https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-can-we-live-together/
But I am stuck on one bit in particular, which Klein offered during his Shapiro interview in response to an outpouring of criticism for the whitewashing portrayal of Kirk in his op-ed. He contends that living with one another on the basis of “social shame and cultural pressure” cannot work and would not be worthwhile if it did: a nation where such things flourished would not be “a free country.”
What could Klein possibly mean by this? We are indeed going to have to live with each other, barring apocalyptic violence—but we already have been for quite some time, and doing so has not required revisionist history of the sort we are now witnessing about one Charles James Kirk in particular. The political ascendancy of right-wing fractions of the U.S. adult population is new. But their existence, of course, is not: they were not born in the summer of 2020, recent efforts to blame their intransigence and bigotry on whatever missteps may or may not have occurred during the George Floyd protests notwithstanding. A key aspect of the way we lived with each other before these self-styled epochal developments involved exactly the “social shame and cultural pressure” that Klein and other influential voices now come to condemn: “political correctness” as it was known in earlier days, or “wokeness” as it has come to be rebranded in recent years.
This shame and pressure did not rely principally on the “the force the state could bring to bear on those it seeks to silence,” as Klein rightly laments. For that kind of strong-armed enforcement of moral norms, Klein could look to the mass deportation campaigns, criminal prosecution of political organizers, and overt state censorship championed by his current right-wing bedfellows. But “PC culture” did indeed involve the shame and pressure Klein decries: a moral etiquette that directed people on how to avoid offense and stigmatized those who did not play by its rules, causing even “top bankers” to think twice before saying things like “r•t•rd” or “p•ssy” in the wrong sort of company.
#MAGA #fascism #Nazis #disgrace #shame #opprobrium #censure #conviviality #USPol #sadism #ezraklein #CharlieKirk #trump #bigotry #racism
