I’m not sure I understand your question. Taking it bit by bit:
“i.e., that most Marxist-Leninists at the time did not think that the working-class base as it existed then was important”
You introduce this with “i.e.”, but it doesn’t seem to me like it means the same thing as the author means by “the lack of an industrial base for the majority of Marxist Leninists”. I think his claim isn’t that they didn’t think the working-class base was important, but that although they proclaimed its importance they were out of touch with actual working-class people and didn’t have a good model of their real needs and wants.
“and then go on to talk about students and the Little Red Book”
He doesn’t. This section is not about students, and I see no reason to think the people he’s talking about waving the Little Red Book were students.
That’s hardly what the article would say if its only point was, uh, “some student protesters were Maoists”
I am not claiming that the only point of this document is “some student protesters were Maoists”. In particular, most of the document is not about student protesters, and the bit you’re quoting from is not about student protesters and tells us nothing about how many student protesters were Maoists or how heartfelt their Maoism was.
“the authors care about Maoism precisely because it was popular and indeed influential”
The author cares about Maoism because he was a leading Maoist during the period the article describes.
“the United Kingdom section of Wikipedia’s article on student activism”
… doesn’t in fact say anything about Maoism being important. It says that from the 1930s on lots of socialist societies (of all kinds) were formed at universities. It names two particular groups formed in 1966, neither of which appears to have been Maoist. And it talks about some particular protests (e.g., the tearing down of the LSE gates, about which our document says “the Left was not actually strong enough to shape events”; and the Grosvenor Square protest, which our document indicates (1) was a minority breakaway group from the larger but less dramatic protest and (2) “went into decline in 1969″, again not suggesting a lot of long-term influence).
But aside from all this point-by-point quibbling, I’m not seeing how any of this bears on the question of (1+2) versus (3) being meant when our author says there were a lot of Maoists among late-1960s student activists. The picture he paints of leftist student activism seems to me more or less what you’d expect: a mixture of genuine ideologues of various kinds (by no means all Maoist), more moderate people making common cause with the extremists, and people for whom the far-left politics was more attire than actual belief (“some comrades were preoccupied in trying to solve their ‘sexual problems’ instead of making revolution”).
And, yet again, everything you say remains far removed from the present-day social justice movement you were originally making claims about. It’s as if I said, I dunno, that modern physics is lightly disguised Christianity, and when challenged kept pointing out that Newton was very religious. (Not quite so extreme; the gap is 40 years rather than 400. But the same logical problem.)
I’ve answered these concerns in a previous comment.
You say they both want a “great cultural revolution”—but the cultural changes they want are completely different, and only one of the groups actually uses the term “great cultural revolution” that you put in quotation marks. You say they both make a big deal of ideologically-driven self-criticism—but this is actually a very common idea, which you can find in notably Maoist movements like Methodism, rationalism, and Scientology. You say they both aim to address “perceived vacuousness, oppression and degradation”—but so far as I can tell (a) sociopolitical movements always get some of their power from participants’ hope that they will bring meaning into their lives, so this doesn’t distinguish Maoism and SJ from evangelical Christianity or neoreaction or transcendental meditation or anything else; (b) the alleged oppressions with which Maoism and SJ are concerned are extremely different and in fact barely overlap; (c) if by “degradation” you actually mean anything different from vacuousness + oppression, you’ll need to explain what.
And you appeal to “actual historical heritage” but again this is very indirect: left-wing student activism was strongly influenced by Maoism for a few years in the late 1960s; subsequent left-wing students were influenced by the aftermath of that activism; those students grew up into left-wing academics; left-wing academics are responsible for much theorizing about “social justice”. If that makes present-day “social justice” an incarnation of Maoism, then it seems to me almost anything can be an “incarnation” of almost anything. (The radical leftist students of the late 1960s were by no means all Maoists; being influenced by something is not the same as subscribing to it wholeheartedly; people’s opinions and attitudes change, often dramatically, over time; present-day “social justice” is broader than academic theorizing about it.)
And: you say the SJ movement developed from leftist student radicalism starting in the 1960s, but the term has been around with a meaning not entirely unlike its present one since the 1840s and (I repeat) the distinctive concerns of present-day SJ that aren’t shared with the 1840s advocates of “social justice” tend to be ones also not shared with Maoism.
a mixture of genuine ideologues of various kinds … more moderate people making common cause with the extremists, and people for whom the far-left politics was more attire than actual belief (“some comrades were preoccupied in trying to solve their ‘sexual problems’ instead of making revolution”).
