Systemic Oppression

Progressives believe, or say they believe, that the history of “Western civilization” is systemically racist, sexist, oligarchic, intolerant, and so on, not merely accidentally or on its margins, but as an essential element and raison d’être of its existence. In other words, these people believe — their political movement depends on the belief — that the entire philosophic, religious, scientific, artistic, and political evolution we loosely call “the West” was rooted in, and fostered by, a fundamental motivation in materialist power lust and a craving for racially and sexually self-serving injustice. That is to say, they maintain, quite literally and as a matter of basic justification for their grand projects of “redistribution” and “social justice,” that Western civilization’s defining achievements and trajectories are reducible to various means of rationalizing and enforcing illegitimate privilege for whites over non-whites, men over women, the rich over the poor. To restate this just one more way, they believe that everything indicative of the West, aka “Eurocentric culture,” must be examined exclusively from a “critical” stance, in order to overcome, subdue, and ultimately destroy it, with a view to ameliorating millennia of fundamental inhumanity which goes by many names, but may most simply be encompassed by the terms “hatred” and “oppression.”

On their view, the West at its theoretical and practical essence — metaphysics and Mozart, Shakespeare and shillings, the crucifix and constitutional government, novels and Newton, the Inferno and the internet, elections and electricity — must, in the end, be understood as manifestations or mechanisms of oppression, and finally erased in the name of realizing justice and freedom for the majority of the human race, a majority which this entire horrible tradition, and this tradition alone, has systemically oppressed.

And these people want you to believe the “right-wingers” are the conspiracy nuts.