Interesting commentary here, but I have to push back on one idea. Richard brings up his defense of the New York Times (and liberalish media in general) and Chris seems to imply that the press maybe used to be good but has gotten worse recently; he notes that the Times was actually very hard on Angela Davis and other far left intellectuals in the 1970s but now is apparently controlled by Taylor Lorenz or something. First of all, it's interesting to consider that conservatives have been whining about the Times and the 'liberal media' for more than half a century, and on basically the same terms- so it's weird to sort of shift the goalposts now and acknowledge, well actually the press was used to be good but now it's not. When I hear conservative critiques of the media there's definitely a boy who cried wolf problem.
But more to the point, I think he dramatically overstates this idea that the Times is now being overtaken by modern Angela Davis types. I recently listened to an interview on the New Yorker Radio Hour with AG Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, and I came away fairly impressed with how seriously he and other leadership take their responsibility to put out a good paper. As Richard noted in his 'why the press is honest and good' essay, they do make a really good faith effort to get things right, even if they are subject to individual biases; it's impossible to imagine, say, an editor at Fox News wrestling seriously with questions of fairness in the way the Sulzberger seems to be.
I also recently listened (out of a kind of morbid curiosity) to a podcast series by some trans activists about how bad the New York Times is, basically because it occasionally runs commentary that the most fringe activists disapprove of. The podcast is basically a profile of a radical activist who worked for the Times for a while and was ultimately pushed out- as miscarriage of justice, in the opinion of the podcast. I of course came away from this impressed with the Times ability to weed out bad actors and stand up to cynical emotional manipulation from junior staffers. The people at the top of the Times are still the grownups, serious people who apparently have an effective system for weeding out lunatics. So overall I think the Times was pretty good in the past, subject to some caveats, and is still pretty good in precisely the same way.
This is why the idea that conservatives are going to fix this problem is sort of fanciful: the conservative movement is just not honest or intellectually serious. Towards the end, they seem to be putting a lot of faith in Ron Desantis. Desantis is currently threatening to use government resources to investigate Bud Light because conservatives are still mad about the Dylan Mulvaney thing. Is this an appropriate or thoughtful use of power? Watching Desantis' presidential campaign implode should tell you what you need to know here. Chris concludes 'If conservative voters are smart and they are thinking long-term...' I'm sorry to tell you that they are not, and if anyone thinks that conservatives are going to be more responsible with power, they're basically committing the same error as leftists who still believed in communism in the 70s.
The conservatives might have griped too much in the past about liberals bias but there were, nonetheless, legitimate gripes. Now they still have legitimate gripes.
I'd be curious what the age gap was between the activist pushed out of the NYT and the "grown-ups" who did the pushing.
My sense (as a Millennial) is that leftist Boomers and Gen Xers commonly have a very real concern for non-partisan principles, e.g. free speech, journalistic integrity, and the pursuit of objective truth, while leftist Millennials and Zoomers DON'T, it's "who/whom" all the way down for them. When they're in charge, the last vestiges of the old principles will be swept away.
I don't really disagree with you on conservatives though.
That’s a good question- in the podcast I mentioned the activist types who left the times were definitely younger; I assume that there are some younger people who aren’t lunatics, and the hope is that those will stay with the paper and eventually take the reins, because we do need to have some real journalism going on. But who knows, maybe in a few years we’ll have an inmates running the asylum type situation.
I think it's pretty clear that the inmates actually run the NYT asylum for a while: recall the firing of Don McNeil, recall Bari Weiss leaving. But now there seems to be some meaningful pushback and some retaking of control from above.
The Don McNeil thing was embarrassing, but Bari Weiss was one of the inmates, and she left voluntarily. I’d say it’s a mixed bag, but still significantly better in terms of journalistic integrity than most other papers, and certainly than conservative media generally.
Yes, I'm sure all the micro aggressions made her feel unseen and constantly crying in the break room; hopefully they'll get some diversity consultants in to teach them about the psychological distress, or maybe Congress will pass a law to protect the marginalized, vulnerable opinion columnists
It's an interesting question whether it'll hurt their credibility as they get more and more obviously biased, or they'll just brainwash everyone into going along with them. I've seen quite a few attempts to produce a more-accurate-but-conservative outlet, and they always flop. I do wonder if the NYT and WaPo become useless for actual knowledge of nonpolitical things if a highbrow, accurate conservative paper will actually succeed. Sometimes products just need the right market.
