Signs of incipient totalitarian impulses have been evident since the rise of political correctness.
1 Yet, warnings from those who saw the character of contemporary "social justice" went largely unheeded. Nevertheless, even before degenerating into "wokeness," social justice bore the seeds of civilizational decline and the simultaneous rise of social and political tyranny.
The weaponization of mostly feigned fragility by snowflake totalitarians has been marshaled to abrogate the rights of those deemed offensive, injurious, and even "dangerous." It also has evinced "paralogistic discourse," or "[d]iscourse that is out of touch with reality, involving illogical, fallacious, unwarranted premises and conclusions."2 Such thinking is characteristic of societal hysteria.3 This weaponization escalated, germinating "cancel culture," the buds from which neo-Stalinist purges have since blossomed.
As I was first to point out, social justice amounts to "practical postmodernism."
4 The relativism, subjectivism, and antiobjectivity of postmodern theory, as well as the priority it places on language, have been harnessed by social justice activists and their followers and put to political ends. Social justice ideology claims that "narratives," "my truth," and language trump or produce reality. In terms of transgender ideology, this means that
declaring one's gender, or mere (re)naming, supersedes and cancels biology. In terms of critical race theory and the Black Lives Matter movement, it means that personal stories of oppression overwrite evidence, statistics, and the arc of history. Given that appeals to objective criteria are banished, when backed by the requisite power, such claims are necessarily authoritarian. Without objective criteria, there is no court of appeal other than power, and thus such "truths" are deemed incontrovertible.
5 The
legal ramifications of practical postmodernism have been nothing less than astonishing.
The policies of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) accelerated the already prevalent upward movement of unqualified persons, those who have achieved important positions thanks to affirmative action and adherence to political ideology. DEI (or DIE) metastasized throughout the culture at large, with signs of the upward mobility of the unqualified seen in
government,
academia, and the corporate world. On Twitter, the accounts of unremarkable activists and otherwise unaccomplished leftists are granted the official blue checkmark of authority and significance.
Historically, the upward movement of the unqualified has been a harbinger of increasing authoritarianism; the unqualified favor authoritarianism, which protects their unearned status, and authoritarianism selects the unqualified, who become avid loyalists of the authoritarian regime.6 Thus, the upward movement of the unqualified should be taken as a telltale sign.
Comment: Maxime Bernier is making real waves in Canadian politics. Has Justin Trudeau met his match?