A recent American Scholar essay attacking political correctness generates some good reader responses in the latest issue.
Among them:
Many people who still value intellectual rigor, coherence, and dialogue have noticed for some time that the social-justice left is the mirror image of the puritanical Christian moral majority that some of us remember in its more muscular form through the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s. The same unthinking dogmatism, the same moral certainty, the same obsession with purity, the same intellectual hollowness and fragility, the same fixation on feelings of personal offense, the same authoritarian impulses.
Today’s campus left has indeed taken on the worst characteristics of the social group it could most clearly identify as its enemy, in the same way that colonized people mimic the worst traits of their colonizers when they finally achieve independence. And yes, the aim of the project (driven not by high ideals but the resentment and vindictiveness of the marginalized), is not to make society more universally just, but simply to invert the power pyramid. Power is all that matters.
What we need is a revitalized, tough, liberal center to oppose the toxic, destructive, extremists on both the left and the right. People who are sick of this seesaw of creeping authoritarianism need to speak up and stick up for each other.
