https://americanmind.org/salvo/wretched-of-the-university/
Postcolonialism rivals Jacobinism and Bolshevism in its systematic destruction of civil society.
In the summer of 2020, decent Americans found themselves overcome by a torrent of propaganda besmirching the United States as a nation racist to its core, with “white privilege” making life intolerable for anyone but its immediate beneficiaries. A fanatical moralism demanded that all right-thinking people sign on to an anti-racist catechism that was as simplistic as it was absurd. And plead “guilty” untold numbers of people did, with a whiff of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the air.
Civic courage was hardly to be found, and accommodation to ready-made lies provided a momentary reprieve for those, especially on the Left, afraid of being “cancelled” by their censorious peers utilizing social media as the weapon most ready-at-hand. The ritualistic self-loathing that had long been present, even institutionalized, on college campuses became the norm in journalism, the entertainment business, corporate culture, professional sports, and in many churches and synagogues, too. As Andrew Sullivan has strikingly observed on more than one occasion, we are all living on college campuses now.
Naïve liberals and suburban housewives joined the hardened Marxists and Maoists (and grifters, too) of Black Lives Matter in demanding the radical revolutionary transformation of a country still largely free, decent, and self-critical. The police became targets of angry mobs (and Antifa terrorists), and pressure grew to withdraw police protection from the weak, aged, and vulnerable, especially in minority communities.
The revolution was driven in large part by white progressives, trust fund babies, and the like who marched as they bandied about tired and stale revolutionary slogans. In the name of “anti-racism,” whole groups of people were stigmatized for belonging to the wrong race or “gender,” an ugly word that has become meaningless as it has been weaponized. Everything was racialized, and it became verboten to judge people by “the content of their character.” Those blacks, not a few in number, who wanted to think for themselves, who refused to define themselves as helpless victims and nothing else, were subject to endless vituperation. The loud, the angry, the uncivil, and the massively uninformed were lauded for their so-called courage and social consciousness. For months, the most “privileged” Americans playacted at revolution, as if any ideological revolution can ever end well.
For all intents and purposes, America had gone mad. Grown-ups took their bearings from 18-year-olds repeating mindless and extremist slogans (and finding “systematic” violence and mass killings against black Americans where they didn’t exist). In their “socially constructed” world, an ideological Second Reality took the place of the common world where citizens debate and deliberate, sometimes contentiously but never violently, about matters of public import.
