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From another good article of his.
The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’ and ‘identity group politics’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology.
....The attractions are obvious. After all, why should a generation which can’t accumulate capital have any great love of capitalism? And it isn’t hard to work out why a generation who believe they may never own a home could be attracted to an ideological world view which promises to sort out every inequality. The place where social justice finds its warriors is identity politics. This atomises society into different interest groups according to sex (or gender), race, sexual preference and more. It presumes that such characteristics are the main, or only, relevant attributes of their holders and that they bring an added bonus. As the American writer Coleman Hughes has put it, it assumes there is ‘a heightened moral knowledge’ that comes with being black or female or gay. It’s why people start statements with ‘Speaking as a ...’. And this new religion is something that people both living and dead must be on the right side of.
The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’ and ‘identity group politics’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways it's actually an attempt to make an old, discredited and very nasty ideology seem not just palatable but desirable. That old ideology being the robber baron variety of capitalism, in which capitalists are free to treat both their workers and their consumers as disposable economic resources to be plundered at will.
How on earth can you make such a vicious ideology seem moral? That's easy. You get people to focus on social justice rather than economic justice. But to do that it was necessary to destroy the Old Left, with their irritating insistence on economic justice for all.
Identity politics has allowed the villains, the robber barons, to pose as heroes. That's why we have Woke Capital.
I believe freedom of contract, which I imagine is what you mean by the robber baron variety of capitalism, is just and moral - and has enriched the world. But you have a point about Woke Capital.
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