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Liberals have to be the dumbest people ever to exist. You can't fix stupid. Or liberals. May I present the ultimate useful idiot; Mr. Bret Weinstein. I don't know how it is even possible to be as stupid as Weinstein. It's one of those mysteries of life, I guess.

Remember, folks, this is the same moron who, after little activist students kicked his dumbass out of Evergreen College, came up with the "Unity 2020" program where we can all get along. I swear, you cannot fix stupid. Or a liberal. But I repeat myself.

Krunoslav 9 May 28
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I think people like him can't except that they opened the gates and let the Diversity, Inclusion and Equality radicals take over every institution.

To be honest I don't know myself what is going on. There are too many players and a lot of diverse agendas. Communists, Fascists, Socialists, Globalists, Corporatists, the Administratives State, to name a few of the groups that have taken advantage of the complete collapse of traditional values.

It seems to have really got rolling with Obama. The moral panic associated with racism put him in office and from there everyone who fills that traditional values alienated them somehow has tried to feed off of the need people feel to be "open minded". Moral panics are now the order of the day. If you find homosexuality, transexuality, socialism, vaccine mandates, so on and so forth disagreeable you are now considered a bad person. One thing that all moral panics have in common is that they seem to always become irrational in scope to the point of absurdity.

wolfhnd Level 8 May 28, 2023

“I'd like the revolution to stop exactly where it benefits me most, please.”

I think that is the comment that nails it. Just like Marry Harrington's of the world. A life long feminist that is no longer the states favorite daughters, because the state as it is true to its nature have found trans little brother that gets all the praise, privileges and attention.

So now you have people like Marry Harrington, a life long feminist, that says she is a "reactionary feminist" now. lol Basically, she wants to go back to the mid 1990's where she has no threat from other fake "victims" and its states favorite daughter. Liberal morons like Bret Weinstein and people like him are the same: “I'd like the revolution to stop exactly where it benefits me most, please.”

Academia career. Where they can be dumbest people alive and get paid as if they are experts and great thinkers and have books published and enjoy nice safe, career and secured retirement.

The problem is that in the oppression Olympics, these creatures of incentives are competing with each other for the favors of the state. Which off course has no money of its own, and has to rob working people to give to these parasites.

"I think people like him can't accept that they opened the gates and let the Diversity, Inclusion and Equality radicals take over every institution. "

The liberal ideology is a contemporary religion. I disagree with the viewpoint of the progressive modern liberals that pursuing religious freedom is a worthwhile objective, because it is a false premise. Liberals impose their own religion upon other religions because they believe it to be the only true faith and the most moral of them all. So much so, they believe that simply self-identifying as a liberal is enough to be morally superior. They outsource the responsibility of personal morality by unloading it onto the liberal ideology itself. This is expanded by the Liberal dogma of the “doctrine of universal human rights.” Those who disagree with it are rarely tolerated; hence, those that are more dogmatic among the liberals, consider even challenging the human rights doctrine to be blasphemous.

By its very nature, liberalism is self-destructive. It is very cynical about old systems on the right and very naive about new systems on the left.

“In the end, the actions of such liberals have the effect---again unwittingly---of continuing to cover for the goals of the extreme Left. Yet again, the soft Left is helping to conceal the hard Left whether it realizes it or not.” ― Paul Kengor, Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century

In a sense, the concept of God has been taken over by the state (communist party). They take away private proprietary so no one is independent economically. They attack family units because the family could be the reason people have more loyalty than the state.

That is why they see religions like Christianity, Islam, and others as competitors in terms of institutions, but also because, like a family, they represent a loyalty dilemma.

They also don't allow individual morality, and so they say morality is no more. This is because if there is a sense of morality by the individual, then it can be used as a perspective from which to judge the actions of the party, and the party is never wrong.

I think Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his speech “Warning to the West,” has summarized communism in this manner.

“Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat ax. All that is subtle in human psychology and in the structure of society (which is even more complex), all of this is reduced to crude economic processes. The whole created being—man—is reduced to matter. It is characteristic that Communism is so devoid of arguments that it has none to advance against its opponents in our Communist countries. It lacks arguments and hence there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp, and insane asylums with forced confinement.”

And while these various movements might be morphed into many shapes and forms and overlap each other, in the end its DNA can be traced back to liberalism. The granddaddy of them all. It is what creates the conditions, (rights instead of morals, state instead of god, the people's state, dogma of egalitarianism, and utopia as goal, as well as completely ignoring human nature in attempt to create a new kind of man, the radical individual that is detached from all that traditionally made use human )

Liberalism sets up all that and than its derivatives we see today, use the same basic foundations just more and more radical manifestation. Along the way they take ideas from all places that benefit their goal. They are all anti human nature and utopian. All these ideologies see humans as something that is the job of the state to shape into whatever idealistic form of human they have envisioned and when all are the same than utopia will be reached. Here on earth. Where there is no racism, inequality, planet is saved etc.

This goal, this utopian if not dystopian goal is seen as the ultimate goal and purpose, hence means justify the end. All that prevented previous religions to become mass murders in this way, are now permitted and encouraged to reach their goal. So they see themselves as on the right side of history and everyone opposing this utopian goal is not just of different mind, but an evil sub human that must be either converted or destroyed.

In George Orwell's dystopian classic 1984, doublethink is the act of holding, simultaneously, two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely. Doublethink requires using logic against logic or suspending disbelief in the contradiction.

The three slogans of the party — “War Is Peace; Freedom Is Slavery; Ignorance Is Strength” — are obvious examples of doublethink. The act of doublethink also occurs in more subtle details throughout the novel.

That is how they keep themselves morality correct in their view even when they deliberately oppress, lie, steal, cheat etc.

All Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless. But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.

“It is astonishing that Communism has been writing about itself in the most open way, in black and white, for 125 years, and even more openly, more candidly in the beginning. The book Communist Manifesto, for instance, which everyone knows by name and which almost no one takes the trouble to read, contains even more terrible things than what has actually been done. It is perfectly amazing. The whole world can read, everyone is literate, yet somehow no one wants to understand. Humanity acts as if it does not understand what Communism is, as if it does not want to understand, is not capable of understanding.” ― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West

“It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world. Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.” ― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party,” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“It is quite true that Marx said that religion is the opium of the people. But of course we now know that Marxism is the crack cocaine of the people.”
― Douglas Wilson

"...we may assert that liberalism believes man's nature to be not fixed but changing, with an unlimited or at any rate indefinitely large potential for positive (good, favorable, progressive) development. This may be contrasted with the traditional belief, expressed in the theological doctrines of Original Sin and the real existence of the Devil, that human nature had a permanent, unchanging essence, and that man is partly corrupt as well as limited in his potential. "Man, according to liberalism, is born ignorant, not wicked," declares Professor J. Salwyn Schapiro, writing as a liberal on liberalism.

I rather think that the attitude towards tradition furnishes the most accurate single shibboleth for distinguishing liberals from conservatives; and still more broadly, the Left from the Right, since with respect to change the revolutionary and reactionary are merely pushing the respective attitude of liberal and conservative toward their limits.

Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide. When once this initial and final sentence is understood, everything about liberalism - the beliefs, emotions and values associated with it, the nature of its enchantment, its practical record, its future - falls into place."

― James Burnham, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism

Liberalism discards all traditional values and moral ties, in assertion that they were all historically oppressive which is not true, but liberalism to justify its own namesake must argue for that fiction. Once the oppression has been established in the minds of the people, it bribes them by saying to them they will participate as body politics and have equal rights, granted by state. Hence it argues it is liberating people from the history or oppression itself, giving them equal rights under the law and promotes chasing utopia where there is no more inequality, racism or whatever.

“Captured by the ideological animus, both socialist and liberal-democratic art abandoned the criterion of beauty - considered anachronistic and of dubious political value - and replaced it with the criterion of correctness. …egalitarianism and despotism do not exclude each other, but usually go hand in hand.

To a certain degree, equality invites despotism, because in order to make all members of a society equal, and then to maintain this equality for a long period of time, it is necessary to equip the controlling institutions with exceptional power so they can stamp out any potential threat to equality in every sector of the society and any aspect of human life: to paraphrase a well-known sentence by one of Dostoyevsky’s characters, ‘We start with absolute equality and we end up with absolute despotism.’ Some call it a paradox of equality: the more equality one wants to introduce, the more power one must have; the more power one has, the more one violates the principle of equality; the more one violates the principle of equality, the more one is in a position to make the world egalitarian.

Liberal democracy is a powerful unifying mechanism, blurring differences between people and imposing uniformity of views, behavior, and language. But it does not require much effort to see that the dialogue in liberal democracy is of a peculiar kind because its aim is to maintain the domination of the mainstream and not to undermine it. A deliberation is believed to make sense only if the mainstream orthodoxy is sure to win politically. Today's 'dialogue' politics are a pure form of the right-is-might politics, cleverly concealed by the ostentatiously vacuous rhetoric of all-inclusiveness.

The illusion they cherish of being a brave minority heroically facing the whole world, false as it is, gives them nevertheless a strange sense of comfort: they feel absolutely safe, being equipped with the most powerful political tools in today's world but at the same time priding themselves on their courage and decency, which are more formidable the more awesome the image of the enemy becomes.

The ideological man is thus both absolutely suspicious and absolutely enthusiastic. There seems to be no idea under the sun that he would not put into question and make an object of derision, skepticism, or contempt, no idea that he would not reduce to an offshoot of hidden instincts, mundane interests, biological drives, and psychological complexes. Hence he is likely to despise reason as an autonomous faculty, to downgrade lofty ideals, and to debunk the past, seeing everywhere the same ideological mystification.

But at the same time, he lives in a constant state of mobilization for a better world. His mouth is full of noble slogans about brotherhood, freedom, and justice, and with every word he makes it clear that he knows which side is right and that he is ready to sacrifice his entire existence for the sake of its victory. The peculiar combination of both attitudes--merciless distrust and unwavering affirmation--gives him an incomparable sense of moral self-confidence and intellectual self-righteousness.”

― Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies

Are you factually correct, or politically correct?

“The cultural situation in America today (and indeed in all Western societies) is determined by the cultural earthquake of the nineteen-sixties, the consequences of which are very much in evidence. What began as a counter-culture only some thirty years ago has achieved dominance in elite culture and, from the bastions of the latter (in the educational system, the media, the higher reaches of the law, and key positions within government bureaucracy), has penetrated both popular culture and the corporate world. It is characterized by an amalgam of both sentiments and beliefs that cannot be easily catalogued, though terms like 'progressive,' 'emancipators or 'liberationist' serve to describe it. Intellectually, this new culture is legitimated by a number of loosely connected ideologies— leftover Marxism, feminism and other sexual identity doctrines, racial and ethnic separatism, various brands of therapeutic gospels and of environmentalism. An underlying theme is antagonism toward Western culture in general and American culture in particular. A prevailing spirit is one of intolerance and a grim orthodoxy, precisely caught in the phrase "political correctness.” ― Peter L. Berger

“Political correctness is a war on noticing.”
― Steve Sailer

Political Correctness origins... from the book Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture, 1st Edition by Geoffrey Hughes (2011)

The history of political correctness is more complex, first emerging in Communist terminology as a policy concept denoting the orthodox party line of Chinese Communism as enunciated by Mao Tse-Tung in the 1930s. This we may call the hard political or literal sense. It was then borrowed by the American New Left in the 1960s, but with a more rhetorical than strictly programmatic sense, before becoming adopted and current in Britain. It is essentially a modern coinage by a minority, deriving from politically correct, dating from about 1970.

