Main Edition
US
FR
April 1, 2020 - 7:00am
Ed West wrote last week about how much he misses the Before Coronavirus (BC) culture wars, in which elites got themselves worked up about minor things. Is Friends racist? Is reality transphobic? The BC version of social justice, he argues, represented a situation in which ‘the white blood cells of society’, political activists, ran so totally out of real problems that they turned on society itself.
All this, he suggests, took place against the backdrop of rising material comfort built on trading relationships with a Chinese regime that practices levels of surveillance autocracy straight out of a sci-fi dystopia. But this is all old hat now: “Now society faces an actual threat, and meanwhile our devil’s alliance with China has been irreparably damaged, it all seems so dated”.
I fear Ed may have called it too soon. The recent replacement of BC-style culture wars with social media coronapanic may look superficially like the end of the woke era. But the recent relative silence of the activists should be read as a temporary ceasefire, not a defeat. Witness this webinar above, posted on Saturday by the African American Policy Forum and featuring the grandmother of intersectionality herself, Kimberlé Crenshaw.
The pandemic is interpreted as holding a unique animus for groups typically depicted by intersectionality as victims. When Crenshaw asks what we should be doing right now to address the pandemic, Professor Dorothy Roberts responds that in the first instance ‘we should be condemning the current racial-capitalist system that caused the spread of this pandemic’. That is, racism and capitalism is responsible for spreading coronavirus ‘to everyone who is vulnerable in the United States’. Far from being a neutral threat to all of us here, coronavirus is more or less explicitly framed as a vicious attack by the evil oppressor, specifically directed at ‘the vulnerable’. Her next suggestion is that to make things better we should abolish prisons and free all the prisoners.
What is striking about the video is the way humane policy suggestions are batched in the same breath as ideas — such as prison abolition — which would likely be furiously opposed by the very working classes for whom the activists and academics in the video claim to advocate. It appears that the US needs European-style social democracy, but not because people are basically decent and all in it together, but because there is an evil Them out there who is ranged in malice against the noble, downtrodden Us.
Far from being dead, Critical Social Justice is recalibrating. It is waking up to the political opportunity presented by the pandemic and beginning to shift its lens from the relatively trivial business of cancelling 1990s sitcoms to genuinely emotive topics such as treatment of healthcare workers. As Ed himself argued in his excellent recent book Small Men On The Wrong Side of History, progressivism is basically ‘Christianity 2.0’. And in moments of great social crisis, religious feeling tends not to fade but to intensify.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeAndrew Breitbart famously taught us that politics is downstream of culture, that the battle of cultural values in everyday life is what most determines and limits political debate and policy. Those who regularly read Breitbart news, Gateway Pundit and similar too independent news sites will see how the left is constantly using the pandemic to intensify its attacks on western culture and values, not pause them. Breitbart was born precisely to expose and fight back against the left’s unending struggle for power and supremacism.
Great post by Mary. I watched the whole webinar she provided a link for. It’s tangential to the points she was making but I was particularly struck by the assault of Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, on President Reagan’s economic policies, in particular identifying him with monetarist policies to fight inflation. This was obviously a reference to US Fed Chairman Paul Volcker’s heroic and successful effort to choke inflation in the US economy. One of the proudest moments of Reagan’s presidency was when he reappointed Volcker to a second term in spite of strong criticism of Volcker’s policies. However, Volcker, who was a registered Democrat for a while, was appointed Fed Chair by Reagan’s Democratic predecessor, Jimmy Carter, not by Reagan. And as anyone who has read his splendid memoirs will know, he was somewhat critical of Milton Friedman’s views, and he was only a monetarist in a loose sense of the word. In any case, the monetary policies of the Reagan administration didn’t strike out in a new direction. Because of Volcker they were basically a continuation of policies started when Carter was president. The misinformation and outright disinformation about Reagan’s presidency from the left has not died down much as it recedes into history.