What Happened to the Social Justice Movement?

A Review of Fredrik DeBoer's How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

Three years ago, in 2020, following Covid19 and the murder of George Floyd, the developed world seemed poised on the verge of revolution.  The view that Western countries were bastions of racism, misogyny, and other oppressions blasted into the mainstream.  Notions of defunding police, rewriting history more akin to Howard Zinn’s or Nicole Hannah Jones’ perspective, dismantling structures, or even a socialist revolution seemed at least plausible.  Three years later most of this is in disrepute.  Policing hasn’t changed, Democrats are urged to move further away from progressivism on social issues, and major socialist organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America are spiraling into infighting and word-policing.  What happened?

Marxist scholar Fredrik DeBoer investigates this in his new book How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement (henceforth “Elites”).  I can’t say I read a lot of contemporary Marxist thought (I’m still recovering from Zinn’s revisionist People’s History of the United States) but DeBoer strikes me as one of the most intelligent and effective writers of Marxist thought alive today. 

Elites is written a bit like a how-to, or perhaps how-not-to guide for fellow socialists, but it’s a great book for anyone.  DeBoer posits the social justice movement as too often getting bogged down in language games or other superficial distractions, lacking clear achievable goals, eschewing coherent leadership (his descriptions of college socialist groups trying to avoid any hierarchical leadership and becoming coercive silos instead are fascinating) and obsessing over identity issues that aren’t popular.  These may be hard words for progressives to hear, but they’re clearly true.  Ruy Teixeira, a progressive scholar and activist, has been all but begging the Democratic Party to follow similar advice as DeBoer is offering to socialists.

The book is on the smaller side, so easy to read and engagingly written.  For non-socialists, it’s an excellent opportunity to have a chance to see how the mind of a smart socialist works.  I generally advocate that it’s a good idea to understand views different, even diametrically opposed from our own, so for conservatives concerned about socialism (I’m an Obama progressive myself, for what that’s worth), this is a good look behind this particular curtain.

I have one small and one large critique of DeBoer’s book.  The small critique is DeBoer makes an excellent point about how social justice advocates too often get distracted by unpopular, superficial matters of language and virtue signaling.  Yet Elites itself indulges the arguably racist (and certainly polarizing and superficial) habit of capitalizing the “b” in Black but not the “w” in white when discussing race.  This affectation, which emerged in journalism after George Floyd, is a classic example of the kind of dividing superficiality that makes race issues worse, not better.  So, it was a surprise to find it in Elites (granted, perhaps this was the publisher’s standard and beyond DeBoer’s control).

The bigger critique is that DeBoer often falls for the same central problem of much of the social justice movement…they can’t seem to fathom that they just might be wrong at least on some issues.  For instance, DeBoer shares the left’s belief that the US and other Western nations remain fundamentally racist, despite increasing evidence that simply isn’t so.  Even on the issue of police violence, the best evidence suggests class (and mental health issues), not race, predicts police misconduct.  It’s too often assumed any disparities must be racism, not the overrepresentation of young black men as perpetrators of violent crime.  Particularly as DeBoer makes a cogent argument for class-first politics, it’s unfortunate DeBoer can sometimes appear to share the far-left’s lack of curiosity for data that conflicts with the trendy narrative on systemic racism.

To some degree then, the social justice movement may arguably be harming race relations (and in the case of defund the police, are indirectly responsible for black citizen’s deaths through increased homicides).  On other issues too, social justice movements may actively be making the world worse, through their failure to understand where they’ve been wrong.  Nuclear power and climate change being a prime example.  Even on #metoo, a genuinely righteous movement, the failure to understand and value due process was a critical mistake because sometimes people do lie, or misremember, or situations are complex beyond mere good/evil binaries.  This failure did much to lose #metoo credibility (as did the failure to take much interest in the plight of blue-collar women in service industries). 

None of this dissuades me from recommending the book.  It’s a good read, well-written and will certainly get debates going.  It comes out in September and there’s great value in understanding these issues from someone in the trenches of the socialist movement.