I love City Journal.
In his essay “1968 and the Meaning of Democracy,” Mahoney provides critical context for understanding the political, intellectual, and academic transformations of the last 40 years. The uprisings of that year initiated “a bold cultural project to subvert or ‘deconstruct’ authoritative cultural, political, and religious traditions in the name of liberation and autonomy.” The spirit of ’68 institutionalized in education and culture the reduction of democratic politics to consent and radical autonomy: “It [1968] is that crucial turning point when modern democracy lost consciousness of civilized liberty as a precious inheritance to be preserved.”
The “ideology of liberation” of the soixante-huitards (’68ers) informs much of the political and cultural discourse in the West today—in France most of all, but also in America. We see it, for example, in the revolutionary sentimentalism that elevates any thug, no matter how illiberal or murderous, into a heroic icon as long as he is the enemy of “bourgeois” authority. More important, the ideology of ’68 hastened the “radicalization of democracy” that has severed ordered liberty from its sustaining traditions, thus undercutting “the moral and intellectual continuity of Western civilization.”
One consequence of the West’s severing of these roots is an “absolute relativism that denies the very idea of universal moral judgments and a universal human nature”—best exemplified by the ideology of multiculturalism. The default orthodoxy of popular culture and academia alike, multiculturalism incoherently combines claims to universal human rights and equality—whose origins lie in the West’s disparaged classical and Christian inheritance—with a rejection of universal values and of the civilization that has articulated and defended these values.
I am so adamantly in agreement with that second paragraph. It describes very much why I keep bothering to write here at Cobb.
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