The era of ideologies has been eclipsed by the reign of technocrats, but the era of technocracy has witnessed the rise of a new global ideology: Intersectionality.

Recently, I received a copy of El Crepusculo de las Ideologias (first published in 1965) by the Spanish man of letters and elegant essayist Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora. This gift, which came to me courtesy of de la Mora’s scientist son, Juan, deals with what may be translated as the “twilight of ideologies.” The book sets forth the thesis that the ideological wars unleashed mostly by discontented intellectuals in the 19th and early 20th centuries are now fortunately coming to an end. Although these political religions were once quite powerful, they’ve now been upended by the reign of technocrats. An army of “experts” has taken command in every Western country; and these rulers offer an allegedly “scientific” approach to governing based on solving practical problems.

Although de la Mora does not predict a total de-politicization of the various Western countries, he does suggest that the rise of technocracy has greatly reduced popular interest in political affairs. In the concluding section of his book, he tries to document this belief by showing in detail a declining participation in elections in Western “liberal democratic states” during the mid-20th century.

De la Mora also notes the streamlining of party blocs and the attempt to create a more efficient form of representation that actually weakens the value of individual votes by reducing minority or “third” parties to ciphers. According to de la Mora, such methods are seen by the public as acceptable and fully compatible with their understanding of “democracy.” After all technocrats, who we are to believe are serious people, will be administering the state, no matter which party or party bloc wins a particular election.

One can find similar ideas in Thomas Molnar’s Decline of the Intellectuals, Jacques Ellul’s L’illusion politique, and even parts of my own After Liberalism. And parts of the same argument also crop up in the writings of James Burnham, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964). According to all these sources and many others, the clash of worldviews and values in Western society ceased to be a significant occurrence sometime in the 20th century and was replaced by the reign of “experts.” This took place through the agency of the modern state understood as an amoral form of public administration. Furthermore, as Ellul and de la Mora stress, all politics after this re-arrangment of power center on administrative problems that the administrative state is supposed to address, and which “experts” will tackle in what we are assured is a value-free fashion. 

Daniel Bell and other mid-century academic sociologists thought this method of rule was quintessentially “democratic” because the people would be allowed to consent and because “public servants” would avoid crass partisanship, a position already evident, at least implicitly, during the Progressive Era when thinkers like Walter Lippmann and Woodrow Wilson identified state-of-the art democracy with scientific management. But Bell and the sociological advocates of social democracy glossed over the problematic aspects of what they imagined was a desirable regime, like massive corruption and nepotism, when they prematurely welcomed “the end of ideology.” 

This now-prevalent concept of “democratic” rule has eliminated the “people” from almost all political affairs and is therefore not really popular government. It certainly would not have been recognizable as such to the founders of the American republic, who assigned a very limited role to “public servants.” Ellul, a French Christian anarchist, may have been the most passionate and persistent of the critics of this proposed “end of ideology.” In fact, he kept writing for almost a half-century against the modern administrative state and its outrageous efforts to orchestrate “popular rule.” 

Christopher Lasch was another social critic who wrote in the same vein, albeit from the perspective of the communitarian left. Moreover, strains of the same anti-technocratic commentary surface in the Hippie movement of the 1960s, which likewise protested against impersonal political and social forces. Marcuse and the Frankfurt School supplemented this attack with an assault on the corporate capitalist economy, which supposedly revealed the same impersonal quality as public administration. The socialist solutions proposed by these Critical Theorists would have undoubtedly made the problem of alienation against which they wrote and spoke even worse; nonetheless, their focus on monolithic control and on the alienation of those living under this tyranny touched what were already then familiar chords. 

There was pushback even more from the right against the political world being reduced to technocratic dominance. These critiques came in different iterations. Some Christian commentators, for example, railed against the moral relativism caused by technocracy; while all social conservatives protested the destruction of traditional authority structures that resulted from technocratic rule. Catholic authors like Molnar and Augusto del Noce joined this protest by lamenting the moral and social breakdown that they associated with the same tendencies. 

Although these last two thinkers loathed the German existential philosopher Martin Heidegger for his subjectivist concept of being, one does notice an overlap between Heidegger’s critique of Technik, as reducing life to outwardness and superficiality, and the more traditionalist Catholic critiques of technocracy. In both cases a “scientific” approach to life and politics is seen as an ominous diversion from a more authentic, dutiful form of existence. Without necessarily denying the difference between traditions of thought, the Jesuit Quentin Lauer, who wrote sympathetically on Heidegger, did look for common ground between Thomistic thought and modern existentialism. 

