Will the Left survive the Millenials?

Vox Populi Vox Dei

Vox Populi Vox Dei

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Midway through my opening address for the Brisbane Writers Festival earlier this month, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese-born Australian engineer and 25-year-old memoirist, walked out. Her indignant comments about the event might have sunk into obscurity, along with my speech, had they not been republished by The Guardian. Twenty minutes in, this audience member apparently turned to her mother: “ ‘Mama, I can’t sit here,’ I said, the corners of my mouth dragging downwards. ‘I cannot legitimize this.’ ” She continued: “The faces around me blurred. As my heels thudded against the grey plastic of the flooring, harmonizing with the beat of the adrenaline pumping through my veins, my mind was blank save for one question. ‘How is this happening?’ ”

I’m asking the same thing.

Briefly, my address maintained that fiction writers should be allowed to write fiction — thus should not let concerns about “cultural appropriation” constrain our creation of characters from different backgrounds than our own. I defended fiction as a vital vehicle for empathy. If we have permission to write only about our own personal experience, there is no fiction, but only memoir. Honestly, my thesis seemed so self-evident that I’d worried the speech would be bland.

Nope — not in the topsy-turvy universe of identity politics. The festival immediately disavowed the address, though the organizers had approved the thrust of the talk in advance. A “Right of Reply” session was hastily organized. When, days later, The Guardian ran the speech, social media went ballistic. Mainstream articles followed suit. I plan on printing out The New Republic’s “Lionel Shriver Shouldn’t Write About Minorities” and taping it above my desk as a chiding reminder.

Viewing the world and the self through the prism of advantaged and disadvantaged groups, the identity-politics movement — in which behavior like huffing out of speeches and stirring up online mobs is par for the course — is an assertion of generational power. Among milliennials and those coming of age behind them, the race is on to see who can be more righteous and aggrieved — who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a spikier brand.

When I was growing up in the ’60s and early ’70s, conservatives were the enforcers of conformity. It was the right that was suspicious, sniffing out Communists and scrutinizing public figures for signs of sedition.

Now the role of oppressor has passed to the left. In Australia, where I spoke, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to do or say anything likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate,” providing alarming latitude in the restriction of free speech. It is Australia’s conservatives arguing for the amendment of this law.

As a lifelong Democratic voter, I’m dismayed by the radical left’s ever-growing list of dos and don’ts — by its impulse to control, to instill self-censorship as well as to promote real censorship, and to deploy sensitivity as an excuse to be brutally insensitive to any perceived enemy. There are many people who see these frenzies about cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, micro-aggressions and safe spaces as overtly crazy. The shrill tyranny of the left helps to push them toward Donald Trump.

Ironically, only fellow liberals will be cowed by terror of being branded a racist (a pejorative lobbed at me in recent days — one that, however groundless, tends to stick). But there’s still such a thing as a real bigot, and a real misogynist. In obsessing over micro-aggressions like the sin of uttering the commonplace Americanism “you guys” to mean “you all,” activists persecute fellow travelers who already care about equal rights.

...

Ms. Abdel-Magied got the question right: How is this happening? How did the left in the West come to embrace restriction, censorship and the imposition of an orthodoxy at least as tyrannical as the anti-Communist, pro-Christian conformism I grew up with? Liberals have ominously relabeled themselves “progressives,” forsaking a noun that had its roots in “liber,” meaning free. To progress is merely to go forward, and you can go forward into a pit.

Protecting freedom of speech involves protecting the voices of people with whom you may violently disagree. In my youth, liberals would defend the right of neo-Nazis to march down Main Street. I cannot imagine anyone on the left making that case today.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/opinion/will-the-left-survive-the-millennials.html
 
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Chris said:
How is this happening? How did the left in the West come to embrace restriction, censorship and the imposition of an orthodoxy at least as tyrannical as the anti-Communist, pro-Christian conformism I grew up with?
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Becoming far worse. But easy to answer if you want to be harshly honest with yourself. Which has become extremely hard for any liberal. Honesty, that is. Because the liberal vision failed to bear fruit in the effort to raise everybody up to the same level, it then morhped into a race to drag everybody down to the same level instead. At that point honesty and liberal values were ditched in an increasingly hysterical response to the failing ideology. Anything but face a reality that destroys all your hopes and dreams.

A dying ideology makes its proponents very dangerous. Just like any cornered animal.