“Fascism” has followed the same semantic pattern, being transformed from its strict Italian political origins to its broader sense of dictatorship and conformity. Roger Scruton has a notable essay on the topic in Untimely Tracts (1987). Today both “Puritan” and “Fascist” are, of course, highly critical terms. Paul Johnson defined political correctness as “liberal fascism” (cited in Kramer and Kimball, 1995, p. xii).

As political correctness has become more fashionable, so it has become less clearly defined, as is typical with such phrases when their currency broadens. It now covers a whole range of individual, social, cultural, and political issues, and topics as diverse as fatness, appearance, stupidity, diet, crime, prostitution, race, homosexuality, disability, animal rights, the environment, and still others. It has taken on the characteristics of a buzzword, becoming a fashionable phrase without a clear meaning, but one which nevertheless invokes certain clear responses, hostile or positive, depending on context. It is a semantic sign of orthodoxy with not one, but several party lines.

Obviously, not all of these listed issues are of equal social importance, especially in terms of values and morality. Yet often they are accorded similar weight and seriousness. Indeed “diversity,” one of the new key terms in the vocabulary, is stretched to accommodate this range of social problems and agendas.

From its first manifestations in America, political correctness has had a double agenda, being a combination of freedom and constraint. The “political” aspect involved opening up new cultural horizons, but “correctness” brought conformity in accepting new agendas, new limits on freedom of expression, and a general avoidance of certain controversial topics.

One feature of political correctness has been the replacement of cultural élitism by relativism. This is not entirely a bad thing. The days are certainly over when writers could describe themselves, as T. S. Eliot famously did, as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion.” Yet Eliot’s damning comment on “the indomitable spirit of mediocrity” (from his 1949 play The Cocktail Party, Act I, scene ii) surely applies to much modern culture.

As early as 1936, incidentally, George Orwell first referred scathingly to a ‘Mickey Mouse universe’. Today we experience the “Disneyfication” of everything. Moreover, Roger Scruton has recently identified what he calls “absolutist relativism,” pointing out the “deeply paradoxical nature of the new relativism. While holding that all cultures are equal and judgment between them absurd, the new culture . . . is in the business of persuading us that Western culture, and the traditional curriculum are racist, ethnocentric, patriarchal, and therefore beyond the pale of political acceptability” (Scruton, 2007, p. 84).

You are correct that there are a lot of isms not easy to classify behind all the mess. But I would argue that until we get rid of liberalism and liberals, making it impossible position to have in any western society, its hard to image how they will stop any kind of push back and further than where they benefit the most in the hirearchy of victimhood. And because they will protect the more radical left, eventually we will be back where we are now, or worse. Hence liberalism must go. Unlike Assad who stayed.

Political correctness became part of the modern lexicon and, many would say, part of the modern mind-set, as a consequence of the wide-ranging public debate which started on campuses in the United States from the late 1980s. Since nearly 50 percent of Americans go to college, the impact of the controversy was widespread. It was out of this ferment that most of the new vocabulary was generated or became current. However, political correctness is not one thing and does not have a simple history. As a concept it predates the debate and is a complex, discontinuous, and protean phenomenon which has changed radically, even over the past two decades. During just that time it has ramified from its initial concerns with education and the curriculum into numerous agendas, reforms, and issues concerning race, culture, gender, disability, the environment, and animal rights.

Linguistically it started as a basically idealistic, decent-minded, but slightly Puritanical intervention to sanitize the language by suppressing some of its uglier prejudicial features, thereby undoing some past injustices or “leveling the playing fields” with the hope of improving social relations.

It is now increasingly evident in two opposing ways. The first is the expanding currency of various key words (to be listed shortly), some of a programmatic nature, such as diversity, organic, and multiculturalism. Contrariwise, it has also manifested itself in speech codes which suppress prejudicial language, disguising or avoiding certain old and new taboo topics. Most recently it has appeared in behavioral prohibitions concerning the environment and violations of animal rights. As a result of these transitions it has become a misnomer, being concerned with neither politics nor correctness as those terms are generally understood.

Political correctness inculcates a sense of obligation or conformity in areas which should be (or are) matters of choice. Nevertheless, it has had a major influence on what is regarded as “acceptable” or “appropriate” in language, ideas, behavioral norms, and values. But “doing the right thing” is, of course, an oversimplification. There is an antithesis at the core of political correctness, since it is liberal in its aims but often illiberal in its practices: hence it generates contradictions like positive discrimination and liberal orthodoxy.

The origins are in many ways the strangest feature. “Political Correctness is the natural continuum of the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don’t seem to see this.” So wrote Doris Lessing in the Sunday Times (May 10, 1992), continuing in this vein in her trenchant essay “Censorship” (2004), which is quoted among the epigraphs above.

“Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.”
“Yes, Dimitry, it is. But it is politically correct.”

“The point of Political Correctness is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it imposes, but about the imposition itself. Tacit collaboration by millions who bite their lip is even more essential than lip service by thousands of favor seekers. Hence, to stimulate at least passive cooperation, the party strives to give the impression that “everybody” is already on its side. ”

― Angelo Codevilla (The Rise of Political Correctness)

She was unambiguous and certainly right: political correctness first emerged in the diktats of Mao Tse-Tung, then chairman of the Chinese Soviet Republic, in the 1930s. But over half a century later it had mutated, rematerializing in a totally different environment, in an advanced secular capitalist society in which freedom of speech had been underwritten by the Constitution for two centuries, and in American universities, of all places. As Christopher Hitchens acutely observed: “For the first time in American history, those who call for an extension of rights are also calling for an abridgement of speech” (in Dunant, 1994, pp. 137–8).

Far from being a storm in an academic inkwell, political correctness became a major public issue engaged in by a whole variety of participants including President George Bush (briefly), public intellectuals, major academics, and journalists of all hues and persuasions. Some claim that the debate was a manufactured rather than a natural phenomenon, and that political correctness started as a chimera or imaginary monster invented by those on the Right of the political spectrum to discredit those who wished to change the status quo. These matters are taken up in chapter 2 “The Origins and the Debate.” The fact is that the debate certainly took place. Exchanges were often acrimonious, focusing on numerous general issues of politics, ideology, race, gender, sexual orientation, culture, the curriculum, freedom of expression and its curtailment and so on.

This work attempts a detailed semantic analysis of how the resources of the language have been deployed, especially in forms of semantic engineering and the exploitation of different registers, both to formulate the new agendas, values, and key words of political correctness and to subvert them. A whole new semantic environment has come into being, through creation, invention, co-option, borrowing, and publicity: a representative sample of this new world of words includes lookism, phallocratic, other, significant other, sex worker, multicultural, herstory, disadvantaged, homophobic, waitron, wimmin, differently abled, to Bork, physically challenged, substance abuse, fattist, Eurocentric, Afrocentric, demographics, issue, carbon footprint, glass ceiling, pink plateau, and first people, as well as code abbreviations like DWEM, PWA, HN, and neo-con.

These are not simply new words, in the way that Shakespeare’s incarnadine, procreant, exsufflicate, be-all and end-all, unmanned, assassination, and yesterdays were original forms four centuries ago. They are more like Orwell’s artificial coinages in Newspeak, for instance, thought crime, joycamp, and doublethink.

Let us briefly consider a fairly recent focused linguistic intervention, the attempt by feminists to alter or enlarge the stock of personal pronouns and to feminize agent nouns like chairman in order to diminish the dominance of the male gender, traditionally upheld in the grammatical dictum that “the male subsumes the female.” Proposals for forms such as s/he were successful in raising consciousness, but produced few long-term survivals.

Another comparison can be made with radical political discourse. Communism attempted to establish a whole new ideological discourse by means of neologisms like proletariate, semantic extensions like bourgeois, and by co-opting words like imperialist and surplus. Hard-line Communists still call each other “comrade” and refer to “the workers,” “the collective,” “capital,” and the “party line,” terms which are regarded by outsiders (who now form the majority) with irony and humor. For the days and locales when Communists could impose semantic norms on populations have long disappeared. They do however survive and eveolve today in contemporary identity politics.

There are three characteristics which make political correctness a unique sociolinguistic phenomenon. Unlike previous forms of orthodoxy, both religious and political, it is not imposed by some recognized authority like the Papacy, the Politburo, or the Crown, but is a form of semantic engineering and censorship not derivable from one recognized or definable source, but a variety. There is no specific ideology, although it focuses on certain inequalities and disadvantaged people in society and on correcting prejudicial attitudes, more especially on the demeaning words which express them.

Politically correct language is the product and formulation of a militant minority which remains mysteriously unlocatable. It is not the spontaneous creation of the speech community, least of all any particular deprived sector of it. Disadvantaged groups, such as the deaf, the blind, or the crippled (to use the traditional vocabulary), do not speak for themselves, but are championed by other influential public voices.

In these respects political correctness has a very different dynamic from the earlier high-profile advocates of, say, feminism or black consciousness in the USA. The feminists of the second wave, such as Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Gloria Steinem, and Susan Sontag, were highly articulate, individual, and outspoken controversialists who did not always agree with each other, characteristics shared by Martin Luther King, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X. By contrast, the anonymous agenda-manipulators of political correctness are more difficult to identify. These features make the conformity to political correctness the more mysterious.

Paradoxically, political correctness manifested itself rapidly and most strongly, not in political parties, but on university campuses; not in the closed societies of Eastern Europe, but in free Western societies, especially in America, the only country in the world where freedom of speech is a constitutional right. Much play was accordingly made about the rights enshrined in the First Amendment, their “ownership” and their proper application.

The primary idealistic assumption is that of equality. This is stronger in the American ideology, underpinned by the proposition that “All men are created equal” (in the Declaration of Independence, 1776) than in the British political scheme, which has no written constitution; accommodates monarchy, ranks of nobility, and a class system, admits deference, accepting the more realistic and practical notion that all are equal before the law. A major problem, as always, is how to achieve “equality,” that is, to redress historical inequalities, at a particular moment in time.

As political correctness has become more fashionable, so it has become less clearly defined, as is typical with such phrases when their currency broadens. It now covers a whole range of individual, social, cultural, and political issues, and topics as diverse as fatness, appearance, stupidity, diet, crime, prostitution, race, homosexuality, disability, animal rights, the environment, and still others. It has taken on the characteristics of a buzzword, becoming a fashionable phrase without a clear meaning, but one which nevertheless invokes certain clear responses, hostile or positive, depending on context. It is a semantic sign of orthodoxy with not one, but several party lines.

Obviously, not all of these listed issues are of equal social importance, especially in terms of values and morality. Yet often they are accorded similar weight and seriousness. Indeed “diversity,” one of the new key terms in the vocabulary, is stretched to accommodate this range of social problems and agendas.

From its first manifestations in America, political correctness has had a double agenda, being a combination of freedom and constraint. The “political” aspect involved opening up new cultural horizons, but “correctness” brought conformity in accepting new agendas, new limits on freedom of expression, and a general avoidance of certain controversial topics.

