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What can we learn about optimal cultural leadership in light of the 2013-2021 social justice period?
Religious leaders did not adequately stand up against the mass movement. Although many conservatives see value in religious institutions as a cultural defense, mainstream Catholicism and Protestant denominations did not substantively address the social justice craze. In some cases they placated or even promoted it.
Academics did not adequately argue against the mass movement. It is not the case, for instance, that the experts in western history, literature, or philosophy were more likely to argue against the mass movement in any substantive way. This is problematic: if learning the best of western culture does not lead to protecting said culture in any genuine sense when it matters the most, then how great is the actual utility of such learning?
The main “public critics” of the period have little in common except that they were passionate and somewhat neurotic men. Yarvin, Peterson, Weinstein, Scott Adams(?). My memory of who was most dominant in this period is somewhat hazy, maybe someone with a better memory can correct me. There were more psychologists among critics than philosophers. You had people like Stefan Molyneux passionately criticizing the proto-movement well before its zenith. His Twitter attests to his neuroticism.
Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make. Why?
It’s difficult to come away with clear takeaways. IMO: (1) it is beneficial to increase anonymous discussion, as this laid the groundwork for future criticism, and allowed for arguments to spread which would otherwise be banned. (2) It may be essential to increase the number of passionate and neurotic men, over men with other skills, as the major critics were more often passionate and somewhat crazy. A “passionate” temperament is occasionally inaccurate, and may result in behavior that leads institutions to weed them out — but their utility in sensing and addressing threats compensates for the occasional bout of craziness.
There is a funny review of Jordan Peterson from 2013, possibly the first time anyone commented about his personality online. It was made on the anonymous literature board of 4chan in 2013, long before his rise to fame.
Flagged as consensus building.
What you call "optimal cultural leadership" is really just "how to make my outgroup not get in power". And your use of neutral language to cover this switch up is bad rhetoric.
A very large percentage of Americans still find the "social justice craze" to be a good thing, including many of the academics/religious leaders/politicians you are critiquing for not being anti-social justice craze from early on. It's fine for you to be anti-social justice craze. But you shouldn't be assuming that everyone else is or that it is the norm around here.
FWIW, I would be very interested in reading an ideologically neutral account of the failures of conservative leadership to account for the rise of wokism, and what lessons can be learned in order to better spread/suppress future ideologies.
Hold up.
For years, on this very forum (well, fine, you have to come buck to the /r/SSC days), whenever someone pointed out the advances of the SJ movement, the response was something to the effect of "it's just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses / Tumblr", or alternatively there'd be an attempt to "steelman" the movement to make it look more reasonable than it actually is ("defund the police doesn't really mean defund the police"), something later dubbed "sanewashing" by other elements of the left.
His use of neutral language is not covering up any switch, it's taking what progressives who participated in Culture War commentary at face value, i.e. assuming their good faith. We can dispense with that assumption, but I'm not sure you'd be happy with that either.
It was more than that, but not much more. There was a lot of media rhetoric from the left and teeth gnashing on the right about certain things, but in the end it doesn't seem to have amounted to much. But beyond some limited effects at the local level, most of the media coverage from the left amounted to little more than trend pieces (where a fringe phenomenon is puffed up into something bigger than it is), and the right's reaction had all the hallmarks of a moral panic. I can't tell you how many arguments in bars I got into where someone would insist that this school district just down the road was teaching kids that white people are bad blah blah blah and can you believe what these kids are hearing about gay people only to find out that they got this information from their neighbor's cousin's kid, or something, which is the equivalent of them just admitting that they got it from some dubious social media post. I have yet to talk to anyone with actual firsthand knowledge of any of this who could reproduce lesson plans or anything.
And at the national level, this rhetoric was soundly rejected within the Democratic party. Regardless of how the Republicans would like to portray them, there are few woke Democratic elected officials. The Squad is the most notorious, but those are a few House reps in safe seats, and even some of those got primaried the last go-round. AOC may be nationally known, but it remains to be seen whether she's that popular outside the Bronx. And when woke politicians do get the opportunity to go national, they fall flat on their faces. If there was ever an election where wokeness could triumph over the Democratic establishment, it was 2020. The woke lane was there for any Democrat who wanted to take it. Who did? Kirsten Gillebrand and Beto O'Rourke. Arguably Kamala Harris, though she wasn't very convincing about it. The Democrats ended up nominating Joe Biden, about as an establishment candidate as you can get. Hell, Mayor Pete made a convincing run as a moderate and even led early on despite being the mayor of a town most people couldn't point to on a map.
Several European countries passed gender self-ID laws, last year the town hall where I live was draped in "TRANS DAY OF REMEMBRANCE" banners, the whole "Gender Affirming Care" thing is a fiasco based on no evidence, and a failure of scientific institutions to do proper filtering, there's people being harassed by the police or outright arrested for not buying the gender ideology, or for mild jokes... Yes please go on and tell me how these things are indicative of a moral panic. I guess it's completely normal for sweeping reforms in accordance with a specific ideology to take place, when the influence of said ideology is nothing but a moral panic.
No it hasn't. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, probably not even you, has ever rejected it. What happened is that Democrats noticed that it's losing them the election, so they're trying to turn the volume down, but they did absolutely nothing to reject it.
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