This is a good description of any social movement. As the newest blogpost from SSC rightly states, ‘The Ideology Is Not The Movement’, and most movements are largely “about” socialization and tribal attitudes as opposed to their ideological focal points. Nevertheless, when discussing what is distinctive about a social movement, particularly in the goals it pursues, ideology starts mattering quite a bit.
It’s as if I said, I dunno, that modern physics is lightly disguised Christianity, and when challenged kept pointing out that Newton was very religious.
And in the absence of further evidence, this would be a good default guess. Now, scientists tend to be a pretty diverse mix when it comes to religious attitudes, so we can conclude that modern physics does not have much to do with religion either way, even though historically it did originate in a religious milieu. But current SJW activism seems to be a lot less like modern physics, and a lot more like, um, Bible study or sermon writing.
You say they both want a “great cultural revolution”—but the cultural changes they want are completely different
Are they? Sure, the modern SJWs have their own laundry-list of concerns—mostly derived from the Frankfurt School (which ironically was fairly conservative in its own social outlook—this is why the conspiracy theorists who want to implicate it are quite wrong) and the Marcuse-influenced ‘New Left’. Their basic attitude is pretty much the same however—get rid of everything that’s ‘old’ and ‘traditional’ (“the old ideas, culture, customs, and habits”—the Four Olds) as something per-se linked to “the exploiting classes” (or, more generally, “oppression!”) which has “poisoned the minds of the people for thousands of years”—and “transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond” to the desired system and worldview. This is not something that conspiracy-theorists wrote about “SJWs”, “Cultural Marxism!” or “the Frankfurt School”, even though it certainly sounds like it. It’s how people actually thought at the time.
The radical leftist students of the late 1960s were by no means all Maoists; being influenced by something is not the same as subscribing to it wholeheartedly …
This is obviously true, and I’m not suggesting that these movements have steadfastly subscribed to the totality of Maoism. But the influence was nonetheless significant enough to describe them as derivative. And people’s opinions can certainly change, but when a late-1960s student activist becomes an academic with SJWish views in the 2000s, this is pretty strong evidence that his opinions have not changed that much.
This is a good description of any social movement.
Which is why I said it’s “more or less what you’d expect” :-).
current SJW activism seems to be a lot less like modern physics, and a lot more like, um, Bible study or sermon writing.
In some important respects, yes. But, more specifically, I don’t see current SJ activists studying the Little Red Book or preaching sermons about the superiority of rural farmers over urban brain-workers. I don’t, that is, see a whole lot of actual Maoism. Which would seem to me to be a relevant thing to look for, when deciding whether present-day “social justice” is just “the newest incarnation of Mao Zedong Thought”.
But it seems that what you mean by “the newest incarnation of” is just “shares a few features with, and has some very indirect historical connections with”. In which case: meh, whatever, call it that if you like, but your terminology seems odd to me.
get rid of everything that’s ‘old’ and ‘traditional’
That was an explicit cry of the Maoists; it does not appear to me to be an explicit cry of the SJ activists.
And in actual fact both movements had/have particular old things they want to get rid of, and they are not the same particular old things.
Suppose we made a list of old traditional things in middle-class American culture (the environment where SJ mostly exists). The list might indeed include ideas about race and gender and sexuality that the SJ movement wants to overturn. It would also, I think, include a whole lot of things it doesn’t. For instance, perhaps the biggest traditional shibboleths in US political culture are “democracy” and “freedom”; SJ activists are generally strongly for democracy, and while they aren’t so enthusiastic about freedom—there are all kinds of things they would like to be banned—my impression is that that’s not because of any (overt or covert) dislike of freedom as such; there are just other conflicting things they care about more.
Traditional middle-class American culture (hereafter TMCAC) is big on “family”, meaning an opposite-sex couple with 2.5 children and a dog, living in a detached house in the suburbs. SJ activists will complain bitterly about the idea that that’s a norm everyone should be expected to conform to, but I’ve never seen them say that that sort of family is actively bad and needs getting rid of.
TMCAC has all sorts of art in it: music old and new, drama (plays, movies, television), etc., etc., etc. Again, SJ activists will complain about various particular instances (e.g., not enough women in movies) but I’ve not seen them saying that existing artforms need to be thrown out and replaced with something new.