The same opposing qualities are encapsulated in the formulations “progressive orthodoxy” and “positive discrimination.” In his survey of 1992, Paul Berman gave a dismal picture of “an atmosphere of campus repression”

On a broader front, Kenneth Minogue argued that “European civilization has been attacked and conquered from within, without anyone quite realizing what has happened. We may laugh at political correctness – some people even deny that it exists – but it is a manacle round our hands” (Minogue, 2001).

More condemning is the view of P. D. James: “I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism” (Paris Review, 1995).

— Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture, 1st Edition by Geoffrey Hughes (2011)

(Political Correctness) Continued..... INTRODUCTION: THE DEBATE AND ITS ORIGINS

But the worst thing they do, according to the accusations, the thing that arouses so much angry resentment, is generate an atmosphere of campus repression. In the name of “sensitivity” to others and under pain of being denounced as a sexist or racist, the postmodern radicals require everyone around them to adhere to their own codes of speech and behavior. Professors and students who remain outside the new movement have to walk on eggshells, ever reminding themselves to say “high school women” instead of “high school girls” or a hundred other politically incorrect phrases. Already the zealots of political correctness have intimidated a handful of well-respected professors into dropping courses that touch on controversial topics. They have succeeded in imposing official speech codes on a large number of campuses. And the resulting atmosphere—the prissiness of it, the air of caution that many people in academic settings have adopted, the new habit of using one language in private and a different and euphemistic one in public—has finally come to resemble, according to the accusers, the odious McCarthy era of the 1950s. Except this time the intimidation originates on the left.

The main accusation is summed up by the title of a 1986 article from Commentary magazine: “The Campus: 'An Island of Repression in a Sea of Freedom’" (by Chester E. Finn, Jr.). But there are secondary accusations too. The repression, bad enough in the universities, is said to be spreading to the museums, where the political slant of the new ideas has a disastrous effect on art, and to the cultural journalism of a beleaguered politically correct city like Boston. And still worse, the same trends have made the fatal leap to the curriculum committees of public school education.

Aspects of the debate turned up in other countries too. There was a battle at Cambridge University in 1981 when university authorities more or less declined to make room for some of the new literary theories. France saw the biggest arguments of all—measured in ink spilled and probable influence (once the news of these arguments begins to spread into other languages), with the subjects ranging from the influence and politics of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to the new glass pyramid at the Louvre to the meaning of Third World revolution.

What was new, then, in the American controversy over political correctness in the early 1990s? A few things, certainly. The name was new. “Politically correct” was originally an approving phrase on the Leninist left to denote someone who steadfastly toed the party line.

“Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.”
“Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.”
(The Rise of Political Correctness)”
― Angelo Codevilla

Then it evolved into “P.C.,” an ironic phrase among wised-up leftists to denote someone whose line-toeing fervor was too much to bear. Only in conjunction with the P C. debate itself did the phrase get picked up by people who had no fidelity to radicalism at all, but who relished the nasty syllables for their twist of irony. Apart from this phrase, some of the particulars had a fresh aspect: the focus on campus speech codes, and the amusing experience of watching people on the right argue for the First Amendment and people on the left against it. The way that certain liberals and old-school leftists joined the neoconservatives in making several of the arguments was also new, and perhaps quite significant, since previous debates tended to observe a chaste division of left and right.

Yet at bottom, the P C. debate was just a continuation of an argument that is more than a decade old. And the longevity of this argument, the way it keeps reappearing in different forms, growing instead of shrinking, producing best-selling books about university education every couple of years, its international dimension, the heat and fury—all this should tell us that something big and important is under discussion. How to specify that big and important thing is not so easy, though. The closer you examine the argument over political correctness, the more it begins to look like one of Paul de Man’s literary interpretations, where everything is a puzzle without a solution. No three people agree about the meaning of central terms like “deconstruction,” “difference,” “multiculturalism,” or “poststructuralism.” Every participant carries around his own definitions, the way that on certain American streets every person packs his own gun. And when you take these numberless definitions into consideration, the entire argument begins to look like ... what?

I would say it looks like the Battle of Waterloo as described by Stendhal. A murky fog hangs over the field. Now and then a line of soldiers marches past. Who are they? Which army do they represent? They may be Belgian deconstructionists from Yale, or perhaps the followers of Lionel Trilling in exile from Columbia. Perhaps they are French mercenaries. It is impossible to tell.

The fog thickens. Shots go off. The debate is unintelligible. But it is noisy!

What explains the confusion? One explanation—there are others—lies in the peculiar history of certain very radical ideas that came out of the sixties’ left, both in this country (USA) and in France. The left-wing uprisings of circa 1968 had two phases, which were in perfect discord, like two piano strings vibrating against each other. The first phase was an uprising on behalf of the ideals of liberal humanism—an uprising on behalf of the freedom of the individual against a soulless system. The second phase was the opposite, as least philosophically. It was a revolt against liberal humanism. It said, in effect: Liberal humanism is a deception. Western-style democracy, rationalism, objectivity, and the autonomy of the individual are slogans designed to convince the downtrodden that subordination is justice.

This second phase, the phase of ultra-radicalism, received a supremely sophisticated expression at the hands of various Paris philosophers, in the theories that can be called postmodern or poststructuralist. Or maybe it’s better (since everyone argues over what is the correct label) to call these theories “ '68 Philosophy,” as suggested by two of the younger Paris thinkers, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. The theories were, in any case, something other than mild doctrines of social reform. They were extravaganzas of cynicism. They were angry theories (though coolly expressed), hard to read, tangled, more poetic than logical. They were by no means internally consistent, one theory with the next. But if they had a single gist, it was this: Despite the claims of humanist thought, the individual is not free to make his own decisions, nor is the world what it appears to be. Instead, we and the world are permeated by giant, hidden, impersonal structures, the way that human forms in Invasion of the Body Snatchers are inhabited by extraterrestrial beings.

The many dazzlements of '68 Philosophy were never any use in addressing mundane questions like these. The great god of the Paris thinkers was Martin Heidegger, who was second to none in holding Western rationalism and humanism responsible for all the unhappiness of modern life and for hinting at millenarian alternatives. But the alternative he ended up embracing was the Nazism of Adolf Hitler. Of course, the Paris ultra-radicals who imbibed the theories of '68 Philosophy were anything but right wing. Yet there was nothing in their leftism to prevent a substantial number of them from tilting to an opposite extreme and celebrating dictators like Mao Zedong, so long as the horrors of liberal civilization were being opposed. For the whole point of postmodern theorizing was, after all, to adopt positions that were so far out, so wild, as to blow your mind.

In Paris, the '68 theories had their day, which lasted well into the late seventies and beyond. Then a new generation of writers came along, the people who were students in ’68 but came into adulthood only in the calmer years that followed—writers like Ferry, Renaut, Pascal Bruckner, Alain Finkielkraut (and writing in English, the late J. G. Merquior), who worried about the mind-blowing ultra-radicalism of the older generation. These younger writers began to suspect that '68 Philosophy, in turning so ferociously against liberalism, sometimes bore a closer relation to the old German romantic philosophies of the far right (the cult of irrationalism, the eagerness to disparage universal ideas of rights, etc.) than anyone seemed to imagine when the theories were in vogue. They worried that by carrying skepticism to extremes, the '68 Philosophers were turning into a species of idiot, the sort of people who can no longer make sensible judgments because they stumble around wondering: Is that a door? Is that a window? The younger writers raised an eyebrow at the muddy prose style, too, and suspected, as Merquior commented (citing Pope), that..

Much was believed, but little understood, and to be dull was construed to be good.

The history of leftism’s ultra-radical phase in America was very different. The sixties’ revolt against liberalism in America was a matter more of action than of theory. Political liberalism seemed to have pushed America into Vietnam. Liberalism seemed incapable of redressing the grievances of black America. It seemed to have failed—and radicals responded simply by going outside the liberal way of doing things.

They turned away from the liberal civil rights movement, away from the liberal Democrats and the unions and the social democratic intellectuals, and they took actions and built organizations of their own. And among these ultraradical efforts, the most important, the ones that made a permanent change in American life, were the sundry campaigns that arose at the end of the sixties and eventually came to be known as “identity politics”—the movements for women’s rights, for gay and lesbian liberation, for various ethnic revivals, and for black nationalism (which had different origins but was related nonetheless).

The secret of these movements, their genius, was simply to invent alternative personalities and encourage people to adopt them. The radical left fell apart after a few years in America just as in France, mostly because it became too extreme for its own good. But the identity-politics movements remained. They were useful, even indispensable, to their own adherents. And they were adaptable. They didn’t stay forever locked in a war with political liberalism; they pushed their way into the Democratic party and the general culture, and they became permanent features of American life.

The May 1968 events in France refers to the volatile, two-month period of civil unrest throughout France punctuated by demonstrations, major general strikes, and occupations of universities and factories. At its height, the events brought the economy of France almost to a halt. The protests reached such a point that political leaders feared civil war or revolution; the national government itself briefly ceased to function after President Charles de Gaulle secretly fled France for a few hours. The protests spurred an artistic movement, with songs, imaginative graffiti, posters, and slogans.

The unrest began with a series of student occupation protests against capitalism, consumerism, American imperialism and traditional institutions, values and order. It then spread to factories with strikes involving 11 million workers, more than 22% of the total population of France at the time, for two continuous weeks. The movement was characterized by its spontaneous and decentralized wildcat disposition; this created contrast and sometimes even conflict between itself and the establishment, trade unions and workers' parties. It was the largest general strike ever attempted in France, and the first nationwide wildcat general strike.

The student occupations and wildcat general strikes initiated across France were met with forceful confrontation by university administrators and police. The de Gaulle administration's attempts to quell those strikes by police action only inflamed the situation further, leading to street battles with the police in the Latin Quarter, Paris, followed by the spread of general strikes and occupations throughout France. De Gaulle fled to a French military base in Germany, and after returning dissolved the National Assembly, and called for new parliamentary elections for 23 June 1968. Violence evaporated almost as quickly as it arose. Workers went back to their jobs, and when the elections were held in June, the Gaullist party emerged stronger than before.

"May 68" affected French society for decades afterward. It is considered to this day as a cultural, social and moral turning point in the history of the country. As Alain Geismar—one of the leaders of the time—later pointed out, the movement succeeded "as a social revolution, not as a political one"

"For start the thing that most struck me about those students in the street was the sentimentality of their anger, it was all about themselves, it wasn't about anything objective. Here they were the spoiled middle-class baby boomers who never had any real difficulties to cope with, shouting their heads off in the street and burning the cars belonging to ordinary proletarians who they pretended to be defending against some imaginary oppresive structures erected by the bourgeoisie. The whole thing was a complete fiction based on antiquated ideas of Karl Marx, ideas which were already redundant in the mid nineteenth century. They were enacting out, if you like it, a self-scripted drama in which the central character was themselves." ― Sir Roger Scruton

True in 1960's France, as it was in U.S. and still true in 2023. Except now it has become a huge multi trillion business worldview. From color revolutions to take over country and do regime changes, to domestic subversion of all traditional values that might one day oppose the state apparatus to ESG and DEI programs to bend the corporate world to its will and force corporate sponsorship of these movements.

May 1968 is an important reference point in French politics, representing for some the possibility of liberation and for others the dangers of anarchy. For some, May 1968 meant the end of traditional collective action and the beginning of a new era to be dominated mainly by the so-called new social movements.

