Progressivism is the new powdered wig

April 17, 2019

Throughout history people have developed ways to stand apart from the crowd and establish themselves as more desirable than their peers. From codpieces to excessive, overt displays of piety, people compete to show themselves superior in whatever facet is valued most by their peers, whether it be wealth, piety, or intellectual acuity. Today people scramble to find different forms of oppression in more places than others or to demonstrate their value through the use of chic terms such as “white privilege” and “toxic masculinity”. This “woke” rhetoric serves as a status symbol to make clear that one is part of the enlightened upper-crust of society, and, naturally, the more sensitive one is to real or perceived oppression, the higher status one has. Progressivism has become the new powdered wig.

The metric of value among today’s academic and media class is intellectualism manifested in perceived cultural awareness. The actual intellectual merits of “woke” rhetoric are irrelevant as the goal is not actual intellectual achievement. Rather, it’s to demonstrate to your peers that you belong or, for the higher status members of this group, to stand out from or above the rest. They dress themselves up in rhetoric, their words serving the same purpose as a peacock’s feathers.

This quest to outdo one another began meritoriously enough in one of the crowning achievements of American liberalism and indeed humanity as a whole; the American Civil Rights Movement of the 20^th Century. Here was a movement unchained by the usual constraints of moral ambiguity, one where any decent, clear-sighted man could say with certainty that their side was right. This created generations of liberals longing for their own crusade, reliving the clear battle of right and wrong like a high school quarterback unable to move past his glory days. Liberals fought, they were right, and they won.

The problem is that they won. For those whose goal in political activism is to create a better world this was a crowning achievement, a satisfying end to a difficult struggle. For those for whom political activism is a form of self-aggrandizement this presented a problem.  It’s hardly a feather in one’s cap to be tolerant when everyone is tolerant.  As overt racism became less and less acceptable and all but disappeared from society, how was anyone to stand out from the crowd?

One way was to compete with one another to show how not racist they were.  It wasn’t long before every college-aged white girl made sure to have a picture of her and her black friend on her Facebook page, even if they’d only met ten minutes ago and weren’t quite sure whether their name was Alyssa or Melissa. However, this could only go so far, as it is difficult to be less racist than simply ‘not a racist’. Society types needed a positive metric on which they could compete to establish their relative status within the group.

The answer was to become more sensitive to non-overt forms of racism and more intense in one’s revulsion to them. Concept creep sunk in, and more and more actions and people were considered racist as the inquisitors of racial tolerance rushed to accuse others of racism in an effort to showcase their own piety.  The subject of debate ceased to be the merits of the topic at hand, be it a policy, comment, or individual, but rather became whether that topic could be labeled ‘racist’. Soon enough the whole country was walking on eggshells to avoid doing or saying anything that could be seen, in or out of context, as racist. To show their sensitivity to be superior to that of the common rabble, progressive elites needed to hit smaller and smaller targets. Thus, overt race-baiting gave rise to code words or their modern equivalent — dog whistle rhetoric.

The advantage of dog whistle rhetoric is that, like its namesake, it can be detected by none but the intended target. Progressives jockeying for social position can prove how special they are by being to be able to pick up on the dog whistle even as it goes unheard by the majority of people who are less attuned to social injustice. And of course, there is no way to be disproven since the language is designed to appear innocent. Anyone suggesting that an alleged dog whistle is nothing more than what it appears to be can easily be haughtily dismissed as un-‘woke’.

New terms were created each season for academic and media elites to cloak themselves in like the latest fashions from Milan. Fluent use of terms such as ‘white privilege’ and ‘microaggression’ began to mark one’s status as a member of the ‘woke’ and provided a useful barometer with which to measure one’s standing within the social group. These terms are intentionally abstract and confusing, ensuring that only the truly ‘woke’ can grasp them and setting off scores of imitation wannabes in school boards across the country. They also provide a useful gatekeeping tool, allowing the chosen to conveniently dismiss the opinions of anyone who questions or rejects these invented concepts without the trouble of having to explain or argue their own position. We outside the court of political correctness must always wonder whether the emperor’s clothes actually exist.