A bolder reaction among some on the right to technocracy developed out of Schmitt’s critical discussions of “neutralization,” especially in his 1929 essay “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations.” In his statements on this subject, Schmitt observed that the major areas of contention in Western society shifted over the course of several centuries from religion to political affairs, to science, and finally to technical and material acquisitions. Parallel with this development was the rise of liberal thinking in the 19th-century West, which reduced all vital human questions to economics. For Schmitt, the effect of these long-range trends was the vanishing of the “Political” as a concern or engagement. 

As is well known, Schmitt viewed the “Political” as the area of life in which the confrontation of warring groups was the most intense. It was a sphere of passions and activities that often boiled over into physical destruction. Yet Schmitt also believed that the depoliticization of modern life did have an obvious downside. It would remove the opportunity for heroism and courage that political struggles produced; and it would move Western societies toward a culture of self-indulgence and self-absorption.

Despite these observations about a dawning technocratic world, history has turned out differently from the way some have predicted. Ideology has made a tumultuous comeback, even if it has been sometimes misrepresented as something else. According to Ellul, although technocrats have subverted all real ideologies, they “have apparently transformed their most profound beliefs and scientific doctrines into a new ideology.” But this is all smoke and mirrors. “What looks like a set of beliefs to be acted on just leaves the individual or group powerless and under the control of the administrative state.” Unlike a real political doctrine that should be a call to action, the appeal to “scientific” expertise, according to Ellul, is a “political illusion” that justifies the passivity of disempowered citizens. 

Still, if the cult of scientific expertise fails to rise to the level of genuine ideology, there has been an ideology on the left that has been transforming every Western “liberal democracy” for several decades now; and it should not be confused with a mere extension of technocracy. Intersectionality, which now pervades our cultural and political lives, does not seem to have much in common with the neutralized or relativized late modern society described by Ellul, Molnar, de la Mora, and Schmitt. How exactly did this new ideology gain such influence, and what connection does it reveal to the “scientifically” managed government it has preserved? 

First, intersectional government, with its gender and antiwhite racial doctrines, builds on a permanent administrative state that reaches into every aspect of our social life. If we were living with the state bureaucracy that existed here and in other Western countries a hundred years ago, our prevalent woke ideology would not have achieved its present ascendancy. Moreover, this administrative tyranny still claims to wield scientific expertise and presents itself, like Dr. Fauci, as the very incarnation of “science.” That this regime is now pushing something other than reasonable ideas does not detract from its claim, which is sustained by the mass media and “educators,” of fighting for “science against superstition.” Or so the sign on the lawn of my Democratic neighbor assures me about the role of our state party. 

Second, intersectional or woke ideology has become the new state religion throughout the Western world at least partly because powerful interests are behind it. Those interests include global capitalism, the mass media, the educational system, government workers, racial minorities, and college-educated women. All these partisans of wokeness are attracted to the same ideology because they benefit from it in different ways. Some receive compensation or special rewards for their victim claims, others strive for an expansion of their bureaucratic powers, and still others are looking for larger markets for their goods and cheaper labor sources. 

It also seems simplistic to ascribe support for this state religion to material interests entirely, although I do not wish to understate this conditioning factor. We may assume that those who benefit from our post-Christian religion believe at least to some extent in what they profess. We are speaking about a body of doctrine that is being drilled into subjects of the state night and day. 

Third, the relationship between the post-Marxist left and Marxism is a subject worth exploring, despite the insistence of our conservative establishment that the two lefts are identical. I won’t deny that there are connections between the two ideologies. Both arise out of what might be described as the generic left, and each stresses such authentic leftist values as the pursuit of greater equality and the overcoming of past inequalities. Both lefts also divide society into victims and victimizers and call on the state to side with the former against the latter. 

There is another similarity between the Marxist and post-Marxist lefts that for me may be the most crucial. Those who support the woke left, if they are old enough to have done so, supported earlier leftist causes; and that may be the case throughout the Western world. The generic left, whatever forms it has taken, has attracted many of the same people.

