The New Gatekeepers
Tablet | Michael Lind
An expansive piece detailing “how the major institutions of American society all came to sing in the woke chorus, and what can be done about it.” Lind traces the infusion of DEI and other left-associated ideologies into every institution in America, attributing the tactic to “entryism,” most often associated with the Trotskyist denomination of Marxism. The tactic is one of infiltration— in this case, using the freedoms and deregulation of the private sector to capture American society without the consent of the governed. The solution? “The restoration of our liberties requires an expansion of democratically accountable government.”
Lind argues that “control of three gateways in particular has been critical to the success of woke entryism…college education, professional accreditation, and commercial services…like Twitter, sales platforms like Amazon, and financial platforms like PayPal…”
“Good Trotsky-style entryists that they are, woke activists, knowing that they would be defeated in free elections and in open public debates, have sought to infiltrate institutions to control key chokepoints or gateways, which empower them to be gatekeepers.”
How is this strategy so successful? “Today, unlike a generation ago, young Americans typically must pass through three gateways, in order to be economically successful…What makes these gateways particularly vulnerable to capture by disciplined, zealous entryists in the United States is the fact that they are mostly private and unregulated.”
As such, the author argues that the is “only one solution to the threat of woke hegemony…a massive expansion of the regulatory powers of government…If the delegation of authority by the government to private institutions empowers the activists who capture those institutions, then the solution is to repeal those delegations of authority and replace them with direct government regulation.”
And what about universities? “If private institutions want to impose any particular ideology on their faculty and students, they should be free to do so—on the condition that they lose their nonprofit status and are redefined as for-profit corporations, subject to federal, state, and local taxes.”
And, more specifically, Harvard? “With an endowment of over $50 billion run by highly paid professional money managers, Harvard University has often been described as a hedge fund with a college attached to it—so why shouldn’t its profits be taxed at the same rate as those of JP Morgan and Bain Capital?”
In sum, it’s not the state, it’s the private sector— “In the United States, in the third decade of the 21st century, the private tyranny of universities, professional associations, and tech platforms is a greater threat than the tyranny of an oppressive state. When it comes to reducing the power of the new entryists in the private sector, the restoration of our liberties requires an expansion of democratically accountable government.”