Punishments for deviation from the social norm have grown harsher and harsher as people on social media strive to lead the mob in its pursuit of justice. See, in this environment, the punishment is never about the severity of the offense or the individual who committed it. It’s about the person calling for punishment. If someone offends, an apology may be sufficient to rectify the situation in the eyes of the average person. However, if one is to be better than the average person, one must be more offended. Thus, to sate one’s thirst for justice requires nothing less than the complete destruction of the career and reputation of the offender. It is for this reason that minor sins or mere differences of opinion are today punished with the social death penalty.

The consequence of all this is that we have become a society that caters to the most sensitive among us, that has turned social media and the entertainment industry, those spheres which should be the most willing to offend and push the envelope, into nation-wide safe spaces. It is now no longer enough to simply be respectful and tolerant; the inquisitors of political correctness must ensure intellectual conformity among all, seeking out and destroying any who deviate even the smallest iota from their standards. Even honest intellectual questioning is disallowed, ensuring that nothing from ‘woke’ culture is ever questioned. When one battle is won, they simply move on to the next, whether removing ‘gay’ from the lexicon is replaced with a fight on the word ‘retard’ or interpreting all ambiguity in the worst possible light. After all, what became of the Knights Templar once the Crusades were finished?

 

It is fair to question how much of the myth of the social justice warrior is based on fact and how much is an urban legend. After all, the cult of political correctness makes an effective political bogeyman, a rhetorical windmill for opponents to charge at. In this day and age (and also throughout all of human history), people are inclined to believe the worst about their political opponents and overreact to fear stoked through hyperbole and misrepresentation. How much does this ‘woke’ oversensitivity actually exist, and how much of it is the product of the imagination of comedians seeking an easy target and demagogues searching for a strawman?

The actual answer is unknown and almost certainly unknowable. Things such as this don’t exist in the binary, are difficult to measure, and will depend very heavily on the constructs and definitions chosen by the examiner. However, there are a couple of modern phenomena that make this portion of the population, whatever their numbers, disproportionately influential.

The first is the prevalence and centrality of social media, and the fact that people haven’t quite learned to ignore it. Don’t get me wrong; social media has absolutely revolutionized communications and discourse across the world, and many of its impacts are positive. Others are not. Among the negative impacts is the fact that it amplifies and gives a forum to the voices of everyone without the normal checks of having to go through an intermediary to make sure that what they’re saying has any merit. It is essentially a letters to the editor section on steroids, but somehow manages to be even worse.

The problem is that it gives a microphone to views that are in a small minority, and that are in the minority because the views are stupid. Say 3,000 people hold one view, and the other 300,000,000 people reject that view because it’s dumb. If those 3,000 people go on Twitter and sound off, which they will because we’ve already established that they aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, and the 300,000,000 stay silent because they’re sane, then what do you end up with? 3,000 people on Twitter expressing outrage about something that no one with a brain would care about. However, it’s easy to see how, from the outside looking in, this would appear to be a legitimate controversy, and the target of the outrage would feel attacked.

This is compounded by the presence of trolls and wannabe social media influencers, as well as the fact that the media acts more like high school gossips than journalists. Shocking as it may be, there are a number of people who use social media not to promulgate legitimate ideas, but to garner attention and notoriety for themselves. Whether they are trying to make a name for themselves, showcase their ‘woke’ credentials, or simply get a rise out of people, there are enough individuals out there with nothing better to do than search for something to be offended by and attack on social media. Once these attacks started being taken seriously and garnering attention, the die was cast. These types were attracted like flies to crap, and a PC arms race was set off to see who could cause the most stink.

