The culture war, writes Samuel Kronin at Quillette, is characterized by "a deepening progressive fatalism about race in America." That's where BLM and the current cultural hysteria comes from.
I Don't Think So. But here's what progressives think.
Before 2008, many believed the country was simply too racist to elect a black president. And then, just like that, it happened and Americans forgot what it felt like before it happened. For progressives, the optimism that came with a two-term black presidency in a white majority country with a recent history of overt racism was thwarted by the realization that racism hasn’t gone away and black disadvantage abides.
Hey, I know. Maybe the problem is that the left's whole religion on race is a false religion, that for decades liberals have gone to church on the notion that America is irredeemably racist and that only liberals have the moral chops to redeem America.
And then when we elect a black president and the "black disadvantage" -- liberalspeak for black dysfunction -- doesn't go away, why, as the primitive mind has it, according to Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return,
The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]
America's blacks cannot be dysfunctional fools, ruined by half a century of liberal post-civil-rights-era politics. Oh no. Systemic white racist-sexist-homophobes must be to blame. Let's recast Eliade's notion.
The liberal... cannot conceive of flat-out black dysfunction issuing from unjust liberal policy. It arises from the systemic immoral malevolence of gap-tooth white bitter-clinger deplorable white oppressors in their insurrectionary far-right terrorist cells. There has to be a right-wing fault at the bottom of it -- at the bottom of everything -- otherwise maybe the whole liberal project is a wrong turn, a moral horror, and an unjust monstrosity.
Liberals have to believe that "racism hasn’t gone away," because if it has the world doesn't need liberals any more.
Earth to liberals: ordinary American Commoners all wish that liberal race politics would just go away so they could get on with working and wiving and thriving without looking over their shoulder to make sure that some liberal isn't about to cancel them for a wrong word 20 years ago. And without ever thinking about race again.
The current left-wing ideological terror is not just "the sharp cultural turn toward identity issues in the 2010s." It's been there all along. Here's what Paul Kengor wrote in The American Spectator about liberals circa 1990
I recently happened upon a folder of my columns for my college newspaper in the late 1980s. I was the editorial page editor for our daily newspaper (published Monday through Thursday), The Pitt News. My goodbye column in May 1990 lamented the liberals who reflexively called conservatives names like “Nazi,” “fascist,” “racist,” “homophobe,” “hater.” Yes, way back then. This was when the political correctness movement really launched. We were already referring to liberals as the Thought Police.
I mean. When you are calling the opposition names, using pedal-to-the-metal pejoratives like "RACIST," we are not talking "progressive fatalism." We are talking people that think that the "other" has no place in polite society, and that the "other" needs to be purged from the public square.
Did I mention that pejorative comes from the Latin pejorare meaning "to make things worse?"
We are talking about the human need for a moral narrative, the need for a meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." And that every moral universe needs a Satan, an Old Scratch, a scapegoat upon which to blame all the evils of the world.
And if your need for a moral narrative comes from a need to justify your status as a ruling class, then, in the modern era, that requires you to pose as the educated enlightened lightbringers, the allies of the oppressed peoples fighting the white oppressors for justice.
So, if you have passed your civil rights acts, if you have elected your First Black President, if you have midwifed a second rate race narrative called the "1619 Project," if you have railroaded a poor dumb cop to jail for not preserving the life of a drugged out black habitual criminal resisting arrest, why, the last thing you are ever going to do is declare victory and give up the game to a new, improved ruling class.
You tell me: when has any religion declared that Satan or the Evil One has been decisively defeated, so now we can wind up the old religion and hang out in cafés drinking lattes until the next religion comes along?
Like old soldiers: religion never dies. It only fades away as the believers, one by one, fail to turn up at regular Sunday services.
If you want to call that "fatalism," be my guest.
No comments:
Post a Comment