Radical leftism in the American sixties naturally made all kinds of efforts to work up some ambitious theories, too, and part of those efforts, no small part either, was to import ideas from France. But that was slow going, possibly because the original works in French were translated only gradually, and in several cases made it into print only after the radical spark from the sixties was gone. Or it was because the French ideas were too baroque for American tastes, and too cynical; or because writers like Herbert Marcuse and others from a German tradition of philosophy, who were already established in the United States, seemed to make it unnecessary to turn in French directions.

Radical leftism in the American sixties naturally made all kinds of efforts to work up some ambitious theories, too, and part of those efforts, no small part either, was to import ideas from France. But that was slow going, possibly because the original works in French were translated only gradually, and in several cases made it into print only after the radical spark from the sixties was gone. Or it was because the French ideas were too baroque for American tastes, and too cynical; or because writers like Herbert Marcuse and others from a German tradition of philosophy, who were already established in the United States, seemed to make it unnecessary to turn in French directions.

Herbert Marcuse (1898 – 1979) was a German-American philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and then at Freiburg, where he received his PhD. He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research – what later became known as the Frankfurt School. In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, historical materialism and entertainment culture, arguing that they represent new forms of social control.

Between 1943 and 1950, Marcuse worked in US government service for the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) where he criticized the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the book Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958). After his studies, in the 1960s and the 1970s he became known as the preeminent theorist of the New Left and the student movements of West Germany, France, and the United States; some consider him the "father of the New Left". His best known works are Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964). His Marxist scholarship inspired many radical intellectuals and political activists in the 1960s and 1970s, both in the United States and internationally.

Still, the sixties Paris ideas did establish some footholds in the United States, in the art world, for instance, where radical posturing has a certain virtue—the more radical, the more virtuous, if you do it well. But the biggest and most important of the footholds, the foothold that has mattered most in the current debate, was in the humanities departments of a handful of universities. French ideas established themselves in waves of fashion in these departments during the course of the seventies and into the eighties. There was an early vogue for the anthropological/Marxist/linguistic ideas of Roland Barthes.

Next came a wave for the Heideggerian/linguistic ideas of Derrida, in the form of “deconstruction" (meaning, interpreting literature in order to show the impossibility of a definite interpretation). Then came a feminist wave for the Freudian/linguistic ideas of Lacan, and after that a wave for Foucault.

But of all these waves, the one that finally sparked the P C. debate of today didn’t begin in Paris at all It was an authentically American mutation of’68 Philosophy, something different, a New World spin on the Paris ideas—a novel variation to add to the already-established mix-and-match versions that drew from Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, linguistics, and anthropology.

The new variation drew from American identity politics. Its fundamental unit was the identity-politics idea that in cultural affairs, the single most important way to classify people is by race, ethnicity, and gender—the kind of thinking that leads us to define one person as a white male, someone else as an Asian female, a third person as a Latina lesbian, and so forth. With this idea firmly in place, the new American thinkers picked up the freshly translated volumes from Paris plus a few that were written over here and went rummaging through the already-existing varieties of’ 68 Philosophy, picking and choosing selected components, sometimes finding ideas that were already suited for the new version and bringing them into stronger American focus, other times making a few alterations.

From Derrida and ’68 Philosophy as a whole came the idea that language and literature are the vast impersonal structures that, more than government or economics or politics, determine the nature of society. Likewise from Derrida and the linguists, who defined the meaning of words by their difference from one another, came the idea of defining people in the same way, thus offering the crucial analogy between identity politics and linguistic analysis. From Foucault and the Nietzschean theorists of culture (and from Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist) came the idea of looking at culture as a field of struggle for achieving political power. Also from Foucault came a focus on marginal social groups. From Marxism came the idea of an impending beneficial social change. From Lacan and the Freudians came a focus on the erotic and on male domination. From the Third Worldist writers came an anti-imperialist variation on Heidegger’s view of the regrettable intellectual tradition of Western civilization.

And voilà: the great new mélange, ’68 Philosophy in its American mutation. Its name is, or ought to be, “race/class/gender-ism,” since “race, class, and gender" is the phrase that dominates its analyses. There is no single author who has succeeded in giving the idea an authoritative definition, no one book or article that you can point to. But I will draw a caricature.

Race/class/gender-ism, in my caricature, pictures culture and language as the giant hidden structure that permeates life. But culture and language are themselves only reflections of various social groups, which are defined by race, gender, and sexual orientation. (The word “class” is invoked only for the purpose of conjuring a slight aura of Marxism.) Groups, not individuals, produce culture. Every group has its own culture, or would, if oppressors didn’t get in the way. Thus we have the cultures of white men, of black men, of women, of black women, of homosexuals, of Hispanic women, and so forth. Categories that go beyond race, gender, and sexual orientation might also play a role—especially any trait that could put a person at a disadvantage, such as being handicapped.

The different cultures are engaged in a struggle for power. The culture of white males (specified sometimes as European males, other times as “whitemales,” most popularly as Dead White European Males or DWEMs) has pretty much won this struggle, and thus has achieved domination over the rest of the world. The domination has succeeded by using terms like rationalism, humanism, universality, and literary merit to persuade other people of their own inferiority. But by shining the light of race/class/gender analysis upon it, this success can be revealed as the power play that it is.

Race/class/gender analysis will show the culture of white males to be a culture of domination and destruction, more or less the way Heidegger pictured Western philosophy, or the way anti-imperialists picture imperialism. By teaching everyone to appreciate the culture of all groups in equal measure and by discouraging the use of certain common phrases that convey racial and gender hierarchies, in short by altering the literature and the language, we will bring to an end the domination of this one small group.

The name of this domination, “Eurocentrism,” evokes the “ethnocentrism” that is criticized by the French followers of Lévi-Strauss as well as the "logocentrism” that is analyzed by the French Heidegerrians. (Logocentrism in this context means the intellectual tradition of Western civilization that has led to the errors of rationalism and humanism—and can be conflated with still another centrism, phallocentrism, to become phallogocentrism, meaning, more or less, the regrettable tradition of imposed masculine logic.) And in eliminating these various centrisms, in abandoning the idea of any kind of cultural “center" at all, a new and more egalitarian society will emerge, giving full rein to diverse cultures of every kind.

Race/class/gender-ism is, in short, a bit of the old ultra-radicalism.

It is ’68 Philosophy, American style, with certain virtues of the French original too—the impiety carried to eye-opening extremes, sometimes the wit, though the American version tends to be more earnest and less clever than the French. The American idea even offers something of the old Apocalyptic spirit, not openly but by implication—in the excitement that these ideas have aroused, the feeling that a new intellectual revolution is at hand, something monumental like the invention of modern physics at the beginning of the century. This is, by the way, an intriguing notion. For even if the theory that I've just described is utter nonsense, it is true that due to the social reforms in the Western countries during the last few decades, and due to the democratic revolutions around the world, the social basis for a global culture is far huger than it ever was before, and who can say what this will produce a hundred years hence?

Still, if the American doctrine has some of the appeal of ’68 Philosophy, it is also vulnerable to all the criticisms and questions that were posed several years ago in Paris. For instance: Does race/class/gender-ism, in putting primary emphasis on a category like race as a factor in culture, offer a refreshingly candid view of influences that have always existed but are normally concealed? Or does the emphasis on race bring us back to the dubious theories of the European past, as Todorov has suggested? Is there a hint in these ideas of the old German romantic philosophies of the far right?

It pains the admirers of Yale deconstruction and of race/class/gender-ism when anyone mentions the early career of de Man, the Yale critic, on the grounds that a young person’s early mistakes should not be used to hound his later achievements. Yet the controversy over de Man and his youthful errors has had one merit at least, which is to give everyone the opportunity to read some Nazi-style literary criticism, for instance de Man’s collaborationist article from 1941, “The Jews in Contemporary Literature,” which has been brought back into print. Now, here was an example of cultural analysis in which writers were categorized on the basis of racial “difference," the Jews on one hand and the Europeans on the other.

Exactly what makes de Man’s early reactionary harping on race different from the postmodern, supposedly progressive harping on race today? It is argued that "race” in the postmodern, sociological, progressive usage has nothing to do with “race” in the old, reactionary, biological usage, and that only someone who is motivated by hostility or by a stubborn unwillingness to entertain new ideas would detect in these up-to-date progressive ideas a scent of old-fashioned reactionary rightism. Yet the distinction between the postmodern ideas and the reactionary ones is not necessarily so clear—if only because, among some of the deconstructionist masters of literary interpretation, there is a peculiar inability to detect any Nazism at all in de Man’s Nazi articles, which raises doubts about the reliability of the new techniques. And because, in the movement for multiculturalism that has emerged out of race/class/gender-ism, a touch of the young de Man’s Euro-style racial thinking does sometimes creep into the discussion, obviously not among the sophisticated thinkers, who are embarrassed by the problem, but on the margins of the movement. It was disturbing, for instance, but not terribly surprising, to discover a certain inappropriate fixation on the Jews in the thinking of a couple of the professors who helped draw up the proposed new multicultural public-school social-studies curriculum in New York State.

Of course someone might say about the several doubts and problems that hover over these new ideas: so what? Just because a doctrine is a bit dotty or has trouble fending off unattractive elements, valuable results might come of it anyway, in the right hands. “Saying absurd things,” as Richard Rorty observes, “is perfectly compatible with being a force for good.” Especially in America, I would add. In France, every educated person receives a pretty good schooling in philosophy, which has the evil effect of encouraging people to be logically consistent in their foolish ideas. But in America we tend to be suspicious of philosophy, unless it is something like John Dewey’s mixture of see-if-it-works pragmatism and social democratic reform. We like ideas—but we water them down.

The natural instinct for most American intellectuals, when it comes to doctrines from France, is silently to demote the philosophies into methods—into techniques that you apply, the way you might apply a carpentry technique, when the occasion requires, and not on other occasions. Some of the professors who promote race/class/gender-ism are happy to embrace the idea in all its radical grandeur. But a far larger number have no interest in way- out implications. Working up a philosophical opposition to humanism and rationalism was never their idea, except maybe for rhetorical effect. On the contrary, these professors are humanists, and always were. They seek the further flowering of liberal democracy.

When they argue for multiculturalism, they don’t mean to displace the culture of rationalism and humanism with a variety of nonrationalist and nonhumanist traditions. They merely wish to remind everyone not to allow the central culture that does exist to fall prey to habits of bigotry or smallmindedness. Fundamentally they wish us to be more rational, not less. Tolerance, that grandest of concepts from the Western Enlightenment, is the name blazoned across their jackets. They don’t mean to overthrow the Western literary canon the way Heidegger wanted to overthrow the Western philosophical canon. They want to expand it. They mean to remind us to look around to see if, because of discrimination in the past or its persistence today, certain authors and works of art have been overlooked. And sure enough, certain authors and works and perspectives have indeed been overlooked, and today some of them have been rediscovered, which is a testimony to the new ideas. And it is good to look for still more writers and more traditions and variety of every sort, not in order to undermine the general culture, but to strengthen it.

The liberal professors who play with these ideas are not revolutionaries against modernity. Mostly they mean to teach a good course—even if, here and there on the faculty, someone may like to keep the students and the state assembly on their toes by uttering a rattling enigmatic Paris slogan now and then or by railing against universal standards and the rule of white males.

