After the Flight 93 Election by Michael Anton

Author:Michael Anton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2019-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Persecution and the Art of Shouting

This suppression of speech and thought is the second-most sinister feature of modern leftism. If we are to overcome it, we must understand its roots.

The first and most obvious is that, because “social justice” rests on a fallacy, it must suppress awareness of that fallacy. The leftist enterprise has staked its success on an absurd and obviously false account of inequality, viz., that all inequality is the result of injustice or oppression. There are only two ways to maintain public support for a proposition that is obviously false: compound the lies, or suppress and punish dissent. Indeed, the two go together because the more the lies pile up, the more dissent must be suppressed.

Since evidence for widespread present injustice is, to say the least, not altogether obvious, social justice warriors must insist that a great deal of present disadvantage is caused by past injustice. Since this assertion is undermined by many observable facts and by logic, it is not readily accepted by most of those held to be advantaged. Questions that inevitably arise include: Have we really disproved all possible explanations for disadvantage besides oppression? Are we absolutely certain that environmental, cultural, or personal factors play no role whatsoever? To the extent that such factors do not arise from one group of humans oppressing another, how can their effects be rightly called unjust? What reason do we have to believe that politics is even capable of eliminating inequalities that do not arise from oppression? What about the opportunity costs and waste that inevitably flow from attempts to accomplish the impossible? How much of today’s disadvantage or inequality is truly attributable to injustices committed decades or even centuries ago? How can a person who has committed no injustice himself be responsible for the injustice of others? Even if one were to accept the concept of hereditary guilt, how can persons with no hereditary connection to past oppressors be responsible for their misdeeds?

These lines of inquiry more than suggest that redistribution and other efforts to correct all disadvantage are unjustified and counterproductive. Therefore, social justice warriors insist that said lines of inquiry be disallowed, along with any arguments that undermine public support for any element of their project. Such arguments are to be denounced when stated and their advocates punished to discourage further heresy. Here is the leftist saint Herbert Marcuse on the necessity of “repressive tolerance”:

the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior – thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives.

Once all claims to moral authority are vested in “history” and “science,” secular persecution of heterodoxy follows almost inevitably.

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