Replies

An excellent consideration of root causes.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/10/23/the_assault_on_objectivity_138422.html

The Assault on Objectivity

FTA:
Our postmodernist intellectuals claim that no objective reality exists; there is only the subjective world we create, shaped by the social class to which we belong. While this may seem like an ivory-tower issue, irrelevant to real life, it is actually the premise behind major campaigns in today’s culture — from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter to the campus “safe-space” movement.
...
According to leaders of the #MeToo movement, however, a judgment of guilt does not require objective evidence. All that is needed is a woman’s claim of having been attacked.

What about the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof? That’s a biased, male perspective, they say. The female “reality” is that women are raped by men, they are intimidated into silence by men, and when one victim does speak out, she must be supported. Furthering the cause of “female empowerment” supersedes any concerns about proof. The accuser’s needs must be accommodated, and her perception of the truth must be embraced by all members of the sisterhood.
...
The same applies to cases that have given rise to Black Lives Matter. If a white police officer shoots a black suspect, the officer is presumed guilty. There is no commitment to discovering the facts of the case. If it is claimed that the shooting had no justification, that the suspect had posed no threat, that he had plainly surrendered, that he had uttered the words “Hands up, don’t shoot” — then that is the narrative to be upheld, even after a thorough investigation reveals it to be false.

Objective facts don’t matter. The conflict is viewed as being between two social classes — between wielders of “white power” and their black victims — with two very different perspectives on reality. Justice, accordingly, consists not in discovering and evaluating the facts, but in condemning the powerful and defending the powerless.
...
The famed legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon has said: “I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.” (Emphasis added.) So it is a woman’s feelings, not the facts, that determine whether rape has occurred. There is supposedly a female way of perceiving the world and a male way — as there is a black way, a white way, a Hispanic way, etc. The truth, then, is not the product of reason, but of crude emotionalism — i.e., the truth is whatever some group feels it is.

Which is exactly what drives the safe-space movement on our campuses. Students are told that when they encounter an idea with which they disagree, they need not give any thought to it. They needn’t judge whether it is right or wrong. Instead, it if clashes with the views held by their social class, they should be shielded from it.

If they hear the disquieting idea that affirmative action is wrong, or that capitalism is good or that the individual has primacy over the collective, they have no way to rationally consider such issues. Can they seek evidence to support their opposite beliefs? To them, evidence is as irrelevant as it is in deciding Kavanaugh’s guilt. After all, if the content of their minds is subjectively determined by their social class, there are no objective facts to identify and no logical inferences to draw from them. Consequently, there can be no purpose to any discussion and no possibility of persuasion. So if students disagree with some idea, they will not try to refute it; they will simply dismiss it as the biased product of the “white privileged patriarchy.”

Once reason is discarded, there is only one means of settling disagreements: physical force. Thus, if speakers whose views you find “offensive” arrive on campus, you don’t challenge them intellectually with questions and arguments — you physically prevent them from addressing their audiences. If the Senate holds hearings to confirm a judge whose views you find “offensive,” you try to shout down the participants and bring the proceedings to a halt. If a jury delivers a verdict you find “offensive,” you riot by destroying storefronts and firebombing cars in order to send a message to the next jury that might consider a similar verdict. If politicians whose positions you find “offensive” enter a restaurant, you accost them and compel them to leave.

The increasing use of violence is ominous. But it is only a consequence. The cause is the assault on objectivity. The cause is the abandonment of reason in favor of emotionalism. The cause is the growing acceptability of forming conclusions — whether about the guilt of an accused or about the truth of an idea — in disregard of evidence.

Another examination of a root cause.

https://www.weeklystandard.com/barton-swaim/the-madness-returns

The Madness Returns

The ferocious incivility Americans have witnessed for decades has arisen largely from the left—and for good reason

FTA:
The news media are attempting to draw parallels between these recent events and spectacles that appear to cast Republicans and conservatives in the role of delirious demonstrators or would-be assassins—the 2011 shooting of Democratic congresswoman Gabby Giffords or angry voters shouting at congressmen after the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2009. The parallels don’t work. Giffords’s assailant wasn’t any kind of conservative or Republican. The anti-Obamacare protesters did not appear to hold partisan or ideological allegiances (Republican lawmakers got earfuls, too) and their protests were nothing close to the shrill malevolence and outright violence carried out by today’s more strident progressives.
...
Senate Republicans, by contrast, even when they strongly opposed a Democratic nominee, refrained from engaging in anything close to such tactics. Nothing remotely similar was done to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, or Elena Kagan. Merrick Garland, Obama’s third Supreme Court nominee, appointed late in the president’s second term, was denied a vote on his nomination but accused of no crimes or of holding retrograde opinions. Liberals complained bitterly about the Garland nomination, but who wouldn’t rather be garlanded than borked?

Unless we’re prepared to believe that Republican presidents tend to nominate bigots and sexual criminals whereas Democratic presidents do not, we are left to conclude that Democrats and liberals are more comfortable with imputing base motives and dishonorable conduct to their adversaries than Republicans and conservatives. The question is: Why?
...
Think of power in two parts: cultural power and political power. Liberals hold nearly all the cultural power the United States has to offer. They dominate the universities, even the universities in the South, where liberalism is anemic. Cultural institutions—museums, arts agencies, opera houses—belong almost exclusively to liberals. Their control of the entertainment industry is nearly complete. The media, too: Fox News and talk radio notwithstanding, liberals still dominate the most eminent and authoritative divisions of print and televised news. How they acquired all this cultural power is a dense topic; suffice it here to say there was no concerted effort to get it. The sphere of cultural power attracts a certain kind of person—a person who believes society ought to be arranged along rational lines and in keeping with the most advanced thought of the day—and such persons are, almost by definition, liberal. To put it less charitably, the cultural sphere attracts people who view themselves as part of an elite, and most elites believe that society should be run by elites.

Political power is something altogether different and, in a republic modeled on universal suffrage, cannot be dominated by the elite simply because they are elite. To achieve the kind of hegemony in the political sphere liberals have achieved in the cultural sphere, they would need a philosophy of government and a field of candidates capable of appealing to people who live in places they would rather not visit. They would need people who can win elections, not just in the boroughs of New York and in L.A. County, but also in Kentucky and Arizona and Nebraska and Alabama.

The problem for liberals is that they believe their political power should correspond to their cultural power.
...
[It just stays this good for the rest of the long article.]