As fun as it is watching liberals tear themselves apart, agonizing over race, gender, sexual identity, and who is the most oppressed of them all (and therefore most deserving of special treatment), it’s important to remember how awful and threatening that tendency within the Democratic Party is.
The Democratic Party is actually now the Social Justice Party, just without the name. New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall has an excellent piece this week exploring how that came to be and the political ramifications of the miserable social justice ideology consuming the party.
The whole thing is worth a read. But if you have time for nothing else, two subjects quoted in Edsall’s piece are crucial in understanding social justice (often referred to as “wokeness”) and its rot.
On the question of why more centrist Democrats don’t push back against the social justice activists dominating the party, given their ideas being largely repulsive to voters (i.e., defunding the police), Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that the activists “have figured out that they can have disproportionate influence by claiming to be physically endangered and psychologically traumatized by speech that offends them.”
As described in my book, Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People, claims of oppression and victimhood as it relates to an individual’s race, gender, or sexual identity is the cornerstone of social justice ideology. Declaring to have been literally, physically harmed by another person’s opinions or even just their presence (thus the population of “safe spaces” on college campuses) is the social justice advocate’s ultimate trump card. Such conduct earns the alleged victim absolute deference because, after all, he has been harmed, and to be harmed requires accountability of the oppressor (always heterosexual white men).
Randall Kennedy, a law professor at Harvard, is also quoted telling Edsall, “On the campuses, many of the most vocal woke folk are students whom teachers and administrators want to mollify, comfort and impress. Many teachers and administrators seek desperately to be liked by students.”
Academia is where social justice ideology originates, and it remains there, raging in its purest form, perpetuated by professors and administrators who teach students to view American society as inherently unfair, unjust, and rooted in racism and sexism.
The people who are supposed to be running the school, of course, want to be liked by their customers (students). But it’s also true that they’re the ones who have taught the students to be social justice advocates. A core part of those teachings is for individuals to claim moral authority through grievance and victimhood. The logical conclusion to being told that they are morally superior through having been supposedly oppressed, students then become the ones to run the campus.
This is the ideology that now dictates the vast majority of what happens within the Democratic Party, and the centrists of the party are quickly either changing or leaving.
It’s entertaining to watch but only until social justice comes for the rest of us, and it is doing that at a rapid pace.