TMCAC tends to be firmly capitalist and business-friendly. Some (by no means all) SJ activists are far enough left that they want that system burned to the ground. That’s a point where they would agree with the Maoists. But, er, that’s because we got here by considering the particular subset of SJ activists who are, if not exactly Maoist, at least communist or something close.
There really doesn’t seem to me to be a close parallel with Maoism here, beyond the fact—with which I gladly agree—that present-day “social justice” leans distinctly leftward and some SJ activists are very far left indeed.
“”transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond” to the desired system and worldview
Yeah, that does sound really Maoist. And that quotation would indeed be evidence for a strong Maoist current in SJ activism, if it came from an SJ activist. But of course it actually comes from the (original) Maoists’ “Sixteen Points”.
I’m sure SJ activists would like to see education, literature and art conform more closely to their principles. And evangelical Christians would like to see them conform to theirs. And neoreactionaries would like to see them conform to theirs. And radical Hindus in India. (Of course, many people in all these groups would say, at least for public consumption, that they don’t want to extinguish diversity. What would be a good way of expressing that? How about “let a hundred flowers bloom”?) Saying that the Maoists and the SJ activists both want that isn’t evidence of some close equivalence between the two; it just shows that both are sociopolitical movements.
The fact that a sociopolitical movement wants to influence culture does not make it an incarnation of Mao Zedong Thought. It makes it a sociopolitical movement.
That was an explicit cry of the Maoists; it does not appear to me to be an explicit cry of the SJ activists.
I agree about this, but what matters in this case is not whether this is an explicit cry of them, but whether it’s a good description of their activities, balancing parsimony with the possibility of error. In this case, SJWs have “called out” and railed about things as diverse and seemingly unconnected as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Halloween festivities and a host of “microaggressions” and other sins supposedly committed by professors, invited speakers, and fellow students. Surely there must be a point at which we have to conclude that this movement is not simply ‘trying to influence culture’ in its preferred direction, but is leaning all-the-more towards a largely futile quest to remake it from the ground up.
Of course even the cultural revolutionnaires were somewhat limited in their effects; they did not after all dismantle the family as an institution or destroy the ancient Terracotta Army. But most people would nonetheless consider theirs a very distinctive “sociopolitical movement”. It makes some sense to ponder why, and to what extent that ‘distinctiveness’ may indeed be shared.
whether it’s a good description of their activities
Sure. (Actually, I think there is an important difference between a movement that says, in so many words, “throw away everything old and traditional” and one that isn’t willing to be explicit about that. But I’m happy to leave that aside.) And the way it looks to me is not that the SJ movement wants to be rid of classical literature and traditional festivities, but that it wants classical literature taught, and traditional festivities celebrated, in ways that don’t upset certain groups in certain ways.
Maybe that’s a great idea, maybe it’s a terrible one. But it’s a long way from saying “out with everything that’s old”. The sort of “cultural appropriation” some university groups were complaining about at Halloween are actually a relatively new thing. Actual traditional Halloween has ghosts and skeletons and witches and the like, not people dressing up as Mexicans or putting on blackface. And slapping “trigger warnings” on the rapes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses might be a waste of time, or might be overindulging people you would prefer not to indulge (though, for my part, I incline towards being generous with accommodations for rape victims) but it doesn’t erase Ovid from the canon or stop anyone reading his poetry.
Surely there must be a point at which we have to conclude that this movement [...] is leaning all-the-more towards a largely futile quest to remake [culture] from the ground up.
Surely. But I don’t see anything suggesting that we’ve reached that point, or that we’re going to.
even the cultural revolutionnaires were somewhat limited in their effects
They were, but they got a damn sight further than the SJ movement has. I don’t know how far that’s because they were genuinely more extreme, and how far it’s because they had the might of a totalitarian state backing them up—but it’s because they did so much damage that the Cultural Revolution has the deservedly terrible reputation it has. Just by way of reminder, here are a few examples (taken, because I am lazy, from Wikipedia):
Historical sites in every part of the country were ransacked and destroyed. [...] Beijing [...] where thousands of designated sites of historical interest were destroyed. [...]
Red Guards from Beijing Normal University desecrated and badly damaged the burial place of Confucius himself and numerous other historically significant tombs and artifacts. [...]