To professors like these and their supporters, to the postmodern liberals who spice up their teaching and writing with a few sprinkles of race/class/gender-ism or a bit of world-weary deconstruction, something about the current debate is very chilling.

They see the Newsweek cover pointing a finger at the “Thought Police,” which means themselves, and they see President Bush denounce them, and they look around for their own allies, who turn out not to be many. And they have reason to feel a pinch of fear. It is because of the disproportion between their own power and that of the hostile institutions arrayed against them.

Here is the mystery in the debate over P C. For if the professors and their students are as devoted to every kind of tolerant and humane idea as they say, and if their radical instincts are closer to Michael Harrington than to Martin Heidegger, and if pluralism is their utopia, how can they work up, some of them, so much zeal for small-time inquisitions? All sorts of explanations can be proposed—for instance, the explanation that points to a heritage of Hawthornean puritanism that is every bit as nasty and unconscious among liberals as among conservatives. Or there is the argument that liberals, too, have their share of bad faith. You could point to old habits of left-wing intolerance that persist long after they have been discredited. Or you could observe that if most of the postmodern professors have a liberal heart, the anti-liberals of the left sometimes end up determing the atmosphere.

Currently we have a lot of academic terms like “difference,” “diversity," “the Other," “logocentrism,” and “theory,” that are intended to be consonant with humanist traditions of the liberal left. But these words willy-nilly hark back to a cultural theory that has its roots in the anti-humanist intellectual currents of a generation ago, and buried within those terms may be certain definite ideas that are anything but liberal. There is the idea that we are living under a terrible oppression based on lies about liberal humanism, and that with proper analysis the hidden vast structure of domination can be revealed. There is the temptation to flirt with irrationalist and racial theories whose normal home is on the extreme right.

And there is the idea that, sparkling like jewels here and there, a millenarian alternative is somewhere lurking, that we can turn the world upside down—if we, the anti-bigot reformers, can only get hold of the dominating verbal structures. For if we can only command the school curriculum, or dictate the literary canon, or get everyone to abandon certain previously unanalyzed phrases that contain the entire structure of oppressive social domination, and replace these phrases with other phrases that contain a new, better society—if we can only do that, great results will occur, and the radiant new day will be at hand.

That is a wild notion, which consciously no one believes, at least not in full. Yet bits and pieces of that idea peek out from within the academic vocabulary. And wild or not, the bits and pieces have a popular appeal, if only because they promise that something can be done about the social inequalities and injustices in the United States that seem so intractable in a conservative age. Perhaps if America were experiencing right now a significant movement for radical social reform, the temptation to embark on verbal campaigns and to invest these campaigns with outlandish hopes would be less, and the students and younger professors would put their energy into real-life democratic movements instead, which might be a relief to their harassed colleagues. A peculiar sort of leftism is plainly an origin of the P.C. syndrome, but it’s easy to imagine that another kind of tum to the left—to a conventional movement for social reform—would also be the solution.

Meanwhile here is a phenomenon that is weirder and less productive than any conventional movement for democracy. Dwight Macdonald defined 1930s fellow-traveling as the fog that arose when the warm ocean currents of American liberalism encountered the Soviet iceberg. Political correctness in the 1990s is a related syndrome. It is the fog that arises from American liberalism’s encounter with the iceberg of French cynicism.

Some of the super-radical positions are without expression here, which is too bad—for instance, the position that views multiculturalism as itself a form of white male domination.

The literary critic Gerald Graff has argued for some time that the best possible response to the crisis in the universities is to “teach the conflict”—to make a study of the debate itself.

This proposal strikes the most radical of the professors as a wishy-washy way to take a real debate and render it toothless, and it strikes other people as a misguided proposal to drag into the classroom arguments that should be conducted among the professors themselves, not in front of their students. But Graff s proposal seems to me the soul of sense. The debate over political correctness has managed to raise nearly every important question connected to culture and education—the proper relation of culture to a democratic society, the relation of literature to life, the purpose of higher education. Naturally to raise a question is not to settle it, which means the crisis in education goes on. But only in medicine are crises a sign of impending death. In intellectual matters, crises are signs of life.

― Debating P.C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses (1995) by Paul Berman (Editor)

....and that was back in 1995. What did so called liberals do since than. Few that have not been converted have done little but the cheer on and support and protect all this insanity. Because its not anti liberal, its liberalism coming more to its true form.

Newsweek, December 24, 1990

By JERRY ADLER with MARK STARR in Boston, FARAI CHIDEYA in New York, LYNDA WRIGHT in San Francisco, PAT WINGERT in Washington and LINDA HAAC in Durham, N.C.

There is an experiment of sorts taking place in American colleges. Or, more accurately, hundreds of experiments at different campuses, directed at changing the consciousness of this entire generation of university students. The goal is to eliminate prejudice, not just of the petty sort that shows up on sophomore dorm walls, but the grand prejudice that has ruled American universities since their founding: that the intellectual tradition of Western Europe occupies the central place in the history of civilization. In this context it would not be enough for a student to refrain from insulting homosexuals or other minorities. He or she would be expected to "affirm" their presence on campus and to study their literature and culture alongside that of Plato, Shakespeare and Locke. This agenda is broadly shared by most organizations of minority students, feminists and gays. It is also the program of a generation of campus radicals who grew up in the '60s and are now achieving positions of academic influence. If they no longer talk of taking to the streets, it is because they now are gaining access to the conventional weapons of campus politics: social pressure, academic perks (including tenure) and -- when they have the administration on their side -- outright coercion.

There is no conspiracy at work here, just a creed, a set of beliefs and expressions which students from places as diverse as Sarah Lawrence Collage (private liberal arts college in Yonkers, New York) and San Francisco State recognize instantly as "PC" -- politically correct.

PC is, strictly speaking, a totalitarian philosophy. No aspect of university life is too obscure to come under its scrutiny.

Role models: But solicitude for minorities does not stop at shielding them from insults. Promotion of "diversity" is one of the central tents of PC. Accrediting bodies have even begun to make it a condition of accreditation. Diversity refers both to students and faculty. Of the 373 tenured professors at Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, only two are black. The latest thinking holds that black undergraduates would be less likely to drop out if there were more black teachers available to act as mentors and role models, so the competition for qualified black professors is acute.

Politically, "Political Correctness" is Marxist in origin, in the broad sense of attempting to redistribute power from the privileged class (white males) to the oppressed masses. But it is Marxism of a peculiarly attenuated, self-referential kind. This is not a movement aimed at attracting more working-class youths to the university. The failure of Marxist systems throughout the world has not noticeably dimmed the allure of left-wing politics for American academics. Even today, says David Littlejohn of Berkeley's Graduate School of Literature, "an overwhelming proportion of our courses are taught by people who really hate the system."

Intellectually, PC is informed by deconstructionism, a theory of literary criticism associated with the French thinker Jacques Derrida. This accounts for the concentration of PC thought in such seemingly unlikely discipline as comparative literature. Deconstructionism is a famously obscure theory, but one of its implications is a rejection of the notion of "hierarchy." It is impossible in deconstructionist terms to say that one text is superior to another.

PC thinkers have embraced this conceit with a vengeance. "If you make any judgment or assessment as to the quality of a work, then somehow you aren't being an intellectual egalitarian," says Jean Bethke Elshtain, a political-science professor at Vanderbilt. At a conference recently she referred to Czeslaw Milosz's book "The Captive Mind" as "classic"; to which another female professor exclaimed in dismay that the word classic "makes me feel oppressed."

The rejection of hierarchy underlies another key PC tenet, "multiculturalism." This is an attack on the primacy of the Western intellectual tradition, as handed down through centuries of "great books." In the PC view, this canon perpetuates the power of "dead white males" over women and blacks from beyond the grave. It obliges black students to revere the thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, who was a literal slave owner. In opposition to this "Eurocentric" view of the world, Molefi Asante, chairperson of African American studies at Temple, has proposed an "Afrocentric" curriculum. It would be based on the thoughts of ancient African scholars (he annexes Pharaonic Egypt for this purpose) and the little-known (to Americans) cultures of modern East and West Africa. This would be one of many such ethnic-specific curricula he foresees in a multicultural America. "There are only two positions," Asante says sweepingly; "either you support multiculturalism in American education, or you support the maintenance of white supremacy."

Right terms: "Community!" "Liberty!" Is there no way out of this impasse? Or are we doomed to an endless tug of war over words between the very people who should be leading us onward to a better life? If two people with as many degrees between them as Fish and Barber can't communicate except by hurtling charges of "racism" and knocking over books in a store, what hope is there for the rest of us? Yet one hears the same thing over and over: I don't know how to talk to African-Americans. I'm scared of saying the wrong thing to women. Whites don't listen. "There are times when I want to be very cautious about offending a feminist colleague, but I can't find the right terms," says Robert Caserio of the University of Utah. And Caserio is an English teacher. The great Harvard sociologist David Reisman recently complained about having to go to "great lengths to avoid the tag 'racist'." He wouldn't be annoyed to have to go to great lengths not to be anti-Semitic!" Harvard's Kilson exploded. And Reisman was once Kilson's mentor!

Yes, of course conflict is inevitable, as the university makes the transition -- somewhat ahead of the rest of society -- toward its multiethnic future. There are in fact some who recognize the tyranny of PC, but see it only as a transitional phase, which will no longer be necessary once the virtues of tolerance are internalized. Does that sound familiar? It's the dictatorship of the proletariat, to be followed by the withering away of the state. These should be interesting years.

Source Article here: Thought Police - Newsweek December 24, 1990

That was written 30+ years ago. And look at us now. Scary isn't it. From collage campus to the streets to every aspect of our lives.

“The truth has become an insult.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” ― William F. Buckley

"In little more than a generation, feminism has obliterated roles. If you wonder why so many men choose not to get married, the answer lies in large part in the contemporary devaluation of the husband and of the father - of men as men, in other words. Leftism has influenced the literary, academic, media, and, therefore, the political elite far more than any other religion. It has taken over Western schools from elementary through graduate. The Left has taken over the universities and, increasingly, high schools and elementary schools. It dominates the news and entertainment media. And many judges and courts are leftist - meaning that their decisions are guided by leftism more than by the law or the Constitution. In colleges throughout America, students are taught to have disdain for the white race. I know this sounds incredible, or at least exaggerated. It is neither.

The problem for the Left, however, is that the moment it stops painting the Right as vile, it has to argue the issues. E.G. Proponents of same-sex marriage regularly label opponents 'radical' and 'extremist.' However, given that no society in thousands of years has allowed same-sex marriage, it is, by definition, the proponents of same-sex marriage whose position is radical and extreme." - Dennis Prager, American Journalist

“A liberal will defend to the death your right to agree with her. Disagree with her, and she will call the police.” Peter Hitchens, The Broken Compass: How Left and Right Lost Their Meaning

As someone said: “The modern definition of a racist is someone who is winning an argument with a liberal.”

“In the end, the actions of such liberals have the effect---again unwittingly---of continuing to cover for the goals of the extreme Left. Yet again, the soft Left is helping to conceal the hard Left, whether it realizes it or not.” ― Paul Kengor, Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century

"It's great to be judged by the color of my skin rather than the content of my character." - BLM arsonist.

