“The animating goal of progressive politics is unvarnished race and gender warfare,” says Andrew Sullivan, who is a prominent center-left intellectual with a column in New York magazine.
Sullivan must make his living by his wit and pen, and has a legitimate claim to having launched the single-sex marriage movement. But his English mix of conservative attitudes and gay politics is out of place in 2018 as his elite social peers outdo each other in their progressive hatred of the low-class outsider who has moved inside President Obama’s White House.
Thus Sullivan must wrap his sharp criticism of the left under a 1,000-word lashing of President Donald Trump and an optimistic view of Obama’s priorities.
Here is Sullivan’s knife:
… the animating goal of progressive politics is unvarnished race and gender warfare. What matters before anything else is what race and gender you are, and therefore what side you are on. And in this neo-Marxist worldview, fully embraced by a hefty majority of the next generation, the very idea of America as a liberating experiment, dissolving tribal loyalties in a common journey toward individual opportunity, is anathema.
There is no arc of history here, just an eternal grinding of the racist and sexist wheel. What matters is that nonwhites fight and defeat white supremacy, that women unite and defeat oppressive masculinity, and that the trans supplant and redefine the cis. What matters is equality of outcome, and it cannot be delayed. All the ideas that might complicate this — meritocracy, for example, or a color-blind vision of justice, or equality of opportunity rather than outcome — are to be mocked until they are dismantled. And the political goal is not a post-racial fusion, a unity of the red and the blue, but the rallying of the victims against the victimizers, animated by the core belief that a non-“white” and non-male majority will at some point come, after which the new hierarchies can be imposed by fiat. When you read the Jeremiah Wright speech today, it seems as if it is coming from a different era altogether.
If Trump has destroyed Obama’s substantive legacy at home and abroad, the left has gutted Obama’s post-racial cultural vision. And those of us who saw him as an integrative bridge to the future, who still cling to the bare bones of a gradually more inclusive liberal order, find ourselves on a fast-eroding peninsula, as cultural and political climate change erases the very environment we once called hope.
Read it all here.
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