Why I am a democratic socialist but neither a liberal nor a feminist: Reflections on America's dysfunctional business culture

I wish to make the following scandalous claim:

I am European-educated (I studied philosophy in France) and on the left.

Without question, hesitation, or qualification. 
I could perhaps be a “feminist” in some relatively uncommon way; in certain common ways I certainly cannot be, however unfortunate that may be.  

I am also a small business person who frequently engages in business conversations with other persons, usually over the telephone. 
I will leave aside the (in fact, more complex) question of other minoritarian social backgrounds for now, and just state that:

In general, I find it best to do business with men rather than women.  And this is partly because, not in spite of, my left-wing political principles.
Though this has only been true of American women.  (I also find Europeans easier to deal with than Americans, of course.)  Why is this?

America today has a largely psychological culture.  It is also one of persons (and so ad hominem arguments usually prevail), including celebrities (authorized to have personalities and opinions as part of them).  It is one where the emotional counts more than the rational.  It is one where the “non-verbal communication” we share with some other animal species is prized over thinking properly so called.  Americans are generally enthusiastic, naive, friendly without necessarily being nice, ignorant and monolingual, believing themselves the center of the universe, loving authority when it is theirs, sophistical (the position that there are no truths, only opinions), and conformist.  Most of all, the business culture is heavily oriented to a management of persons in terms of the emotional properties of their manner of thinking.  The new religion is “Therapy” (for which “spirituality” is just another name).  When there is any slight difficult, the other person, since he must be wrong and “I/we” must be right, must be crazy.  All practical problems are personal and to be solved with social control.  

Doing business in America means dealing with the business (and government) culture, which is overwhelmingly driven by the need for business to manage the people they must deal with effectively (in terms of getting what the business wants), efficiently (in the use of the company’s resources, not the customer’s), and so profitable.  Social control now is everywhere. 

Female workers in managerial capacities, and any credible feminism, face the problem that they are likely to be employed partly as workers who may have a good rapport with people, because they have been socialized to believe that Relationships and Feelings matter more than anything that can be best expressed only in impersonal language.  (Similarly, and a fact that ought to scandalizes everyone, Black men are often hired to be security guards because they are expected to be more comfortable with using violence, so long as it is authorized by the institution employing them).s Those female managers and professionals who master the largely impersonal language of their employer or profession, often seem to approach such truths as pre-established and inviolable, and so they can explain them to you, and if they sense resistance, turn emotional and try to manage how you feel.    

What is missing here is a functioning use of discourse in the sense that allows for rationality, definable as the practice of “giving and asking for reasons.  Rationality requires that neither party approaches the interaction as if they were necessarily right, or masters of the meaning of what they say, or as if they are employed and charged with what amounts in the end to exercising authority as telling you what to do.

I never wanted to just get my way.  It is a deft move of many feminists and other liberals to say that when there is a disagreement.  Women of course are more conservative than men, almost always, in at least one way: They are hyper-sensitive to any emotional, communicational, or behavioral cues that they can read as portending violence. Of course, a national security state that rules with a floating state of emergency will read “violence” into everything, so that the very concept becomes meaningless, except of course their own behavior when and as officially authorized.  (Professionals can in principle always be criticized on the basis of the higher authority of the institution that employs them, while the institution itself cannot of course be criticized from within itself.  Logically, that would result in set theoretical paradoxes, as a totality (or, mathematically, a set) that includes individuals is treated simultaneously as an individual that itself must fall under the rules of constitution that define it as set.)

Now everyone knows about and is keyed to the constant possibility of #MeToo violations, typically, though not necessarily, of women by men.  In fact, this has been going on since the early 1970s, precisely at the outset of the now dominant paradigm of social organization called neoliberalism.  The feminists famously said the personal is the political.  This equation, or mapping, is problematic in several ways. Which term maps onto the other?  Is everything that is personal also political?  Is only the personal truly politically?  And is the political in truth only personal?

In my youth, the big debate on the left was between some forms of Marxism and the “new social movements” that included feminism and gay liberation.  Guess who won.  

And guess what happens to a man like me if I get into an argument?  For many women, even those who are left-wing academics, and with whom I may agree about many things, a man who insists or persists in a discussion, or even dares to disagree and speak dissonantly somehow, is what may be called an Insistent Man.  Which, to the liberal left (that now needs to be buried more than praised and included), is of course: micro-aggression and so theoretically sanctioned, by hermeneutical creativity, imagined violence.  I have found myself subject to violence on the part of people in positions of authority for reasons as mere as these. 

