The "successor ideology" won't stop coming at us

 

Andrew Sullivan, a left-wing writer and commentator, has some sobering thoughts.  I think he's summed up very succinctly the dilemma confronting us, and the dire threat it poses to our constitutional Republic.  Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.

Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget [critical race theory] for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?

What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.

We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences.

Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that “the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.” She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism.

This is the media hub of the “social justice movement.” And the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough. Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy,” designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot.

The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”).

A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing.

. . .

The movement is much broader than race — as anyone who is dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you. The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.” The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy.” And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.

In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence — and you are either fighting this and “on the right side of history,” or you are against it and abetting evil. There is no neutrality. No space for skepticism. No room for debate. No space even for staying silent. (Silence, remember, is violence — perhaps the most profoundly anti-liberal slogan ever invented.)

And that tells you about the will to power behind it. Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. Liberalism is only concerned with your actions. The successor ideology is concerned with your mind, your psyche, and the deepest recesses of your soul. Liberalism will let you do your job, and let you keep your politics private. S.I. will force you into a struggle session as a condition for employment.

. . .

It is absolutely no accident that this illiberal ideology has no qualms whatever with illiberal methods. The latter springs intrinsically from the former. Kendi, feted across the establishment, favors amending the Constitution to appoint an unelected and unaccountable committee of “experts” that has the power to coerce and punish any individual or group anywhere in the country deemed practicing racism. Intent does not matter. And the decisions are final.

. . .

We are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s. This isn’t coming from the ground up. It’s being imposed ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda, and its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown.

There's much more at the link.  Sobering reading, and food for thought.

I don't agree with much of what Andrew Sullivan says or believes.  I don't like or share his politics.  I think he's way off base in many areas . . . but in this, I think his analysis is very persuasive.  Writing from within the liberal camp, he can see the threat to it from its own left wing - and if it threatens him and his "traditional liberal" norms, standards and beliefs, it's doubly threatening to those of us who don't share that outlook on life.

As I've said many times before, there's no voting our way out of this.  Those who stole last November's election did so calculatedly, cynically, and with every intention of making us come to heel.  They want to impose on this country the new order - the "successor ideology" - that Sullivan identifies.  They're gearing up to fight tooth and nail to suppress and eradicate any and all challenges to the election, even though they may be supported by incontrovertible evidence.  If those challenges persist and strengthen, there's no telling what they'll do, not least because they know that if they lose, the consequences for them would be very bad indeed.  I pointed out some time ago:

The progressive Left has committed high treason.  They've subverted and undermined the US political process to steal power from the legitimately elected candidate.  They know that if they ever lose power, those who take the reins from them will want criminal investigation and prosecution of all those involved in that electoral fraud - and one of the penalties for high treason is death.  For the left to allow the right to win would be to commit at least political, if not a very physical suicide.  This they will never do voluntarily.

I fully expect a weaponized Department of Justice and other organs of the present Administration to be actively deployed against what the current, illegitimate "powers that be" regard as dissidents, even traitors (from their perspective).  They've stolen power, and they'll hang onto it by any means necessary, even if that means breaking the laws and the constitution that still theoretically govern us.  Part of this is that they know the punishment that awaits them if they're convicted of electoral fraud on this scale, and they want to avoid that:  but much more of it is that they're convinced that they're right, and we're wrong, and it's their mission, their destiny, to eradicate our false beliefs and make us toe the Party line.  (I would call it a "mission from God", along Blues Brothers lines, but they mostly don't believe in God, so that would be a misnomer.)

Folks, if you haven't yet accepted the reality of our situation, you need to do so now.  We're in a fight for the survival of our constitutional republic - for the survival of freedom itself.  If we lose, there's nowhere else to go.

We stand or fall here - and we'd better not fall, because if we do, we'll be ground into the dirt, and our children and our children's children will never know what it is to be free.

Yes, the struggle will be hard, and it may turn bloody.  God knows, after all I've seen and experienced in six-plus decades on this earth, the last thing in the world that I want is civil war . . . but those seeking to impose their will upon us have no such scruples.  If that's what it'll take to crush us, to force us to conform to their will, they'll do it.  As far as they're concerned, anything goes, because they know they're right in the very depths of their being, and there's no persuading them that they might, just possibly, be wrong.  They're "true believers".

It may be that many of us will have to pay with our lives to preserve the gift our Founding Fathers left us.  Are you willing to pay that price, if need be?

Peter