license to operate”. Okay. Well, that’s pretty symbolic. What about their legal, actual license to operate? Let’s focus on that, right? So there’s that problem with the Palestinian movement. But I’ve been heartened to see that there were protests like the uncommitted protests in Michigan. You saw it had an immediate effect on the Democrats. They responded immediately, they’re like, “Holy shit!” Huge Arab populations in Arizona. The two biggest concentrations [of Arabs] are Arizona and Michigan. Do the math on that. And then there’s protests at the White House. That’s good, because this administration can start pressuring Israel to pull back. 

Another thing that’s bothered me about this is the hostility to a two state solution. And when you press leftists about, “Well, what do you mean by a one state solution?” The time frame immediately becomes like 50 years. Do you think that Israel is going to voluntarily turn itself into a different kind of state in which the Palestinians, that are going to soon outnumber the [Israelis], and it’ll be one man, one vote? They’re never going to do that. It strikes me as unrealistic. Is that the just thing? Yes. That is the morally just thing, to have a state where it’s one person, one vote. But that doesn’t strike me as realistic. [Some would say] the two state solution isn’t realistic. Well, [if]you look back at the history of the two state efforts under Clinton, there was no crisis for Israel. And okay, Israel sabotaged that. The PLO, then becoming the PA, was corrupt and fucked it up. And there’s a whole sordid history of failure. But, I mean, they got pretty far, including Netanyahu who went along with it, played ball. I’m not saying “a two state solution is completely within reach and is totally reasonable”. No. But amidst all this horror that you see, the fact that there isn’t – I mean, obviously, cease fire now – but the idea that a two state solution has no traction… 

There’s like 600,000 settlers there. Yes, and a lot of them are completely nuts, they’re right wing lumpen lunatics. But a lot of them are also just people who are like, “it’s cheap to live in the settlements”. And I’m not sure it’s totally out of the question if – I mean, there is an international crisis, and it seems like when I try to think about what are realistic solutions, one is, in 50 years, Israel will be militarily defeated. And that will probably come with serious payback for Israeli civilians if that’s the case. That’s, first of all, 50 more years of this kind of “mowing the lawn” every ten years of massacring Palestinian civilians. And the vision at the end is basically the implosion of the region. So I can’t quite get on board with that. 

Is the two state solution realistic? No, you can make a very strong case how that’s pie in the sky. But you can also make a case [that] maybe it’s not. Maybe if there was enough pressure on Israel. Jeffrey Sachs is saying there’s got to be a third force. There’s got to be European or international soldiers policing the line. And people on the left say there’s too many settlers, and a lot of them are fucking dangerous and nuts. But a lot of them are also just people who just live out there because there’s good services and it’s cheap. And if the Israeli government was like, “everybody out, you got to go”, a lot of them would go. There’d be armed conflict with those who wouldn’t go. 

Class Unity: They pulled them out before. They pulled them out of the West Bank. 

Christian Parenti: So I’m not an expert on this. And I probably shouldn’t even be saying this, but I find it disturbing. So we’re supposed to imagine that the solution is the implosion of the whole region? I don’t know. So that’s where I’m at on this. And it’s very depressing. 

Class Unity: No, it’s a really big question. I wanted to hear your thoughts. Thanks so much. 

Christian Parenti: Yeah. And I get how totally impossible a two state solution probably seems, but I don’t know, man. What if there was an arms embargo? What if there was a trade embargo? And what if there’s going to be a U.N. force here, and it’s going to separate and it’s going to police these lines. And some portion of the settlers can stay in the West Bank, but they’re gonna have to deal with the Palestinian Authority. I don’t know. It’s a miserable situation. It’s horrible. It’s utterly, utterly horrible. And I understand why people are so… I mean, it’s just awful. So awful. And of course, this kind of stuff happens everywhere. You don’t see it in Sudan because there isn’t internet and people don’t have cell phones, but there are children in Sudan right now buried in rubble, crying over the corpses of their mothers. And it’s awful. 

Class Unity: Thank you to everyone for coming. Ending on that note, it was all-around a great discussion. Thank you everyone for coming and asking questions. Thank you to our speaker, Christian Parenti. It’s been great. And maybe we could do it again sometime. 

Christian Parenti: All right, I’d like that. Thank you all. And good luck with everything.