When radical zealotry meets the polarising populists

[Celerity]

Some activist-scholars, Eszter Kováts writes, have turned social justice into a latter-day religion, with perverse effects.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/when-radical-zealotry-meets-the-polarising-populists


Taking their ‘war’ into the academy: Donald Trump Jnr (left) on a panel organised by Turning Point at Colorado State University in 2019, part of the far-right student organisation’s ‘Culture War’ campus tour

Much ink has been spilt in recent years over the ‘culture wars’ in western Europe and north America. These have been prosecuted by populist conservatives, weaponising the terms ‘political correctness’, ‘cancel culture’, ‘woke-ness’, ‘cultural Marxism’, ‘gender ideology’ and ‘critical race studies’—suggesting the moral demons they thus conjure up are widely removed from ordinary folk and their supposed values.

In the face of these conservative cudgels, many activists and activist-scholars have sought to dismiss any critique of claims made in the name of social justice as betraying age-old oppressive attitudes and preservation of privilege, or even, when these come from the left, an agreement with the right wing. Yet over the years it has become increasingly clear that those critiques of ‘identity politics’ or ‘intersectionality’ coming from the progressive side—variously from Marxists, liberals, feminists and advocates of gay and lesbian rights—cannot be dismissed so easily.

Indeed, embarrassingly—as I show in comparing the discourses around ‘gender’ of the German far right and the Hungarian illiberal right—the anti-pluralistic right capitalises on the most radical progressive claims in the west to legitimise anti-democratic measures. By the overemphasis on ‘situated knowledges’ and by reducing gender to subjective identity such claims provide a convenient bogey for the authoritarian right—as representing a ‘decadent’ west which has lost its moorings—and they lack the grounding in universal norms to challenge its equally particularistic, ‘traditional values’ and ‘eastern’ or ‘underdog’ counter-position.

Tricky relationship

‘Freedom of speech’ in the university setting has been at the heart of these arguments. The relationship between academia and politics is genuinely tricky and the two spheres cannot be as easily separated as naïvely ‘value-free’ scientists would have us believe. Yet the sociologists Sarah Speck and Paula Villa are rightly critical of ‘the conflation of politics and scholarship, however progressive or well-intended these may be; for example when instructors or students fail to distinguish between a university seminar and an activist training session, with reading lists guided solely by political preference, or when research unhesitatingly adopts questions and categories from an activist agenda. Research, they say, must ‘remain open and free from considerations of the all‑too‑immediate political utility’.

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