The self-loathing card

Many lazy thinkers love thought-terminating clichés, and lazy thinkers who are gay men often play the self-loathing card. When someone departs from the orthodoxy, and you either cannot refute his argument or just don't feel like doing so, simply accuse him of being a self-loathing LCR. Problem solved.

Tellingly, I never hear the people who play the self-loathing card play it against something to which the evidence suggests that it might apply, namely, the incessant gay male self-flagellation in the LGBT media and LGBT organizations. It is de rigueur in those settings to blame everything on gay men, whether or not the problem being discussed is specific to gay men. Thus, the self-loathing card has to do with wrong-thinker-shaming rather than with situations in which actual self-loathing might apply.

Donald Trump: Political correctness for the white working class

People often praise Donald Trump for being politically incorrect. In one sense he is, but in a more fundamental philosophical way, he is politically correct.

As I have noted before, political correctness is at heart the belief that certain persons' emotions are an infallible oracle into Truth with a capital T. The different strains of political correctness differ in identifying the elect. The Trump movement is all emotion, all the time, and relies on the emotions of his base.

Political correctness also emphasizes identity politics. The Trump phenomenon has that base covered, too.

Another aspect of political correctness is its view of government as the cure for whatever ails you, with narrowly defined exceptions. Trump fits that one.

Some have said that Trump holds a mirror to the American people. The view in the mirror includes those who have pushed American thought in the direction of political correctness.

Someone actually wrote this: David Brooks and the "new" shame culture

David Brooks, in today's New York Times, writes of a "new" shame culture that has allegedly taken over college campuses since the eighties:

Many people carefully guard their words, afraid they might transgress one of the norms that have come into existence. Those accused of incorrect thought face ruinous consequences. When a moral crusade spreads across campus, many students feel compelled to post in support of it on Facebook within minutes. If they do not post, they will be noticed and condemned.

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[E]verybody is perpetually insecure in a moral system based on inclusion and exclusion. There are no permanent standards, just the shifting judgment of the crowd. It is a culture of oversensitivity, overreaction and frequent moral panics, during which everybody feels compelled to go along.

Brooks is so close and yet so far. Apart from the references to social media, he accurately describes the culture of political correctness, on campuses and elsewhere, that I experienced in the eighties. So much for the newness of the new, post-eighties shame culture.

Brooks also writes that the "new" shame culture "might reverse, a bit, the individualistic, atomizing thrust of the past 50 years." In a culture in which so many people are obsessed with identity categories, what "individualistic, atomizing thrust" is that?