Indeed. Activists find responsibility to be their kryptonite, so they avoid it like a plague.

During the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, in his famous speech I have a Dream, American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., said: “I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.” I agree with that statement fully. And yet looking at what I see today, I can't stop thinking that poor Martin is spinning in his grave.

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“Racial stereotyping. For Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders, the sin of white racism was stereotyping all black people as inferior. It was a prejudice to be sure, but it was predicated on the assumption that all blacks were the same. King objected to stereotyping because he wanted blacks to be treated as individuals and not reduced exclusively to their racial identity (hence the meaning of his famous statement about the content of one's character taking precedence over the color of one's skin).

The postmodern left turns the civil rights model on its head. It embraces racial stereotyping - racial identity by any other name - and reverses it, transforming it into something positive, provided the pecking order of power is kept in place. In the new moral scheme of racial identities, black inferiority is replaced by white culpability, rendering the entire white race, with few exceptions, collectively guilty of racial oppression. The switch is justified through the logic of racial justice, but that does not change the fact that people are being defined by their racial characteristic. Racism is viewed as structural, so it is permissible to use overtly positive discrimination (i.e., affirmative action) to reorder society."

― Kim R. Holmes, The Closing of the Liberal Mind: The New Illiberalism's Assault on Freedom

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“...obscurantist feature in social scientists trying to combine pluralism with environmentalism. They are so preoccupied with the role of prejudice in creating hostile environments that they perpetually deny the obvious, that stereotypes are rough generalizations about groups derived from long-term observation.

Such generalizations are usually correct in describing group tendencies and in predicting certain collective actions, even if they do not adequately account for differences among individuals. Nonetheless, as Goldberg explains, the self-described pluralist and prominent psychologist Gordon Allport went out of his way in The Nature of Prejudice (1954) to reject stereotypes as factually inaccurate as well as socially harmful.

For Allport and a great many other social Scientists, nothing is intuitively correct unless it is politically so.”

― Paul Edward Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State

Off course people who have prejudice against prejudice, are simply unrealistic, if not downright stupid. Stereotypes evolved and stayed as part of human evolutionary journey because they were more constructive than destructive. But it takes a lefty to take mechanism for benefit of cognitive economy, deeply ingrained in all of us and turn it into political weapon. Specific prejudices can be put to the test, but prejudice itself cannot, because it has its useful and at this point, critically useful function in human society. Way before term political correctness was invented.

“While exorting us to judge other cultures in their own terms, he [Said] asks us to judge Western culture from a point of view outside---to set it against alternatives, and to judge it adversely, as ethnocentric and even racist. In its 'totalising' vision the left fails to distinguish civil society from the state, and fails to understand that the ends of life arise from our free associations and not from the coercive discipline of an egalitarian elite. ― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“The further Fascism receded into history and the fewer visible fascists there were on display, the more self-proclaimed anti-fascists needed fascism to retain any semblance of political virtue or purpose. It proved politically useful to describe as fascist people who were not Fascists , just as it proved politically useful to describe as racist people who were not racists.” ― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“In Italy, Fascists divide themselves into two categories: Fascists and Anti-Fascists.”
— Ennio Flaiano

The term "fascist" has been used as a pejorative, regarding varying movements across the far right of the political spectrum. George Orwell wrote in 1944 that "the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless ... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'".

Communist states have sometimes been referred to as "fascist", typically as an insult. For example, it has been applied to Marxist regimes in Cuba under Fidel Castro and Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh. Chinese Marxists used the term to denounce the Soviet Union during the Sino-Soviet Split, and likewise the Soviets used the term to denounce Chinese Marxists and social democracy (coining a new term in "social fascism" ).

In the United States, Herbert Matthews of The New York Times asked in 1946: "Should we now place Stalinist Russia in the same category as Hitlerite Germany? Should we say that she is Fascist?". J. Edgar Hoover, longtime FBI director and ardent anti-communist, wrote extensively of "Red Fascism". The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s was sometimes called "fascist". Historian Peter Amann states that, "Undeniably, the Klan had some traits in common with European fascism—chauvinism, racism, a mystique of violence, an affirmation of a certain kind of archaic traditionalism—yet their differences were fundamental....[the KKK] never envisioned a change of political or economic system."

Professor Richard Griffiths of the University of Wales wrote in 2005 that "fascism" is the "most misused, and over-used word, of our times".

"In short, “fascist” is a modern word for “heretic,” branding an individual worthy of excommunication from the body politic. The left uses other words—“racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe,” “christianist”—for similar purposes, but these words have less elastic meanings. Fascism, however, is the gift that keeps on giving. George Orwell noted this tendency as early as 1946 in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language”: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.

American Progressivism—the moralistic social crusade from which modern liberals proudly claim descent—is in some respects the major source of the fascist ideas applied in Europe by Mussolini and Hitler." - Dinesh D'Souza

"The Nazis played the same games against Jews that today’s left plays against 'Eurocentrism,' 'whiteness,' and 'logocentrism.' When you hear a campus radical denounce 'white logic' or 'male logic,' she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced 'Jewish logic' and the 'Hebrew disease'...The white man is the Jew of liberal fascism.

If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help

Fascism’s success almost always depends on the cooperation of the “losers” during a time of economic and technological change. The lower-middle classes—the people who have just enough to fear losing it—are the electoral shock troops of fascism (Richard Hofstadter identified this “status anxiety” as the source of Progressivism’s quasi-fascist nature). Populist appeals to resentment against “fat cats,” “international bankers,” “economic royalists,” and so on are the stock-in-trade of fascist demagogues.

Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don’t matter. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of “good things” under the direction of “our people” is always and everywhere justified.

Only because so many were determined to label fascism right-wing that populism under Mussolini was redefined as such. After all, the notion that political power is and should be vested in the people was a classical liberal position. Populism was a more radical version of this position. It’s still a “power to the people” ideology,

Fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact—an inconvenient truth if there ever was one—is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate and control the same social space.

In his unintentionally chilling 1890 essay, Leaders of Men, Wilson explained that the “true leader” uses the masses like “tools.” He must not traffic in subtleties and nuance, as literary men do. Rather, he must speak to stir their passions, not their intellects. In short, he must be a skillful demagogue.

― Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

Why is it that after a century of socialist disasters, and an intellectual legacy that has been time and again exploded, the left-wing position remains, as it were, the default position to which thinking people automatically gravitate when called upon for a comprehensive philosophy? Why are ‘right-wingers’ marginalized in the educational system, denounced in the media and regarded by our political class as untouchables, fit only to clean up after the orgies of luxurious nonsense indulged in by their moral superiors? Is it as the evolutionary psychologists say, that egalitarian attitudes result from an adaptation, one that sustained those hunter-gatherer bands when sharing the quarry was the primary social bond? … Or is it, as Nietzsche tells us, that resentment is the real default condition of social beings, who know only that the other has what they want, and must be made to suffer for it?
Whatever the explanation, we have seen, in every writer considered in this book, the assumption of an a priori correctness. It does not matter that equality cannot be defined or concretely situated. It is just obvious that it is the answer, so obvious that we have no need to define the question. At the same time there exists on the left a remarkable fear of heresy, a desire to safeguard orthodoxy and hound the dissident…

Clearly we are dealing with the religious need, a need planted deep in our ‘species being.’ There is a longing for membership that no amount of rational thought, no proof of absolute loneliness of humanity or of the unredeemed nature of our sufferings, can ever eradicate. And that longing is more easily recruited by the abstract god of equality than by any concrete form of social compromise. To defend what is merely real becomes impossible, once faith appears on the horizon with its enticing gift of absolutes.

-- Roger Scruton, from Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands (2015)

“AFTER THE ORGY”

"I have a vision for the future where all the necessary sex education will be available for everyone. . . . No one will ever go hungry for sex because there will be sex kitchens all over town serving sex instead of soup. . . . We will learn how to use orgasm to cure disease as some of the ancient Tantrics and Taoists did. . . . In the future, everybody will be so sexually satisfied, there’ll be an end to violence, rape and war. We will establish contact with extra-terrestrials and they will be very sexy." - Annie Sprinkle, (1996) an American sex educator, former sex worker, feminist stripper, pornographic actress, cable television host, porn magazine editor, writer, sex film producer, and sex-positive feminist, which now identifies as ecosexual.

"If it were necessary to characterize the state of things I would say that it is after the orgy. The orgy is . . . the explosive moment of modernity, that of liberation in all domains. Political liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of productive forces, liberation of destructive forces. . . . Today everything is liberated . . . we find ourselves before the question: what are we to do AFTER THE ORGY?" - Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer in The Transparency of Evil (1993)

Contemporary attitudes toward sexuality and its liberation—what Jean Baudrillard has aptly dubbed the “culture of premature ejaculation.” This is a culture rooted in an imagined dialectic of “repression” and “liberation,” or the belief that our sexuality has been suppressed and denied by prudish Victorian values and that we must now free our sexuality through hedonistic enjoyment:

Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation. More and more, all seduction . . . disappears behind the naturalized sexual imperative calling for an immediate relation of a desire. . . . Nowadays one no longer says: “You’ve got a soul and you must save it,” but “You’ve got a sexual nature and you must learn how to use it well.” . . . “You’ve got a libido and you must learn how to spend it.”

Yet this leaves us with the troubling question of just what is there left to do “after the orgy”—after every taboo has been violated, every prohibition transgressed, and every desire satiated.

― Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (2003)

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"Modern man can no longer die a dramatic death. He dies in a hospital room like a bee inside a honeycomb cell. Death in the modern age, whether due to illness or accident, is devoid of drama. We live in age in which there is no heroic death.

Human life is mysterious that way. Human beings aren’t strong enough to live and die only for themselves. That’s because we have ideals. We can only act for the sake of something. We soon tire of living only for ourselves. It necessarily follows that we also need to die for something. That something used to be called a ‘noble cause.’ To die for a noble cause was thought the most glorious, heroic, and honorable way to die.

But there are no noble causes today. Democratic governments obviously have no need for noble causes. Yet if one cannot find a value that transcends oneself, life itself, in a spiritual sense, is rendered meaningless."
― Yukio Mishima

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“The conservative "thinks of political policies as intended to preserve order, justice, and freedom. The ideologue, on the contrary, thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature. In his march toward Utopia, the ideologue is merciless.” ― Russell Kirk

"That Marxism is not a science is entirely clear to intelligent people in the Soviet Union. One would even feel awkward to refer to it as a science. Leaving aside the exact sciences, such as physics, mathematics, and the natural sciences, even the social sciences can predict an event—when, in what way and how an event might occur. Communism has never made any such forecasts. It has never said where, when, and precisely what is going to happen. Nothing but declamations. Rhetoric to the effect that the world proletariat will overthrow the world bourgeoisie and the most happy and radiant society will then arise.” ― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West

“Kirk defined the ideologue as one who “thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature.” Unleashed during the most radical phase of the French Revolution, the spirit of ideology has metastasized over the past two centuries, wreaking horrors. Jacobinism, Anarchism, Marxism, Leninism, Fascism, Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism—all shared the fatal attraction to “political messianism”; all were “inverted religions.” Each of these ideologies preached a dogmatic approach to politics, economics, and culture. Each in its own way endeavored “to substitute secular goals and doctrines for religious goals and doctrines.” Thus did the ideologue promise “salvation in this world, hotly declaring that there exists no other realm of being.” ― Russell Kirk, The American Cause

“Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.”
― David Foster Wallace

“A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”
― Robert Frost

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“I would rather try to organize politics and political discourse in a way that encouraged engagement on moral and religious questions. …If we attempt to banish moral and religious discourse from politics and debates about law and rights, the danger is we’ll have a kind a vacant public square or a naked public square.

