So Pup Tentacle, instead of seeing freedom of speech as an individual right that is sacrosanct, you, the illiberal left sees it as an obstacle in the way of “social justice.”
“The Marxist left has always dismissed liberalism’s commitment to protecting the rights of its political opponents … as hopelessly naïve. If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place society’s unequal power relations. Why respect the rights of the class whose power you’re trying to smash? And so, according to Marxist thinking, your political rights depend entirely on what class you belong to.”
By BCL from Being Classically Liberal link Feb 24, 2016 https://beingclassicallyliberal.lib...liberal-regressive-left-and-its-consequences/ The Intolerant, Illiberal, Regressive Left and Its Consequences
The tribalism, cultural Marxism, and anti-liberalism that permeates the identity politics promoted by the regressive left is self-evident to anyone who has been paying attention to the metastatic growth of the contemporary “social justice” movement over the last few years.
While liberalism as a philosophy has always supported things like freedom of speech and expression, civil discussion and the free exchange of ideas, and judging individuals based on their character, not superficial things like skin colour or gender. On the hand, the illiberal left opposes all of these things, and in order to understand why, it is first necessary to understand the ideology behind the “social justice” movement.
At its core, the philosophy of the social justice movement is one firmly rooted in cultural Marxism. Just as Karl Marx saw the capitalist as the exploitative oppressor of the working class, illiberal leftism adopts a worldview in which white people are the oppressor class and minorities, primarily blacks, are the oppressed.
Consequently, illiberal leftism has rejected liberalism’s tendency to judge individuals as individuals and instead adopted the Marxist approach of judging people on the basis of what group they belong to while substituting “race and gender identities for economic ones.”
Consider a student union diversity officer at Goldsmith University, who banned white people and men from an event promoting equality. After accusations of what was obvious racism and sexism, the woman denied the allegations, stating that,
“I, an ethnic minority woman, cannot be racist or sexist towards white men, because racism and sexism describe structures of privilege based on race and gender.”
You may be thinking, “that’s not the definition of racism,” and you’d be correct. Racism, by definition, is the belief that some races are naturally superior to others and that race is the primary determinant of human traits. Racial discrimination is treating people differently solely on the basis of their race, and has nothing to do with “structures or privilege.”
Social justice extremists like this woman have literally redefined what racism is in order to justify their own racism. In their view, their actions are justified as they are a natural response to oppression.
In another clear case of the tribalism promoted by social justice advocates, a young girl in a viral video, to the applause of her classmates, tells her teacher that white people have never been oppressed. I suppose totalitarian African dictators evicting white people from their lands and telling them never to come back doesn’t count as oppression.
It seems very likely that the rise of the regressive left has resulted in more racial animosity between whites and non-whites. When a person is told, or it is implied, that they are a bad person because of their skin color, sexual orientation, or what not, it is natural for them to start to associate even more with that group- identity based on those characteristics rather than seeing themselves as an individual.
And if you put people into groups based on superficial characteristics and then designate one group (white people) as an oppressor class, members of whom are only successful because of some unearned privilege, and another as the oppressed class (minorities, especially blacks), members of whom are only unsuccessful because their oppressed status, naturally division and hatred between the members of these groups is going emerge. The rise of right-wing populism is thus almost certainly a reaction to left-wing identity politics which paints whites in a negative light.
Instead of fostering a unified society where people see themselves as individuals rather than a part of a particular group, the social justice movement is likely responsible for further dividing people along tribalistic lines. There are vastly better means to which eradicate racism and sexism from society than the identity politics upon which the social justice movement is based.
