Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Jonathan Chait, on Political Correctness

Can We Start Taking Political Correctness Seriously Now?

Chait is no friend of conservatism, as witnessed by these recent contributions: a post titled “Sorry, ObamaCare Denialists, You’re Insane,” and one titled “Why Climate-Science Denialism Should Disqualify Anyone From Holding Office.”. Yet he apparently has had his brain shaken into working position, and his statements regarding Political Correctness ring with observable validity.
"Political correctness is a system of thought that denies the legitimacy of political pluralism on issues of race and gender. It manifests itself most prominently in campus settings not because it’s a passing phase, like acne, but because the academy is one of the few bastions of American life where the p.c. left can muster the strength to impose its political hegemony upon others. The phenomenon also exists in other nonacademic left-wing communities, many of them virtual ones centered on social media, and its defenders include professional left-wing intellectuals".
In the recent University of Missouri shake up, the PC crowd was joined by agitators who were at Ferguson, and local professors who wished to operate in secrecy. These operators have demonstrated that the PC totalitarians have more power than many might think. PC definitely is a denial of pluralism in the same sense that Leninism and Maoism were (and are).
"The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement. (For those inclined to defend p.c. on the grounds that racism and sexism are important, bear in mind that the forms of repression Marxist government set out to eradicate were hardly imaginary.)"
It's very good that there is a growing cognition of the connection between PC and Marxism, not just in the Class Warfare sense, but also in the revolutionary sense. The upheaval at U MO was a small revolution by the Marxist/PC revolutionary crowd.
"That these activists have been able to prevail, even in the face of frequently harsh national publicity highlighting the blunt illiberalism of their methods, confirms that these incidents reflect something deeper than a series of one-off episodes. They are carrying out the ideals of a movement that regards the delegitimization of dissent as a first-order goal. People on the left need to stop evading the question of political correctness — by laughing it off as college goofs, or interrogating the motives of p.c. critics, or ignoring it — and make a decision on whether they agree with it."
After seven years of an Alinsky president and governing agencies, Chait should know better. The Left is identical with PC; it is tautological with totalitarianism and suppression of dissent. There will be no outcry of "unfair" from the Left on any revolutionary activity by students, or on any behavior by any actors from one of their Victimhood Classes. All actions by the "aggrieved" are fair game in the Marxist eyes of the Left.

"You cannot know my pain", they shriek at "the privileged". Those words are the justifications for any and all oppression of those not in their class. Will the internal noncongruencies bring them down? We are told that homosexuals cannot know the pain of the blacks; that blacks cannot know the pain of white lesbians; that white lesbians cannot know the pain of black XY transsexuals who "feel" that "today I am a white lesbian".

It doesn't appear that the lack of sanity, which would stop cis-normal folk from such outrageous behaviors, will stop the growing trend toward Marxist PC identity. And even if it might, there are the professional Marxist activists who are omnipresent and ready to exacerbate anything whatsoever into full blown revolutionary destruction of the sane people who become unfortunate victims in these attacks.

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