Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Liberal Ideas #1 - The Cancer in the Left

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Oct. 13, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

15:48

Liberal Ideas #1 - The Cancer in the Left

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	If you follow politics, particularly if you are left-leaning, you have probably become aware of the emergence of people who will claim to be progressives.
	These people aren't referring to the American progressive era of the 1890s to the 1920s, they are referring to neoprogressivism, a political movement that isn't new, but has only recently found itself at the forefront of Western politics.
	This ideology is often conflated with liberalism, especially by people who consider the left to be a monolithic political position, and this has not been discouraged by neoprogressives themselves, as it allows them to use people's positive predisposition to liberalism as a Trojan horse to inject illiberal and neoprogressive ideas into circumstances in which they would otherwise be rejected.
	I have previously detailed how neoprogressives repeatedly violate liberal principles in the video Illiberal Progressives.
	This video is the first in a series of videos to explore and examine neoprogressivism in detail.
	This will be done from a liberal perspective, to ensure a distinction between the two competing political philosophies of the left.
	I found an excellent and concise definition and history of neoprogressivism on the website for conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation.
	Beginning in the 1950s, a more radical form of liberalism emerged in the academy that sowed the seeds for the sexual revolution and multiculturalism.
	Neoprogressivism mobilized the new left of the 1960s, transformed American politics, and continues to dominate the cultural and political conversation today.
	It combines what neoprogressives call personal politics, the idea that American citizens have a right to all forms of self-expression, and cultural politics, the idea that cultural groups are entitled to special status, together as the twin pillars of a new identity politics.
	As a result, citizens today have more, not less, freedom from government in the realm of sexual expression, and the American electorate has been fractured into various groups.
	Shortly after this history, the article gives an excellent synopsis of one of the primary identifiers of neoprogressive thought.
	The new progressivism divides Americans into categories of race, class, and gender.
	It renews the specter of race conflict by rejecting the goal of civil rights, in which individuals achieve equality under the law.
	Instead, the goal is political, racial solidarity against what is viewed as an inherently racist American system.
	This is an excellent description that is, unfortunately, not limited to the United States.
	What the author is describing is usually known as identity politics, which is the first of the three pillars of neoprogressivism.
	The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's definition of identity politics is as follows.
	The Leyden phrase identity politics has come to signify a wide range of political activity and theorizing founded in the shared experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups.
	Rather than organizing solely around belief systems, programmatic manifestos, or party affiliation, identity political formations typically aim to secure the political freedom of a specific constituency marginalized within its larger context.
	Members of that constituency assert or reclaim ways of understanding their distinctiveness that challenge dominant oppressive characterizations with the goal of greater self-determination.
	Identity politics is the rallying cry by which neoprogressivism attempts to gain mass appeal through recruitment by association.
	It is not through fine argumentation, clear-headed empiricism or accurate reason that people are persuaded to join the neoprogressive cause, but by playing a game of snap with physical characteristics.
	The purpose of identity politics is, ironically, to remove the individual from the equation when calculating the experience of the individual.
	No longer is the question, what is John's experience?
	The question is now, what is the experience of black people?
	As if this is somehow a universal constant.
	The appeal to the collective is designed to give issues more weight, more legitimacy and more urgency.
	To appeal to a collective is to magnify the problem, to maximise attention drawn to it, and relies on the individual not examining the pretext of this approach too carefully.
	It does not attempt to utilise any form of intellectual engagement.
	It instead attempts to gather appeal on the most base level by asserting the claim, we look alike, therefore we must think alike.
	It is this appeal to demography that ties in most potently with the next pillar of neoprogressivism.
	If identity politics is the clarion call to action for neoprogressives, then political correctness is the sword with which they can strike down their opponents.
	Here are several dictionary definitions of political correctness.
	Someone who is politically correct believes that language and actions that could be offensive to others, especially those relating to sex and race, should be avoided.
	The avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.
	Demonstrating progressive ideals, especially by avoiding vocabulary that is considered offensive, discriminatory, or judgmental, especially concerning race and gender.
	Anyone who has read 1984 can recognise thought-terminating rhetoric when they see it, which is precisely the point of political correctness.
	The appeal to avoid the potential collective offence of people who can be defined but not identified and are left deliberately intangible in order to enable claims of offence without anyone actually raising a complaint.
	Thus, any comment or action taken against a member of a demographic protected by identity politics can be obfuscated and astroturfed by counter-claims made against that person's demographic identification.
	The most striking example of political correctness in action was the case of the Rotherham rape gangs.
	These immigrant-only gangs were able to operate with impunity for a decade, enabling grooming gangs to molest thousands of underage white British girls.
	Instead of arresting the exclusively Muslim perpetrators for drug and sexual offences, a cold fear gripped the authorities as they knew that any action taken against the non-white criminals, despite their crimes being manifest, would be interpreted via the lens of political correctness and the authorities, although taking legitimate action, would be condemned as racists.
	This is the danger of political correctness.
	Although probably not originally designed for such a job, it has been repurposed as a weapon against dissenting viewpoints and action taken by individuals born into non-protected demographics.
