The inclination to consider Animal Farm a how-to manual

Bari Weiss and the Left-Wing Infatuation With Taking Offense by Shadi Hamid.

In our identitarian age, the bar for offense has been lowered considerably, which makes democratic debate more difficult—citizens are more likely to withhold their true opinions if they fear being labeled as bigoted or insensitive. (The irony, of course, is that I can be a critic of identity politics without being labeled racist in part because of identity politics.) In the longer term, the effects of identity-driven discussions become even more pernicious. As I recently argued, basing our positions on who we are rather than what we believe is polarizing precisely because identities are more fixed than ideas.

This is why identity politics can sometimes seem like a new sort of political theology. Belief and conviction are good things, but only if there’s something to believe in. Identity politics and the virtue-outbidding it necessitates often signal the absence of religion in search of religion—with followers mimicking its constituent elements: ritual, purity, atonement, and excommunication.

In purely practical terms, moral posturing doesn’t usually change anyone’s mind, because people intuitively interpret it “as a form of jockeying for in-group status.” But it doesn’t need to change minds, nor is it necessarily supposed to. Its point is to transform politics into a question of purity. It’s not enough to have the right opinion or intent: The precise words used to convey the right opinion become just as important, as Weiss herself quickly found out. Within this framework, acknowledging the legitimacy of different opinions—if the language used can conceivably be seen as insensitive to a disadvantaged group—becomes more than difficult, too; it becomes a moral failing.

The additional irony is that in pursuit of respect and sensitivity of the marginalized, the postmodernists are entirely relaxed about disrespecting and obliterating anyone in disagreement with them on any issue, no matter how trivial. Postmodernism in its various forms is intellectually incoherent. Postmodernism is not only a new faith-based religion, but it is an authoritarian and totalitarian religion.

Sometimes it feels as if postmodernists never evolved from their first infatuation with Animal Farm by George Orwell in junior high school and have never been disabused of their initial impression that it was a how-to book.

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS