Not a bad article overall. The description of the processes by which the notion of a common sociopolitical good and any allegiance to the country itself has been dissolved, is as good and insightful as any thumbnail sketch is likely to be.

I would however balk at what appears to be a somewhat communitarian thrust to his analysis: opposing, or poising, the sovereign and self-justifying conscience of the sensitive, oppression descrying, woke “elites” of the clerisy ( a word we have seen mentioned in another thread just recently) against a presumptively reified “community” having, apparently, its own self-justifying claims: which under a Freudian take, become accepted with maturity.

My own opinion is that a more effective and revealing analysis of the deeper issues at hand would employ an analysis of competing sovereign individuals as they attempt to sort out not their own sovereign moral tastes, but the root justifications (if any) which they employ while leveling demands based on those tastes upon other putatively equally morally sovereign individuals.

Or, in the conceptual framework of the critically woke: Is their anthropological analysis such that sovereign and self-justifying moral preferences only exist as valid in a “woke” population?

By conceptually breaking up the community, (viewed either as a community of oppression or order depending on which side of the fence you stand), into consciences equally sovereign to the woke consciences, one is able to compare and weigh individual apples against individual apples. This, without any of the moral assumption baggage that inhibits a radical analysis and thus covertly allows the so-called oppression fighters to stake claims and engage in self-justifications impinging on others who have been disadvantageously lumped into a community of pleading punching bags. That is the way the woke get to declaim from a position of smuggled-in conceptual advantage.

So, instead of trying to argue that the community should be preserved because “maturity”, against someone who is shouting that the old society must be destroyed and refashioned based on their own sovereign, subjective, and self-justifying moral sensibilities, the better response is to say, “Ok fine. F##k you. We are admitted enemies without a common good or a shared humanity. All former bets are indeed now off, all formerly shared assumptions cast aside, no fundamental social contract exists, and we are ready to start pulling the trigger in order to get what we want for no reason other than we want it. Do you have anything else to say before the shooting starts?”

That at least gets us all to the base line, and to an even “playing field”: “You put your demanding face in my face because you feel you want to have by any means necessary the social dream you dream; plain and simple. And I then, may with equal validity put your face out of my face by any means convenient because I don’t want it there; plain and simple: likewise with no justification needed or called for, right? ”

Will they respond to this, and begin thinking about their hidden predicates?

My guess is that they won’t. First, because they cannot justify a sovereign subjective urge according to a rational hierarchy; and second, for the reasons [reasoning] Hubert pointed to in the essays explaining the reluctance of the critical theorist type to “legitimize” the so-called oppressor by engaging in a rule bound [logical] exchange with him in the first place. Their predicates are not hidden to them anyway. They know that their anthropology/morality floats free on an act of unanchored, unanalyzed will; ultimately, a simple will to power and control based on a not only post modern, but post human, sensibility.

But at least this reductionistic exercise undeceives us. It tells us where the real battlefield is, and who, or better, what it is that we confront, and what the terms of the contest are.

Yes, it has the effect of dehumanizing the other. But that is a deconstructive act which they, or “evolution” have accomplished themselves.

I just read “How race politics liberated the elites” by Matthew Crawford.
If society is taken to be inherently oppressive, the notion of a common good disappears. https://unherd.com/2020/12/how-race-politics-liberated-the-elites/

Most people who post here would find it interesting.

We are seeing the Western version of a Cultural Revolution trying to manifest. Without a Mao it won’t have the same level of effectiveness, but the intensity of the insanity is the same for those who act it out. Wokism, coupled with advancing age, will destroy the Boomer Democratic Party. Something will emerge in its place, probably Trumpism without Trump.

Geoffrey Britain:

I’m not as fast off the draw to label people with whom I disagree as sociopaths or psychopaths.

Foucault, maybe. He is a downright bizarre, unwholesome character. I would have to know more about his life to hazard an opinion.

But I’ve read about six feet of Chomsky and listened/watched recordings of him many times. I even knew his son at one of the software companies where I worked, and I don’t see him as sociopath.

Chomsky lives in a bubble he’s built carefully over the decades. He is smart enough that he can dismiss most criticism. I’d say his problem is that he is an academic/public intellectual rock star with an ego to match.

In my reading on sociopaths, they are not just selfish, dishonest or manipulative, they are impulsive and take risks. They don’t manage long, constructive lives and careers as Chomsky has.

Which by the way is how I decided Trump wasn’t a sociopath, as was my impression of him in 2016.

Ringo says what I was trying for quite crisply.

Margaret Ball:

Sounds like another walk in the woods of software development! (I’m a programmer.)

I’m still wondering how Chomsky became pope. Other things being equal, my guess is that in an academic debate (maybe not in public with Foucault) Chomsky is one of those guys who thinks faster than others and can crush his opposition.

I’ve been around my share of Bright Guys who can do that. It’s impressive, but I noticed in the long run it’s a special gunslinging skill which doesn’t necessarily arrive at the best thinking, though it often dispatches the competition.

BTW, there’s a long-standing rumor Foucault was stoned during the debate. This sounds right to me as an expression of Foucault’s contempt for old-school Enlightenment thinking, which Chomsky has always claimed as his model.

Obama’s impact will fade in time for he’s a liar, could care less about factual truth and is an advocate of the end justifying the means. His influence today is the result of two conditions; his leftism and white virtue signaling. Never have so many been so wrong about a man’s character.

You are correct as to Zinn being the author rather than Chomsky. Apparently I suffered what my daughter’s generation labels a “brain fart”. However, I stand by my characterization of Chomsky and Foucault as being sociopaths. I’d also add Zinn, Marx and Engels to that category.

That doesn’t mean today’s intellectuals are worthless or inconsequential. Some of them do great work, but the cultural context has changed. We are more skeptical and less reverential. That’s not wholly a bad thing. There was much nonsense in those modern masters. But they did appear to transcend the popular culture and the newspaper polemics of the day in a way that the writers and thinkers of the past generation or two don’t.

But Tom Woods? Please. He’s not even worth mentioning in this context.