	And the very act of doing this is a demonstration of the third pillar of neoprogressivism, postmodernism.
	Postmodernism is a slippery concept, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes as follows.
	That postmodernism is indefinable as a truism, however, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic, and rhetorical practices, employing such concepts as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyper-reality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the university of meaning.
	This is a complex definition to the uninitiated, so I will describe it more clearly.
	Postmodernism is a style of debate used to disrupt the foundations upon which an argument rests, instead of addressing the argument itself.
	This is done by constant questioning of the certainty of the argument's presuppositions, in order to undermine the unambiguity of the concepts from which it is formed.
	The postmodernist will start big, and gradually reduce their line of questioning to the very granules of which an argument is made, until the target is unable to provide adequate detail or is simply exhausted from explaining each and every stage of their argument.
	Put simply, postmodernism is deliberately designed to win a debate without actually having the debate.
	It is self-evident that this is intellectually dishonest, and it is the shield by which neoprogressivism prevents, diverts, or deflects any legitimate criticism of its precepts.
	Postmodernism is the result of critical theory, a description of which can be found in university courses across the Western world.
	The narrow sense of critical theory was coined by a group of German philosophers and social theorists, known as the Frankfurt School.
	This began with Horkheimer and Adorno and stretched to Marcuse and Habermas.
	They distinguished critical from traditional theory, saying that a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human emancipation, to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.
	In a broader sense, critical theories aim to explain all the circumstances that enslave humans.
	This group of thinkers is still active today.
	The circumstances that enslave humans is the totality, which is modern society.
	The title Getting Out of Totality refers to the ways in which people like Horkheimer and Adorno saw a system of enlightenment that had become tighter in its organization, more global in its reach, and more powerful in its ability to control people.
	They saw modernity and enlightenment joining hands to create a new universal myth that entrapped us with its appeal while controlling us and diminishing our freedom at every step.
	Although Foucault thought differently about Enlightenment, he also saw a growth in the global accumulation of power from which it was increasingly difficult to escape.
	The theme of these thinkers is that, ironically, attempts at liberation end up being steps towards oppression.
	Postmodernism is adopted by neoprogressivism for a number of reasons.
	The first and foremost is that neoprogressivism seeks to outright reverse and destroy that which can be broadly categorized as traditionalism.
	And this can be most effectively done by employing postmodernist ideas.
	Often this is done by petitioning for the rights of individuals, which is a perfectly laudable goal.
	Take for example the gay rights movement in the United States.
	While politicians such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton opposed gay marriage a decade ago.
	I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.
	I am not somebody who promotes same-sex marriage.
	I believe that marriage is not just a bond, but a sacred bond between a man and a woman.
	Now they were on the forefront of neoprogressive politics in helping to get gay marriage passed.
	It is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.
	That's why I support marriage for lesbian and gay couples.
	This changeability is probably just politicians being politicians, but it shows the rapid rise of neoprogressivism and the good it can do.
	However, the flip side is the primacy of the collective above the individual.
	This can be seen in the example of Diane Smith Gander, the chairman of Transfield.
	Miss Smith Gander, who is also the president of the Chief Executive Women Group, said that to reach that target and an eventual bigger target of 50-50 representation of women on business boards and in senior roles, capable men would have to make way for women.
	When it comes to senior jobs and political appointments, I think 50-50 representation is where we're heading.
	She said at an Australian Institute of Company Directors lunch in Melbourne on Tuesday.
	If we're going to get six and six, it means four of those ten men who are inevitably qualified and well-intentioned are going to lose their gig.
	They are not going to want to lose their gig, and that's a sad and sorry thing, but that's just the way it is.
	This is the problem we're actually dealing with.
	Some men are going to have to give up their hard-won roles to allow equality.
	In this example, it is axiomatic that in the pursuit of advancing women as a demographic, there will be many individual men who will be subject to injustices because of the way they were born.
	This is how the system that neoprogressivism is creating is designed to work.
	The injustices to individuals are irrelevant so long as the collective goals remain intact.
	Not only that, but a system designed to perpetuate injustices will naturally be taken advantage of by opportunistic people who, frankly, will lie and manipulate the system for their own reasons.
	To a liberal, the definitions of the principles of neoprogressivism should in and of themselves be transgressive.
	To understand neoprogressivism, one must focus on the collectivist nature of the ideology, putting it in direct odds to the individualist ideals of liberalism.
	Everything about neoprogressivism, political correctness, postmodernism, and identity politics, hinges on taking advantage of the good will of the subject.
	Each pillar of neoprogressivism relies on the willing cooperation and participation of the individual.
	If no goodwill is extended to neoprogressivism, then there is no method by which to operate.
	A single death is a tragedy.
	A million deaths is a statistic.
	This quote is often misattributed to Joseph Stalin, but remains memorable because it holds within it an essential truth.
	It is impossible to truly care about a large group of people, because it is impossible to conceive of them as individual human beings.
	Human beings whom we can choose to like or dislike based on their own unique characteristics, the very basis of empathy.
	As we will see in the next episode of this series, these fallacious appeals to collectivism are the main method of propagation for activists of neoprogressivism.

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