It doesn't give me much confidence that if conservatives gain more cultural power they will use it better than liberals do. I would prefer to see some kind of smart opposition movement that actually cares about freedom of speech.
The good news for you is that conservatives aren't going to gain more cultural power in the foreseeable future; they lose every cultural battle, and when they win elections, they just lose those battles harder.
The reason you back the right is to keep the left under control. The right is incapable of taking control.
The bud light debacle is a bad marketing campaign, and a marketing campaign is a speech issue. Under a regime that respects freedom of speech, companies can make bad marketing campaigns and the public can respond accordingly; there's no reason why the government should be involved. And it's not like this is an isolated incident. Desantis frequently uses the power of government to investigate or sanction people with opinions he dislikes, or threatens to. The decline of support for freedom of speech among liberals is dispiriting, but unfortunately there isn't any credible opposition.
"they’re using taxpayer money to build robots to castrate people to create trans identities." Well, robotic surgeries have become commonplace with the da Vinci system and other systems. Some of those systems are purchased with taxpayer funding, and among the surgeries they are used for, some are undoubtedly these elective castrations. So, this Rufo statement is technically accurate. Someone could look at the George Floyd episode and conclude "they're using taxpayer money to pay folks to kill Black people." With the same level of technical accuracy, and intellectual honesty.
I was hoping to get thoughtful conservatism, not echo chambered uncritical paranoia like this. Disappointing.
Chris: And I think your point, though, is that my critics, invariably, never address the substance of my work and my reporting. They never address all of the reports I did on Critical Race Theory in schools. They just attack me personally. They never grapple with the substance. As such, I feel justified in really dismissing their personal criticism because implicit in their argument is, by being unwilling to engage in the substantive debate, they’re conceding defeat because they’re not even trying to confront the facts and the real arguments.
Richard: Yeah, exactly. So this stuff is indefensible.
I think what's needed here is a recognition of the battle going on in each person's mind. Everyone needs to think they are good, and right-thinking. But journalists swim in this CRT/DEI/pro-trans water, and have to get along, for the sake of their careers and peace of mind, and so they need to either swallow the gospel whole or kind of push it down and just not think about it. Which is where the common behavior comes from, of simply responding to everything with a racist = sexist = maga = Trumpist = propagandist = Qanon loony, blanket, all-purpose dismissal. In the individual's mind, it's not about winning the argument, or not believing Rufo's - or anyone else's - reporting. it's about not having the argument at all, and moving on to safer things. They can't bear to actually engage, so they studiously ignore it, just like people who make sure to get all their news from MSNBC (or FOX).
Rufo's subsequent discussion of how people slowly engaged with his CRT reporting seems to intuit that there are two groups of people, the true believers and those who are just trying not to explicitly deal with thinking about these issues, and that latter group can be swayed by essentially making it too exhausting and uncomfortable to keep ignoring the issue.
Many or most of the behaviors we see aren't driven by a search for the truth, or a will to power, but simply the preservation of one's view of the self.
David French actually has had a lot of success as a lawyer. It seems like Rufo is falling for the right-always-loses fallacy that Hanania talks about elsewhere in this transcript.
Transgenderism seems newer than 1968. "Trans exclusionary radical feminists" are really closer to the 2nd wave feminism of the 60s/70s.
> Are Protestants in jail more than Catholics? Nobody knows, nobody cares. We should be like that with race. White ethnic groups, some are in prison at much higher rates than others.
The disparities between Protestants & Catholics just aren't nearly as high as white vs black.
The David French of the 2000s (which was perhaps before Rufo's time; before mine too since I'm even younger) was a very different one from the David French of the last few years. At least as a pundit, I doubt French today does much benefit to conservatism on the issues on which he still agrees with it.
"If this person gets into the Oval Office, [he] is going to not just symbolically take a sledgehammer to the bureaucracy."
Really? Did Ron DeSantis do that in Florida?
I don't think so. The total recommendation for the Florida budget for FY 2021-2022 budget is $96.6 billion. This is an increase of $4.3 billion over the previous fiscal year.
