Abstract
Decades of mind-numbing political correctness on the academic far-left robbed the humanities and social sciences of their legitimacy, generated the alt-right as its very own dialectial alter-ego, and provided an essential catalyzing ingredient in Donald Trump's electoral victory—understood as the clearest expression of a weary nation's revulsion at p. c.'s intolerable moralizing. The illiberal, antisemitic, white nationalist alt-right and the illiberal, antisemitic, anti-American alt-left mirror one another perfectly! Faced with competing totalitarianisms at both extremes, the liberal center should defend itself first of all by forthrightly reclaiming the univeristy as a space for education and not indoctrination. Yet the politically correct professoriate do not want to hear this—and their over-the-top hostile overreactions to the news that they are to blame for what they hate most prove that it's so. Time to repeal and replace political correctness.
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Notes
Mark Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” The New York Times, November 18, 2016 (my emphasis), https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html?_r=0 .
Katherine Franke, “Making White Supremacy Respectable. Again,” November 21, 2017, Los Angeles Review of Books, http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/making-white-supremacy-respectable/
Damon Young, “Mark Lilla’s ‘The End of Identity Liberalism is the Whitest Thing I Ever Read,” Very Smart Brothers, November 23, 2016, http://verysmartbrothas.com/mark-lillas-the-end-of-identity-liberalism-is-the-whitest-thing-ive-ever-read/
David Palumbo-Liu, “The Whiteness of a Liberal in the Age of Trump,” The Huffington Post, November 23, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-palumboliu/the-whiteness-of-a-libera_b_13177492.html
Sebastian Gorka, personal communication (March 31, 2017).
Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998), 90; my emphasis.
Rorty, of course, was not the only one to have cautioned the left that radical multiculturalism was a dead end. Take for example, Todd Gitlin, who wrote that, “For too long, too many Americans have busied themselves digging trenches to fortify their cultural borders, lining their trenches with insulation. Enough Bunkers! Enough of the perfection of differences! We ought to be building bridges.” The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1985), 237. From Lilla’s point of view, the point is that the Democrats failed to head such clarion calls, and lost as a result. My own point, not being much of an apparatchik of any sort, is less partisan and more general.
Gabriel Noah Brahm, “The Post-Left: an Archeology and a Genealogy,” Democratiya 13, Summer 2008, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/democratiya_article/the-post-left-an-archaeology-and-a-genealogy .
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Brahm, G.N. Killing the Messenger: Mark Lilla’s “End of Identity Liberalism” and its Critics. Soc 54, 326–330 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-017-0146-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-017-0146-5