I'm currently planning a little review of Tom Kratman's work and it won't make any sense without an explanation of his weird little obsession with transnational progressivism or 'tranzis'. An explanation will be too large to go into the actual review, so I kind of need to separate it into its own section. So, there's a huge chance you're reading this to understand what I'm ranting about some time in the future.
Transnational Progressivism is a strange political concept and it's primarily due to its origins. It was first proposed by John Fonte in his The Ideological War Within The West written in 2006 and this is the first strange thing. Unlike every other political ideology I've ever heard of, Transnational Progressivism is the only one ever named by its opponents. Marxism, Leninism, Communism, Liberalism and Conservatism are all names at least partially coined by their members. They're proudly owned by their adherents and this is where Transnational Progressivism gets a little weird. It's a label that seems to be applied solely by tranzis' opponents.
So what exactly is Transnational Progressivism? Fonte defines eight policy areas that are at its core:
1)The ascribed group over the individual citizen (people are part of an assigned 'group' rather than an independent citizen),
2)Grouproportionalism as the goal of fairness (assigned groups should be proportionally represented in all areas of life)
3)The values of all dominant institutes to be changed to reflect the perspectives of the victim groups (all institutes should reflect not just the dominant world view, but also the world view of all participating groups)
4)The demographic imperative (the standard paradigm of immigrants assimilating into the national culture should be replaced with an encouragement to diversity)
5)The redefinition of democracy and democratic ideals (Replace the idea of the democratic majority with the sharing of power between different groups)
6)Deconstruction of national narratives and national symbols of democratic nation-states in the West (the folding of national identities into a more inclusive structure)
7)Promotion of the concept of postnational citizenship (decouple the concept of citizenship from nation-states)
8)The idea of Transnationalism as a major conceptual tool (transnationalism as the next stage of multicultural ideology)
A quick problem immediately strikes once one reads through Fonte's list: many of these concepts are almost completely without definition or attributed to a handful of relatively innocuous pieces of work. Take, for example, number 7. The only evidence given is a single line written by Law Professor Linda Bosniak. There's no context given, nor is it mentioned that a quick Google search shows that Professor Bosniak's work is almost entirely in the area of US immigration and the rights of migrant/immigrant workers. This is scarcely someone interested in rewriting global democratic structures.
This kind of cherry picking is endemic throughout the whole work. Fonte's opening example is the asking of the UN, by fifty American NGOs, to censor the US for its discrimination. Fonte seems to find that because the NGOs' requests were ignored or stymied by federal officials, they should have simply put up and shut up, rather than publicly appealing to the UN for help. It's a fairly nonsensical argument, almost akin to claiming that a whistle-blower should take his problem to his manager and then shut up when told to.
There's also a massive streak of American Exceptionalism running through the work. While 'examples' of Transnational Progressivism are taken from all over the Western world (mainly from the UK, EU and Israel) they are only presented as a threat to the US. The ideology only really seems to come across as the enemy of US Constitution, not the larger world.
Of course one simple paper isn't enough to define my problems with the concept of Transnational Progressivism. David Carr coined the short term 'Tranzi' and immediately adds to the concept when he observes that many tranzis are:
'high-level statesmen, the wealthy and the heads of multibillion-dollar corporations. Their behaviour cannot be explained away in terms of the Marxist "Class struggle.'
Because of course, all left-wing effort is directed towards the 'Marxist Class Struggle' and that's something only the poor care about. It has nothing to do with a rich man's desire to do something good in the world, not at all.
Where things get a little weird is in a fundamental shift from Fonte's words, to the words of his followers. Fonte's three works on Transnational Progressivism (link for the Wikipedia article on the subject with all three papers linked) always point out that Transnational Progressivism is a political ideology and opposed to traditional liberal democracry. His supporters, however, view tranzi-dom in a far darker light. Take this article written about Transnational Progressivism (the second result on a Google search). Almost immediately, the author states that:
Fonte is quick to forewarn us that this coming global administration will be no respecter of our freedoms and suggests that some form of racialist police state will be imposed.
I've browsed through Fonte's papers and I can't really find anything of the kind. Fonte is worried about the increase in multiculturalism and the effect on democracy, but he never suggests, for example, that the elites will encourage the historically oppressed to get even with their 'oppressors'. Nor does he suggest that the police will side with the 'oppressed' against the 'dominant'. To be honest, this sort of thing is reaching.
This strikes at the heart of my problem. Transnational Progressivism is a historical successor to the Red Scare of the Cold War and bears many of its trappings. There is no-one defining themselves as a tranzi, only people labelling others as such. Their 'ideology' has been stretched into a kind of conspiracy. And that's really what the problem is with tranzi-dom: It's a conspiracy theory, no different from bleating about George Soros or claiming that Obama's a secret Muslim.
