american thinker

by Brian Cabana

    On the surface, the dynamics of left-wing politics represent a progression of the Tammany Hall patronage system into the professional and managerial class. One could easily tell a story (and perhaps it should be told) of how traditionally Democrat ethnic patronage networks navigated the centralization of American governance institutions to rise ever higher in the managerial hierarchy, eventually taking control over those institutions during the Obama administration.

    Yet there is a quality in the modern left that distinguishes it from traditional arrangements of political patronage. A traditional patronage network works through a strictly defined relation of authority and subordination — lord to vassal, patron to client, political boss to precinct captain. The modern left, uncomfortable with hierarchies of formal authority, tends to obscure these dispensations of concrete authority in favor of manufacturing a “hive mind,” a consensus-driven social unit that attains political strength through ideological uniformity.

    Effectively, what the modern college-bred left has produced is a novel means of maintaining political discipline, one that serves the same function as the Tammany Hall patronage system but modifies its processes to suit a culture of anxious, coddled, middle-class status strivers. The patronage racket has been replaced by what is here dubbed an Oedipus Racket, a system of ideological compliance built upon a vertical chain — not of hierarchical authority, but of psychological dependence.

    The control mechanism mirrors the Jungian reading of the Oedipus complex, in which a pathological caregiver — the devouring mother — deliberately deprives her victim — the infantilized child — of independent potency so that the child will never leave her and she can play her caregiving role in perpetuity. The child, whom Jung dubs a co-conspirator, accepts the arrangement, forgoing his autonomy so that he may be perpetually cared for. This has obvious parallels in left-wing politics, wherein a caregiving class — schoolteachers, bureaucrats, NGO hacks, and social workers — subverts the autonomy of its client class — migrant workers, the poor, and various social outcasts — so as to perpetuate their clients’ dependence on their caregivers.

    But there are subtler parallels. The caregiver class is simultaneously victim and offender in a chain of Oedipal relations. It functions as the Oedipal mother with respect to an infantilized, welfare-dependent underclass, yet at the same time, the caregiver class is itself infantilized by the vast institutional architecture that employs it: NGOs, universities, government departments, and professional associations. These institutions infantilize the official caretaker by absolving him of responsibility for the practical results of his activities. Instead, accountability is diffused within the vast institutional apparatus itself. Even as the bureaucracy relentlessly fails in the ostensible core mission, even as learning outcomes worsen, homelessness and crime increase, and housing diminishes, the bureaucrat himself remains a white-collar professional in good standing so long as he abides by protocol and ticks every box, analogous to how the ex-con receives his EBT card so long as he abides by his parole requirements.

    Just as the baseline Oedipal dynamic is maintained by keeping the underclass in a state of welfare dependency, the institutional Oedipal relation is achieved by undermining the individual agency and potency of the bureaucratic functionary. The minion is compelled to undergo over 20 years of education in which he learns nothing of practical value (and little of legitimate academic value), but is initiated into the discourse of leftish-managerial “bureaucratese.” This means that once funneled into the institutional apparatus, the bureaucrat is positioned as the infantilized child in the Oedipal conspiracy. He is dependent on the bureaucratic apparatus because he himself can contribute nothing of real value. He thus perpetuates the fiction of the institution’s social utility, adopting the ideological framework of the bureaucracy — the Oedipal mother — in exchange for employment and protection, even as these same institutions become malignant.

    One critical distinction between traditional patronage and the Oedipal left is that patronage systems are, at their core, transactional. The transaction is rarely on fair terms — it is more often a protection racket — yet it remains transactional in the sense that two distinct parties with disparate interests are commonly acknowledged, meaning that each party reserves the right of refusal should the arrangement become intolerable. Should King Richard II overstep a certain limit, Wat Tyler could organize a rebellion. Should Tony Soprano extort an excessive protection tax, the local pizza merchant could turn to the FBI or seek to defend himself. This is possible only insofar as each party in the patronage scheme recognizes his identity and interests as distinct from those of the other party.

    The Oedipal left, however, works under a different dynamic. The devouring mother — the institutional apparatus — seeks to subsume the identity of the infantilized child — the bureaucratic functionary — into her own. Meanwhile, the child subconsciously accepts becoming an extension of the mother’s identity because he has no potency as an individual, and where there is no potency, there is no autonomy, and hence no identity. The bureaucrat in himself is impotent; he can only act effectively in the world as an avatar of his institution. So the bureaucrat gives over his ineffectual personal autonomy to the potency and security of the Hive Mind. Because the Oedipal bureaucrat effectively assumes the identity of the devouring mother — the overarching institution — he cannot entertain any tacit right of refusal, as he has merged his identity with the bureaucratic hive.

    To illustrate, suppose a state of the American union were to thoroughly deinstitutionalize education, say through a comprehensively funded universal voucher program. What becomes of the education professional, schooled in such abominations as “Social Emotional Learning,” “Whole Language,” and “Mixed Literacy,” when the public rejects his services altogether and turns to the practical layman to teach math and reading He would effectively cease to be. At the very least, his professional identity would be obliterated.

    The Oedipal left is thus anxious that all human interaction should be mediated through institutional authority. The managerial left is existentially implicated in the legitimacy and authority of the institutional apparatus — the construct that affords it collective potency and identity through the bureaucratic hive. It is terrified at the prospect of interfacing with the world as an individual, without the shield of institutional authority and the protection of rank, as doing so would expose the falseness of the apparatus of officialdom where he takes his refuge.

    This manifests first in the form of pathological conformity, displayed most glaringly in the COVID/BLM era, as the managerial class would universally and instantly adopt whatever innovation was signaled by institutional leadership at the drop of a hat (including such linguistic atrocities as “Birthing Parent” and “Menstruating People”). More telling still is the extravagant rage and animus the Oedipal left directs against dissenters, such as the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, or the genteel liberals on the “Intellectual Dark Web” who protested left-wing excess as meekly and generously as they possibly could. What these dissenters did not understand was that the threat perceived by the Oedipal left was not that of any specific proposition or idea; the threat came from the idea that people might be received according to their individual cogency and competence, that the blanket of institutional protection might be whisked away, laying bare the managerial class’s impotence.

    Image via Pxhere.