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Goldberg views feminism as a “joke”
For another angle on how neoconservatives respond to leftist social revolution, here’s Jonah Goldberg writing at The Corner:
… I think opponents of gay marriage sometimes misunderstand that occasionally giving in a little prevents giving in a lot. Consider feminists today. There was a time when their arguments galvanized millions of ordinary Americans. Today, feminism is something of a joke—at least when it’s identified as feminism—because the issues groups like NOW yap about are so distant from the lives and desires of ordinary women.Amazing. Just this week, the radical feminist law, Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which has forced hundreds of men’s athletic programs across the country to shut down if there were more males than females enrolled in sports programs at a given college or university, was re-affirmed in its existence by the Bush administration. Yet Goldberg assures us that feminism is “a joke”—as long as it’s identified as feminism. Yeah, but when it’s not identified as “feminism,” when it just keeps moving forward transforming more and more of society, then it’s not a joke at all, is it? I’m reminded of how the old American Spectator always used to treat feminism as a joke, even as feminism was progressively taking over America.
If we put Goldberg’s unserious view of feminism (not to mention his rush to compromise on homosexual marriage) alongside Terry Eastland’s dry-as-dust response to Grutter v. Bollinger, we get a diptych of metropolitan conservatism in its, ahem, “confrontation” with the left. During the period when a leftist movement is steadily gaining power, the metropolitan conservatives treat it as a joke. But as soon as it wins total victory and is made into the supreme law of the land, as racial proportionality has with Grutter, the metropolitan conservatives view it as a dry technical problem that they hope—without caring very much about the result—to reform around the margins. Comments
“Diptych”? Now that sent me running to the dictionary. Good word though. Goldberg’s absurd complacency mistakes words for reality, but hasn’t it been obvious since that obscure Englishman called Orwell that the modern Left places high among its priorities the debasement of language? Posted by: Paul Cella on July 21, 2003 7:43 PMI would add, however, that there is nothing wrong with making fun of leftist absurdity. In fact, laughter will help help us sane admidst the insanity. Posted by: Paul Cedlla on July 21, 2003 7:48 PMIt depends. If the laughter suggests that X is not really a serious problem, but something not to be taken seriously, then it cripples any possible resistance to it. The “right” has done a lot of such laughter in recent decades. If the laughter is gallows humor, saying, “The world’s gone mad, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” that’s different. At least it’s not pretending that a bad thing doesn’t exist. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on July 21, 2003 8:03 PM |