It is like this:
She says this is the rule. 
You have some question or some caveat and start to ask…

And she doesn’t like that.  What looks to you like her intolerance of what someone else says or does is to her outrage that her authority as job-holder and professional is questioned and so she is personally insulted and should be.  And now you are the bad guy, and watch you; she can send you to prison.  Count yourself lucky if this happens to you while being a white man and not while being black.  

The employer, which may need or want her to be intolerant in this way, welcomes and expects her to protest about oppression to her demographical or body type, her gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, etc., because this has been shown to be effective, and the costs of nurturing affirmative action-style concessions to identity politics and the false but easy claim to being oppressed are low since liberals at least are broadly in agreement on it. When I was an undergraduate at Berkeley in the 1980s, there was no dissent to this position at all, and the administration joined progressive students in enforcing it. It was and is an idol of the state.

Of course, gender is not the problem; a gender ideology is.  The prevalent gender ideology is neoliberal.  And the therapeutic state is the police state. 

Has the ground begun to shift again?  Clearly, yes, and the shift on the left took place between the financial crisis of 2008 and the presidential election of 2016 (with the defeat of Hilary Clinton and the near-victory in the Democratic primary of the first avowedly socialist major candidate since Eugene Debs).  Sound the alarum: Liberal feminism is dead.  Yes, and everyone now knows that.  

In the end, this is not a story of gender or culture. Even if it is only within a horizon of thinking best established until now in European culture, philosophically and otherwise, and that culture was essential bourgeois and predominantly, if not definitively, masculine. It is a story of neoliberalism, and that is a story of what happened in societies like ours after 1968. Certain notions and forms of liberalism, that is, a culture of liberty and tolerance, involving a rejection of more disciplined and overtly authoritarian styles of governance in favor of superficially looser, freer, more flexible, more expressive, less deliberate and deliberative, styles of interaction. They did not make us more free necessarily, and often left us much less so. It took a while for much of this to become quite visible. What happened with notions of gender and race equality and affirmation (of difference in form and sameness in status) as markers of social liberation is that they were used (and exploited) in the service of rather different agendas, which were ones of governance linked to the needs of capital to control labor, and of capitalist states to manage populations. The prevalent notions of therapeutic spirituality and a near-universal need for administrative regulation of persons in the interest of maximizing health and controlling risks of mental or moral deviance and malaise or illness (a term that literally just means badness) are not so new; what is new is their pervasiveness and the way they have further taken over from both more subjectively autonomous forms of engagement in process of personal and social amelioration or learning. The way in which feminist thought, discourse, and political engagements together with New Age “spiritualities” that are invariably meant to be non- or anti-”Western,” developed promoted a normative femininity as alternative to a discredited style of subjectivity that was European and bourgeois, masculine, and associated with norms of rationality, and in this way it offered women in particular a beatific new womanhood, now equal to or even dominant vis-à-vis the older styles. Since the shift happened most in America, and the rejected older social forms are identifiably European, it was also a cultural shift with precise geopolitical referents. And yet more than anything, it is contradictions of capitalism at a cultural level that are involved here. What I have said about women professionals and functionaries is largely true in America, but the same problems happen with men in those same positions also. The more emotion-invoking and personal coddling that depends on pervasive feelings of insecurity that businesses think must be managed, as all social difficulties somehow are, these derive from the contradiction that capital needs both to efficiently control the people it must work with to make money, at the risk of greater costs or even risks of costly social or political disruption,
and at the same time not make too many of these people so unhappy that that leads to costs. One can see this crystallized in the customer service phone hold system, where often insipidly unpleasant Muzak, as this elevator music used to be called, is used to keep the customer in a stated of managed frustration, as well as outsourcing to him or her the cost of time spent waiting.

The Americans have innovated in personal styles.  I think France and Europe have taken a different direction.  Style is good (I myself write about a visual art, film, which is largely style, and impossible without it), but maybe we should ask more questions about reason and unreason at the level of personality.  And how to democratize our business culture instead of merely feminizing it.  And feminizing it in an anti-democratic, irrational, and anti-political manner.