Bret Stephens, The New York Times, Dec. 20, 2018; [JB comment: Blame the "left" (whatever it is) -- identity politics at its worst?]
The president and the senator both want you to know that our system is “rigged.”
Image from, with caption: Apotheosis of Washington, U.S. Capitol rotunda.
Excerpt:
For decades, the left sought to dethrone the idea of truth. Truth was not an absolute. It was a matter of power. Of perspective. Of narrative. “Truth is a thing of this world,” wrote Michel Foucault. “Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true.”
Then Kellyanne Conway gave us “alternative facts” and Rudy Giuliani said, “Truth isn’t truth” — and progressives rushed to defend the inviolability of facts and truth. ...
For decades, the left sought to enthrone identity politics. “We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression,” reads the 1977 statement of the black feminist Combahee River Collective, one of the key documents in the development of contemporary U.S. identity politics.
Then Trump turned identity politics on its head by appealing to white voters, and progressives rediscovered the beauty of our national motto, E pluribus unum. ...
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