Libraries full of historical and foreign texts were destroyed; books were burned. Temples, churches, mosques, monasteries, and cemeteries were closed down and sometimes converted to other uses, looted, and destroyed. [...] Clergy were arrested and sent to camps; many Tibetan Buddhists were forced to participate in the destruction of their monasteries at gunpoint. [...]
Public security in China deteriorated rapidly as a result of central officials lifting restraints on violent behavior. Xie Fuzhi, the national police chief, said it was “no big deal” if Red Guards were beating “bad people” to death.
In the course of about two weeks, the violence left some one hundred teachers, school officials, and educated cadres dead in Beijing’s western district alone. The number injured was “too large to be calculated.” [...]
In August and September 1966, there were 1,772 people murdered in Beijing alone. In Shanghai there were 704 suicides and 534 deaths related to the Cultural Revolution in September. In Wuhan there were 62 suicides and 32 murders during the same period.
So I’ll tell you what. When the SJ movement has destroyed one major historical site and murdered one person, get back to me and I’ll willingly agree that the SJ movement, having done only three orders of magnitude less damage than the Cultural Revolution, can reasonably be put in the same pigeonhole for some purposes. Until then, I’m quite comfortable not summoning up the spectre of Mao to haunt us as we watch a few overzealous student societies asking for trigger warnings on classical literature.
I’m not sure I understand your question. Taking it bit by bit:
“i.e., that most Marxist-Leninists at the time did not think that the working-class base as it existed then was important”
You introduce this with “i.e.”, but it doesn’t seem to me like it means the same thing as the author means by “the lack of an industrial base for the majority of Marxist Leninists”. I think his claim isn’t that they didn’t think the working-class base was important, but that although they proclaimed its importance they were out of touch with actual working-class people and didn’t have a good model of their real needs and wants.
“and then go on to talk about students and the Little Red Book”
He doesn’t. This section is not about students, and I see no reason to think the people he’s talking about waving the Little Red Book were students.
That’s hardly what the article would say if its only point was, uh, “some student protesters were Maoists”
I am not claiming that the only point of this document is “some student protesters were Maoists”. In particular, most of the document is not about student protesters, and the bit you’re quoting from is not about student protesters and tells us nothing about how many student protesters were Maoists or how heartfelt their Maoism was.
“the authors care about Maoism precisely because it was popular and indeed influential”
The author cares about Maoism because he was a leading Maoist during the period the article describes.
“the United Kingdom section of Wikipedia’s article on student activism”
… doesn’t in fact say anything about Maoism being important. It says that from the 1930s on lots of socialist societies (of all kinds) were formed at universities. It names two particular groups formed in 1966, neither of which appears to have been Maoist. And it talks about some particular protests (e.g., the tearing down of the LSE gates, about which our document says “the Left was not actually strong enough to shape events”; and the Grosvenor Square protest, which our document indicates (1) was a minority breakaway group from the larger but less dramatic protest and (2) “went into decline in 1969″, again not suggesting a lot of long-term influence).
But aside from all this point-by-point quibbling, I’m not seeing how any of this bears on the question of (1+2) versus (3) being meant when our author says there were a lot of Maoists among late-1960s student activists. The picture he paints of leftist student activism seems to me more or less what you’d expect: a mixture of genuine ideologues of various kinds (by no means all Maoist), more moderate people making common cause with the extremists, and people for whom the far-left politics was more attire than actual belief (“some comrades were preoccupied in trying to solve their ‘sexual problems’ instead of making revolution”).
And, yet again, everything you say remains far removed from the present-day social justice movement you were originally making claims about. It’s as if I said, I dunno, that modern physics is lightly disguised Christianity, and when challenged kept pointing out that Newton was very religious. (Not quite so extreme; the gap is 40 years rather than 400. But the same logical problem.)
Which I answered at the time.
You say they both want a “great cultural revolution”—but the cultural changes they want are completely different, and only one of the groups actually uses the term “great cultural revolution” that you put in quotation marks. You say they both make a big deal of ideologically-driven self-criticism—but this is actually a very common idea, which you can find in notably Maoist movements like Methodism, rationalism, and Scientology. You say they both aim to address “perceived vacuousness, oppression and degradation”—but so far as I can tell (a) sociopolitical movements always get some of their power from participants’ hope that they will bring meaning into their lives, so this doesn’t distinguish Maoism and SJ from evangelical Christianity or neoreaction or transcendental meditation or anything else; (b) the alleged oppressions with which Maoism and SJ are concerned are extremely different and in fact barely overlap; (c) if by “degradation” you actually mean anything different from vacuousness + oppression, you’ll need to explain what.
