AN INMATE OF THE PROGRESSIVE ASYLUM CRIES OUT FOR HELP:

The pressure to avoid criticizing current progressive practice is intense. More and more, though, people seem to acknowledge that we have a problem, a really deep problem that we seem to have no way to find our way out of. . . .

Manarchist, dudebro …. These are terms that are typically employed as a cudgel against the left by centrist Democrats. They argue for dismissing a particular political argument by presuming that a certain set of people makes that political argument. Which, whatever: a majority of the socialists I’ve known in my life have not been white men, and I’ve known thousands, but who cares, right. The bigger question at this point is what any of that has to do with a guy using Emmett Till’s memory to wage political warfare over a trade agreement. What does manarchism or brocialism or whatever have to do with that ugly comment? Who knows? It doesn’t matter: Bauer knows that those are magic words. He understands how today’s progressive internet works. He understands critique drift. He knows that whatever complaints about him can simply be filtered through third-hand appropriated feminism. Because that’s how we do things, now.

What all of this descended into, as was inevitable, was a White Off. A White Off is a peculiar 21st-century phenomenon where white progressives try to prove that the other white progressives they’re arguing with are The Real Whites. It’s a contest in shamelessness: who can be more brazen in reducing race to a pure argumentative cudgel? Who feels less guilt about using the fight against racism as a way to elevate oneself in a social hierarchy? Which white person will be the first to pull out “white” as a pejorative in a way that demonstrates the toothlessness of the concept? Within progressivism today, there is an absolute lack of shame or self-criticism about reducing racial discourse to a matter of straightforward personal branding and social signaling. It turns my stomach.

(If there’s one thing I know about today’s progressive white people, it’s that they are all sure other white people are the really white ones.)

So true. Plus:

And none of this is even to begin to ask what, exactly, any of this stuff accomplishes, how continuing to build this immense shibboleth White Dudes — made by white people, for the entertainment of white people — actually helps in the fight against racism or sexism. Set those basic questions of what we’re actually doing here aside. How do we separate good from bad when those conversations are inevitably preempted by the same tired-ass slogans, played-out memes, and exhausted insults? I don’t know how to ask people to do better work and have higher standards when they treat any criticism as a political betrayal.

Criticism of today’s progressives tends to use words like toxic, aggressive, sanctimonious, and hypocritical. I would not choose any of those. I would choose lazy. We are lazy as political thinkers and we are lazy as culture writers and we are lazy as movement builders. We ward off criticism of our own bad work by acting like that criticism is inherently anti-feminist or anti-progressive. We seem spoiled.

Also true.