What Happened To You?

Andrew Sullivan is one of the liberals I referenced in Fighting The Good Fight II in opposition to the radical theories of the New Racists.  He's just written "What Happened To You? The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism".  Some lengthy excerpts below (with added commentary from me) and the whole article is worth reading.

“What happened to you?”

It’s a question I get a lot on Twitter. “When did you become so far right?” “Why have you become a white supremacist, transphobic, misogynistic eugenicist?” Or, of course: “See! I told you who he really was! Just take the hood off, Sully!” It’s trolling, mainly. And it’s a weapon for some in the elite to wield against others in the kind of emotional blackmail spiral that was first pioneered on elite college campuses. But it’s worth answering, a year after I was booted from New York Magazine for my unacceptable politics. Because it seems to me that the dynamic should really be the other way round.

The real question is: what happened to you?

This reminded me of my post from 2016 about my own political journey, What Happened??

Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?

One of the great lies being spread by the proponents of the New Racism is that the opposition is solely from Republicans.  The truth is that opposition is much broader as can be seen in my Fighting the Good Fight post.

What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.(emphasis added by THC)

We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences. 

Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that “the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.” She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism.

This is the media hub of the “social justice movement.” And the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough. Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy,” designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot.

The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”).

A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world.

As Philip K Dick wrote many years ago:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

CRT says you must believe in theory, not reality.  But reality still exists.  Don't forget.

The movement is much broader than race — as anyone who is dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you. The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.” The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy.” And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy. (emphasis added by THC)

In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence — and you are either fighting this and “on the right side of history,” or you are against it and abetting evil. There is no neutrality. No space for skepticism. No room for debate. No space even for staying silent. (Silence, remember, is violence — perhaps the most profoundly anti-liberal slogan ever invented.)

And that tells you about the will to power behind it. Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. Liberalism is only concerned with your actions. The successor ideology is concerned with your mind, your psyche, and the deepest recesses of your soul. Liberalism will let you do your job, and let you keep your politics private. S.I. will force you into a struggle session as a condition for employment.

And when it comes to K-12 education, inflicting these concepts on children is cruelty. What kind of childhood are we trying to create by telling youngsters that their race and gender are the only significant things about themselves and others?  What is the impact of making children obsess about each other's race and gender?  Why do we want white and Jewish children to hate themselves, their parents and their ancestors?  Why do we want the other children hating whites and Jews?  Why do we want all the children hating their own country and history?  Why do we want 8-year olds choosing their gender in the classroom?

What happened to me? You know what I want to know: What on earth has happened to you?

I have exactly the same principles and support most of the same policies I did under Barack Obama. In fact, I’ve moved left on economic and foreign policy since then. It’s Democrats who have taken a sudden, giant swerve away from their recent past. 

A plank of successor ideology, for example, is that the only and exclusive reason for racial inequality is “white supremacy.” Culture, economics, poverty, criminality, family structure: all are irrelevant, unless seen as mere emanations of white control. Even discussing these complicated factors is racist, according to Ibram X Kendi.

Kendi, and those like him, simply refuse to debate their opponents, because they believe any opposition to their views is driven by racism and they will not engage with racists.  Those liberals and conservatives who still think this is about a debate in the "marketplace of ideas" are delusional.  The very nature of the beliefs of the race and gender ideologues is to deny the possibility that critics could actually be motivated by ideas other than those solely based on race, gender and power.  That is why Sullivan and others understand that if this ideology triumphs it is the end of liberalism and the end of an open and free society.

You keep asking: what happened to me? I remain an Obamacon, same as I always have been. What, in contrast, has happened to you?

Check out this really insightful interview of Wes Yang by Matt Taibbi. Yang beautifully explains the radical shift in elite opinion. He notes the ascending rhetoric: “So there’s a line in an n+1 essay, where the person is saying, ‘Oh, we are now menaced by whiteness and masculinity.’ Whereas in the past, we would have said, ‘Oh, we’re menaced by racism and sexism.’” He sees what this movement is about: the end of due process, the rejection of even an attempt at objectivity, a belief in active race and sex discrimination (“equity”) to counter the legacy of the past, the purging of ideological diversity, and the replacement of liberal education with left-indoctrination. 

