> And this is being done under the banner of progressivism
I think it's a very confusing time. A lot of people want to be "good people". They don't understand how the definitions of words have changed and what they're really signing up for. "Anti-racisim" sounds great - what reasonable, moral person wants to be racist? But you begin to read the text and you start to see it isn't what you think it is. That it isn't anything like what we've been working towards in terms of civil rights and equality.
I don't think "Progressivism" is the right word. There's not a good name for this philosophy yet other than derogative terms like "woke". Social Justice maybe but I find it unjust. I've seen "therapeutic totalitarianism" as one candidate.
Its authoritarianism. One thing that frustrates me so much as an independent, is the refusal of even very intelligent people to acknowledge the y-axis of the political spectrum. People accuse the left of going right while the right goes far right, but that's not it! They are both going "up"!
There's still a lot of actual racist violence by the police in this country. And there's a situation where municipal governments essentially have no power to actually stop out of control cops.
But there are lots of people who want to do something but aren't going to dive full tilt into actually challenging the serious problematics of a violent police force. So there's a huge market for "do something small" which involves challenging fairly petty expressions of racism.
Basically, on "the left" and "the right" you have experts taking people's real grievances and turning them into "feel good" symbology. The idiocy of the social signaling is annoying but the way the actual grievances go unaddressed is a considerably worse problem.
Bari Weiss wrote in Tablet yesterday (before this current hullaballoo had begun) about this[1]. I think "successor ideology" is an apt if awkward stand-in term, because it focuses on the project as an attempt to ideologically present "the next stage" or replacement for liberalism:
No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it’s “Social Justice.” The author Rod Dreher has called it “therapeutic totalitarianism.” The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as “the successor ideology” — as in, the successor to liberalism.
At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly describes its mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality. Until then, it is up to each of us to see it plainly. We need to look past the hashtags and slogans and the jargon to assess it honestly — and then to explain it to others.
The new creed’s premise goes something like this: We are in a war in which the forces of justice and progress are arrayed against the forces of backwardness and oppression. And in a war, the normal rules of the game — due process; political compromise; the presumption of innocence; free speech; even reason itself — must be suspended. Indeed, those rules themselves were corrupt to begin with — designed, as they were, by dead white males in order to uphold their own power.
There isn't anything remotely "leftist" about this sort of thing. It's done in service of some left-ish movements. Or, rather, I'd argue that "progressive" and "left" have been (mis)appropriated.
I think it's a very confusing time. A lot of people want to be "good people". They don't understand how the definitions of words have changed and what they're really signing up for. "Anti-racisim" sounds great - what reasonable, moral person wants to be racist? But you begin to read the text and you start to see it isn't what you think it is. That it isn't anything like what we've been working towards in terms of civil rights and equality.
I don't think "Progressivism" is the right word. There's not a good name for this philosophy yet other than derogative terms like "woke". Social Justice maybe but I find it unjust. I've seen "therapeutic totalitarianism" as one candidate.