Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class by Catherine Liu
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Calling Time on Tolerance

Catherine Liu wants to start a class war. “Class war over distribution of resources is the critical battle of our times,” she announces boldly from her position of tenured security in the University of California. It a change in party politics or a push for voter registration. O, a revolution. And she means what she says, including the rejection of the fundamental precept of liberal democracy, tolerance. Tolerance can no longer be tolerated: “Tolerance for them [traditional Leftists] is the highest secular virtue—but tolerance has almost no political or economic meaning.”

It’s not entirely clear who would be on the opposing sides but in general it appears that the less well off are to be mobilised against the more well off. Her contribution to the war effort is to document the moral smugness of the current liberal ‘haves’ who have lost what she thinks is their historical role as advocates for the ‘have nots.’ More specifically, as a start she wants the supporters of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to bury the hatchet and get serious about taking power and returning America to its socialist destiny. Who nominated Liu to articulate the grievances of the deprived classes is not disclosed. Her presumption is,… well how can one express it, … elitist and condescending in exactly the same manner as those she accuses of false liberality.

This sort of Marxist revivalism is quaint, reminiscent of the hard-liners of the 20’s and 30’s, especially since it is addressed not to those who have been the losers in the racket of democratic capitalism over the last 50 years or so but to the winners, those

“Liberal members of the credentialed classes [who] love to use the word empower when they talk about ‘people,’ but the use of that verb objectifies the recipients of their help while implying that the people have no access to power without them.” Which of course they don’t.

In other words, she’s after the conversion of the gatekeepers to power - ”culture industry creatives, journalists, software engineers, scientists, professors, doctors, bankers, and lawyers, who play important managerial roles in large organizations” - to get on her bandwagon. Right, that’ll work. Just give ‘em a bit of some old fashioned woke rhetoric and they’re sure to sign up.

Presumably she also wants her colleagues in film and media studies (!) to get on board with the revolutionary programme. Indeed, perhaps they are the only ones who can understand its arcane rational and vocabulary:

“The poststructuralist cultural studies theorists despised the oppressive post–World War II liberal consensus as much as the most visionary of neoliberal economists like Alan Greenspan and his overlord, Ayn Rand… If you do not believe me, do a search for liberal consensus in digitized copies of cultural studies books of the 1990s and you will see it appears only to be dismissed with the patriarchy and heteronormativity and a vaguely Foucauldian idea of “domination.”

Forget translating this for the masses; your average corporate executive is likely to respond with a blank stare.

But, thankfully, Ms Liu is not unsympathetic to the challenges her programme will pose to many people. “To renounce one’s narcissistic fetishization of intelligence or refinement is not a simple act,” she says. In this she is absolutely correct as even Mao learned in his Cultural Revolution, which I’m sure Ms Liu looks upon nostalgically. Of course her own narcissistic fetishisation of revolutionary Marxism must be an exception to the rule. Her sagacity should not be questioned but tolerated.

Virtue Hoarders is a book published by a mainstream academic press. This is enlightening in a particular way. I now understand at least some of the vehement anti-intellectual stands taken by many Right wing politicians and pundits in the United States. If this tired Marxist rhetoric is typical of many academics, one has to fear for the mind of the country from the Left as well as from the Right.

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