The poisonous environment is perhaps the product of penumbrae of Marxism mixed with the totalitarian "The personal is political"

Ignore the headline of the article, the content is grappling with more interesting matters. From Everyone Lost at the Ford-Kavanaugh Hearings by Andrew Sullivan.

To the extent that the hearing went beyond the specifics of Ford’s allegations and sought to humiliate and discredit Kavanaugh for who he was as a teenager nearly four decades ago (a dynamic that was quite pronounced in some Democratic questioning of the nominee), it was deeply concerning. When public life means the ransacking of people’s private lives even when they were in high school, we are circling a deeply illiberal drain. A civilized society observes a distinction between public and private, and this distinction is integral to individual freedom. Such a distinction was anathema in old-school monarchies when the king could arbitrarily arrest, jail, or execute you at will, for private behavior or thoughts. These lines are also blurred in authoritarian regimes, where the power of the government knows few limits in monitoring a person’s home or private affairs or correspondence or tax returns or texts. These boundaries definitionally can’t exist in theocracies, where the state is interested as much in punishing and exposing sin, as in preventing crime. The Iranian and Saudi governments — like the early modern monarchies — seek not only to control your body, but also to look into your soul. They know that everyone has a dark side, and this dark side can be exposed in order to destroy people. All you need is an accusation.

The Founders were obsessed with this. They realized how precious privacy is, how it protects you not just from the government but from your neighbors and your peers. They carved out a private space that was sacrosanct and a public space which insisted on a strict presumption of innocence, until a speedy and fair trial. Whether you were a good husband or son or wife or daughter, whether you had a temper, or could be cruel, or had various sexual fantasies, whether you were a believer, or a sinner: this kind of thing was rendered off-limits in the public world. The family, the home, and the bedroom were, yes, safe places. If everything were fair game in public life, the logic ran, none of us would survive.

And it is the distinguishing mark of specifically totalitarian societies that this safety is eradicated altogether by design. There, the private is always emphatically public, everything is political, and ideology trumps love, family, friendship or any refuge from the glare of the party and its public. Spies are everywhere, monitoring the slightest of offenses. Friends betray you, as do lovers. Family members denounce their own mothers and fathers and siblings and sons and daughters. The cause, which is usually a permanently revolutionary one, always matters more than any individual’s possible innocence. You are, in fact, always guilty before being proven innocent. You always have to prove a negative. And no offense at any point in your life is ever forgotten or off the table.

Perhaps gay people are particularly sensitive to this danger, because our private lives have long been the target of moral absolutists, and we have learned to be vigilant about moral or sex panics. For much of history, a mere accusation could destroy a gay person’s life or career, and this power to expose private behavior for political purposes is immense.

This lightly touches on an idea I have been speculating with.

Why is the American Democratic Left acting so crazy right now? What is the combination of circumstances that have formed them, in contrast to much of their post-war history, into the party of mob-rule, despotism, coercion, sexual prudery, anti-free speech, social intolerance, bigotry, and prejudice?

It is easy enough to lay it all to their immersion in the various ideologies with the penumbra of Marxism - Rawlsian Social Justice, Third Wave Feminism, Critical Theory, Postmodernism, Multiculturalism, Frankfurt School socialism, Intersectionality, Deconstructionism, Socially Constructed Reality, etc.

And I do believe those are critical elements. Certainly critical, but are they sufficient? There seems a greater animus to their actions and beliefs than is typically associated with such anemic, arcane and desiccated ideologies.

I have wondered whether the missing ingredient might be the idea that the "Personal is Political" which emerged in association with Second Wave Feminism in the 1960s. Carol Hanisch, a prominent member of the women's liberation movement, published in 1970, an essay, The Personal is Political. In the essay, she argues:

One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.

From an ideological or philosophical perspective, this is akin to the mainstream of Marxist/Stalinist/Soviet thinking and is quintessential totalitarianism. It also dovetails with Mussolini's leftwing fascism and his goal:

Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.

But I don't think it was initially seen and interpreted that way. The personal is political became a rallying cry and embedded in political discourse. It seemed a snappy aphorism that captured the idea that what motivates a person personally can be directed towards political ends.

Everyone seemed to ignore the opposite implication. When you build the highway from the personal to the political, it is a two-way road and the political also becomes personal. There can be no privacy when everything you do is subject to politics and therefore subject to the state. It is this sloppy thinking that seems to have preceded such noxious ideas as "hate crimes" where you are punished not just for the crime, but what the state might choose to infer you were thinking when you committed the crime.

And from there, we are just a stones-throw from the other Stalin-era truism "Show me the man and I will show you the crime."

In September 2015, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff published in The Atlantic, The Coddling of the American Mind (now out as a book).

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Haidt also riffs on work investigating victimhood culture. From The Rise of the Culture of Victimhood Explained by Ronald Bailey.

Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning are arguing that the U.S. is now transitioning to a victimhood culture that combines both the honor culture's quickness to take offense with the dignity culture's use of third parties to police and punish transgressions. The result is people are encouraged to think of themselves as weak, marginalized, and oppressed. This is nothing less than demoralizing and polarizing as everybody seeks to become a "victim."

All of these issues seem to me to perhaps be related to the notion that the personal is political. There are people now who effectively believe that we can and should legislate politeness and good manners to ensure that no one feels bad; all of it to be enforced by the coercive power of the state.

And with that mindset, we end up with Title IX travesties, the Kavanaugh hearings, Believe the Women and Believe the Children. Bewildering to people living in the real world but absolutely sensible to those who have imbibed the penumbrae of Marxism along with the destructively empowering idea that the personal is political and that therefore any amount of destruction is warranted in pursuit of personal ends.