You guys are dreaming. It's rather sad, in the end.
Really fantastic discussion! I was already interested in reading Rufo's and your books, and now I've gone from "maybe" to "definitely am buying and reading both ASAP." Also, Rufo's inside perspective on DeSantis reinforces my desire to see him win the Presidency, because unlike Trump (great salesman, lousy manager), DeSantis has the self-discipline, conscientiousness, and leadership acumen to make great personnel decisions and to do political jiu-jitsu with laws and institutional politics to beat the Left at their own game and on their own turf. But with the Left going hard after Trump and, therefore, keeping his name constantly in the news, and with Trump shining on the campaign trail with his electrifying big rallies (not DeSantis's strong suit), DeSantis would have a steep uphill battle in the Primaries. But even if he has to remain governor of Florida for another four years, I suspect he will make good use of that time and provide a workable model for other red state governors to follow. At any rate, your and Rufo's public conversations and writings are having an impact for good on our culture. You guys understand the long game, and your smart and skillful enough to win it.
I agree 100%, and stupidly wasted some time down a rabbit hole trying to figure out exactly how long the political cycle is. (Of course you were speaking broadly.) There are papers using Fourier transforms and such. Generally in postwar America the parties switch off every 8 years so you have a 16-year period from election of a GOP president to election of a GOP president. There are larger cultural cycles, though--the recent atmosphere seems very similar to the 70s with its increasing radicalism, which implies about 40 years.
No, it's never an exact thing, but there definitely does seem to be a dynamic where one generation forgets the lessons the last learned.
"You are never going to *defeat* leftism. It's been here since the Jacobins in the French Revolution. You have to re-convince people how stupid it is approximately every 25 years."
"But what made them so SUCCESSFUL in wokefying our Western culture?"
I'd like to take a crack at answering this, with my only qualification being someone who was a Lit major back in the late 80s at a private liberal-arts college, and thus sort of an eyewitness to the birth of the postmodern Left cultural revolution. I think it was a 2-pronged (at least) campaign.
1) Soc Just is first and foremost a moral project (or a political project surrounded by a Praetorian guard of hard-edged moralism), and the key to their success has been the creation and propagation of a new morality, based on a sort of fundamentalist Egalitarianism and centered on the Western history of oppression in re Marcuse's "coalition of the marginalized", meaning women, gays and most especially black people. Or more simply: Soc Justice was able to piggyback onto the Civil Rights movement, and present itself as an extension of it, thus establishing and cementing the idea of them as Official Defenders of the Oppressed;
2) After crafting this new morality, they were able to weaponize it and march to power through motte/bailey type language games, or Kafka Traps where anyone opposing them faces a Catch-22 where no matter what they do/say, they are inevitably smeared with a Bigotry Accusation. And in post-60s America, most especially in culture and on campus, being smeared as a bigot is the Scarlet A of our time, which can destroy not only your career but your personal life too. Add to this the fact that most people defer to zealots, if the balance is agreeing to something minor in the moment vs getting down in the dirt with people who'd gladly smear and destroy you and feel righteous doing so (see what happened to E.O Wilson, Alice Dreger or Steve Pinker when they threatened Left dogma).
And add to this secularization (our societal god-shaped hole) and the massive collapse in moral legitimacy experienced by post-60s bourgeois liberals and the subsequent eruption of White Guilt, throw in 50 years of Hollywood and media crafting narratives about black suffering and white crimes, and voila, there you have it: once the New Left installed an emotional Skinner box in enough brains, and were able to zap people for unapproved thoughts and reward them for obedience to dogma, their total victory was only a matter of time.
Thanks for going through this, I think it's a great summary. I think a lot of spergy/science-y people are less concerned with what people think so we tend to be less affected. Of course, it also makes us less effective at convincing other people to go along with us!
I've seen a lot of people describe SocJus as a sort of Christian heresy with no Christ--it does sort of piggyback on existing Christian moral narratives with sin (racism/sexism), the elect (marginalized groups), repentance ('doing the work'--though they are much less likely to forgive a prior transgression), and so on.
Soc Just is definitely a Christian heresy, most especially because it posits a sacred victim at the center of our moral universe, who died for our sins and who suffers when we blaspheme against them, with of course the difference being swapping out the son of God for "the marginalized".
