Will the Left Survive the Millennials?

[Hamilcar]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/opinion/will-the-left-survive-the-millennials.html?emc=eta1

Will the Left Survive the Millennials?
By LIONEL SHRIVERSEPT. 23, 2016

Midway through my opening address for the Brisbane Writers Festival earlier this month, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese-born Australian engineer and 25-year-old memoirist, walked out. Her indignant comments about the event might have sunk into obscurity, along with my speech, had they not been republished by The Guardian. Twenty minutes in, this audience member apparently turned to her mother: " 'Mama, I can't sit here,' I said, the corners of my mouth dragging downwards. 'I cannot legitimize this.' " She continued: "The faces around me blurred. As my heels thudded against the grey plastic of the flooring, harmonizing with the beat of the adrenaline pumping through my veins, my mind was blank save for one question. 'How is this happening?' "

I'm asking the same thing.

Briefly, my address maintained that fiction writers should be allowed to write fiction — thus should not let concerns about "cultural appropriation" constrain our creation of characters from different backgrounds than our own. I defended fiction as a vital vehicle for empathy. If we have permission to write only about our own personal experience, there is no fiction, but only memoir. Honestly, my thesis seemed so self-evident that I'd worried the speech would be bland.

Nope — not in the topsy-turvy universe of identity politics. The festival immediately disavowed the address, though the organizers had approved the thrust of the talk in advance. A "Right of Reply" session was hastily organized. When, days later, The Guardian ran the speech, social media went ballistic. Mainstream articles followed suit. I plan on printing out The New Republic's "Lionel Shriver Shouldn't Write About Minorities" and taping it above my desk as a chiding reminder.

Viewing the world and the self through the prism of advantaged and disadvantaged groups, the identity-politics movement — in which behavior like huffing out of speeches and stirring up online mobs is par for the course — is an assertion of generational power. Among milliennials and those coming of age behind them, the race is on to see who can be more righteous and aggrieved — who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a spikier brand.

When I was growing up in the '60s and early '70s, conservatives were the enforcers of conformity. It was the right that was suspicious, sniffing out Communists and scrutinizing public figures for signs of sedition.

Now the role of oppressor has passed to the left. In Australia, where I spoke, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to do or say anything likely to "offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate," providing alarming latitude in the restriction of free speech. It is Australia's conservatives arguing for the amendment of this law.

As a lifelong Democratic voter, I'm dismayed by the radical left's ever-growing list of dos and don'ts — by its impulse to control, to instill self-censorship as well as to promote real censorship, and to deploy sensitivity as an excuse to be brutally insensitive to any perceived enemy. There are many people who see these frenzies about cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, micro-aggressions and safe spaces as overtly crazy. The shrill tyranny of the left helps to push them toward Donald Trump.

Ironically, only fellow liberals will be cowed by terror of being branded a racist (a pejorative lobbed at me in recent days — one that, however groundless, tends to stick). But there's still such a thing as a real bigot, and a real misogynist. In obsessing over micro-aggressions like the sin of uttering the commonplace Americanism "you guys" to mean "you all," activists persecute fellow travelers who already care about equal rights.

Moreover, people who would hamper free speech always assume that they're designing a world in which only their enemies will have to shut up. But free speech is fragile. Left-wing activists are just as dependent on permission to speak their minds as their detractors.

In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal — and maybe my generation should retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math.

But do we really want every intellectual conversation to be scrupulously cleansed of any whiff of controversy? Will people, so worried about inadvertently giving offense, avoid those with different backgrounds altogether? Is that the kind of fiction we want — in which the novels of white writers all depict John Cheever's homogeneous Connecticut suburbs of the 1950s, while the real world outside their covers becomes ever more diverse?

Ms. Abdel-Magied got the question right: How is this happening? How did the left in the West come to embrace restriction, censorship and the imposition of an orthodoxy at least as tyrannical as the anti-Communist, pro-Christian conformism I grew up with? Liberals have ominously relabeled themselves "progressives," forsaking a noun that had its roots in "liber," meaning free. To progress is merely to go forward, and you can go forward into a pit.

Protecting freedom of speech involves protecting the voices of people with whom you may violently disagree. In my youth, liberals would defend the right of neo-Nazis to march down Main Street. I cannot imagine anyone on the left making that case today.

[Grinning_Colossus]

Old Grey Lady complains about the youth.

