The New Puritans

http://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-new-puritans
Date Written:  2020-08-10
Year Published:  2020
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX24122

The attack on congressional candidate Alex Morse for consensual sexual relationships is disturbing for many reasons, but mostly because it reveals a new American phobia toward adulthood.

Abstract: 
-

This is not a sexual harassment issue in the classic sense of someone who actually has power over someone else, for instance in the workplace or in a classroom. The concept here is that students who might "wish to enter progressive politics" will feel uncomfortable refusing, or even just not answering, so mighty a personage as the Mayor of Holyoke, Massachusetts, for fear of what that might do to their job prospects someday, in a field they have not even chosen yet.

Therefore, just as a child or, say, a St. Bernard cannot consent to sex, neither apparently can an adult college student with an uncertain job future. And given that consent is "complicated" when such a "lopsided power dynamic" comes into play, it’s no wonder that the actual encounters could be harrowing -- even when, as the Boston Globe explained, the victims were not even aware of that "power imbalance" at the time.

...

But the most grotesque part of the story is the obsessive/delusional misunderstanding of "power," which after years of intersectional propaganda has become the primary lens through which young progressives see the world. Constant preaching that all human interactions are political contests, with one side always getting the better of the other, has made a whole generation phobic about adulthood.

This terror of a world separated into victimizers and victims has already ruined journalism, where a new class of reporters is so locked into the idea that every second of airtime or line of an editorial is an exercise of power that they've begun demanding the removal of alternative political viewpoints from their publications -- other ideas make them feel literally unsafe.

New reporters see news audiences in much the way the College Democrat leaders view students, as helpless beings incapable of exercising judgment or free will. Journalists like me once enjoyed the idea that our audiences were grownups capable of taking in difficult truths and deciding their meaning for themselves: the new trend is to see audiences as defenseless, childlike lumps, who must be led to the correct political conclusion the way horses are led by their bits.