And then what?

If the self-identified marginalized complete their great upending, a majority of the human race will have to have somewhere to go

The notion of revolution keeps evolving. There were already differing notions of what a revolution was for in the late 1700s, when Edmund Burke contrasted those that had recently occurred in the United States and France. Marx and Engels channeled their excitement about developments throughout Europe in the 1840s into the Communist Manifesto. It wasn’t until 1917, however, that a nation acted on their prescription and imposed radical economic leveling on a populace. Other such upheavals followed in the wake of the Russian prototype, in 1949 in China, and in 1959 in Cuba, to name two examples of such regimes that are still with us.

The great countercultural enterprise that burst upon the West in the late 1960s had its roots in the kind of class struggle that all the above-cited revolutions were about. Positing a dichotomy between economic haves and have-nots was at the core of William Appleman Williams’s concept of moral equivalence (which held that the US and the USSR were both just superpowers with imperial ambitions and no real distinctions), the Port Huron Statement, and the Gramscian long march through the institutions that came out of the crackup of the radicalism of the day.

But an expanded sense of what that kind of revolution was about was underway by the end of that fabled decade. To some degree, the civil rights movement was responsible, but even that started out as a basically economic grievance. Black Americans demanded equality of opportunity. They wanted to get hired, to buy homes, to avail themselves of the full range of activity as producers and consumers enjoyed by their white fellow citizens.

But the tone of the movement changed markedly after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Militant figures came to the fore, as did a sense that skin color was something to be exulted in, rather than a physical characteristic that ought not to have much sociocultural significance.

Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique and the 1966 founding of the National Organization for Women did much to expand the notion of revolution beyond class considerations. Rumblings of something fundamental were felt throughout society. Feminists demanded that Western civilization redefine its foundations, such as the family and the place of sexuality.

The 1969 Stonewall riot, considered at the time to be of secondary or tertiary significance in comparison to the Vietnam war, race-related issues, and the mainstreaming of recreational drugs, added yet more fervor to this demand.

The half-century since these developments has made clear that identity has supplanted class as the impetus of revolutionary struggle.

And that struggle has scored a degree of success that constantly surprises. Consider how quickly America went from President Obama publicly affirming the millennia-old definition of marriage to the Obergefell v Hodges decision. Fifteen years ago, the notion of transgender bathrooms was laughable.

The educational, corporate, journalistic and entertainment worlds are all on board with the prioritizing of identity. Even Christian denominations are splitting over identity.

The fine arts are completely given over to this prioritization. Consider the experience of the director of the American Contemporary Ballet company:

“Our dancers were free to post whatever they wanted on their own social media, but I knew I wasn’t going to do it on the company account,” he said. “That’s not part of our mission.” 

But backlash erupted on social media from both acquaintances and strangers. One Instagram message from a former employee stated, “Art is inherently political so your messaging seems to be spiteful of a crucial movement.” A former dancer from Jones’s company posted a message on their Instagram Story: “If this doesn’t drip with cowardice and blind misunderstanding of privilege and accountability to your community, I don’t know what does.” 

Meanwhile, some of Jones’s dancers started questioning his refusal to post the symbol after they, too, became the target of social media backlash.

In the face of mounting pressure from the dance world, Jones sent an email to his employees clarifying his position. “American Contemporary Ballet is not a political organization,” he wrote. “Our mission is great dance. It is not our prerogative to represent each other politically.”

That’s when his work started to take a hit. His plans to turn his company’s adaptation of The Nutcracker into a film fell through, even though his proposal was under consideration by “some of the most renowned directors in Hollywood,” he said. 

When an agent he hired to find funding and get a director for the projecttold him he needed to hire dancers of color from outside his company to get the film made, Jones objected. 

“One of the things I will not do is hire by race or give preference by race,” he said. “Ballet does discriminate, just not by race. This is a highly athletic art form that discriminates by body, talent, and artistic sensitivity. You have to have a certain kind of feet and proportions. It’s not just a convention. It’s like an opera singer having a loud voice.”

So Jones pushed back against the agent’s advice. “I told him I don’t hire by race, and he said, ‘If you say that, you’ll never work again.’”

The notion of reparations, originally a scheme by which the government would somehow come up with a criterion for determining who was a legitimate descendant of slaves and monetarily compensate such persons for their ancestors’ deprivations, has morphed into a demand for such recompense for an ever-expanding array of put-upon demographics:

Gay reparations have successfully won financial restitution for surviving victims of government persecution in the 20th century, including incarceration and maltreatment in Gen. Francisco Franco’s Spain and Nazi Germany (a policy that was continued for another quarter-century in West Germany). The U.S. movement, led by the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., seeks atonement and compensation for the surviving victims of the “Lavender Scare,” the postwar period of mass firings of thousands of gay federal civil servants in the United States who were suspected of being “perverts.”  

Over the past decade, more than a dozen Caribbean nations have been seeking debt relief and other reparations from their erstwhile European colonizers for alleged native genocide and chattel slavery. Separately, a delegation that included New York Times writer and 1619 Project architect Nikole Hannah-Jones traveled to Rome last July to press the Vatican to commit the Catholic Church’s global resources to financially repairing the damage caused by the Church’s sanctioning of and benefitting from the trans-Atlantic slave trade.   

Advocates of climate reparations seek trillions of dollars in aid from the wealthy nations of the so-called global North to the developing countries of the global South. In response to such claims, the European Union this year agreed to create a climate fund to mitigate the predicted ecological and humanitarian toll that will be caused by greenhouse gas emissions emitted by industrialized powers.   

Gay reparations and  climate  reparations both have been the subject of recent books published by Oxford University Press in 2022 and 2021 and written by serious academics at reputable institutions, Bard College and Georgetown University. Foreign Policy magazine has run lengthy articles in support of  gay reparations  and  climate reparationsjust in the past few years.   

Proposals have also been floated for reparations for abused psychiatric patients and residential aged care patients, as well as compensating all women, whether they work or not, for the alleged income gap – a sign that the concept continues gaining purchase. At the same time, thousands of private individuals have taken matters into their own hands, Venmo-ing cash transfers to black acquaintances or to online fundraising efforts to aid black people in crisis.   

In a sense, the expanded notion of revolution that has been underway for the past several decades does have its roots in what the Jacobins and the Marxist-Leninists saw as the fundamental divide besetting humankind: the powerful versus the marginalized.

But what is to be done with the majority of the species that spends its days tending to its households, jobs and productive engagement with its immediate community, with nary a thought of oppressing anyone?

The revolutionaries are not going to get that majority to declare some kind of conversion to their vision, at least not with any degree of sincerity. In fact, the message that “no, we are not going to go along with this” is being codified in legislation in several states around America.

It’s momentarily pleasant to think that one can opt out of this societal tension, but the revolutionary forces will not permit it.

Given the nearly complete permeation by identity revolution of every last institution of civic life, it’s worth asking just what is to become of the preponderance of us in the new scheme of things. That’s quite a swath of humanity that will not be permitted to contribute to the world’s general advancement anymore, at least unless it’s on the revolutionaries’ terms. There’s no camp that could be big enough in which to quarantine them all.

And I’ll leave you with this exit question: Given that this revolutionary impulse is based on bitterness, what hope is there that harmony can somehow result from its success?