Why do so many kind people join punitive progressive antiracism?

As Rorty put it in Achieving Our Country, one comes to feel that self-expression is, in itself, a kind of persuasion, in that since you have the “proper” ideals, how you feel must, by itself, carry a certain moral and even logical authority. No human being can sit and review basic principles and their validity on a daily basis, and thus after a while, this Cultural Leftist has come to suppose that their sentiments are a kind of political manifesto in themselves. The result is what Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams have called “folk politics,” under which a prime attraction, embodied partly in the idea that to vent is to reason, is that we can “reduce complexity down to a human scale.” Electism is presented as complex – i.e. in requiring the “work” we are told is necessary – but it is also, in being motivated by a simple quest to show that one is not a racist, rather easy. Easy is always attractive to all of us: Electism is a kind of politics hack. Poet Czeslav Miłosz captured that conformity lends an outright sense of pleasure and relief. Who among us doesn’t enjoy a sense of having it all figured out? That rush of joy from solving an algebra problem, that sense of peace from figuring out the overriding reason that a romantic relationship went bust, or even the soothing feeling you get when first noticing that the app you download onto your phone will also pop up on your iPad so that you don’t have to do it twice – to have a sense that all you have to do is push a button and everything falls into place can be a gorgeous thing.
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