So they care about social justice, which is bad, and they are only pretending to care about social justice, which is bad, and they use it as cover to do the opposite of social justice, which is also bad.
So, higher education is definately bad, and whether social justice is bad or not depends on whether you open the box and find out if the cat is a Republican or a Democrat?
I'm pointing out the contradiction in this ongoing "political correctness/woke" backlash.
They're complaining about people doing the right thing. And they know that. So they have to complain they're doing the right thing wrong, or doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Or the right thing is only a cover for a nefarious plot.
Which only re-inforces that it's the right thing, even before you examine the decades long track record of people arguing against it.
It's not hard to make the argument that it's a cover for a nefarious plot. Given the timing of when these ideas rose to prominence, that it was a reaction to the 'occupy wall street' movement and the prospect of an underclass uniting against the ruling class is a parsimonious explanation. The US ruling class very effectively prevented poor white and poor black citizens from making common cause in the early twentieth century by telling one of them they were better than the other. It's no great leap of the imagination to suppose they'd try the same in the twenty-first.
I don't personally subscribe to that narrative - dividing the losers of the new economic reality might have been an incidental goal, but the idea that social justice is a solution to elite overproduction[1] makes more sense to me. And as a means of curbing elite overproduction I actually like it - just as Edwardian scandal culture selected for self-control, cancel culture selects for a lot of the qualities we'd want in a successful elite. But I've yet to hear a good argument why it's not a cynical play by the elite to divide the poorest citizens against each other. Most who subscribe to the tenets of the system refuse to acknowledge the argument at all.
It's very hard to argue that social justice isn't designed to divide the poorest people against each other, since intended or not that's an effect it has[2]. I imagine the best counterargument to the belief I put forth in my first paragraph would be an alternate explanation for why these ideas arose when they did - does anyone who doesn't believe it's a cover for a nefarious plot have one?
[1] as argued very eloquently by, I believe, Charles Eisenstein in an essay I wish I could locate.
[2] and it puts one in the position of arguing that Yale isn't a racist institution, which is a losing position from the outset.