And the yearning for larger meanings in politics will find undesirable expression. Fundamentalists will rush in where liberals fear to tread. They will try to clothe the naked public square with the narrowest and most intolerant moralism.”

*Michael Joseph Sandel is an American political philosopher.

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“Liberalism has failed, not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded. As liberalism has become more fully itself, as its inner logic has become more evident and its self contradictions manifest, it has generated pathologies that are at once deformations of its claims, yet realizations of liberal ideology.

A political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equity, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity, and of course expand liberty in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and undermines freedom.”

― Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2018)

Reminds me of what someone said. Liberalism delivered what it promised, but it was the opposite of what most expected.

Liberalism vs. Reality - Feb 29, 2020 Excerpt from James Burnham, Suicide of the West (1964; New York: Encounter Books, 2014), pp. 319-40; 345-9.

Feb 29, 2020 Excerpt from James Burnham, Suicide of the West (1964; New York: Encounter Books, 2014), pp. 319-40; 345-9.

The Guilt of the Liberal - Feb 29, 2020 Excerpt from James Burnham, Suicide of the West (1964; New York: Encounter Books, 2014), pp. 221-8.

@Krunoslav

The problem with liberalism is mostly the personality type that embraces it. Liberals are open personalities, high in empathy and low in conscientiousness. They would ask what is wrong with being open and high in empathy? The answer is that like so many things they are not what they seem on first examination.

Almost every task requires focus. A liberal has no focus or boundaries. They lack the conscientiousness to do the hard work and focus necessary to manage just about anything. They will explore new ideas but don't stick around long enough to see the consequences and deal with them. When the new idea turns out to be a disaster they blame someone else not the flaws in the original concept. It's the dark side of openness, no boundaries.

Most people think of empathy as a positive personality trait. The problem is that empathy is tied to primitive mirror neurons. It evolved to understand what other agents are feeling or about to do. It is a useful evolved ability. Like openness however it comes with a dark side. Instincts or emotions are by definition irrational. By that I mean that they are genetically acquired predispositions separate from what we consider our rational abilities. You may feel someone else's pain but if you try to rationalize it you are consider "cold". Worse still is that every emotion comes with it's opposite. The The fight or flight analogy is a good example. Love/hate is another. The empathetic it turns out are likely to divide the world irrationally into infants to be protected and predators. It can take many forms such as ideological disagreements. In effect anyone who disagrees with them will be placed in the predator category. Liberals justify this tendency with the bizarre idea of emotional intelligence. While instinct is a form of intelligence it cannot be rational or reflective because those processes take place in a different part of the brain. A conscientious person will stop and consider what the consequences of acting on emotion will be but that is painful for an open person.

Of course the above is a gross over simplification. A healthy, intellectually active person should be open to new ideas and empathetic to the needs of other people. It only becomes unhealthy when there are no rational boundaries and no conscientiousness to act responsibly in on empathetic impulses.

@wolfhnd I think you might be relaying too much on evolutionary biology, and not giving enough credit to also evolved ability to develop oneself to psychological maturity. You mentioned personality types. But that is a productive of liberal institutions. I completely reject that personality type classification because its false. it was developed by bureaucrats for the bureaucratic administration of its day and since it fits with liberal ideology it was kept. I know because I've investigated the origins of the whole personality type nonsense. IT has nothing to do with neither biology or individuals, its purely invented to serve the needs of a bureaucracy, so they can easily categorize people and put them in nice neat boxes based on scalable criteria. It is as dangerous concept.

In regards to empathy. Its a useful emotion in the right context for which it has evolved. Mostly for mothers to be able to understand the needs of infants and babies who can't tell them what is wrong in any other way. Men had to evolve compartmentalization so they can go in the battle and half someone in two with a large axe and than come home and be a good husband and father. But men were not meant to replace role of mothers anymore than women were meant to be warriors. It is liberalism and its derivatives like feminism that inverted that, with obviously disastrous consequences.

Speaking of evolutionary biology, we have also evolved ability to condition ourselves in needs arise. Hence women can be good nurses and work with wounded in war time or in ER (Emergency room). But it is their predisposition to have more empathic responses that make them better at this job that most men. Even if invidious can condition themselves for it as well.

"A conscientious person will stop and consider what the consequences of acting on emotion will be but that is painful for an open person."

Yes. In other words, reaction vs responsibility. Responsibility meaning response able. Stimulus + pause + evaluation + response.

This is simply called psychological maturity. Something that was considered a virtue because it was based on personal responsibility. On character building. Liberal ideology and its derivatives, as much as they bitch and moan about individuality, its only in real of legal rights, privileges. Not individual responsibility. Rights have replaced morals. And human rights have allowed people to outsource the whole problem of morality to ideology itself. I identify as liberal, therefore I need no individual morality, its already prepackaged by being liberal. And since they consider liberalism to be more moral than anything else , it is enough to be part of , self identify as liberal. Problem is that liberalism does not accommodate for sense of meaning , so sooner or later fundamentalists will take over.

“I would rather try to organize politics and political discourse in a way that encouraged engagement on moral and religious questions. …If we attempt to banish moral and religious discourse from politics and debates about law and rights, the danger is we’ll have a kind a vacant public square or a naked public square.

And the yearning for larger meanings in politics will find undesirable expression. Fundamentalists will rush in where liberals fear to tread. They will try to clothe the naked public square with the narrowest and most intolerant moralism.”

*Michael Joseph Sandel is an American political philosopher.

Haven't we seen that?

"Western civilization is a story of full bellies and starving hearts. Of a feast of information and a famine of truth. Of conveyor belts churning out processed food, conformity-enforcing media and power-serving culture. Enough food to stay alive but not enough sustenance to live."

"As a million debates on libertarian principles have taught us — if you do not clearly define who and what you are in the name of individualism, then a more coherent and collective block will do it for you."

“There is nothing that has done more havoc to the rain of revival than the illusion of "modernism and theological liberalism" Liberalism sets itself as another gospel but not the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” ― Oluseyi Akinbami

"Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children." Once liberalism discarded its metaphysical supports (transcendent standards of truth and justice which pre-date liberalism) and became a political doctrine, it was bound to curve in on itself.

In the end, privileges, or rights. However, you want to call them, have replaced morality as though by traditional religions. Something that comes from the individual. In a liberal system of rights, these privileges are rewarded based on how one supports the state and the privileges are limited or taken away to those who oppose the state, hence the new system of values is based on worshiping the religion of statism. And that leads to socialist’s style of government. As we can clearly see today. It is inevitable.

“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”
― Frederic Bastiat

And now the state has to make sure there is no voting, but that new generations are so dependent on the state that they have no choice but to support its policies. Whatever they might be.

@Krunoslav

Evolutionary psychology is suspect as are all of the soft sciences but it really isn't that much different than any other way of studying "human nature". For example "psychological maturity" is going to be highly subjective and situational.

The reason that an evolutionary lens is critical is because you can't directly access instincts that are formulated deep in the older parts of the brain. Liberals try to deny the important influence of instinct on human behavior because it threatens their proclivity for social engineering. Conservatives dislike that approach because as you say it comes from liberal institutions which are hostile to conservatism.

As to personality types that is really just a statistical way to predict behavior that is tried to genetics. The classifications are largely arbitrary as are most classifications. Classifications however are useful language tools.

@wolfhnd" For example "psychological maturity" is going to be highly subjective and situational. "

Well, there is a proper criteria for it. Its not as subjective as one might think.

There are four main points of psychological maturity:

  1. Acceptance of responsibility for his own life and actions.
  2. A healthy adult plans and acts in terms of a lifespan.
  3. A cardinal characteristic of maturity is emotional stability.
  4. Attitude toward the unknown.

Closely related to the concept of mental health is that of psychological maturity. "Maturity," in the broadest sense, is the state of being fully grown or developed. A living organism is mature when its normal process of development is completed, and it functions on the "adult" level appropriate to its species. "Psychological maturity," then, is a concept pertaining to the successful development of man's consciousness, to the attainment of a level of functioning appropriate to man qua man.

At first, a child knows only perceptual concretes; he does not know abstractions or principles. His world is only the immediate now, he cannot think, plan or act long-range; the future is largely unreal to him. At this stage, he is a dependent, necessarily: his method of functioning (although biologically inevitable at this period of his life) is inadequate to the requirements of survival as an independent entity.

As the child grows, his intellectual field widens: he learns language, he begins to grasp abstractions, he generalizes, he makes increasingly subtle discriminations, he looks for principies, he acquires the ability to project a distant and more distant future—he rises from the sensory-perceptual level of consciousness to the conceptual level. His power to deal independently with- the world around him, with the facts of reality, rises accordingly—in step with his increasing knowledge and increasing proficiency at conceptual mental functioning.

The first and basic index of psychological maturity is the ability to think in principles.

More broadly, the basic index of successfully achieved adulthood is the policy of conceptualizing. This means: "an actively sustained process of identifying one's impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one's perceptual material and of abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions and discovering new answers and expanding one's knowledge into an ever-growing sum."

It must be stressed that this policy constitutes evidence of maturity only when it is practiced in all areas of a person's life and not exclusively in the area of his professional work. There are men who are brilliant at conceptualizing and thinking in principles when their focus is on higher mathematics or some distant galaxy or some business activity—but who become helplessly insecure, concrete-bound children, blind to abstractions and principles, seeing nothing but the immediate moment, when their focus is on, say, current politics or a problem in their personal life. Maturity is evidenced by the ability to think in principles about oneself.

All other aspects of psychological maturity are derivatives and consequences of developing one's conceptual faculty. The most important of these aspects are the following:

  1. A man who deals with the facts of reality on the conceptual level of consciousness has accepted the responsibility of a human manner of existence—which entails his acceptance of responsibility for his own life and actions.

A child cannot accept such responsibility; he is still in the process of acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary for independence. But an adult who expects others to take care of him—and/or who habitually cries, when the consequences of his actions catch up with him, "I couldn't help it!"—is a case of self-arrested development, a person who has defaulted on the process of human maturation.

  1. The acceptance of responsibility for one's own life requires a policy of planning and acting long-range, so that one's actions are integrated to one another and one's present to one's future. A child, in large measure, "lives for the moment." A healthy adult plans and acts in terms of a lifespan.

This policy entails a corollary: the willingness to defer immediate pleasure or rewards, when and if necessary, and to tolerate unavoidable frustration.

An infant's typical reaction to frustration is crying. If & child learns that he cannot go to the circus on the day he had expected to, he may, understandably, feel crushed; next week, to him, seems like an infinite time away. But a healthy adult does not view his life and goafs in this manner. He does not repress his frustrations; if he can find a way to overcome them, he does: if he cannot, he moves on; he is not paralyzed by them.

