This is largely valid but incomplete since it ignores the other side.<p>The far right has been engaged in its own war on the enlightenment for about the same amount of time. Both the left of the sort this author is describing and the anti-enlightenment right emerged in the 1970s. I’ve come to believe that both were at their core a reaction to the threat of atomic annihilation.<p>Both have really been making the same argument: that there is no objective reality and reason is merely rationalization of power. The difference is where they take it: to a Marx inspired push for equality of outcome or an anti-rationalist push to maintain tradition for its own sake.<p>The most recent manifestation of this war was the emergence, also at the same time, of the modern “woke” left and the “alt-right.” I’ve always seen these as two sides of the same coin in that both are a war on the enlightenment and liberalism.<p>While atomic annihilation is largely out of people’s minds, the threat driving today’s reaction is the decline of the middle class and mass youth unemployment.
long article. it's just setting the stage when author says this, but already I feel like there's a lot of projecting,<p>> That’s a few hundred years as opposed to 200,000 or so of Homo sapiens’ history, when tribalism, creedalism, warfare, theocracy or totalitarianism reigned.<p>The focus on abstract power structures (tribes, leaders) & denial that everyday life rests upon a shared, liberally created, semi-consistent semi-objective set of day to day interactions with the others about us (not big powers or exterior forces) is a big turn off in this to me. we do accept irrationalities, but fallibilism, objectivity, accountability, and pluralism are not just some new fangled invention. we have all always had to build our own views of the world & all of these have been part of the toolkit forever. one sometimes blunted & muted by societies& weights about us but still an embodied truth of living, of viewing, of determining.
> Formal legal equality, they argue, the promise of the American experiment, has never been actual equality, even as, over the centuries, it has been extended to everyone.<p>This is simply, factually true (except for the “it has been extended to everyone”, part; even formally, legally, the US system permits discrimination on <i>every</i> axis, it even has a strict heirarchy of conditions required to discriminate.) To deny it is inconsistent with the overt liberal ideals that the piece here seeks to defend, which perhaps is itself an illustration of how the American national mythology built around it supposed devotion to the ideals of liberalism supercedes actual liberal rationality.<p>> It is, rather, a system to perpetuate inequality forever, which is the single and only reason racial inequality is still here.<p>Is that the intent? I dunno, I’m not really comfortable treating groups of people as ibdividuals with coherent intent. That seems yo be dangerously straining convenient metaphor. Is it the experienced outcome? Certainly.<p>Is it the reason for the outcome? Certainly, mythologizing legal equality and overstating its reality and consequences on material condition is <i>a</i> source of resistance to change to deal with actual substantive systemic inequality (while that may seem cobtroversial under modern “legal equality” that includes integration, the benefit of hindisght abd emotional distance should help even defenders of the justice of the <i>status quo</i> recognize that it was under the segregationist system of separate-but-formally-equal).<p>Come talk to me when your defense of “liberalism” and “Enlightenment rationality” against Critical Race Theory doesn’t start out with dogmatic defense of mythology about the concrete results of those things that isn’t defensible on the terms you claim to be defending.