And in the words of Aldous Huxley, "The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."
Of course, C.S. Lewis also had a good line on the matter; "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
This is exactly where this current tyranny is coming from:
The radical leftist who promote it are thereby granted the liberty to abuse all who oppose them, since those "reactionaries" must be bigots, racist, sexist, transphobes, homophobe - in short: evil people who deserve the abuse of good people like themselves.
Dissidents who reject this new tyranny aren't respected fellow citizens with different opinions: they are evil people who must be silenced. If this trend is allowed to proceed to its logical conclusion: the dissidents will be silenced permanently, by eradication.
> To be able to destroy with good conscience
Like those ignorant young students, barging into complex discussions they often fail to understand, to shut them down. To shut down thought, invention, investigation, and discussion. And to do all that primarily in the very academic institutions dedicated to all these projects.
> to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation'
A succinct description of cancel culture, the radical left's mob justice that has become normalized.
Are you saying that the radical right is cancelling people?
Or do you mean the idea of cancel culture is being used to suppress ideas?
I don’t understand how either could be true. I am nowhere near being a radical right person, at least I wouldn’t consider myself to be, but I am very concerned about the behavior described in the article as I have experienced the behavior first-hand. We are talking about the suppression of people and ideas.
[1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-republicans-will-com...
[2] https://time.com/5849495/black-lives-matter-defund-police-de...
Additionally, those are just examples of people in the public sphere, there are tons of videos and other examples of online of students shouting down professors or guest speakers, calling them "fascists", demanding they be fired, literally cancelling speakers with opposing views. I mean there's just a lot of evidence online, very easy to Google. I can link it here if that's helpful, but I worry that the people who don't already know about this problem will probably just ignore the links since they were already willfully ignorant up to this point.
Of course there are examples of right extremes, nobody here is denying that, we’re talking about the extremes of the left and how they are having a chilling effect on scientific research.
For the record, I am not a Republican and I am not a Democrat.
A few people complaining about you on Twitter now apparently constitutes being "cancelled", even if it comes with no actual consequences.
Yes, and let's go further in. Is it really "all who oppose them" they're after? Or is it just envy, "all who have something I want?"
They would rather destroy society than admit what they are doing doesn't work for them.
The author provides plenty of examples for this in the article, some of which are well-known, and none of which are factually disputed.
It seems the ones who ignore reality are those assuming and/or pretending "the center" is still firmly in control on these issues. That simply is not the case, which is really a key point in the article.
Which reminds me of this gem by Alexis De Tocqueville from "Democracy in America";
"" That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and
mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like
that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood;
but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual
childhood: it is well content that the people should
rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For
their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it
chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that
happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and
supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures,
manages their principal concerns, directs their industry,
regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their
inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care
of thinking and all the trouble of living?""
When has that happened, though? It's more often the opposite. Hitler magnified racism as a tool to gather power. Racism against African-descended people grew out of the institution of slavery, not the other way around.
Come to think of it: the fascists ideologues were probably certain of being "the good guys", themselves.
One of the most tragic facets of human psychology is that being abused a particular way makes you more likely to abuse others in that same way, not less likely.
I think it's interesting that you speak in such abstract terms about this. What has the American far left or center-left actually done that's as bad as, for example, the recent attempted insurrection or the stripping of rights from women and LGBT people perpetrated by the right?
> the fascists ideologues were probably certain of being "the good guys", themselves.
I've personally never heard of a political movement--left, right, or center--that considered itself the antagonist in its own narrative
The civil unrest of the summer of 2020 - 19 deaths, billions in damages. Accompanied by a heaping spoonful of apologetics from the media, academics and certain corporations.
I believe the overturning of Roe and the insurrection were terrible, for the record.
This line of reasoning would just fall into the same error of justifying oppressive actions by the American left "because they are aimed at a group that is even worse".
I consider the examples cited in the article to be very alarming, for example:
> Soon after that, a few colleagues and I attempted to pass the Chicago Statement—what I viewed as a very basic set of principles about the necessity of free speech on campus. My shock continued as students broke into a faculty meeting about the Chicago Statement screaming “free speech harms” and demanding that white male professors “sit down” and “confess to their privilege.”
