Crosspost
Martin Gurri is not a name I am familiar with but he has written a stormer of an article on Unherd which bears reading : How the identity cult captured America. Nothing really new, it is terrain we have trod repeatedly and that may well be why it resonates and frustrates in equal measure. We may be stuck in the muck of that landscape.
We might ask how such a deformed and unsatisfying creed as the cult of identity has come to achieve the status of an established church. The answer isn’t hard to tease out. Identity justifies control by those who have lost authority. The institutional elites are held in contempt by the public. Their advice is rejected and their commandments ignored.
By wielding that fuzzy and mutable ideal, equity, the elites aim to regain control of policy and prosecutorial decisions — but also of the education of children, the research of scientists and scholars, the persons and opinions that will be tolerated online, the treatment of the poor and homeless, and ultimately, the words in the mouths and thoughts inside the heads of the common herd. As a bonus, they get to surf a wave of puritanical smugness. They can call dissenters “deplorables” and treat their dissent as a form of racism or homophobia. What could be better?
Indeed.