Recent political events that have unfolded over the past year have revealed a disturbing pattern of an identity politics-fueled progressivism, evolving from its once distasteful authoritarian impulses, towards a more sinister version, that increasingly exhibits totalitarian proclivities.  From the tactics used to coerce or extort corporate compliance with the policy preferences of progressives to the current struggle to inculcate public school children with the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT), in word and deed, progressive ideologues are mirroring the tactics used by the former Soviet Union to crush all political opposition and exact compliance with their divisive ideology.

The political tactics of progressive partisans, carried out and nurtured through the political institution of the Democratic Party and its subsidiary organizations, including the higher education establishment, the media, and now in corporations, have become overweening, ruthless, acrimonious, and unapologetically extreme.

Rise of the Progressive Politburo

Over the past five years, the pursuit of progressive politics has gone well beyond intemperance.  Progressives have the dubious distinction of successfully standing on its head Clausewitz's dictum, that war is the continuation of politics by other means.  For the hard left wing of the Democratic Party, it is politics that is the continuation of war by other means.

Individuals who disregard the commandments of the political correctness religion are punished by being blacklisted and ostracized from civil society, forced to attend sensitivity training sessions, or engage in acts of public self-flagellation, complete with confessions for desecrating the inviolable provisions of identity politics, issued and enforced by progressive zealots in academia, the media, and the Democratic Party.

Just as the use of the term "counter-revolutionary" became entirely arbitrary and capricious in Soviet Russia, so too today is the ever-evolving definition of exactly what constitutes "racism." For the commissars of the Progressive Politburo, racism is a term, the definition of which is infinitely elastic and mutable, altered whenever necessary to support the preferred progressive Narrative of oppressor and oppressed.  In short, racism is whatever progressives deem it to be at any given point in time.

Indeed, the success of the CRT campaign to date is that progressives have weaponized accusations of racism in the same manner as Stalin and his henchmen did with bogus charges of "counter-revolutionary" activities.  Today's whimsical and perennial accusations of "racism" are raised with the same frequency and telling effect as Stalin's use of the sweeping term "counterrevolutionary."

CRT advocates use this tactic deftly, with the consent and approval of the Pravda media, as an instrument of trepidation and compliance; sometimes it's used as a cudgel, or sword of Damocles, against corporations, to extort money or browbeat them into pronouncing support for progressive political policies.  From speech codes to overt censorship, enacted through the Orwellian concept of "misinformation," progressives are following an historical script that was used by the Soviet Politburo, to consolidate their power and rule with an iron hand to crush those dissenters in their path.

These noxious political tactics are most pronounced in the quest to root out the purported evils of systemic racism.  The most prominent and telling manifestation of the power of the Progressive Politburo is in the current audacious plan to subjugate every aspect of American life under the aegis of racialism, which at present entails the attempt to coerce school districts and corporations to implement the teachings of CRT.

The New Democratic Party

History will record Biden's election as the date when the governing philosophy of the Democratic Party officially was taken over or usurped by the identity politics teachings, ideas, and recommended policy mandates of zany left-wing college professors, specializing in grievance studies and proselytizing the primacy of racialism.  These philosopher-kings of the new Democratic Party preach endlessly about the menacing nature of "Whiteness" — the newest oppressor in progressives' dichotomous neo-Marxist world of terminal conflict.  The CRT flock no longer cites Marx's seminal work Das Kapital, but rather their new chosen ideological bible, "Das Whiteness." 

Large American multi-national corporations have joined with the government, as well as with the Democratic Party, to form a type of corporate state, where the belief in the strictures of identity politics and in the legitimacy of the socio-economic theory of racialism is ubiquitous and unchallenged.  Many corporations cower in fear of being stigmatized with accusations of racism, for their opposition to or lack of affirmative support for Democrats' political issues.  Companies today must be forever vigilant to monitor speech and policies that may be perceived as slights against members of identity politics protected classes.

The pernicious doctrine of CRT

In one sense, CRT as a social doctrine is merely old affirmative action wine in new bottles.  CRT gains acceptance today by avoiding the "reverse discrimination" Achilles heel that has always plagued affirmative action practices; it acquires novelty by its pretensions to be a cogent, systematic political theory.

CRT is a strange amalgamation comprising a crude, bargain-basement version of Marxism, identity politics principles, and a dash of Leninism.  This doctrinal smorgasbord is used to bootstrap or shoehorn their intellectually incoherent theory, to describe American history and society as inherently and irredeemably racist.

For the past two decades, academic institutions have been incubators for birthing new theories and concepts to feed the diversity beast's need for instances of perpetual grievance.  The Democratic Party, as the vehicle for the Progressive Politburo, provided a safe harbor for these academic theories and novel paradigms of oppression, and they have now entered the mainstream.

In the Soviet Union, the commissars were omnipresent, ensuring that individuals and institutions complied with party dogma and policies.  Politics had primacy because it was integral to every aspect of society, culture, and the economy.  There was no escape from revolutionary politics or ideology because the Communist Party made it its business to ensure that everything was politicized.

Similarly, members of the Progressive Politburo have now politicized every aspect of American society.  They instill their divisive, partisan ideology, in sports, public schools, the military, and the arts and entertainment worlds, as well as in foreign policy.

Like Marxism, CRT promises a similar future-based utopia for its path toward a promised land of a racist-free society.  The means to its professed ends, however, will balkanize the country along divisive racial lines, by fomenting conflict between those imbued from birth with "White privilege and those people "of color."

Recent concerted, if somewhat ad hoc, efforts to thwart the runaway CRT train and its desire for the tectonic transformation of the nation should provide some consolation for those who cherish freedom of thought, association, and speech.   But what is disheartening — indeed, frightening — is that the virus of racialism, the Democratic Party's new omnibus governing template, has spread with such alacrity among so many Americans.

John Kinsellagh is a financial writer, attorney, and former financial adviser.  He has served as an arbitrator for the financial services industry for over twenty-five years.  He is the author of Election 2016 and Mainstream Media: Democratic Party-Complex, both available on Amazon.com.  Read more of his commentary at johnkinsellagh.substack.com.

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