Critical RACIST Theory: Why Is Such Illiberal Thinking Suddenly All The Rage?
I just realized that is the accurate title for "Critical Race Theory" and aligns with all its intersectional cousins, too.

Andrew Sullivan has a piece on why "wokeness" is winning: "if critical race/gender/queer theory is unfalsifiable postmodern claptrap, as I have long contended, how has it conquered so many institutions so swiftly?"

It's been a staggering achievement, when you come to think of it. Critical theory was once an esoteric academic pursuit. Now it has become the core, underlying philosophy of the majority of American cultural institutions, universities, media, corporations, liberal churches, NGOs, philanthropies, and, of course, mainstream journalism. This summer felt like a psychic break from old-school liberalism, a moment when a big part of the American elite just decided to junk the principles that have long defined American democratic life, and embrace what Bari Weiss calls "a mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality."

It's everywhere. Across the country, schools and colleges are dumping SATs so they can engineer racial equity, and abolish the idea of merit. The Smithsonian backed the idea that working hard, showing up on time and perfecting a task are functions of "whiteness". In California, there's a ballot initiative to legalize government discrimination on the basis of race; and a new mandate that company boards add members from under-represented communities. Corporations who haven't publicly committed themselves to the full woke project are being hounded by their employees into doing so, meaning hiring and firing on the basis of race, or forcing employees into re-education sessions, guided by DiAngelo and Kendi.

The reasons Sullivan sees?

The first, it seems to me, is emotional. The reason so many people marched this summer was because of a righteous revulsion at the visceral image of a black man being murdered slowly on the street by a bad, white cop. This revulsion is a vital and important thing -- and it's completely compatible with a liberal attempt to reform the cops and criminal justice to ensure equal treatment under the law for everyone of every race. In fact, there is considerable bipartisan support for a pragmatic shift.

But this was emphatically not the core message of the Black Lives Matter movement, rooted in critical theory. BLM's critical race activists do not support reforming the police, they want to abolish them entirely. In fact, they demonize all cops as "bastards", and they justify violence and exonerate crime as legitimate resistance to the far greater crime of white oppression.

Liberals, concerned about resilient racial inequality, have simply decided to ignore this. Or they think that a little radicalism is no bad thing in a polarized time.

...The second reason for CRT's triumph is that it's super-easy. Social inequalities are extremely complicated things. ... Untangling this empirically in order to figure out what might actually work to improve things is hard work. But when you can simply dismiss all of these factors and cite "structural racism" as the only reason for any racial inequality, and also cover yourself in moral righteousness, you're home-free. Those who raise objections or complications or cite nuances can be dismissed by the same easy method.

Tribalism and social aspiration also play parts in this, as does a sort of religiousness: How becoming "woke" is like becoming "born again.

But what also make CRT so successful is ruthlessness. Those who hold a view of the world in which only power, and the struggle for power, matters, have few qualms in exercising it. After all, under CRT, power is always on the side of the white cis-heteropatriarchy, so payback is always fair play. Discriminating against the unwoke or whites or males or the cis-gendered or Asian-American, is not just fair, but vital. Shutting down speech protects the oppressed; bullying on social media and in the workplace becomes a form of virtue; mercy and forgiveness are mere buttresses for white supremacy; HR departments diligently identify dissidents, and discipline them. Once you set up this system of censorship and fear, persecute a few prominent sinners pour décourager les autres, and encourage snitches, dissidents will increasingly self-censor, and dissent peter out, until the new orthodoxy is the only one.

...The truth is that liberal democracy is hard, counter-intuitive, complicated and requires self-restraint, reason, and toleration at levels most humans are incapable of. That's why it is such a rare and fleeting exception in the world today and all but non-existent for the vast majority of human history. Critical race theory is much more attuned to human nature. It gives you the simplest template for understanding the world, it assigns you virtue if you assent, it gives you instant power over others purely because of your and their identity, and it requires nothing more than tribal instinct to thrive. That's why it is here to stay. And why the fight for liberalism is going to be long and hard and require as much courage, steel, and rigor as we can muster.