https://americanmind.org/salvo/american-maoism-2/
Rage meets self-pity as the permanently offended root out false thought.
Those of us who care about the survival of ordered liberty are daily faced with a conundrum: Do we painstakingly chronicle the constant assaults on the life of the mind and civilized norms and risk the charge of being one-note Johnnies? Or do we turn to other, more noble concerns and preoccupations, doing the right and the good? The latter path might seem more high-minded, rooted in a refusal to have our intellectual and political agendas determined by the rage of others. Why should our concerns be determined by the transparently false agendas of those who tear down and repudiate, and who offer nothing constructive in place of our civic and civilized inheritance? Let them pursue the thankless path of total critique, while we teach, build, construct, and sustain a civilized order worthy of human beings.
In truth, however, we must be attentive to both tasks, the positive work of high-minded thought and action that makes reasonable choice and civic comity possible, and the defense of the city without which nothing noble and choice-worthy can be sustained. And there is much to be learned by confronting the deep pathologies at the heart of the ideological deformation of reality. In any case, to stand aside while ideologues and fanatics seize the commanding heights of the academy and civil society entails nothing less moral and civil abdication, a choice for passivity over our non-negotiable duty to pass on the precious inheritance that is civilized liberty as a trust to our children and grandchildren. Surely Leo Strauss was right when he wrote in the 1940s that the greatest practical task of political philosophy is to defend “sound practice” against “bad theory.”
And bad theory abounds today. We daily witness displays of political rage informed by what David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith call in their indispensable 2022 book, The Strategy of Maoism in the West, “permanent offence taking.” Righteous indignation and the search for new and newer victims (and oppressors) are on constant display. DEI offices in colleges, universities, and corporations (and the news media, too) look to penalize, marginalize, and humiliate “oppressors” and “exploiters” as much as to “privilege” the oppressed, who must remain victims in perpetuity for the new system of ideological control to sustain itself. Merit, progress, opportunity, and civic reconciliation are all passé notions, deemed at once racist, offensive, and intolerable. What used to be called “Americanism,” equality under God and the law, must be castigated in a pathological display of collective self-loathing.
