just like the election of Donald Trump heralded a new era of right-wing populism, when it may in fact have been the high watermark of that movement.
perhaps, but on the other hand, is the Social Justice movement as it currently is, given its narrow focus, sustainable?
in fact, that’s probably why it’s trying to merge everything into itself, but such energy may be exhausted if the system itself is not designed or evolved for ideological sustainability. after all, how Communist are the Communist countries now, and how virtuous are they after all these years?
perhaps, but on the other hand, is the Social Justice movement as it currently is, given its narrow focus, sustainable?
…no?
I’m suspect that almost everyone above the rank of Culture-War Grunt 1st Class is aware of this, at least on some level, and most of the remaining battles are just people trying to control the shape of the aftermath and/or grab as many quick victories as possible before it all falls apart.
Can you expand on this?
It’s a big topic and a lot of it falls into “things I would regret posting” territory, but yeah, OK, sure, let’s try for a compact explanation.
On a theoretical level:
SJ is fundamentally limited by the fact that it relies on powerful elites to be willing to attack themselves and their own interests in the name of cultural virtue. This is a very limited resource. At some point the elites will get tired of punching themselves in the face – at some point, SJ ideology will demand that they give up something they really care about – and then they’ll drop it, as soon as they can find a face-saving way to do so.
It gets some mileage out of the fact that it’s a useful weapon in certain kinds of internecine elite disputes and power struggles; there are a lot of elites who are non-male or non-white or non-straight etc., and SJ offers them obvious advantages in the workplace and at the cocktail party. But the nature of the ideology is such that the demands will always keep growing, always keep pressing down harder, and as this goes on more and more elites are going to find that the benefits aren’t worth the costs (especially if their own benefits are already locked in).
(Many things would be different if SJ were a non-elite-driven movement, or if it were even capable of becoming a non-elite-driven movement, but it isn’t and it can’t. Many things would be different if SJ were genuinely about transfering power from elites to non-elites, but it’s not.)
Less theoretically:
You can already see people looking around for an exit. Writers at respectable mainline-liberal publications like The Atlantic – the very same writers who spearheaded SJ’s rise to mainstream cultural dominance – have been talking nervously about overreach and SJ-gone-mad for a while now. SNL, a reliable mirror of the elite zeitgeist, did this sketch in early 2018. Most importantly of all, if you actually talk to people about SJ…not internet weirdos, not the cultural rightists who’ve hated it from the get-go, but actual middle- and upper-middle-class normies…they’ve become scared and upset. They are worried about the wrath of the righteous mob falling on them, or on the people they love, for “saying the wrong thing.” They’re angry about the continued indignity that they suffer from continued overt attacks on their identity categories. Sometimes they’re explicit about the fact that they’re hiding their true views on the subject because they’re afraid of “consequences.”
On a more practical level: SJ has enough size and power, at this point, that it’s capable of demanding “revolutionary” changes that are real and far-reaching, not just alterations to the etiquette codes at prestige institutions. And elites, mostly, do not want those.
(I live in New York and I’m married to a teacher, so I’m probably inclined to over-weight evidence pertinent to the New York educational system. But it seems extremely telling that de Blasio’s attempt to change the admissions policies at the city’s specialized high schools – to get rid of the well-prepared-elite-child-favoring exams, and open up the schools to many more kids from disadvantaged minority backgrounds, a move that was 100% in line with SJ orthodoxy and vociferously promoted with SJ arguments – was roundly defeated by the very same Times-reading latte-sipping urban liberals who make up the SJ power base for all intents and purposes.)
I’m inclined to say that if Hillary had won, we’d already be seeing the beginnings of the real backlash, with upper-middle-class mostly-white folks latching onto whoever offered them the chance to become whatever-we-call-Reagan-Democrats-now and stop flagellating themselves. Trump is enough of a bogeyman to rally the base and keep things together for a while longer. But, fundamentally, this cannot continue forever and so it will stop.
ALL THAT BEING SAID:
I don’t think this is very deep insight. I don’t think I have access to any information that other people don’t. If in fact I’ve put together the puzzle pieces, it’s one of those four-piece plastic puzzles for three-year-olds.
There are people so young that they genuinely don’t remember the world not being like this, and there are people who spend so much of their time in online echo chambers that they genuinely believe people like the world being like this. I imagine they mostly expect to keep doing what they’re doing, which mostly amounts to “saying angry things on the internet,” and will do so until the culture-at-large makes them stop by drying up their streams of external validation. They’re the ones I’m referring to as Culture War Grunts.
But the people who are older and more grounded than that…I get the feeling that they’re desperately trying to figure out when it’s all going to come tumbling down, and how, and what’s going to happen next.
I think that all sorts of people, from Pete Buttigieg to the craziest far-right cults, are trying to position themselves to sweep in and be the prophets of a scoured-clean land looking for some principle that isn’t SJ by which to guide itself.
(I should really get on that.)
I think that there’s a desperation, a nakedness, to recent mainstream SJ positions that I didn’t see in their predecessors. A willingness to dispense with the formalities, to come out and say “yes, the identity category is the only thing that matters here, no further discussion is necessary.” This is a very vague thing and I’m not coming up with any particularly-compelling examples at the moment, so maybe it’s all in my head, but…I do have some sense that people have given up trying to spread or even cement SJ ideology, and are now just trying to wring as many favorable outcomes out of it as they can before the culture-at-large takes away that option.