This problem could be remedied relatively easy with just a little bit of investigation or common sense. Unfortunately, the news media at large thinks of themselves as Bob Woodward and acts like TMZ. They are the adult equivalent of the kid in high school standing on the sidelines chanting “fight” at the slightest hint of provocation. The media’s job is not to report the facts; the media’s job is to sell newspapers or ad time, and nothing sells better than outrage. The media will jump at the slightest hint of controversy, no matter how one-sided or inconsequential, and even go so far as to straight up manufacture controversies. Let’s not forget the Honey Nut Cheerios controversy, where the media played up the awful racially-charged comments left on the YouTube page of a Honey Nut Cheerios commercial featuring an inter-racial couple and treated it as a legitimate controversy. As troubling as the racist statements in the comments section may seem, you have to actively avoid doing research not to know that racist statements make up the bulk of the comments section in literally every YouTube video ever.

There is another phenomenon that gives this powdered wig progressivism outsized influence in our society, and that is the spheres of influence this type of thought possesses. In an increasingly fragmented society, powdered wig progressivism has found a home among the most powerful elements, finding a home in the academic, media/entertainment, and technology fields. Nestled comfortably in their ivory towers, those in these fields can go their whole lives without having to suffer the indignity of listening to an opposing opinion or, god forbid, having a conversation with someone who doesn’t share their basic worldview. Us peons outside have no choice but to listen to these gods who control our means of communication and, in the case of the academics, means to advancement.

This allows groupthink to set in. When everyone around you parrots the same view, no matter how ridiculous it may seem, human nature is to not only express this view itself, but to come to actually believe it. The Overton window among the milieu shifts and the baseline for what is common sense shifts with it, allowing more and more radical views to seem normal and eliminating more conventional ones from the conversation. Importantly, when there is nobody left to express dissent, it becomes easier to dismiss and demonize the dissenters as ‘racists’, ‘Nazis’, or ‘white supremacists’ and demand their exorcism from polite society.

It is no surprise that the elites would be particularly susceptible to this phenomenon, mindless status-seekers they are (and have always been). Those in the top rungs of society have always been obsessed with demonstrating their value and piety as a means of further social advancement. As progressive ideology becomes more and more a way for the “woke” to show their relative enlightenment and less about serious intellectualism, people demonstrate their loyalty to the group by embracing increasingly bizarre ideas and becoming more and more intolerant of dissent. The wigs get bigger and more ornate, and the bald become more ridiculed.

When virtue-signaling replaces the actual conduct of business, as demonstrated aptly by Gillette, very real consequences begin to emerge. Lives are destroyed. People are fired not for what they’ve done or even what they’ve said, but simply for the views they hold privately. Justice cannot be had when people, rather than waiting for the facts to emerge, rush to form a judgment that coincides with their “woke” ideology. When you can’t understand what an article is talking about because the DCist though it was more important to avoid using the team name ‘Redskins’ than to clearly report on the subject of their article, society has completely jumped the shark.

The consequences don’t just impact those of us who look at these views with scorn. Since November 2016, these same aloof elitists have wondered, mouths agape, how a racist like Donald Trump could get elected President of the United States. Surely this was a “whitelash”, white anger at the election of a black man. Never mind that the black man was elected twice, once in a landslide, and supported by many of the same people who now voted for orange evil incarnate. No, surely this had to demonstrate how fundamentally flawed the United States was and how white supremacy ruled everything.

Again, ideology tries to force a square peg through a round hole. The truth is much simpler. After years and years of hearing every Republican and every conservative idea slammed as ‘racist’, the term ceased to have any meaningful impact. The left had simply cried wolf too many times. Though defining ‘racist’, its evolution in American politics, and its application to Donald Trump could fill volumes, the fact is the term was no longer a bogeyman. People weren’t willing to be intimidated into voting against somebody because his opponents attached on oft-abused label to him, even if in this case the label may well have applied.

But, of course, the purpose of this progressivism was never practical. Status symbols never are. The purpose of this progressivism is to stand above the crowd. If anything, the more those outside the elitist enclaves reject their ideas, the more special and unique the “woke” individuals in the know become. At the end of the day, that’s all they really wanted.