And you appeal to “actual historical heritage” but again this is very indirect: left-wing student activism was strongly influenced by Maoism for a few years in the late 1960s; subsequent left-wing students were influenced by the aftermath of that activism; those students grew up into left-wing academics; left-wing academics are responsible for much theorizing about “social justice”. If that makes present-day “social justice” an incarnation of Maoism, then it seems to me almost anything can be an “incarnation” of almost anything. (The radical leftist students of the late 1960s were by no means all Maoists; being influenced by something is not the same as subscribing to it wholeheartedly; people’s opinions and attitudes change, often dramatically, over time; present-day “social justice” is broader than academic theorizing about it.)
And: you say the SJ movement developed from leftist student radicalism starting in the 1960s, but the term has been around with a meaning not entirely unlike its present one since the 1840s and (I repeat) the distinctive concerns of present-day SJ that aren’t shared with the 1840s advocates of “social justice” tend to be ones also not shared with Maoism.
This is a good description of any social movement. As the newest blogpost from SSC rightly states, ‘The Ideology Is Not The Movement’, and most movements are largely “about” socialization and tribal attitudes as opposed to their ideological focal points. Nevertheless, when discussing what is distinctive about a social movement, particularly in the goals it pursues, ideology starts mattering quite a bit.
And in the absence of further evidence, this would be a good default guess. Now, scientists tend to be a pretty diverse mix when it comes to religious attitudes, so we can conclude that modern physics does not have much to do with religion either way, even though historically it did originate in a religious milieu. But current SJW activism seems to be a lot less like modern physics, and a lot more like, um, Bible study or sermon writing.
Are they? Sure, the modern SJWs have their own laundry-list of concerns—mostly derived from the Frankfurt School (which ironically was fairly conservative in its own social outlook—this is why the conspiracy theorists who want to implicate it are quite wrong) and the Marcuse-influenced ‘New Left’. Their basic attitude is pretty much the same however—get rid of everything that’s ‘old’ and ‘traditional’ (“the old ideas, culture, customs, and habits”—the Four Olds) as something per-se linked to “the exploiting classes” (or, more generally, “oppression!”) which has “poisoned the minds of the people for thousands of years”—and “transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond” to the desired system and worldview. This is not something that conspiracy-theorists wrote about “SJWs”, “Cultural Marxism!” or “the Frankfurt School”, even though it certainly sounds like it. It’s how people actually thought at the time.
This is obviously true, and I’m not suggesting that these movements have steadfastly subscribed to the totality of Maoism. But the influence was nonetheless significant enough to describe them as derivative. And people’s opinions can certainly change, but when a late-1960s student activist becomes an academic with SJWish views in the 2000s, this is pretty strong evidence that his opinions have not changed that much.
Which is why I said it’s “more or less what you’d expect” :-).
In some important respects, yes. But, more specifically, I don’t see current SJ activists studying the Little Red Book or preaching sermons about the superiority of rural farmers over urban brain-workers. I don’t, that is, see a whole lot of actual Maoism. Which would seem to me to be a relevant thing to look for, when deciding whether present-day “social justice” is just “the newest incarnation of Mao Zedong Thought”.
But it seems that what you mean by “the newest incarnation of” is just “shares a few features with, and has some very indirect historical connections with”. In which case: meh, whatever, call it that if you like, but your terminology seems odd to me.
That was an explicit cry of the Maoists; it does not appear to me to be an explicit cry of the SJ activists.
And in actual fact both movements had/have particular old things they want to get rid of, and they are not the same particular old things.
Suppose we made a list of old traditional things in middle-class American culture (the environment where SJ mostly exists). The list might indeed include ideas about race and gender and sexuality that the SJ movement wants to overturn. It would also, I think, include a whole lot of things it doesn’t. For instance, perhaps the biggest traditional shibboleths in US political culture are “democracy” and “freedom”; SJ activists are generally strongly for democracy, and while they aren’t so enthusiastic about freedom—there are all kinds of things they would like to be banned—my impression is that that’s not because of any (overt or covert) dislike of freedom as such; there are just other conflicting things they care about more.
Traditional middle-class American culture (hereafter TMCAC) is big on “family”, meaning an opposite-sex couple with 2.5 children and a dog, living in a detached house in the suburbs. SJ activists will complain bitterly about the idea that that’s a norm everyone should be expected to conform to, but I’ve never seen them say that that sort of family is actively bad and needs getting rid of.