Yang sees the attempt to dismantle the entire carapace of liberal society and liberal institutions: “[The proponents of the successor ideology are] not trying to be malicious, but they are trying to basically annihilate a lot of the foundational processes that we depend upon and then remake them anew. You operate from the starting point that all the previous ideologies, methods, and processes are untrustworthy, because they produced this outcome previously, so we’ve got to remake all of them.” Precisely. This is a revolution against liberalism commanded from above.

I disagree with Yang (one of the other people I linked to in the Fighting The Good Fight post) on one point.  The proponents of the successor ideology are trying to be malicious.  They are evil, not just deluded.  Many of those who support them without understanding the full implications of the ideology are not malicious; in fact it is their good nature that is being taken advantage of by the proponents and, in some instances, the intimidation of knowing that not going along with this nonsense will jeopardize their educational opportunities, job and career.

While awaiting execution for his part in an anti-Nazi conspiracy, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

"Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. … The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."

Back to Sullivan:

Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone.

Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Non-violence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Color-blindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.

It is absolutely no accident that this illiberal ideology has no qualms whatever with illiberal methods. The latter springs intrinsically from the former. Kendi, feted across the establishment, favors amending the Constitution to appoint an unelected and unaccountable committee of “experts” that has the power to coerce and punish any individual or group anywhere in the country deemed practicing racism. Intent does not matter. And the decisions are final. An advocate for unaccountable, totalitarian control of our society is the darling of every single elite institution in America, and is routinely given platforms where no tough questioning of him is allowed.

The great danger is that these beliefs are not just limited to crazy academics like Kendi, but now widespread in most of our institutions and the media.  Normal people face an interlocking mechanism of repression whether in education or the workplace in which any dissent from the New Racism is itself declared to be racist; any dissent from the new gender ideology is declared to be transphobic, and then the offender is cast into the darkness.

One of the other constant themes we hear from Progressives is an obsession about radicalism on the Right, an argument it deploys to increase fear among its followers and to obscure its own radicalism.  However, as Sullivan points out, the Pew Center has been asking a standard set of questions to voters since 1994 and those results show that Democrats have moved much further Left than Republicans have to the Right.

On immigration, Republicans have moved around five points to the right; the Democrats 35 points to the left. On abortion, Republicans who advocate a total ban have increased their numbers a couple of points since 1994; Democrats who favor legality in every instance has risen 20 points. On guns, the GOP has moved ten points right; Dems 20 points left. 

Sullivan summarizes:

We are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s. This isn’t coming from the ground up. It’s being imposed ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda, and its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown.

But as Wes Yang notes, Biden has also aided and abetted and justified this radicalism. He has instituted a huge program of overt government race and sex discrimination throughout every policy and area of government; he backs decimating due process for sexual accusations on campus; he favors abolishing religious freedom as a defense of anti-gay discrimination; he believes that gender identity should replace sex as a legal category, and gender identity should rest entirely on self-disclosure; he favors expediting and maximizing mass immigration, not stemming it. In Yang’s rather brutal assessment, for the hard left, “what they saw is that with Joe Biden, who’s this throwback figure, the activists could all rush to him and get most of what they wanted from him anyway.”

The Biden Administration is the most race obsessed and racist administration since that of Woodrow Wilson and, when it comes to gender, its unprecedented denial of evolutionary biology is mind-boggling.   It bears constant repeating that the New Racists and White Nationalists bring the same analysis to society - it is all about race and power - the only difference is who ends up on top.  It is the capture of the Federal government by this hideous movement that adds to the urgency need for all decent Americans to speak out in opposition before the administration, in lockstep with the media and corporate oligarchs imposes an authoritarian future upon us.  As we learn more each week about how deeply the New Racism has penetrated so many of our institutions they question is whether there is still time to stop it?