Christopher F. Rufo  ⚔️

The fact that a vague limp-wristed anti-essentialist view of reality had much in common with the fist-pumping essentialism of Marxism was a reach that a lot of people in the IDW were more to happy to make, and it was their first big error.https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1389255521325109250 …

Explain this in more detail.

1/ The IDW was looking for an explanation for what was happening in the academic culture, especially with respect to speech and "identity" scholarship, and originally *some* of the people within it put forward the idea that this was coming from a synthesis of PoMo and Marx.

2/ The two were thought to be philosophically compatible and complimentary. This never made sense to me (and to lots of other people). An article in Aero (probably around 2018) successfully attacked it, and after that fewer people advanced the idea, thank goodness.

Which camp are you in? What do you think is the most important lineage?

I think both inform the scholarship in some of the grievance studies departments, for example. But they're *separate* influences, and academics take what they want from *each* of them. PoMo and Marx are not easily hybridized into a single philosophical framework.

This seems correct to me. My sense is that they borrow the basic conflict theory from Marx, power-knowledge theory from Foucault, and the racial politics from the 1960s Black Power thinkers. It's a powerful combo.