Tom Holland in “Dominion” [2019] show direct link from Christian theology to this new social justice or Critical Social Justice
2010s is when Critical Social Justice began and it peaked in 2020
Civil rights in 1960s and 1970s were reaching a peak consensus but these new campaigns started and aggressively promoted identity politics “nationalist populism.” Now culture and politics were inseparable.
2015 - Critical Social Justice and intersectionality were said to be everywhere but this was happening years before in Critical Theory in schools
Postmodernism - reality is constructed by systems of language. This explains mania over “power structures” which came from Foucaulian notion of interconnectivity of power and knowledge
“Postmodernism Knowledge Principle” says that objective knowledge can’t be obtained
“Postmodern Political Principle” says that society is structured into system of power and privilege” [this creates an individualized knowledge system determined by identity and lived experience”
They claim to be left-wing but it’s a mistake to call them that because they have abandoned wealth distribution goal
Privilege comes from money, class, heredity, nepotism
Influences that are direct [intersectionality] and indirect
1960s theorists are one part of the movement, another is the Frankfurt school
4 pillars of postmodernism: social construction of concept of self, ethical relativism, deconstruction in art and culture, globalization
Postmodernists wanted to deconstruct the meta narratives that have influenced society before like religion, science, rationality but Critical Social Justice, intersectionality, and identarianism created a new meta-narrative. It’s a perversion of postmodernism! Postmodernism has been used in so many different ways that it confuses people.
Postmodernists have taken apart language and concepts, but when activists of early 2000s infiltrated, no longer theoretical deconstruction!
“Applied postmodernism and postmodernism” difference
Postmodernism declined in 1980s which covered up its mutation into Postcolonism, Queer Theory, and Critical Race Theory [after “applied postmodernism” came up in 1989]
Critical Theory exposes how powerful operate through cultural discourses. Might see this as something happening before the new puritan’s obsession with power structures but this also applies to the French postmodernists where power and knowledge were interfused.