I tend to think of Soc Just as a mashup of Protestantism (the moralization of everything) and Marxism (the politicization of everything).
All of this makes sense now that politics has (mostly) replaced religion in the West, with Marxism being the first political religion, but far from the last.
While this makes theological sense, most Christians for the first 1700 or so years of Christianity were, in practice, more Nietzschean than even most hardcore Nietzscheans today are. It was only when societies became rich and institutionally stable that victimhood fetishism really went through the roof. Maybe Christian victimhood fixation was necessary, but not sufficient to result in this. Rich democracies with stable institutions systematically reward those who can best make the case that they've been wronged, so it's not surprising such a society would yield a perpetual competition to demonstrate one's victimhood.
appreciate your perspective, very good points...i guess another factor too is life in the market state and what this does to humans and their brains/souls and societies across generations. if "the customer is always right" and the customer most wants to feel loved and special (the same yet different and better), then everything will be remade to give the customer what he wants.
Postwar prosperity, global capitalism, and the welfare state turned a chicken in every pot into a pond for every Narcissus...
This is a good question. I think, as Richard mentions in the interview (and elsewhere), liberalism was always a bit crazy (e.g., bussing). As more New Left progeny began to enter the institutions, the establishment liberals, who were never inoculated against blank slate views on race, and prone to white guilt, they became easier to push around as the New Left-types gained ground on campus and elsewhere.
Interesting commentary here, but I have to push back on one idea. Richard brings up his defense of the New York Times (and liberalish media in general) and Chris seems to imply that the press maybe used to be good but has gotten worse recently; he notes that the Times was actually very hard on Angela Davis and other far left intellectuals in the 1970s but now is apparently controlled by Taylor Lorenz or something. First of all, it's interesting to consider that conservatives have been whining about the Times and the 'liberal media' for more than half a century, and on basically the same terms- so it's weird to sort of shift the goalposts now and acknowledge, well actually the press was used to be good but now it's not. When I hear conservative critiques of the media there's definitely a boy who cried wolf problem.
But more to the point, I think he dramatically overstates this idea that the Times is now being overtaken by modern Angela Davis types. I recently listened to an interview on the New Yorker Radio Hour with AG Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, and I came away fairly impressed with how seriously he and other leadership take their responsibility to put out a good paper. As Richard noted in his 'why the press is honest and good' essay, they do make a really good faith effort to get things right, even if they are subject to individual biases; it's impossible to imagine, say, an editor at Fox News wrestling seriously with questions of fairness in the way the Sulzberger seems to be.
I also recently listened (out of a kind of morbid curiosity) to a podcast series by some trans activists about how bad the New York Times is, basically because it occasionally runs commentary that the most fringe activists disapprove of. The podcast is basically a profile of a radical activist who worked for the Times for a while and was ultimately pushed out- as miscarriage of justice, in the opinion of the podcast. I of course came away from this impressed with the Times ability to weed out bad actors and stand up to cynical emotional manipulation from junior staffers. The people at the top of the Times are still the grownups, serious people who apparently have an effective system for weeding out lunatics. So overall I think the Times was pretty good in the past, subject to some caveats, and is still pretty good in precisely the same way.
This is why the idea that conservatives are going to fix this problem is sort of fanciful: the conservative movement is just not honest or intellectually serious. Towards the end, they seem to be putting a lot of faith in Ron Desantis. Desantis is currently threatening to use government resources to investigate Bud Light because conservatives are still mad about the Dylan Mulvaney thing. Is this an appropriate or thoughtful use of power? Watching Desantis' presidential campaign implode should tell you what you need to know here. Chris concludes 'If conservative voters are smart and they are thinking long-term...' I'm sorry to tell you that they are not, and if anyone thinks that conservatives are going to be more responsible with power, they're basically committing the same error as leftists who still believed in communism in the 70s.
Sulzberger Interview: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/a-g-sulzberger-on-the-battles-within-and-against-the-new-york-times
Lunatic trans activists podcast: https://open.spotify.com/embed/show/0NuHlGNjEkgjwAHdoIOcQw?utm_source=generator
It's not goalpost moving when the conservatives of today aren't the same conservatives of the 50 years ago. Rufo is in his 30s.
