Thread by @EveKeneinan

What Happened To You?

The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism
andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/what-happene…

“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.”

“We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered in one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past years."

“And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences.“

“This is the media hub of the “social justice movement.” And the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough.”

“Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy,” designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot.”

“The reason ‘critical race theory’ is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation …” ⬇︎

“… that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (‘intersectionality’).”

“A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable ‘systems’ and ‘structures’ and ‘internal biases’ arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing.”

“The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.”

The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy.”

“And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.”

Here comes some key parts ⬇︎

“In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence — and you are either fighting this and “on the right side of history,” or you are against it and abetting evil.”

“There is no neutrality. No space for skepticism. No room for debate. No space even for staying silent. (Silence, remember, is violence — perhaps the most profoundly anti-liberal slogan ever invented.)”

“And that tells you about the will to power behind it. Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. Liberalism is only concerned with your actions.”

“The successor ideology is concerned with your mind, your psyche, and the deepest recesses of your soul. Liberalism will let you do your job, and let you keep your politics private. S.I. will force you into a struggle session as a condition for employment.”

IRONICALLY, the Successor Ideology — Wokeism — both INTERPRETS THE WORLD this way: “In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence” — AND seeks TO BRING ABOUT THE NIGHTMARE VISION THAT BELONGS TO IT.

It reads the world as “an ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence from which there is no escape, no refuge” and DESIRES TO INFLICT THIS VERY THING ON EVERYONE.

I struggle to find words for the kind of evil that *pretends* that a mass murder of hundreds of millions is going on, when it is not, and *seeks to carry out a mass murder of hundreds of million* in order to stop the fantasy mass murder it pretends is happening.

I come up against the same mental wall I come up against when trying to understand — not just to know, but to understand — how any German listening to Hitler could be persuaded that the Jews were a sinister superpower bent on the destruction of Germany, with the power to do it!

America — a toxic sewer of “ongoing violence and oppression from which there is no escape, no refuge, no release”?

Ask the people of Hong Kong, of North Korea, of Cuba!

We are watching the greatest, freest, multi-racial liberal democratic republic the world has ever seen go down in a tide of gibbering madness.

I hate it.

They’re raving mad and obviously so!

And they’ve made a murder-suicide pact to take down the best things in the world.

Even if it weren’t a DIRECT THREAT to me and mine — the SHEER IMBECILIC UNREASON of the thing!

Bad enough to destroy hundreds of millions of lives — but to do so in a self-righteous fit of madness? To serve your own moralistic VANITY?

It must END.

We must END IT.

It's DEMONIC.