Jargoeauxgne

But this writer sees the Social Justice movement (and perhaps Trumpism too) as people trying to attack fake problems when they ran out of real problems to attack. Whereas I see the Social Justice movement as addressing a real problem that had been festering for a while...

I explained my thinking in this thread. Basically, as the country got more diverse, women attained economic near-parity, and the Black middle class came of age, it just wasn't tenable for everything to be run by white guys anymore.https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1079116390420733952 …

Ian Morris, the historian, says that "each age gets the thought it needs." That's a bit Panglossian in its extreme form, but I think it's true that social problems create a demand for solutions, and eventually solutions emerge.

In 2013 we had a country that was still mostly run by white guys when it didn't make sense to have a country run mostly by white guys. That created social problems (tons of people felt left out or ignored), economic problems, and personal problems (Harvey Weinstein etc.).

So I think Social Justice emerged as a way of addressing that increasingly glaring disparity. And it largely succeeded, changing our culture in ways that will lead to greater diversity, not just in the elite but in the national imagination of who counts as an American...

The reformist restlessness of the educated class certainly helped to supply some of the power behind this movement, but ultimately this supply was just meeting the demand.

But where does that leave Trumpism? It's obviously a reaction against the diversification of the country -- a doomed longing to restore the gender roles and concepts of nationhood of the 1920s, which were really destroyed half a century ago...

So is there some way in which we needed Trumpism, or something like it? Maybe. White-nationalism and male supremacy are non-starters, of course. Those stupid ideas are not needed and will continue to lose out...