The conservatives might have griped too much in the past about liberals bias but there were, nonetheless, legitimate gripes. Now they still have legitimate gripes.
I'd be curious what the age gap was between the activist pushed out of the NYT and the "grown-ups" who did the pushing.
My sense (as a Millennial) is that leftist Boomers and Gen Xers commonly have a very real concern for non-partisan principles, e.g. free speech, journalistic integrity, and the pursuit of objective truth, while leftist Millennials and Zoomers DON'T, it's "who/whom" all the way down for them. When they're in charge, the last vestiges of the old principles will be swept away.
I don't really disagree with you on conservatives though.
That’s a good question- in the podcast I mentioned the activist types who left the times were definitely younger; I assume that there are some younger people who aren’t lunatics, and the hope is that those will stay with the paper and eventually take the reins, because we do need to have some real journalism going on. But who knows, maybe in a few years we’ll have an inmates running the asylum type situation.
I think it's pretty clear that the inmates actually run the NYT asylum for a while: recall the firing of Don McNeil, recall Bari Weiss leaving. But now there seems to be some meaningful pushback and some retaking of control from above.
The Don McNeil thing was embarrassing, but Bari Weiss was one of the inmates, and she left voluntarily. I’d say it’s a mixed bag, but still significantly better in terms of journalistic integrity than most other papers, and certainly than conservative media generally.
She left voluntarily because she was being constantly attacked by other NYT staffers and the leadership did nothing.
Yes, I'm sure all the micro aggressions made her feel unseen and constantly crying in the break room; hopefully they'll get some diversity consultants in to teach them about the psychological distress, or maybe Congress will pass a law to protect the marginalized, vulnerable opinion columnists
It's an interesting question whether it'll hurt their credibility as they get more and more obviously biased, or they'll just brainwash everyone into going along with them. I've seen quite a few attempts to produce a more-accurate-but-conservative outlet, and they always flop. I do wonder if the NYT and WaPo become useless for actual knowledge of nonpolitical things if a highbrow, accurate conservative paper will actually succeed. Sometimes products just need the right market.
It doesn't give me much confidence that if conservatives gain more cultural power they will use it better than liberals do. I would prefer to see some kind of smart opposition movement that actually cares about freedom of speech.
I think the best we have in that respect right now is Elon Musk (only half joking).
Your best chance is to become a libertarian or something similar, I've actually seen them go after both sides.
In practice with our dumb two-party system it's pick your poison, do you think Republicans or Democrats are worse.
Freedom of speech is always the underdog's ideology anyways.
The good news for you is that conservatives aren't going to gain more cultural power in the foreseeable future; they lose every cultural battle, and when they win elections, they just lose those battles harder.
The reason you back the right is to keep the left under control. The right is incapable of taking control.
The bud light debacle is a bad marketing campaign, and a marketing campaign is a speech issue. Under a regime that respects freedom of speech, companies can make bad marketing campaigns and the public can respond accordingly; there's no reason why the government should be involved. And it's not like this is an isolated incident. Desantis frequently uses the power of government to investigate or sanction people with opinions he dislikes, or threatens to. The decline of support for freedom of speech among liberals is dispiriting, but unfortunately there isn't any credible opposition.
If neither side ever cared about it you wouldn't have it in the first place. It would have been long gone.
"they’re using taxpayer money to build robots to castrate people to create trans identities." Well, robotic surgeries have become commonplace with the da Vinci system and other systems. Some of those systems are purchased with taxpayer funding, and among the surgeries they are used for, some are undoubtedly these elective castrations. So, this Rufo statement is technically accurate. Someone could look at the George Floyd episode and conclude "they're using taxpayer money to pay folks to kill Black people." With the same level of technical accuracy, and intellectual honesty.
I was hoping to get thoughtful conservatism, not echo chambered uncritical paranoia like this. Disappointing.
Chris: And I think your point, though, is that my critics, invariably, never address the substance of my work and my reporting. They never address all of the reports I did on Critical Race Theory in schools. They just attack me personally. They never grapple with the substance. As such, I feel justified in really dismissing their personal criticism because implicit in their argument is, by being unwilling to engage in the substantive debate, they’re conceding defeat because they’re not even trying to confront the facts and the real arguments.
Richard: Yeah, exactly. So this stuff is indefensible.
