I must have missed something along the way in my understanding of the meaning of what I thought , were our values, stretching back principally to the western Enlightenment, extending into the great civil rights movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s and now, or so I thought, properly representative of our society’s legal and moral zeitgeist. . I thought that individual rights, most particularly the right of equality of opportunity and treatment, regardless of one’s race, gender, beliefs, sexual orientation and those other indicia of individual expression were a properly settled matter. Apparently, I was wrong.
How wrong I am is revealed daily by the Democrat party and their presidential candidates.
They tell us that what we once regarded as individual rights of expression, including freedom of speech and assembly are really not representative of a properly constituted society. Instead we must engage in and pay homage to the primacy of politically correct, elitist driven, group think. Yes, this is the world of identity politics deploying, the cult of victimization, the fatuous notion of the incongruously named term “cultural appropriation, the speech control notion of “platform banning,” and the general denigration of the individual’s rights in favour of catering uncritically to a grievance orientated politics.
All of this is brought to us by the virtue seeking social justice warriors, determined to ferret out and slay all perceived wrongs.
They are a predatory lot whose true intent is not to advance pluralism but rather to make their beliefs the only acceptable ones. It is a new form of censorship and all done in the name of righteousness.
Their method is adversarial, pitting one group against the other. The pleaded wrongs ostensibly victimizing their favorite groups are generally ascribed to the nefarious practices, past and present, of groups they do not like. The narrative is so controlled by these grievance antagonists that one word of opposition, one voice of skepticism is met with howls of outrage and the quick and ever at the ready response of “racist<” “misogynist,” “denier “or some other pejorative term. It is all designed to shut down debate and generally it works. So-called public opinion is really a carefully managed amalgam of the thoughts of the political class. In fact, all opinions must be filtered through predicate terms identifying one’s group, the stratifications of race, gender selection, orientation, the oppressed, the suppressed, and alternatively, the entitled, being seemingly infinite. Previous notions of what constitutes success are replaced by a new model which embraces a hierarchy of victimhood.
They really don’t want their so-called grievances to be solved because such an outcome would take away their identity. More practically, it would deny them their life blood, namely funding, and publicly financed interest group support networks.
This is the new liberalism and the Democrat party delightfully sucks it up. One of their favorite affectations is their embrace of the odious term, ‘Cultural Appropriation.” Their presidential candidates lined up at the LBGQT pandering session they conducted earlier this fall.
Cultural appropriation is a phrase that comes down to this: if you are a member of one race, you cannot attempt to wear the fashions of another, sport a hair style not identified with your race and on goes the exclusionary list. It is the most ridiculous of all of the mutated offspring of political correctness with its group identity sticker affixed firmly to its closed mind. It demands bloodline purity of a type not known since the infamous Nazi Nuremberg laws. It speaks of “staying in your own lane.” So much for ending racial segregation and not judging a person by the color of their skin.
Their embrace of this concept defines the modern-day Democrat Party. It is the Obama-Clinton dream and it has been achieved. Forget about the working class, forget about keeping America strong, forget about “peace and prosperity.” Now it’s all about transgender bathrooms, 47 or is it 48 gender identification recognition…. don’t agree and you’re a knuckle dragger and the rest of the nut job agenda that defines modern day Democrat politics. Get ready for the reparation payments to the next self-identified aggrieved group. You owe it to them and you had better not forget it.