Every time you hear someone lamenting political polarization, I suggest you ask yourself: who actually started it?
Who introduced the idea that people are wicked simply for having opinions?
That such opinions were not to be taken seriously on their own merits, but understood as the expression of irrational feelings, or of defending one's supposed privileges?
It seems to me that "polarization" only became bad when the pushback took on a momentum of its own.
All through the seventies, eighties, nineties, and possibly the early noughties and beyond, "radical" was a compliment. Because radicalism was mostly on the favoured side. Wholesale questioning of the institutions and traditions of society was simply a sign that you were an intelligent, idealistic person.
Suddenly there is a radicalism on the other side-- a wholesale questioning of the wholesale questioning, as it were-- and that's bad, bad, bad...
Very true.
ReplyDeleteI know from multiple personal experiences in medicine, science and academia; that the young radicals of the 1970s and 80s, are the utterly-intolerant, authoritarian, censoring totalitarian bureaucrats of the 2000s onward.
Many (perhaps most! - certainly a high proportion) of these have accumulated the ususal Establishment "honours" allocated by the British monarch/ government (such as OBE, CBE, knighthoods (Sir) and the female equivalent of Dame, and life peerages).
Yet they still regard themselves as the Real radicals!
bruce g charlton
Indeed! The only way they can remain anti-establishment is by constantly changing the goalposts and upping the demands, and even that isn't very convincing to very many people any more.
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