Sociopathetic Just-Us Whiners in 2014

# CancelColbert and the Return of the Anti-Liberal Left: The left can only afford to be contemptuous of liberal values when the right wrong isn't in charge.

"Perhaps every political generation is fated to be appalled by the one that succeeds it. In the 1960s, longtime socialist intellectuals were horrified by the anarchic energies of the new left. Then some of those new leftists reached middle age and watched, aghast, as new speech codes proliferated on college campuses during the first iteration of political correctness. I was in college then and am now in my thirties, which means it’s my turn to be dismayed by a growing left-wing tendency towards censoriousness and hair-trigger offense.

It’s increasingly clear that we are entering a new era of political correctness. Recently, we’ve seen the calls to # CancelColbert because of something outrageous said by Stephen Colbert’s blowhard alter ego, who has been saying outrageous things regularly for nine years. [Now Colbert uses sarcastically inane euphemisms.] Then there’s the sudden demand for “trigger warnings” on college syllabi, meant to protect students from encountering ideas or images that may traumatize them [the oh so precious snowflakes] ; an Oberlin faculty document even suggests jettisoning “triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals.” At Wellesley, students have petitioned to have an outdoor statue of a lifelike sleepwalking man removed because it was causing them “undue stress.” As I wrote in The Nation, there’s pressure in some circles not to use the word “vagina” in connection with reproductive rights, lest it offend trans people.

Nor is this just happening here. In England’s left-wing New Statesman, Sarah Ditum wrote of the spread of no-platforming—essentially stopping people whose ideas are deemed offensive from speaking publicly.

....

Call it left-wing anti-liberalism: the idea, captured by Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” that social justice demands curbs on freedom of expression.

“[I]t is possible to define the direction in which prevailing institutions, policies, opinions would have to be changed in order to improve the chance of a peace which is not identical with cold war and a little hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which does not feed on poverty, oppression, and exploitation.” ... “Consequently, it is also possible to identify policies, opinions, movements which would promote this chance, and those which would do the opposite. Suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones.”

Note here both the belief that correct opinions can be dispassionately identified, and the blithe confidence in the wisdom of those empowered to do the suppressing. This kind of thinking is only possible at certain moments: when liberalism seems to have failed but the right is not yet in charge. At such times, old-fashioned liberal values like free speech and robust, open debate seem like tainted adjuncts of an oppressive system, and it’s [it was] still possible for radicals to believe that the ideas suppressed as hateful won’t be their own."

[Instead, many of the recent attacks have targeted liberals whose rational views ought to be those of any individual seeking genuine social justice. Instead, the recent crop of bandwagon-following Sociopathetic Just-Us Whiners fail to understand that justice requires apprehension of reality, tolerance of differing opinions, compassion, and growing a spine. Being triggered, or more likely pretending to be triggered, over imagined or projected slights reveals an immaturity typified by pre-teens. Puerile emotional fragility is justification for individual psychotherapy, not for the "cancellation" of the victimhood-target-du-jour.]

"It’s no surprise, of course, that right-wingers wrong-wingers like Michelle Malkin, author of a defense of Japanese internment, glommed on to the recent anti-Colbert campaign. Anti-liberalism is, after all, supremely useful to the right wrong. Some day president Paul Ryan or Ted Cruz or Rand Paul [even worse, the Electoral College stuck the world with Putin's Puppet] is going to be sworn in, and an ascendant, empowered conservatism C*N*servativism will once again try to curtail dissent in pop culture and academia, just as it always does. Public art won’t be taken down because it’s considered triggering—it will be taken down (or covered up) because it’s considered indecent. There might be another # CancelColbert campaign, but it won’t come from the left [not so fast, Michelle]. Maybe people will be ashamed, then, that this one did.

[Unfortunately, it's possible that, in this day of social-media anonymity and pseudonyms, some of the victimhood-targets-du-jour are being chosen—a la

Cambridge Analytica and (Russian) Internet Research Agency—by the wrong. In other words, some of the pre-surge moralistic finger-pointing could be engineered by distract-from-DUHnocchio's-sociopathic-gaffes agents of RepuGNican cronies/trolls/shills and Putinesque agents. Even more unfortunate, those who are governed by emotions rarely rip curtains aside and wonder who might be deliberately pressing their oversensitive buttons.]