Many people sense that something’s wrong with political correctness and identity politics, but can’t quite put their fingers on it and articulate that feeling in a crisp and intellectually rigorous manner. Somehow, the nature of the beast escapes identification. You catch a glimpse of it in the corner of your eye, but turn to look, and it’s gone. To understand why we need to take a step back in time.
The traditional divide between the left and the right in America has been that the right wants a republic and the left wants democracy. If the majority wants to suck your wallet dry, democracy allows it to do so. The right has been highly skeptical of this kind of government since the inception of the United States. James Madison said that democracies “have ever been incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
Instead, the founding fathers set up a republic, which limits the power of the majority over the individual by endowing the individual with “certain unalienable rights.” In the minds of the traditional conservative or libertarian, the right stands for protecting the individual from the majority.
Traditionally, the left railed against the limited government as a form of dictatorship against the majority – a kind of minority rule. They see it as the 1% against the rest. In recent decades, however, the left has turned a corner that thoroughly confuses conservatives. Armed with the conceptual tools of postmodernism and cultural Marxism, the left has aligned itself with minorities against the majority. Rather than arguing for the rights of the majority over the minority, as they did before, leftists have reversed their argument and now advocate minority rule over the majority. It’s a reversal designed to cause cognitive dissonance. Conservatives are so used to being the champions of the minority against majority rule that the new approach is entirely disorienting.
Cognitive dissonance is a tool often used by hypnotists and magicians to fool the audience. The good news is that once people fully understand the mental trick, the disorientation disappears. Once conservatives fully understand what he wants to achieve, the postmodernist methods lose their persuasive power.
Consider airport security. Singling out only Muslims for inspections would be discrimination of a minority – God forbid. In order to avoid offending this minority, therefore, the overwhelming majority need to be inconvenienced by pointless security controls. Similarly, Canada will now become the first non-gendered country in the world. Since there exists a minority of people confused about whether they are men or women, the remaining majority must surrender their sexual identities.
In American universities, radical leftists have imposed a totalitarian regime to silence free speech to make women and ethnic minorities feel “safe.” Never mind that a large group of people now lives in constant fear of being ostracized, fired or expelled. Their security doesn’t count because they belong to the “privileged” majority.
To break the left’s spell, conservatives and libertarians must understand that the left is trending toward tyranny. That’s right. Minority rule is tyrannical. There is fundamentally no difference between an autocrat and the winners of Oppression Olympics in identity politics. Americans should reject both majority and minority rule, as neither are compatible with liberty. Ayn Rand once said that the smallest minority is the individual. Individual rights, therefore, grant equal rights to all minorities and balances their powers.
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