I think what's needed here is a recognition of the battle going on in each person's mind. Everyone needs to think they are good, and right-thinking. But journalists swim in this CRT/DEI/pro-trans water, and have to get along, for the sake of their careers and peace of mind, and so they need to either swallow the gospel whole or kind of push it down and just not think about it. Which is where the common behavior comes from, of simply responding to everything with a racist = sexist = maga = Trumpist = propagandist = Qanon loony, blanket, all-purpose dismissal. In the individual's mind, it's not about winning the argument, or not believing Rufo's - or anyone else's - reporting. it's about not having the argument at all, and moving on to safer things. They can't bear to actually engage, so they studiously ignore it, just like people who make sure to get all their news from MSNBC (or FOX).
Rufo's subsequent discussion of how people slowly engaged with his CRT reporting seems to intuit that there are two groups of people, the true believers and those who are just trying not to explicitly deal with thinking about these issues, and that latter group can be swayed by essentially making it too exhausting and uncomfortable to keep ignoring the issue.
Many or most of the behaviors we see aren't driven by a search for the truth, or a will to power, but simply the preservation of one's view of the self.
David French actually has had a lot of success as a lawyer. It seems like Rufo is falling for the right-always-loses fallacy that Hanania talks about elsewhere in this transcript.
Transgenderism seems newer than 1968. "Trans exclusionary radical feminists" are really closer to the 2nd wave feminism of the 60s/70s.
> Are Protestants in jail more than Catholics? Nobody knows, nobody cares. We should be like that with race. White ethnic groups, some are in prison at much higher rates than others.
The disparities between Protestants & Catholics just aren't nearly as high as white vs black.
The David French of the 2000s (which was perhaps before Rufo's time; before mine too since I'm even younger) was a very different one from the David French of the last few years. At least as a pundit, I doubt French today does much benefit to conservatism on the issues on which he still agrees with it.
If Rufo is simply unaware of French's track-record, that's reason to discount what he says about him.
"If this person gets into the Oval Office, [he] is going to not just symbolically take a sledgehammer to the bureaucracy."
Really? Did Ron DeSantis do that in Florida?
I don't think so. The total recommendation for the Florida budget for FY 2021-2022 budget is $96.6 billion. This is an increase of $4.3 billion over the previous fiscal year.
You guys are dreaming. It's rather sad, in the end.
Really fantastic discussion! I was already interested in reading Rufo's and your books, and now I've gone from "maybe" to "definitely am buying and reading both ASAP." Also, Rufo's inside perspective on DeSantis reinforces my desire to see him win the Presidency, because unlike Trump (great salesman, lousy manager), DeSantis has the self-discipline, conscientiousness, and leadership acumen to make great personnel decisions and to do political jiu-jitsu with laws and institutional politics to beat the Left at their own game and on their own turf. But with the Left going hard after Trump and, therefore, keeping his name constantly in the news, and with Trump shining on the campaign trail with his electrifying big rallies (not DeSantis's strong suit), DeSantis would have a steep uphill battle in the Primaries. But even if he has to remain governor of Florida for another four years, I suspect he will make good use of that time and provide a workable model for other red state governors to follow. At any rate, your and Rufo's public conversations and writings are having an impact for good on our culture. You guys understand the long game, and your smart and skillful enough to win it.
"Edited for clarity" means:
"So part of it I think is just like, it’s just sort of the geography and sort of like where people are placed"
becomes
"So part of it is just geography and where people are placed."
And "edited for grammar" means adding quotes when one is quoting.
Form aside, it was an interesting interview.
I agree 100%, and stupidly wasted some time down a rabbit hole trying to figure out exactly how long the political cycle is. (Of course you were speaking broadly.) There are papers using Fourier transforms and such. Generally in postwar America the parties switch off every 8 years so you have a 16-year period from election of a GOP president to election of a GOP president. There are larger cultural cycles, though--the recent atmosphere seems very similar to the 70s with its increasing radicalism, which implies about 40 years.
No, it's never an exact thing, but there definitely does seem to be a dynamic where one generation forgets the lessons the last learned.
"You are never going to *defeat* leftism. It's been here since the Jacobins in the French Revolution. You have to re-convince people how stupid it is approximately every 25 years."