I wouldn't say that the new identity politics is a generational thing per se, so much as a fad that has caught on over the last ~5 years due to the profitability of clickbait combined with social media echo chambers. The youth just tend to be disproportionately susceptible to fads. Hopefully it'll pass... or we'll all end up living in a neo-millet system, which could be fun.

[The Minsky Moment]

No.  The Left is DOOMED.  It will die a lingering death by random anecdote.

[Admiral Yi]

It's a reasonable argument.  Seems to me whenever you read about someone pushing back against PC idiocy it's almost always someone from an older generation, which raises the possibility that as Millenials age the idiocy will become an unchallenged orthodoxy, questioned only by alt-right "fuck her in the pussy" frat boy retards.

[Hamilcar]

It's a reasonable argument.  Seems to me whenever you read about someone pushing back against PC idiocy it's almost always someone from an older generation, which raises the possibility that as Millenials age the idiocy will become an unchallenged orthodoxy, questioned only by alt-right "fuck her in the pussy" frat boy retards.

There is a lot to that but it seems to be (maybe the older ones here can correct me) is that in previous generation, society didn't indulge these kinds of tantrums.

[Valmy]

I think we just have more platforms for extremists to turn the screws on us, from both ends. It is not like the right is looking just really great these days either.

[Berkut]

It's a reasonable argument.  Seems to me whenever you read about someone pushing back against PC idiocy it's almost always someone from an older generation, which raises the possibility that as Millenials age the idiocy will become an unchallenged orthodoxy, questioned only by alt-right "fuck her in the pussy" frat boy retards.

It's a completely reasonable argument.

It's one I've been making for a long, long time. If you insist that the moderates are evil because they refuse to bow to the radical extremism, what you will be left with is, well, Trump.

The left wants to blame the rise of Trumpism on the right, but in reality they are, at least, equally at fault, if not at greater fault. The demonization of the moderates in their own party (how many Blue Dogs are left?), and lumping all "Republicans" into the same bucket, has had as much to do with the polarization of discourse as anything Fox has done.

And the reverse is true as well - the loopy left sees how effective the rhetoric of exclusion and intolerance is from the far right, and they have decided they should give it a shot as well, but targetted at different groups is all, often their own.

It actually makes me kind of stunned that the crazy right might actually win this little culture war we are having, only because the regressive left is more worried about whether those on their own side are pure enough for their lofty "ideals" to be tolerated.

[Valmy]

Yeah they are fully embracing the 'better Hitler than Blum' way of thinking. I have often grumbled about how shitty leftists were as allies during my commitment to clean and renewable energy. They seemed determined to burn coal than dare to embrace a single alternative that was not 100% pure and perfect in everyway.

But frankly I have talked enough about that. The fact that leftists let the perfect destroy the good is well demonstrated. See: British Labour Party.

[The Minsky Moment]

There is a lot to that but it seems to be (maybe the older ones here can correct me) is that in previous generation, society didn't indulge these kinds of tantrums.

We never had the New Left?  Radical chic?  Students occupying universities?  Manifestos denouncing capitalist rhetoric?

How quickly we forget.

[Valmy]

There is a lot to that but it seems to be (maybe the older ones here can correct me) is that in previous generation, society didn't indulge these kinds of tantrums.

We never had the New Left?  Radical chic?  Students occupying universities?  Manifestos denouncing capitalist rhetoric?

How quickly we forget.

Yeah I think we tolerated them just fine. They now just have a bigger platform to dominate the conversation now.

[Hamilcar]

There is a lot to that but it seems to be (maybe the older ones here can correct me) is that in previous generation, society didn't indulge these kinds of tantrums.

We never had the New Left?  Radical chic?  Students occupying universities?  Manifestos denouncing capitalist rhetoric?

How quickly we forget.

Well this is my question, being (I suspect) a bit younger than you. Did institutions back then yield so easily?

[Solmyr]

Old Grey Lady complains about the youth.

Millennials: Young people who grumpy, racist old farts complain about as being "too PC".

[Martinus]

Old Grey Lady complains about the youth.

Millennials: Young people who grumpy, racist old farts complain about as being "too PC".

That's rich coming from a Russian with a moustache.

[CountDeMoney]

We never had the New Left?  Radical chic?  Students occupying universities?  Manifestos denouncing capitalist rhetoric?

How quickly we forget.

"Oh, you were a bomb maker for the Weather Underground?  How mainstream."

[Solmyr]

Old Grey Lady complains about the youth.

Millennials: Young people who grumpy, racist old farts complain about as being "too PC".

That's rich coming from a Russian with a moustache.

Says the Russian without a moustache.