Academic

BARI WEISS: Stop Being Shocked. No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to u?

By Ed Driscoll

BARI WEISS: Stop Being Shocked.

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.

?The master?s tools will never dismantle the master?s house,? as the writer Audre Lorde put it. And the master?s house must be dismantled?because the house is rotted at its foundation.

The beating heart of this new ideology is critical race theory.

Read the whole thing, although what Weiss defines as ?liberalism? is really a massive stolen base by ?Progressives? in the 1920s to rehabilitate the brand after Wilson had so soiled it during WWI, as Fred Siegel wrote in his 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses:

Liberals were those Progressives who had renamed themselves so as to repudiate Wilson. ?The word liberalism,? wrote Walter Lippmann in 1919, ?was introduced into the jargon of American politics by that group who were Progressives in 1912 and Wilson Democrats from 1916 to 1918.? The new liberalism was a decisive cultural break with Wilson and Progressivism. While the Progressives had been inspired by a faith in democratic reforms as a salve for the wounds of both industrial civilization and power politics, liberals saw the American democratic ethos as a danger to freedom at home and abroad.

* * * * * * * *

The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. ?Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class,? Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, ?and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected.? Alienated from middle-class American life, liberalism drew on an idealized image of ?organic? pre-modern folkways and rhapsodized about a future harmony that would reestablish the proper hierarchy of virtue in a post-bourgeois, post-democratic world.

So from that point of view, ?liberalism,? while changing its spots in the Trump era, is still working as the original ?Progressives? redefined it.

Related exit question from across the pond: What did you do in the Great Culture War, Daddy?

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on October 17, 2020 (boomark / email).