Mr. Divine is the natural inheritor of the mantle of Staussian Alan Bloom in his ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ . Note that Starussianism is defined by a mendacious re-reading of Philosophical History.  Students are the target of both of these hyper-reactionaries, whose political self-conceptions were/are that of Prophet as political/moral iconoclast. Conceived cinematically, Mr. Divine’s  essay is pure Cecil B. DeMille merde, in  all its dated, indeed laughable melodrama. All that is missing from Andy’s iteration is the pipe-organ trills. A telling excerpt is demonstrative :

The reason I don’t agree with this is because I believe ideas matter. When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges — your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression — will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/we-all-live-on-campus-now.html

Mr. Divine presumption here is that his readership is utterly ignorant of his political evolution from Thatcherite, to Neo-Conservative, to an idiosyncratic ‘Centrist’ Neo-Liberalism. And he relies on an audience, that are too young to be acquainted with that trajectory.  And as for ‘a hierarchy of oppression’, Mr. Divine forgets that some of his readership recalls with a kind of revulsion his advocacy, indeed, his unsavory apologetics for the Bell Curve.

Some selective quotation from his latest screed is telling:

The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment — untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights — are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites.

…

Living in this period is to experience a daily, even hourly, psychological hazing from the bigot-in-chief.

…

Liberals welcome dissent because it’s our surest way to avoid error. Cultural Marxists fear dissent because they believe it can do harm to others’ feelings and help sustain existing identity-based power structures.

…

The whole cultural Marxist idea of a microaggression, after all, is that it’s on a spectrum with macro-aggression. Patriarchy and white supremacy — which define our world — come in micro, mini and macro forms — but it’s all connected.

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But cultural Marxists see no such distinction. In the struggle against patriarchy, a distinction between the public and private makes no sense.

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There’s a reason that totalitarian states will strip prisoners of their clothing. Left-feminists delight in doing this metaphorically to targeted men — effectively exposing them naked to public ridicule and examination because it both traumatizes the object and more importantly sits out there as a warning to others.

…

Marxism with a patina of liberalism on top is still Marxism — and it’s as hostile to the idea of a free society as white nationalism is. So if you wonder why our discourse is now so freighted with fear, why so many choose silence as the path of least resistance, or why the core concepts of a liberal society — the individual’s uniqueness, the primacy of reason, the protection of due process, an objective truth — are so besieged, this is one of the reasons.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/we-all-live-on-campus-now.html

The whole of this section of his latest essay, targets the ‘Left’ in its many mendacious iterations, allied to a logorrhea steeped in a personal defensiveness: that seems embarrassingly reminiscent of the confessional.

Queer Atheist