  1. A cardinal characteristic of maturity is emotional stability. This trait is the consequence of one particular aspect of the policy of conceptual functioning: the ability to preserve the full context of one's knowledge under conditions of stress—frustration, disappointment, fear, anguish, shock. It is the ability, under the pressure of such emotions, to preserve one's capacity to think. The opposite of this state is described as "going to pieces."

One of the unmistakable signs of immaturity is the characteristic of being habitually swamped, mentally, by the concrete problem of the moment, so that one loses one's abstract or long-range perspective, one loses the wider context of one's knowledge, and one is taken over by feelings of anger or panic or despair that paralyze thought.

A young person's hold on an abstract perspective, under conditions of stress, is, at best, tenuous; that perspective is still in the process of being formed and of growing firm. But a properly developed adult's perspective has hardened and does not normally crack under pressure.

(This kind of emotional stability must be distinguished sharply from that counterfeit form of stability which is achieved by emotional repression. The repressor, who is so fearful of losing control that he dares not let himself know what he feels, is not an exponent of maturity.)

  1. Finally, there is an aspect of psychological maturity that is profoundly important and that few adults fully achieve. It pertains to one's attitude toward the unknown—not toward knowledge which has not yet been discovered by anyone, but toward knowledge which is available but which one does not possess.

To a child, the world around him is—necessarily—an immense unknown. He is aware that adults possess knowledge far in excess of his own and that there are many things he is not yet able to understand. He knows that he does not yet know the wider context of his life and actions. He tells himself, in effect: "I will have to wait until I grow up. There are many things I cannot understand now. They are ' known to other people, but they are beyond me at present."

This is not the attitude of a genuinely mature adult. An adult, too, of course, may recognize (and, indeed, must often be prepared to recognize) that there are things he does not yet know and needs to learn. But he does not entertain such a category as that which is known to others but unknowable to him—unknowable in principle. This does not mean that his goal is to possess encyclopedic knowledge. It means that, within the sphere of his first-hand concerns, of his own actions and goals, he regards himself as competent to know that which he needs to know and to acquire whatever knowledge his interests and purposes demand. It means that he does not resign himself to the permanently unknown, when and if the knowledge is available and is relevant to his activities. It means that he does not regard himself as a second-class citizen psycho-epistemologically. It is this attitude, consistently maintained, that marks a man's entry into full adulthood, i.e., into full self-responsibility.

Notes: there are four main points of psychological maturity.

  1. Acceptance of responsibility for his own life and actions.
  2. A healthy adult plans and acts in terms of a lifespan.
  3. A cardinal characteristic of maturity is emotional stability.
  4. Attitude toward the unknown.

@wolfhnd "The reason that an evolutionary lens is critical is because you can't directly access instincts that are formulated deep in the older parts of the brain. Liberals try to deny the important influence of instinct on human behavior because it threatens their proclivity for social engineering. Conservatives dislike that approach because as you say it comes from liberal institutions which are hostile to conservatism."

Well yes, but instincts we are born with, however how to use them productively and constructively and in healthy way , we have to learn.

For example...

According to leading psychologists, positive self esteem is vital in development of a healthy personality. Nathaniel Branden calls self esteem: The immune system of consciousness.

Positive self esteem is vital in development of a healthy personality.

Nathaniel Branden points out that man's need of self-esteem is inherent in his nature. But he is not born with the knowledge of what will satisfy that need, or of the standard by which self-esteem is to be gauged; he must discover it.

"You are not responsible for the programming you picked up in childhood. However, as an adult, you are one hundred percent responsible for fixing it." ― Ken Keyes, Jr.

“Apart from disturbance whose roots are biological, I cannot think of a single psychological problem—from anxiety and depression, to underachievement at school or at work, to fear of intimacy, happiness, or success, to alcohol or drug abuse, to spouse battering or child molestation, to co-dependency and sexual disorders, to passivity and chronic aimlessness, to suicide and crimes of violence—that is not traceable, at least in part, to the problem of deficient self-esteem. There is no value-judgment more important to man — no factor more decisive in his psychological development and motivation — than the estimate he passes on himself." ― The Psychology of Self-Esteem, Chapter 7: The Meaning of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden

Quite simply... Self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.

We are born into this world unarmed. Our mind is our weapon and it is our responsibility to arm ourselves with the tools to help us cope with the challenges of life. No antidepressants, or alcoholic beverages will do what we must do ourselves. You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences."

In a world in which the total of human knowledge is doubling every few years it seems, and it's accelerating exponentially every year, our security can rest only on our ability to learn. Our ability to meet the challenges of life instead of trying to hide from them.

"Tell me how a person judges his or her self-esteem, and I will tell you how that person operates at work, in love, in sex, in parenting, in every important aspect of existence - and how high he or she is likely to rise. The reputation you have with yourself - your self-esteem - is the single most important factor for a fulfilling life." ― Nathaniel Branden

Strengthening self-esteem or The immune system of consciouses if you will, is not a quick or easy process. We can’t do it directly. Self-esteem is a consequence of following fundamental internal practices that require an ongoing commitment to self-examination.

.............................

"It is difficult to escape the conclusion that in most (and perhaps all) instances of mental illness whose cause is psychological, there is some degree of complicity on the part of the victim. They did not will their illness directly; but they volitionally initiated reality-avoiding policies which brought them to that end.

The small evasions, the indulgences in irrational wishes, the surrenders to surmountable fears, the willful acts of self-blindness—such are the means by which the infection is started, and is subsequently reinforced as the condition worsens across the years. In some cases, it must be said the factor of evasion appears to be largely or entirely absent; the "complicity" may be devoid of any element of dishonesty, but may simply entail a policy of repression that nonetheless leads to very harmful consequences.

Man's need of self-esteem is inherent in his nature. But he is not born with the knowledge of what will satisfy that need, or of the standard by which self-esteem is to be gauged; he must discover it. The need for such an experience is inherent in man's nature. But if a man lacks the self-esteem to earn it, he attempts to fake it—and for example, he chooses his partner (subconsciously) by the standard of her ability to help him fake it, to give him the illusion of a self-value he does not possess and of a happiness he does not feel. This same principle, of course, applies to a woman's or man's romantic-sexual choices.

The scope of a person's productive ambition reflects, not only the range of his intelligence, but, most crucially, the degree of his self-esteem. The higher the level of a man's self-esteem, the higher the goals he sets for himself and the more demanding the challenges he tends to seek. (This refers, of course, to healthy, rational forms of ambition and not to the pretentious aspirations of a self-doubting individual who is struggling to evade and deny his own deficiencies.) On any level of intelligence or ability, one of the characteristics of self-esteem is a man's eagerness for the new and the challenging, for that which will allow him to use his capacities to the fullest extent—just as a fondness for the familiar, the routine, the unexacting, and a fear of the new and the difficult, is a virtually unmistakable indication of a self-esteem deficiency. In the realm of his work, the primary desire of a man of self-confidence is to face challenges, to achieve and to grow; the primary desire of the man lacking in self-confidence is to be "safe."

It is a person's values that determine what he seeks for pleasure—not necessarily his conscious, professed values, but the actual values of his inner life. If a man makes an error in his choice of values, his emotional mechanism will not correct him: it has no will of its own. If a man's values are such that he desires things which, in reality, lead to his destruction, his emotional mechanism will not save him, but will, instead, urge him on toward destruction: he will have set it in reverse, against himself and against reality, against his own life. Man's emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer: man has the power to program it, but no power to change its nature—so that if he sets the wrong programming, he will not be able to escape the fact that the most self-destructive desires will have, for him, the emotional intensity and urgency of life-saving actions. He has, of course, the power to change the programming—but only by changing his values.

A rational, self-confident man is motivated by a love of values and by a desire to achieve them. A neurotic (to the extent that he is neurotic) is motivated by fear and by a desire to escape it. This difference in motivation is reflected, not only in the things each type will seek for pleasure, but in the nature of the pleasure he will experience. For the rational, psychologically healthy man, the desire for pleasure is the desire to celebrate his control over his existence. For the neurotic, the desire for pleasure is the desire to escape reality.

It is a person's values that determine what he seeks for pleasure—not necessarily his conscious, professed values, but the actual values of his inner life. If a man makes an error in his choice of values, his emotional mechanism will not correct him: it has no will of its own. If a man's values are such that he desires things which, in reality, lead to his destruction, his emotional mechanism will not save him, but will, instead, urge him on toward destruction: he will have set it in reverse, against himself and against reality, against his own life. Man's emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer: man has the power to program it, but no power to change its nature—so that if he sets the wrong programming, he will not be able to escape the fact that the most self-destructive desires will have, for him, the emotional intensity and urgency of life-saving actions. He has, of course, the power to change the programming—but only by changing his values."

― Nathaniel Branden

@wolfhnd "As to personality types that is really just a statistical way to predict behavior that is tried to genetics. The classifications are largely arbitrary as are most classifications. Classifications however are useful language tools. "

No, not true. Personality types is not tied to statistics derived from behaviour, its statisticians framing behaviour in other to influence it.

"All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation." - Thomas Sowell

"We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don’t, often it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions. "
— Jessamyn West, US novelist (1903-1984)

Some people make an assumption they foolhardily want to believe in and than try to find evidence to support their assumption. Scientific approach is about looking at statistics and adjusting your assumptions according to what they reveal to you.

"Beware of people who use statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts – for support rather than illumination." — Andrew Lang, British author (1844-1912)

But to take full advantage of the interpreting the data correctly we often need experience.

Scientists tested a frog. They cut its legs off and said, “Jump!” The Frog didn’t jump.
Scientists therefore concluded that when frogs lose their legs they become deaf.

"Information is pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience. "
— Clarence Day, US author (1874-1935)

In the case of personality types, they didn't even look at statistics, they invented the personality types to fit the statistics into their boxes. Like I said. I've studied that topic in a lot of detail, but I won't post here everything, just trust me on it.

@Krunoslav

This may be our last conversation, your self education is pretty impressive. Hope life treats you well.

We will never agree on something like personality tests. I suspect we don't agree on IQ as well. The thing is that you are right that "they invented the personality types to fit the statistics into their boxes". I would argue however that if you are open minded enough you can see that the personality types did not just appear out of thin air. They follow long established common sense prejudices. Despite their best efforts the researchers could not entirely divorce themselves from their cultural heritage. When they assembled the statistics they found that their own prejudice for a liberal world view did not fit the data. The data it seems conformed to traditional prejudices. I'm sure they are now busy trying to "fix" that but the cat is already out of the bag so to speak.

Of course personality types are just abstract because everything having to do with language is abstract. No set of categories are going to fix physical reality perfectly. That applies to hard science as well as soft science. It becomes a question of accuracy and precision. The hard sciences are very accurate and precise. The soft sciences only loosely accurate and precise. I don't know how it could be otherwise. There is no way for the soft sciences to do controlled experiments so they rely on statistics almost entirely and analogical categories. Sometimes the two overlap a bit and something like neurology influences psychology. How much influence is questionable but it does help.

It's easy to critique something like psychology because it is full of charlatans and the self deluded but it is as close to a science of human behavior as we have. Like philosophy I don't take it too seriously but I'm willing to occasionally give it the benefit of the doubt. The same way I take traditional conservative ideas.

@wolfhnd "This may be our last conversation, your self education is pretty impressive. Hope life treats you well."

Shame about the last conversation part. Thank you for the kind words. I hope the same is true for you and life treats you well, friend.

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