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For months now, I have been trying to better understand the evolution of the old socialist left into today’s “progressive left,” which has suddenly, since last summer, become so dominant in our media, institutions of higher education, elite culture and politics.

When I was in college, the first stirrings of the “new left,” as it was then called, were of some interest. I remember the 1962 Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society. That heralded the beginning of a shift in fixing blame for social injustice on culture and not on economic class.

My tutor during junior year was the brilliant American Marxist scholar Barrington Moore, who was firmly set in the classical socialist tradition of class antagonism as the cause of injustice and the economy as the primary determinant of class power and prerogative.

But today’s progressive left in American seems to have switched out economic class for racism as the villain in our society.

The summer’s protests, some violent, led by Antifa and Black Lives Matter, provoked me to read Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence and discover, really for the first time, the historic occurrence of syndicalism, which evolved into national socialism in the 1920s in Italy and Germany.

I had overlooked the long-standing division within the socialist movement between internationalism – classical Marxist preference for the proletariat class in every society – and a more ethnic, even tribal, socialism, which sought justice in one society only. National socialism needed a narrative with which to engage both the workers and the bourgeoisie together in the same national community. The foundational concept was that of a “folk,” an identity construct. The economic system was a corporatist one where production was largely left for profit enterprises under state direction.

To explore the possible emulation of today’s progressive left in America, a cultural force at the root of our current distemper in politics and of older national socialist models, I wrote this personal essay.

I would be grateful to learn your thoughts on reading it.

Here are the proceedings from our most recent fellow’s meeting on the American crisis from international perspectives.

On February 4, the United Nations General Assembly celebrated the Day of Human Fraternity to honor the Document of Human Fraternity, jointly issued by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in Cairo on February 4, 2019. Religions for Peace held an online conference that same day. Lord Daniel Brennan, Chair Emeritus of the Caux Round Table, is a member of the advisory council of Religions for Peace. He spoke on the covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with Christian communities as a model for human fraternity and engagement with others.

You may read his remarks here.

The collapse of moderation as a political culture in America as demonstrated by the decline in trust and tolerance of Americans on the left and on the right towards those who disagree with them is an existential crisis for the American Republic.

Such collapse, one, removes a social foundation for vigorous fidelity to the Caux Round Table Principles for Government and, two, threatens the survival of our constitutional arrangements.

I have attempted to show in two graphics how the American political system has changed from a centrist modality of compromise and collaboration to a bi-polar confrontation, encouraging more and more aggressive tit-for-tat escalation between the extremes.

I add to this presentation three graphs I designed for my classes some eight years ago when the process of polarization was getting firmly underway. There is one graph for each of the three major cultural orientations of Americans – left, center and right.

You may read this explanation of where we are here.

Just recently, I commented on Apple CEO Tim Cook challenging the business model of Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook in giving users a free service in return for their supplying Facebook with valuable information to sell to advertisers, thus turning “customers” into “suppliers.”

Cook announced that Apple would provide a filter so that users could gain control over the use of their personal information.

Facebook has now bowed to the morality of Apple’s concern for its customers by inserting a prompt in its app to educate users about the use of their personal information. The new Facebook screen will ask users for permission to use data collected from third-party websites and apps.

Thus, competition from Apple has forced Facebook to give its “suppliers” more respect, as persons with dignity.

Just recently, I raised a question about the application of stakeholder theory to social media, pointing out that a social media business model which relies on selling advertising converts users into suppliers to be squeezed and privileges advertisers as customers.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, in a public talk, made a similar point on Data Privacy Day. (Linked here and embedded above).

Two years previously, he had spoken, with real concern, of the “emergence of a data-industrial complex.”

Cook said this year: “The fact is that an interconnected ecosystem of companies and data brokers, of purveyors of fake news and peddlers of division, of trackers and hucksters just looking to make a quick buck, is more present in our lives than it has ever been. And it has never been so clear how it degrades our fundamental right to privacy first and our social fabric by consequence.”

“As I’ve said before, “if we accept as normal and unavoidable that everything in our lives can be aggregated and sold, then we lose so much more than data. We lose the freedom to be human.”

“Together, we must send a universal, humanistic response to those who claim a right to users’ private information about what should not and will not be tolerated.”

Cook then announced that Apple is introducing a product which will give users of social media the power to limit their exploitation as suppliers of personal data. The new product to be introduced this quarter is called App Tracking Transparency or ATT. Cook said: “At its foundation, ATT is about returning control to users — about giving them a say over how their data is handled.”

He then noted that the apps “we use every day contain an average of six trackers. This code often exists to surveil and identify users across apps, watching and recording their behavior…. Right now, users may not know whether the apps they use to pass the time, to check in with their friends or to find a place to eat, may in fact be passing on information about the photos they’ve taken, the people in their contact list or location data that reflects where they eat, sleep or pray.”

He continued: “Technology does not need vast troves of personal data, stitched together across dozens of websites and apps, in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it. And we’re here today because the path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom.”

“If a business is built on misleading users, on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform.”

“Call us naive. But we still believe that technology made by people, for people and with people’s well-being in mind, is too valuable a tool to abandon. We still believe that the best measure of technology is the lives it improves.”

In response to Cook, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that “Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work.”

To put his complaint in other words, Zuckerberg confirmed that competition provides a public good in restraining the rapaciousness of monopoly niche players like Facebook.

ATT restrictions, if taken up by users, will put users in charge of their relationship with Facebook.

Apple’s ATT fence protecting personal data will cause revenue losses to Facebook in its core business, experts say, as it becomes harder for the company to gather personal data and use it to prove to advertisers that advertising on Facebook increases sales for whatever is so advertised. The flow of data Facebook currently extracts from apps allows it to build profiles of app users. Those profiles are valuable to advertisers in educating them on the conversion rate of their ads into purchases.

Who is more on the side of a moral capitalism – Cook or Zuckerberg?