This scene chillingly echoes the birth of previous oppressive tyrannies, in Nazi Germany, and Communist Russia and China. Its overt oppression and silencing of opposing views, its deliberate disruption and eradication of civil open debate, its ideological principled and fervent objection to civil liberties such as free speech, the identity politics (and motifs of divisive class/race warfare), the implied violence, the struggle-session public pressure on the sinful individuals to confess their sins...
The fact that the radical American left aligns itself with two of these past tyrannical regimes serves to increase this alarm.
But the worst of all concerns is that these aren't some shrill fringe radicals who are being ignored as such; no, this faction has become dominant to the point of controlling the policies of our academic, social, and cultural institutions.
The article describes leading academic institutions, publications, and even government institutions like the National Science Foundation and the NIH which are bowing to the radical leftist mob and its demand. All these key institutions are increasingly captured and controlled by this radical ideology, putting these oppressive, tyrannical radicals effectively in control of an increasing number of our important societal, cultural, and academic institutions.
(In a way that the small number of right-wing radicals who tried to storm the capitol are very much not; in fact, their magnification as an excuse to further promote oppression, tyranny, and institutional radicalism also evokes alarming echoes of the past.)
Clearly the radical left doesn't allow itself with Russia and China as they are today; however they do express sympathy for the ideologies that underlie the Soviet Union and Maoist China.
Maybe I've seen much of it simply because I lived in SF for years, but you are bound to run into folks there who self-describe not only as "Marxists", but also as "Communists" and sometimes specifically "Maoists".
The push to override civil liberties, notably free speech as described in the article, in service of "more important goals", is certainly reminiscent of communist and Maoist agendas.
Edit: this is actually a "straw man", not a "red herring".
> Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, philosopher, academic, scholar, and author. She is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A feminist and a Marxist, Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and is a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She is the author of more than ten books on class, gender, race, and the U.S. prison system.
> After her acquittal, Davis went on an international speaking tour in 1972 and the tour included Cuba, where she had previously been received by Fidel Castro in 1969 as a member of a Communist Party delegation.[46] Robert F. Williams, Huey Newton, Stokely Carmichael had also visited Cuba, and Assata Shakur later moved there after escaping from a US prison. Her reception by Afro-Cubans at a mass rally was so enthusiastic that she was reportedly barely able to speak.[47] Davis perceived Cuba as a racism-free country, which led her to believe that "only under socialism could the fight against racism be successfully executed." When she returned to the United States, her socialist leanings increasingly influenced her understanding of race struggles.[48] In 1974, she attended the Second Congress of the Federation of Cuban Women.[46]
> In 1971, the CIA estimated that five percent of Soviet propaganda efforts were directed towards the Angela Davis campaign.[49] In August 1972, Davis visited the USSR at the invitation of the Central Committee, and received an honorary doctorate from Moscow State University.[50]
> On May 1, 1979, she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union.[51] She visited Moscow later that month to accept the prize, where she praised "the glorious name" of Lenin and the "great October Revolution".
The word "tyranny" evokes images of mid 20th century fascist soldiers marching through streets, in shiny black leather boots. Tyranny is seen as instigated by the known set of motivations that were in play at that specific time and place: hate, racist bigotry, intolerance, a sense of superiority.
We then fail to identify tyranny, even when it's the same phenomenon at its core, because superficially it looks different. It looks the opposite: where the fascist tyranny was instigated by racism, this apparently new and different phenomena is motivated by an extremely strong reaction to racism.
We fail to acknowledge that sometimes the reaction can be just as bad, and lead to the same pathology, as the problem that initially provoked it.
We ended up in a very similar position of hatred, intolerance, and sense of superiority. We just fail to realize it, because the flag-bearers of this new form of tyranny are entirely convinced they are "the good guys", and are only correcting the faults of the "bad guys": the fascists and bigots of yore.
Come to think of it: the fascists ideologues were probably certain of being "the good guys", themselves.