After WWII liberal ideals were untested and theoretical, no evidence of its weakness for anyone to point to. It was great-sounding and humanistic, held the high ground. More than half a century later the debris of its failed attempts to turn the theory into reality is lying around in giant stinking heaps, growing bigger and more dangerous each day. There's evidence, heaps of it, that the ideology could never and will never work. Like a cornered animal the liberal/progressive/regressive has turned nasty in a big way.

Dangerous times. Not only because the left has become oppressive and dishonest, but also because they are pushing the middle to the far right.


Will the Left survive the Millenials? Question is, will the left survive the mounting backlash from the right and what used to be the middle. I don't think so. I think it is going to get very ugly. The left has stuck its fingers firmly in its ears and won't back off to relieve the fast-mounting pressure. Idiotically trying to screw the lid farther down on the pressure cooker that is way too far under pressure already.

The millenials are irrelevant babies.
 
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The progressive future foreseen by the great science fiction author Ray Bradbury way back in the 50s

Fahrenheit_451_1st_ed_cover.jpg

Captain Beatty, Montag's fire chief, personally visits Montag to see how he is doing. Sensing Montag's concerns, Beatty recounts how books lost their value and where the firemen fit in: over the course of several decades, people embraced new media, sports, and a quickening pace of life. Books were ruthlessly abridged or degraded to accommodate a short attention span while minority groups protested over the controversial, outdated content perceived to be found in books. The government took advantage of this, and the firemen were soon hired to burn books in the name of public happiness.
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Alan said:
The progressive future foreseen by the great science fiction author Ray Bradbury way back in the 50s

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George Orwell already called it in the 40s: surveillance everywhere, a ministry of truth to tell you what to believe and newspeak to limit your vocabulary to what is accepted ... he just had the year wrong, 1984 should have been called 2016
 
NarrowBandFtw said:
George Orwell already called it in the 40s: surveillance everywhere, a ministry of truth to tell you what to believe and newspeak to limit your vocabulary to what is accepted ... he just had the year wrong, 1984 should have been called 2016
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Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George Orwell
 
NarrowBandFtw said:
George Orwell already called it in the 40s: surveillance everywhere, a ministry of truth to tell you what to believe and newspeak to limit your vocabulary to what is accepted ... he just had the year wrong, 1984 should have been called 2016
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1984 is more of a commentary on fascism/totalitarianism (and blind nationalism) than liberalism/conservatism.

While themed in a form of war-time Britain in the 40s and how a Stalinist government might affect such a situation, Orwell was not criticising "liberals" - the concept of modern day "liberals" simply did not exist at the time of writing.
 
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scudsucker said:
Care to back that up with some proof?
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:confused: why do people insist on proof of something that is clear as day?

Liberalism pretends to be all about equality, yet they've entirely abandoned any notion of freedom in the name of forcing equality upon everyone all the while fostering ever increasing levels of corporatism, militarism and indeed cronyism.

Fascism was the same thing: public private partnerships that mutate into a select few controlling the many through corporatism, militarism and cronyism. Theoretically it was more authoritarian than modern day liberalism, but the gap must be closing when it is already completely taboo to refer to someone's skin colour or gender in any way shape or form that distinguishes them from any other person.
 
Because the burden of proof rests upon you.

You make an extraordinary claim. You need to back that up with facts.




Else; we are at the level of "because I say so" - which I, for one, left 36 years ago.
 
scudsucker said:
Care to back that up with some proof?
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Easy.
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konfab said:
Easy.
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Any proof that this is a good indication of liberal thought?

And not just you doing some cherry-picking?

The "liberals" you you fear so much are not a homogeneous group, they are not the Fees Must Fall movement; they are not the US Democratic party; they are not the social democracies of Norway; they are manifold and very different to each other.

You need to work out which liberals you hate so much, and perhaps pour your energy into hating those specific liberals. Else all that effort you put in is diluted and wasted..... and ridiculed.

Just a thought.
 
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Number 4 wtf. The story is less important than our feels...?
 
scudsucker said:
Because the burden of proof rests upon you.

You make an extraordinary claim. You need to back that up with facts.




Else; we are at the level of "because I say so" - which I, for one, left 36 years ago.
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There is nothing extraordinary about pointing out that you can see it for yourself if you merely open your eyes.
Nowhere did I say "because I say so", I said "because it is so obvious even a blind man can see it".

You may think it sounds like a wild claim to say modern liberalism = fascism, to me it's akin to saying that the sky is blue. Something everybody can easily see for themselves everyday and without taking the time to verify it on a daily basis they still know it to be true.

EDIT: a lengthy read that more articulately makes the point https://mises.org/library/liberalism-vs-fascism
 
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