💯
"But what made them so SUCCESSFUL in wokefying our Western culture?"
I'd like to take a crack at answering this, with my only qualification being someone who was a Lit major back in the late 80s at a private liberal-arts college, and thus sort of an eyewitness to the birth of the postmodern Left cultural revolution. I think it was a 2-pronged (at least) campaign.
1) Soc Just is first and foremost a moral project (or a political project surrounded by a Praetorian guard of hard-edged moralism), and the key to their success has been the creation and propagation of a new morality, based on a sort of fundamentalist Egalitarianism and centered on the Western history of oppression in re Marcuse's "coalition of the marginalized", meaning women, gays and most especially black people. Or more simply: Soc Justice was able to piggyback onto the Civil Rights movement, and present itself as an extension of it, thus establishing and cementing the idea of them as Official Defenders of the Oppressed;
2) After crafting this new morality, they were able to weaponize it and march to power through motte/bailey type language games, or Kafka Traps where anyone opposing them faces a Catch-22 where no matter what they do/say, they are inevitably smeared with a Bigotry Accusation. And in post-60s America, most especially in culture and on campus, being smeared as a bigot is the Scarlet A of our time, which can destroy not only your career but your personal life too. Add to this the fact that most people defer to zealots, if the balance is agreeing to something minor in the moment vs getting down in the dirt with people who'd gladly smear and destroy you and feel righteous doing so (see what happened to E.O Wilson, Alice Dreger or Steve Pinker when they threatened Left dogma).
And add to this secularization (our societal god-shaped hole) and the massive collapse in moral legitimacy experienced by post-60s bourgeois liberals and the subsequent eruption of White Guilt, throw in 50 years of Hollywood and media crafting narratives about black suffering and white crimes, and voila, there you have it: once the New Left installed an emotional Skinner box in enough brains, and were able to zap people for unapproved thoughts and reward them for obedience to dogma, their total victory was only a matter of time.
Thanks for going through this, I think it's a great summary. I think a lot of spergy/science-y people are less concerned with what people think so we tend to be less affected. Of course, it also makes us less effective at convincing other people to go along with us!
I've seen a lot of people describe SocJus as a sort of Christian heresy with no Christ--it does sort of piggyback on existing Christian moral narratives with sin (racism/sexism), the elect (marginalized groups), repentance ('doing the work'--though they are much less likely to forgive a prior transgression), and so on.
Soc Just is definitely a Christian heresy, most especially because it posits a sacred victim at the center of our moral universe, who died for our sins and who suffers when we blaspheme against them, with of course the difference being swapping out the son of God for "the marginalized".
I tend to think of Soc Just as a mashup of Protestantism (the moralization of everything) and Marxism (the politicization of everything).
All of this makes sense now that politics has (mostly) replaced religion in the West, with Marxism being the first political religion, but far from the last.
While this makes theological sense, most Christians for the first 1700 or so years of Christianity were, in practice, more Nietzschean than even most hardcore Nietzscheans today are. It was only when societies became rich and institutionally stable that victimhood fetishism really went through the roof. Maybe Christian victimhood fixation was necessary, but not sufficient to result in this. Rich democracies with stable institutions systematically reward those who can best make the case that they've been wronged, so it's not surprising such a society would yield a perpetual competition to demonstrate one's victimhood.
appreciate your perspective, very good points...i guess another factor too is life in the market state and what this does to humans and their brains/souls and societies across generations. if "the customer is always right" and the customer most wants to feel loved and special (the same yet different and better), then everything will be remade to give the customer what he wants.
Postwar prosperity, global capitalism, and the welfare state turned a chicken in every pot into a pond for every Narcissus...
"Narcissism is the new default."
The West has come full circle from civilization to its opposite, and like the ourobouros ends a historical cycle by wedging its head up its own ass...
Liberalism, socialism, communism etc have given way to radical narcissism, meaning: the more I love myself, the better the world will be.
Talk about triumph of the therapeutic!
look forward to reading!
This is a good question. I think, as Richard mentions in the interview (and elsewhere), liberalism was always a bit crazy (e.g., bussing). As more New Left progeny began to enter the institutions, the establishment liberals, who were never inoculated against blank slate views on race, and prone to white guilt, they became easier to push around as the New Left-types gained ground on campus and elsewhere.