The moral obligation of the moderate leftists
It's often raised by those who want to seem fair and unbiased that both the left and the right have extremes that harm their reputation. In response, I've pointed out that the right acknowledges some far-right outliers' embrace racism, i.e., racial superority, but that the right has a history of rejecting them, ostracising them--this can be found, for example, in Hawley's Right-wing Critics of American Conservatism.
But what about the left? They don't seem to set any boundaries.
The moral obligation of the moderate leftists
Quote:
...On the Right, I think we’ve identified markers for people who have gone too far in their ideological presuppositions. And it looks to me like the marker we’ve identified is racial superiority. I think we’ve known that probably since the end of World War II, but we saw a pretty good example of it in the 1960s with William Buckley, because Buckley, when he put out his conservative magazine, the David Duke types kind of attached themselves to it, and he said, “No, here’s the boundary. You guys are on the wrong side of the boundary. I’m not with you.” And Ben Shapiro recently did this, for example, as well in the aftermath of the Charlottesville incident.
So what’s interesting is that on the conservative side of the spectrum we’ve figured out how to box-in the radicals and say, “No, you’re outside the domain of acceptable opinion.”
Now here’s the issue: We know that things can go too far on the Right and we know that things can go too far on the Left. But we don’t know what the markers are for going too far on the Left. And I would say that it’s ethically incumbent on those who are liberal or Left-leaning to identify the markers of pathological extremism on the Left and to distinguish themselves from the people who hold those pathological viewpoints. And I don’t see that that’s being done. And I think that’s a colossal ethical failure, and it may doom the liberal-Left project.
The Lefties have their point. They’re driven fundamentally by a horror of inequality and the catastrophes that inequality produces—and fair enough, because inequality is a massive social force and it does produce, it can produce, catastrophic consequences. So to be concerned about that politically is reasonable. But we do know that that concern can go too far. So I’ve suggested that there’s a triumvirate of concepts that have the same potentially catastrophic outcomes when implemented as the racial superiority doctrines. Diversity, inclusivity, and equity as a triumvirate—even though you could have an intelligent conversation about two of those anyways. But I would say that of the three, equity is the most unacceptable. The doctrine of equality of outcome. And it seems to me that that’s where people who are thoughtful on the Left should draw the line, and say, “No. Equality of opportunity? Not only fair enough, but laudable. But equality of outcome…?” it’s like, “No, you’ve crossed the line. We’re not going there with you.”
Now maybe that’s wrong. Maybe it’s not equity. That’s my candidate for it. But it is definitely the case that you can go too far on the Left and it’s definitely the case that we don’t know where to draw the line. And that’s a big problem....
