The Storm Before The StormBy ROD DREHER • June 5, 2017, 3:13 PM
Here’s a must-read piece by Jacob Siegel, reflecting on how dissatisfying he found a public debate last weekend between editors from Dissent and American Affairs. Siegel says that for the past 10 years he has been moving both right and left politically, as the center has become hollowed out. He didn’t like the debate because “the left pandered and the right was coy.”
In Siegel’s account, the two Dissent editors, Tim Shenk and Sarah Leonard, carried on as if the Left were obviously correct, had nothing to talk to the new Right about, and simply had to wait for the Left’s inevitable triumph. Siegel says that is a pretty incredible position to hold when Republicans are winning all over. And:
“As someone who considers myself a leftist,” one audience member said during the Q&A, “I did feel sometimes a little bit uncomfortable with the only calls for building broad solidarity coming from the right.”
What the questioner was getting at I think, was Shenk and Leonard’s refusal to even acknowledge any conflict between identity politics and the formation of broad class-based coalitions. An especially notable omission given how commonly this issue comes up in intra-left debate.
At various points both Dissent editors dismissed concern over political correctness and campus radicalism as petty preoccupations of the right. This at the same moment, while “the Left turned on its own” that videos of the Evergreen college protests were going viral. Broadcast—forget about just on cable TV—in millions of youtube clips that are played, refracted, remixed and replayed to a vast audience of Americans who are still, as Shenk rightly noted, deeply invested in the culture war.
Siegel says that the Left makes a huge mistake in minimizing this stuff. He’s correct in that. Political correctness may be extreme on certain campuses, but it will inevitably be mainstreamed by institutions run by graduates of these colleges.
A small but telling example: the announcement that the US men’s and women’s national soccer teams will be wearing pro-gay jerseys:
And notice how the Fox Sports journalist described this move:
U.S. Soccer has dropped some spiffy new rainbow kits to raise money for a good cause, coinciding with LGBTQ Pride month in June.
What if you are a US Soccer player who is Catholic, Evangelical, Muslim, or otherwise religious, and objects morally to celebrating gay pride (even if you have no problem at all with gays and lesbians playing professional soccer)? Too bad for you. If you objected publicly by refusing to wear the jersey, you would put your career at risk. So: violate your conscience or suffer professional consequences. This is one example of how coercive political correctness moves throughout the system.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-storm-before-the-storm-weimar-america-liberalism/
