Andrew Sullivan is often asked this question, he says, but would like to reverse the polarity.
The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so. And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign are well taken. Is this a wedge issue for the GOP? Of course it is. Are they using the term “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman? Of course they are. Are some dog whistles involved? A few. Are crude bans on public servants’ speech dangerous? Absolutely. Do many of the alarmists know who Derrick Bell was? Of course not.
But does that mean there isn’t a real issue here? Of course it doesn’t.
Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT 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.
[Aside: Derrick Bell was the guy who founded what is most properly called CRT (although the demands to know what 'is really CRT' are a motte-and-bailey tactic). His most famous work isn't merely theoretical, it's actually fantastic -- not in the sense of being excellent, but in the sense of being a made-up fantasy story.]
Sullivan goes on to diagnose the issue as the transformation of the elite ideas of 'social justice' into a rejection of liberalism -- not just 'whiteness' or America or the Founding, but a rejection of the whole 300-year liberal project as itself a form of racism and oppression. That, he says, has big consequences in a nation that was founded precisely to pursue those classical liberal principles.
He doesn't want to go so far as supporting Republicans, of course, who are obviously "a nihilist cult" (and who are ironically, for nihilists, devout believers in God and country). He'd like some fellow Democrats to maybe step back from the pit, is all. But at least he's seeing the pit, recognizing a descent into the abyss.
2 comments:
Who knows what anyone on the left thinks nihilism means these days; some are apt to use it to describe anyone who negates their own pet ideas. "Cult" is easier: more and more writers are pretty sure anyone with a trace of belief in God is indistinguishable from members of the weirdest sort of Jim Bakker/Jim Jones snake-handling dehumanizing cult.
As a change of pace, we re-watched "Open Range" this week. Nice movie, full of people who reveal their characters in small choices about small interactions, leading up to a crisis of courage and solidarity in pulling down a tyranny. They have to decide to back each other up in an ugly, scary emergency, but they don't degenerate into a cult. They're all candidly terrified, and mostly do the right thing anyway, each at his own moment of truth.
I love that movie. It’s a kind of anti-High Noon.
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