Priceless.
The revolution eats its young.
At a growing number of campuses, professors now attach “trigger warnings” to texts that may upset students, and there is a campaign to eradicate “microaggressions,” or small social slights that might cause searing trauma.
These newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first p.c. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses.
Stanford recently canceled a performance of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson after protests by Native American students.
The show is a musical attack on Jackson, the Democratic Party, and America in the hateful spirit of Howard Zinn.
UCLA students staged a sit-in to protest microaggressions such as when a professor corrected a student’s decision to spell the word indigenous with an uppercase I — one example of many “perceived grammatical choices that in actuality reflect ideologies.”
A theater group at Mount Holyoke College recently announced it would no longer put on The Vagina Monologues in part because the material excludes women without vaginas.
The play (if you can call it that) was and is a radical feminist landmark, now given the deep six over its insensitivity to victims of that PC hoax, "sex reassignment surgery."
Some left bloggers have taken the trouble to prove Chait's point that liberalism is being seriously infected by this crap by bashing him and defending everything from rude heckling to actual crimes along a spectrum including communicating a threat, vandalism, breaking and entering, assault, destruction of property, etc.
It is the same as the defense of terrorism offered by the more radical left in days gone by.
It is asymmetrical warfare, the only way the powerless can fight back against the powerful, they say.
Reminds you of their ludicrous defense of their generally hateful and often lying propaganda that they are "speaking truth to power."
Except that their attacks are by no means all or even mostly attacks on power-holders, and in fact are generally attacks on people as powerless as themselves who just refuse to endorse or surrender to their psycho PC fanaticism.
The are attacking people for what they say, have said, or would say, sometimes to the point of actual violence, always with the aim of intimidation and pour encourager les autres, and regularly with the aim of ruining careers, taking jobs, destroying personal lives.
Who was it who descried "the politics of personal destruction"?
Oh, yes. Big Bill.
Chait offers this almost as a definition.
Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate.
Perfectly true, but it will not do as a definition because it leaves out the coercion, menace, threat, and frequently near and sometimes actual violence essential to the thing.
The entire aim of PC is coercive and brutal, and its targets are not limited to the extreme right, or even just the right.
As some of Chait's examples show, their view is that if you are not with them you are against them, and they treat you accordingly.
Chait, again.
[P]olitical correctness is not a rigorous commitment to social equality so much as a system of left-wing ideological repression.
Not only is it not a form of liberalism; it is antithetical to liberalism.
Indeed, its most frequent victims turn out to be liberals themselves.
Same old self-righteous left wing assholes.
But the term is older than that and the thing even older than the term.
I remember the 1960s.
And it can be traced back even further, being older than the New Left, as old as the Old Left.
Chait is aware of this history, though it is not and was not the entire Marxist left that took this view but only the revolutionary Marxist left, the Leninists and their progeny.
The Marxist left has always dismissed liberalism’s commitment to protecting the rights of its political opponents — you know, the old line often misattributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” — as hopelessly naïve.
If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place society’s unequal power relations.
Why respect the rights of the class whose power you’re trying to smash?
And so, according to Marxist thinking, your political rights depend entirely on what class you belong to.
The modern far left has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones.
. . . .
Liberals believe (or ought to believe) that social progress can continue while we maintain our traditional ideal of a free political marketplace where we can reason together as individuals.
Political correctness challenges that bedrock liberal ideal.
While politically less threatening than conservatism (the far right still commands far more power in American life), the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening.
It is an undemocratic creed.
Well, that.
And that anti-liberal, anti-democratic political authoritarianism, coercion, and violence just don't lead to the place liberals want, or ought to want, to go.
On the other hand, once upon a time liberals defended imperialism (J S Mill, for example) and even settler colonialism, even including displacement or expulsion of natives.
Pretty much where I am, actually.
Though I presume not Chait.
Although maybe.
Israel, after all, is the last successful European settler state in Africa.
On the other hand, the current left wave of disapproval of Israel's identity as a specifically Jewish state is using anti-racism and anti-nationalism to undermine its success.
I have no idea where Chait stands on that.
No comments:
Post a Comment