DK RE ACTIVISM, THEN AND NOW, PT II EXCERPTS continued from the other day

"...And in the last, critical step, all the intellectual and political achievements of western civilization increasingly fell into disfavor, seen as instruments of straight white male oppression against "marginalized" groups. These achievements included most of the western intellectual tradition, free speech, and representative democracy itself. In my opinion, much of the new scholarship about white people and western civilization is projection on the part of female and nonwhite academics. Having become obsessed with race, gender, or both, they assume that western civilization has been equally obsessed with those categories. In fact it has been less obsessed with them than any other--which is why the ideas of racial and gender equality are almost unique to the West...." DK

This is a good insight, one I share. But, I would like to qualify it to some extent by arguing that this end of the line for Western Civilization was not so much a new development with late 20th and 21st Century leftist liberal fragmentation ideology. 

Rather, if one really looks at the principles espoused, and the antecedents invoked, it is hard not to see the radicalism of the founding American rebels writ large in the pronouncements and behavior of these postmodern leftists.

Moreover, on the other hand, the postmodern initiatives from the right build no less on the kind of dogmatic radical religious sectarian separatism, anti eastablishmentarianism, civil libertarianism, disobedience, nonjurorism, authoritarian puritanism, personal conscience and evangelicalism, Calvinism, that one sees now flourishing on the radical right, and to some extent in some ways on the left as well, simultaneously. 

One might say that the willingness of the various BLM groups to attack monuments and Christian symbols and institutions themselves smacks both of the radical Reformation and some persecuted sects that fled here from British Isles and Low Countries, as well as the views of the later deist and atheist founders here on the democratic left, all and each in their separate ways willing to leave the ideals, examples, political models, monuments, principles, and social order of the Old Western World permanently behind in the dustbin of history. 

There is a sense in which some of these ostensibly progressive movements were less progressive in a real sense than retrogressive. 

Thus, it has not been a strictly onesided, or a recent expression only, of our radical heritages we see now playing themselves out yet again across America.

Once a civilization like the West, a fussy thing to have gotten up in the first place and actually had it hold together for a time, has been set adrift, it is truly uncertain that in the fullness of time it will ever again come ashore, and will not resemble very closely what had been cut loose from its moorings in 1515 or 1776 or 1914. 

The radicalism of the left of color here is more committed than ever to a globalist, and anti nationalist ideological agenda, because that is what they were taught from the very beginning, not just in the last 50 years but rather the last 250 or so years since 1776. This very globalist agenda of the left played into the Democratic Party's globalist free market agenda very well until recently.

The radicalism of the right, instinctively at first nationalistic and isolationist rather than globalist, only came to globalization relatively late in the game, when the wealthy among the Republicans began to have more and more to gain even than the Democrats by hawkishness, corporate, individual, estate tax, offshoring, and direct foreign investment advantages under globalization.

This post is dedicated to J C D Clark.