NEO-NEOCON: Leftist guilt about “privilege” as motivation dates back to the Soviet revolution.
Related: Jonathan Kay Of Canada’s National Post On the Tyranny Of Twitter: How Mob Censure is Changing the Intellectual Landscape. “Without intending to, Twitter’s culture warriors have created a sort of crowdsourced ideological autocracy ― and paradoxically, it’s left-wingers who are often targets:”
In a 1945 essay, Notes on Nationalism, George Orwell described a rumour among leftists that the real reason American troops had been brought to Europe was to suppress English communism*, not fight the Nazis.
“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that,” Orwell famously noted. “No ordinary man could be such a fool.” Even by Orwell’s high standards, those words have aged extremely well. Tell an ordinary Canadian schlub that white people aren’t allowed to quote Beyoncé, and he will be smart enough to laugh in your face. Dress down a superbly intelligent Peace and Conflict Studies PhD candidate for the same act, and she will fall over herself with apologies.
I refer here, of course, to federal NDP leadership candidate Niki Ashton, who back in March tweeted “Like Beyoncé says, to the left. Time for an unapologetic left turn for the #NDP, for social, racial, enviro and economic justice.” The Vancouver chapter of Black Lives Matter tweeted a demand that Ashton retract her appropriation of Beyoncé. And she complied, meekly replying: “Not our intention to appropriate. We’re committed to a platform of racial justice + would appreciate ur feedback.”
Shades of America in the 1960s, which, aside from Goldwater’s abortive candidacy in 1964, was largely blue-on-blue warfare, with milquetoast older New Deal Democrats, particularly in academia, meekly knuckling under to the demands of the radical New Left.
* To be fair, given that the British left brought nationalism and socialism to England concurrently with National Socialism was being vanquished in Germany, I can somewhat understand the basis of their fears.
(Kay’s article found via Kathy Shaidle, whose thoughts on it are also well worth your time.)