How the progressive left aligned itself with postmodernism
We have reached a point in history where the ideas that sustain the liberalism and modernity at the heart of western civilization are at great risk. The precise nature of this threat is complicated. It arises from at least two overwhelming pressures, one revolutionary and the other reactionary, that are at war over which illiberal direction our societies should be dragged.
Far-right populist movements claim to make a last desperate stand for liberalism and democracy against a rising tide of progressivism and globalism. They are increasingly turning toward leadership in dictators and strongmen who can maintain and preserve ‘western’ sovereignty and values.
Meanwhile, far-left ‘progressive’ crusaders portray themselves as the sole and righteous champions of social and moral progress.
They not only advance their cause through revolutionary aims that openly reject liberalism as a form of oppression: they also do so with increasingly authoritarian means, seeking to establish a thoroughly fundamentalist ideology of how society ought to be ordered. Each side in this fray sees the other as an existential threat, and thus each fuels the other’s greatest excesses. This culture war is sufficiently intense that it has come to define political — and, increasingly, social — life through the beginning of the 21st century.
Though the problem on the right is severe and deserves careful analysis in itself, we have become experts in the nature of the problem on the left. This is partly because we believe that, while the two sides are driving one another to madness and further radicalization, the problem coming from the left represents a departure from its historical point of reason and strength: the liberalism essential to the maintenance of our secular, liberal democracies. The progressive left has aligned itself not with modernity but with postmodernism, which rejects objective truth as a fantasy dreamed up by naive or arrogantly bigoted Enlightenment thinkers who underestimated the collateral consequences of progress.
Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay – Spectator | USA – July 18, 2020.
