The Twitter-incited mob that shut down last week’s
Donald Trump rally at the University of Illinois’ Chicago pavilion was the
first skirmish in what is shaping up to be a civil war between a political
Left that has lost its mind and a political Right that has lost its mind and
its soul. The tensions between these two camps are so contorted and dishonest
that even trying to unpack the issues puts the un-packer in jeopardy of being
branded as one kind of thought-criminal or another.
The Left has lost its mind in a climax of zealotry over
the new religion of social justice, with its sacred “victims” (blacks,
LBGTQs, etc), its sacred tenets (“diversity,” “inclusion”), and its endless
charges of blasphemy (renamed “micro-aggressions”) against heretics
(“racists,” “homophobes”) who object to absolutist thought policing. This was
nicely described by Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and Professor of
Ethical Leadership at New York University in a recent podcast with author Sam Harris. (Skip to 1 hour 30 minutes in the long discussion.)
The religion got started on the campuses, where social
science careerists ginned up an elaborate doctrine to justify the
self-importance of their new departments in so-called race, gender, and
privilege studies — the main point of which was to create new categories of
sacred victims suffering spiritual torments (“traumas”) that could never be
healed. These crypto-religious “studies” led to a multiplication of demons
that had to be exorcized by an equal multiplication of diversity deans and
committees aimed at punishing blasphemies — such as arguing against
affirmative action (“racist”), or wearing a Mexican sombrero at a tequila
party (“cultural appropriation” + “racist”), which happened recently at posh
Bowdoin College.
The hysteria incited by the academic diversity corps
spread readily and easily into Democratic Party politics, where badly-needed
minority votes could be harvested to shore up the dwindling votes of
traditional supporters such as labor unions, and make up for (you might say
cover up) the Party’s complete surrender to both Wall Street and the war
industry.
The religion of the social justice warriors, got a huge
boost with the deaths, and subsequent canonization of the new mega-saints,
Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and other black youths who were
killed under circumstances that were, at least, ambiguous, and, at most, due
to their own poor judgment and misbehavior. (Pause for cries of “racist” to
subside). The Michael Brown / Ferguson, Mo. incident and subsequent riots led
to the “Black Lives Matter” movement, with its now secular (“the street”) and
campus branches, and its vote-garnering panders (Hillary) in politics.
Possibly the worst blasphemy — which I will now state —
is the idea that the new religion of social justice exists to disguise the
vast disappointment over the failure of the civil rights movement to uplift —
that is, raise out of poverty, illiteracy, and crime — a substantial part of
the black population. In fact, much of the official policy of the civil
rights era only made matters worse, especially the well-known failures of the
welfare system with all its disincentives to economic striving. So, the
well-intentioned people of the Left — a dying breed — are left in dismay and
embarrassment, fighting demons, while black America chooses more and more
remain an oppositional culture, apart, antagonistic, and increasingly bent on
vengeance.
Enter Trump, perhaps the worst figure possible to call
bullshit on this vast matrix of dishonesty, with his ugly cohort of
“poorly-educated” white yahoo supporters. Why? Because the well-educated
non-yahoos of both parties are too cowardly and too corrupt — too busy making
money off the war racketeers and the medical racketeers, and the Wall Street
racketeers, and the campus racketeers — to take on some of the central lies
of our times, which Trump manages to do in the crudest possible ways.
What the politicians and the media and the cringing,
pandering intellectuals of this country aren’t figuring is what happens when
the political crisis of the moment is amped up by the financial and economic
train wreck that is certain to come before the fall elections. The nation has
already gone mad with the internal contradictions of its own beliefs. The
next step will be when it literally goes to war with itself.
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