Thus, one should not be surprised to learn, for example, that journalist Carl Bernstein, who was instrumental in bringing down Richard Nixon, was raised in suburban Washington by Communist parents. Bernstein today is an ardent woke Democrat, who supports Kamala and who wrote an adulatory biography of Hillary Clinton. Similarly, Betty Friedan went from being a Communist to a feminist. Barack Obama was raised as a Marxist by his mentor Frank Marshall Davis, but later evolved into a black nationalist and transformed himself still later into an advocate of intersectional politics. Arguably, what drives the intersectional left is not Marxist ideology but the type of personality that has been attracted to a wide variety of leftist causes.

The woke left manifests most of the hates and fixations that have drawn many to the left. Although they typically have been squishy soft on Communist dictatorships, they have rarely been believing or orthodox Marxists. The left to which they now belong is the handmaiden of corporate, crony capitalism, and in no significant way has it been influenced by Marx’s historical or economic theories. Kamala Harris’s father may be some kind of academic Marxist but what his ditzy politician daughter offers is a grab bag of garbled leftist talking points, most of which have nothing to do with Marxism. 

What may be designated as the Freudianization of leftist ideology was observed by the scholars Eugene Genovese and Louis Althusser, who came from the Marxist left, as well as Christopher Lasch, a communitarian guild socialist. Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution (2023) looks at the same process from a slightly different angle by focusing on the marriage between our social and educational elites and the politics of resentment spread and justified by New Left authors. All these interpreters have correctly explained the left’s most recent metamorphosis. Those who have been part of this newest left indulge in bizarre forms of therapeutic politics, like the castration of dysphoric boys and the encouragement of biological males claiming to be women to enter girls’ locker rooms. These practices of course have nothing to do with Marxism or socialism, but they do illustrate the rush into madness by Western countries that have been saturated by post-Marxist leftist ideology.

Pedro Gonzalez has described this phenomenon from a different angle by looking at Generation Z, which has been raised on therapeutic politics and culture: “Today, the culture of ‘I am defined by psychic pain and want everyone to know that’ is everywhere.” Michael Kaye, global head of communications at OkCupid, told HuffPost that in 2023, “there was a 21% increase in mentions of ‘mental health’ and ‘therapy’ on OkCupid profiles between February and July, and a 4% increase in August 2022 compared to August 2021.” 

The conservative movement has either missed or glossed over such developments. From the 1950s on, the emphasis among movement conservatives was on fighting world Communism and resisting Soviet aggression. Rivers of printer’s ink were spent on depicting the Communist enemy and detailing how former Communist devotees had been converted to God and country. From the 1980s on, the neoconservatives were in the movement’s driver’s seat together with Republican operatives. What was then stressed by conservative celebrities was America’s duty to spread its democratic values all over the globe and our obligation to stand shoulder to shoulder with the “Middle East’s only democracy.” 

More recently, a generation of younger conservatives has taken sides in the struggle between the populist Republicans and the older Republican establishment. Strangely enough, this struggle is taking place with less and less reference to the cultural war that Pat Buchanan made the centerpiece of his political career. What Irving Kristol wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 1992 as a response to Buchanan’s speech at the Republican Convention, that the cultural wars were already lost, may now be the common wisdom. 

Whether we’re speaking about control of the electronic media or government administration, technocrats, ideologues, and globalist capitalism happily coexist and cooperate.

Right now, the conservative media elite are also pointing to the return of Communism and Marxism among their Democratic opponents. Meanwhile, our next Republican president, who is hardly a deep political thinker, keeps telling us that he’s fighting Marxists (and also fascists) in the Democratic Party. What Trump is fighting is plenty bad but hardly the Communist foe that was around during the Cold War. Still, we can understand the rhetorical value of conjuring up Marxist and Marxist-Leninist enemies for a movement that once came together in response to that threat.

Unfortunately, that’s not the dangerous antagonist that is now confronting the right, and the one to which it’s now badly losing. And anyone noticing this real enemy should have already figured out that it’s very much allied to technocracy. Whether we’re speaking about control of the electronic media or government administration, technocrats, ideologues, and globalist capitalism happily coexist and cooperate. What most definitely has not happened is a triumph of technocracy over ideology. Neither have we sunk into moral relativism, which might have been preferable to the inverted morality that our technocratic ideologues have inflicted on us. Things have turned out even worse than what the critics of technocracy once warned against.