So, I’d thought—or maybe I just feared—that I was going to have to spend half my day on this latest claptrap linked by Alan Jacobs (I don’t know if he agrees with it or just liked that he’s referenced in it) but instead I’m going to struggle to briefly latch onto just one bit.
It also drives the often indiscriminate efforts to take down statues, “defund the police,” to “abolish ICE,” pass a Green New Deal, and generally remake the country.
This is no mere partisan cause. It is every bit as zealous and righteous as America’s previous religious revivals. It is driven by a mixture of social and philosophical ideas, but nevertheless gets its energy and power from an ever-increasing zeal. However, it lacks any coherent organization or leaders who can be targeted and co-opted or at least defeated; it is a mob leading a mob, and woe to any who step out of line.
Well, okay, this is two bits.
First, there’s nothing indiscriminate about calls for cultural, economic, political, racial, and social justice—in truth they are all one and the same, in a dynamic akin or analogous to intersectionality. If you can’t see the connections between taking down statues, defunding the police, abolishing ICE, and the Green New Deal, it’s because you’re afraid doing so will call attention—yours or, worse, your readers’—to the fact that they are all of a piece.
Second, here’s, I think, the rub for these folks: the very fact that so much of this “indiscriminate effort” is movement based rather than personality based, they don’t know who to target, co-opt, or defeat. (That middle one is especially notable.)
So much of modern American society is built atop visiting degradations upon people who aren’t White that there quite literally is no course correction, no chance of salvation, other than wholesale movementand remaking. You can’t attack the push for America to come to justice for being “indiscriminate”; it only looks that way to you because you won’t admit that America’s ills all are connected.