harvey young
The New Culture Forum
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Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Can Trump Save America and The West? What Can UK Learn from Trump? + New Tory Leader Kemi Badenoch" video.
I think one of the problems of the liberal left is that they have been feasting on the past work intellectual left from 1968 (Foucault Derrida Deleuze) that developed in the 1970'sand 1980's in universities. In the 1990's they set about putting these philosophical and abstract techniques into "praxis". that was the so called march though the institutions that had its Genesis in universalities and administration and spread out from there in terms of regulation from the late 2000's i think. the putting theory into praxis turn was from within the context 1970's grass roots political movements in the US, such as feminism and racial minority's, eg critique under patriarchy and colonialism. The grass roots approach as multiple Genesis contexts (see the movie about Gloria Stieman) was introduced into universities in the 1990's onwards.
What i think has happened is they have rested interested critical theoretical reflection on their theory and concentrated on praxis. Thus their praxis remained, a putting into praxis of various projects, that have their rational in work done in the 1970's and 1980's. And so their praxis is kind of out of date because the theory is way out of date now. They have treated the theoretical basis say of justice and equality as a kind of Platonism or race and gender schematised Platonist idea of justice. They then easily just throw this net over all contexts and issues and differences, and it starts to look absurd to ordinary intuitions. A blind repetition of the same schemas. For the left though dogmatic repetition has its central place through media, ie a kind of cognitive materialist view: if you say sexism and racism to everything over and over, then eventuality sexism and racism are the only issues people see, ie as if there is no non gender non race conceptual content in experience. But of course the world does not divide up in only this way. Ordinary people see the incongruence of reporting in the media and the hypocrisy and contradictions that follow, they hadn't managed to take control of all of our representations.
To be fair from the late 2000's a number of new but related theoretical programs emerged: under the vague banner Speculative Realism with Zizek and Badiou and Serres. This was: on the one hand the attempt to return to a totalising institutional Hegel on the assumption they had achieved control of many of the institutions by then; and on the other hand its was linked to views of imminent environmental catastrophe. The so called environment emergency was the lefts reworking of the old universal total catastrophe of Nuclear War back in the 1960's to 1990's. It functions as the absolute risk that refers to and implicates all of humanity and so is a device to talk about everything from a global and international perspective and then bring in regulatory controls over all states. This is the praxis for unlimited speculative realism. However to ordinary people against it looks like when ever the left have a problem with the electorate not seeing on the ground what the left gender and race schemas are meat to make them see, the left start talking about the weather.
Its not that the left have found themselves on the wrong side of history, rather their theoretical and practical basis is now merely more of historical than political interest.
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