JF

Interestingly enough, one doesn't have to be part of a minority to partake of that, c.f. White Fragility and all the rest. However the trajectory of such a holism seems, to me, congenitally tied to this ideology's Marxist roots. I see more of a growing tension than a break.

It won't shift overnight so much as the tendency you're highlighting will become harder and harder to ignore. Ideally, this would lead the New Class would achieve greater self-consciousness and speak in their own voice, rather than ever-more-elaborate ventriloquism. Ideally.

oh yeah, but to be fair, i wasnt saying that it would shift overnight, because both you and i have seen this thing going on for years. rather, i think that we'll reach the point where this older universalism will just be completely superceded, and corona has hurried that up.

I don't think it can be superceded except by becoming more rational, and rational in a novel way. If the left departs from its putative universalism in the way you describe, they would become either liberals or reactionaries, but those are the two things they fear most.

thats where i think youre just wrong, and i think history even bears this out. like EVERYONE here during the 70s was afraid of becoming just a damn succdem. they were revolutionary maoists for god's sake. theyre all succdems today!! literally to a man!!

if you were part of the weather underground and managed to not end up in jail or blowing yourself up, you ended up on wall street or something, lol. i think the rumor of leftists being mortally afraid of joining the liberals has been massively overblown.

That's not quite what I mean. Yes, those people made their peace with the established order, as will many of the radicals today. But the left is not actually run by Roger Ailes and hippies-turned-stockbrokers because taking that route makes you irrelevant from a left perspective.

i mean, joining the DNC is one thing, and yes, that makes you irrelevant inside "the left". but thats all. the left can still maintain its rhetorical distance to libs in a minoritarian political context just as easily as a majoritarian one.