The “social justice” causes that have predominated over the last eight years are boutique issues. They are flotsam bobbing on the surface of a sea of real and serious issues that are pushed from the news so we can instead grapple with social justice issues that make the crusaders feel good about themselves but that impact at most a small minority of people. And I’d wager a lot of Americans think this.
At the same time we’re devoting inordinate attention to these boutique issues, we’re minimizing concerns a broad swath of our nation shares. While President Obama wades into every police use-of-force controversy with seriousness of purpose, he tells Americans their bathtubs are a greater danger to them than ISIS. The ordinary voter would never know that Obama may become the first president not to have presided over a year of economic growth exceeding 3 percent, when we’ve been told incessantly the economy is in recovery. (Remember “Recovery Summer”? Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s op-ed titled “Welcome to the Recovery”?)
While terrorists rampage across the Middle East, Europe, and, increasingly, the United States, our government claims the greatest threat to the United States is climate change. We drum productive members of society, such as former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, out of business for holding views on social issues such as gay marriage that are supposedly beyond the pale today but represented the national consensus as recently as the 2008 election.
All of this gives the feeling of the spinning out of control Freddy Picker warned about. Respected institutions like the police are under assault while the radical Islamic roots of terrorism are minimized or denied. Issues such as transgender rights, about which most Americans haven’t thought one way or another, suddenly become moral tests. All the while, we are screaming into each other’s faces and accusing each other of being xenophobes, haters, enemies of progress, and deniers of scientific truths.
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