TMCAC has all sorts of art in it: music old and new, drama (plays, movies, television), etc., etc., etc. Again, SJ activists will complain about various particular instances (e.g., not enough women in movies) but I’ve not seen them saying that existing artforms need to be thrown out and replaced with something new.
TMCAC tends to be firmly capitalist and business-friendly. Some (by no means all) SJ activists are far enough left that they want that system burned to the ground. That’s a point where they would agree with the Maoists. But, er, that’s because we got here by considering the particular subset of SJ activists who are, if not exactly Maoist, at least communist or something close.
There really doesn’t seem to me to be a close parallel with Maoism here, beyond the fact—with which I gladly agree—that present-day “social justice” leans distinctly leftward and some SJ activists are very far left indeed.
Yeah, that does sound really Maoist. And that quotation would indeed be evidence for a strong Maoist current in SJ activism, if it came from an SJ activist. But of course it actually comes from the (original) Maoists’ “Sixteen Points”.
I’m sure SJ activists would like to see education, literature and art conform more closely to their principles. And evangelical Christians would like to see them conform to theirs. And neoreactionaries would like to see them conform to theirs. And radical Hindus in India. (Of course, many people in all these groups would say, at least for public consumption, that they don’t want to extinguish diversity. What would be a good way of expressing that? How about “let a hundred flowers bloom”?) Saying that the Maoists and the SJ activists both want that isn’t evidence of some close equivalence between the two; it just shows that both are sociopolitical movements.
The fact that a sociopolitical movement wants to influence culture does not make it an incarnation of Mao Zedong Thought. It makes it a sociopolitical movement.
I agree about this, but what matters in this case is not whether this is an explicit cry of them, but whether it’s a good description of their activities, balancing parsimony with the possibility of error. In this case, SJWs have “called out” and railed about things as diverse and seemingly unconnected as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Halloween festivities and a host of “microaggressions” and other sins supposedly committed by professors, invited speakers, and fellow students. Surely there must be a point at which we have to conclude that this movement is not simply ‘trying to influence culture’ in its preferred direction, but is leaning all-the-more towards a largely futile quest to remake it from the ground up.
Of course even the cultural revolutionnaires were somewhat limited in their effects; they did not after all dismantle the family as an institution or destroy the ancient Terracotta Army. But most people would nonetheless consider theirs a very distinctive “sociopolitical movement”. It makes some sense to ponder why, and to what extent that ‘distinctiveness’ may indeed be shared.
Sure. (Actually, I think there is an important difference between a movement that says, in so many words, “throw away everything old and traditional” and one that isn’t willing to be explicit about that. But I’m happy to leave that aside.) And the way it looks to me is not that the SJ movement wants to be rid of classical literature and traditional festivities, but that it wants classical literature taught, and traditional festivities celebrated, in ways that don’t upset certain groups in certain ways.
Maybe that’s a great idea, maybe it’s a terrible one. But it’s a long way from saying “out with everything that’s old”. The sort of “cultural appropriation” some university groups were complaining about at Halloween are actually a relatively new thing. Actual traditional Halloween has ghosts and skeletons and witches and the like, not people dressing up as Mexicans or putting on blackface. And slapping “trigger warnings” on the rapes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses might be a waste of time, or might be overindulging people you would prefer not to indulge (though, for my part, I incline towards being generous with accommodations for rape victims) but it doesn’t erase Ovid from the canon or stop anyone reading his poetry.
Surely. But I don’t see anything suggesting that we’ve reached that point, or that we’re going to.
They were, but they got a damn sight further than the SJ movement has. I don’t know how far that’s because they were genuinely more extreme, and how far it’s because they had the might of a totalitarian state backing them up—but it’s because they did so much damage that the Cultural Revolution has the deservedly terrible reputation it has. Just by way of reminder, here are a few examples (taken, because I am lazy, from Wikipedia):
So I’ll tell you what. When the SJ movement has destroyed one major historical site and murdered one person, get back to me and I’ll willingly agree that the SJ movement, having done only three orders of magnitude less damage than the Cultural Revolution, can reasonably be put in the same pigeonhole for some purposes. Until then, I’m quite comfortable not summoning up the spectre of Mao to haunt us as we watch a few overzealous student societies asking for trigger warnings on classical literature.