Until now, that is; until this phase of American history that has more of the maelstrom than the watershed about it. War is folly? Many Baby Boomers thought so in their youth, before some wave of feminism came along and diverted them to the cause of getting women involved in the bombing and strafing. Today, the hill of equal opportunity having been taken, war itself is in vogue with the youthful Left. One factor is that Ukraine, with the West at its back, is now fighting a war for national survival against a rapacious Vladimir V. Putin. Another is that Putin shares a space in many American minds with Donald Trump. Yet another is that the working-class segment of Trump’s base, grievously versed in the concept of a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, has already made the anti-war position its own. To adopt a sanguine view of war, then, is to join in the great struggle against a Trumpist-Putinist Axis. The justice of Ukraine's particular struggle provides moral cover for doing what one wants to do anyway. Support for that struggle and for America's part in it, which ought to be arrived at after a journey of sorrow, becomes a snap. Look at the reader comments in The New York Times during 2022 and see all the heroes jumping aboard polemical trains to the front.
"Love is the answer" and "We're all brothers and sisters" have gone the same way in related handbaskets. Maniacal partisanship has put agape out of mortal reach for those concerned, while the biological essentialism of current leftist thought (barely matched by right-wing bigotry) has made the notion of "all brothers and sisters" downright heretical.
Biological essentialism, in turn, is teetering on the brink of its own sub-maelstrom. Only a few years ago, "toxic masculinity" was a veritable Homeric epithet in progressive discourse, so well was it understood that the human race consisted of good, wise, cooperative females and bad, doltish, self-seeking males. But even as hard-core feminist writers were busily turning the adjectives into money, someone was making off with the nouns. It seems in retrospect as if there had been one morning when they awoke to find their cash cows and bulls gone, but of course it didn't really happen overnight. It happened just slowly enough for some feminists to remark that a transsexual (hereinafter transgender) person who had changed from male to female was not a real woman; but those feminists were already on the wrong side of history. Before much longer, room will have to be found on the wrong side of history for those who assert that a transgender woman is, too, a real woman. Though their time has not yet passed, it has entered a state of incoherence as radical progressives call upon each other to deny that binary sexuality has any basis in fact. It's impossible to be a real woman if womanhood is make-believe.
That's where matters stand, in a snapshot taken at this moment. The vanishing of nouns has of course sparked a riot among the pronouns, but it's really the noun situation that's leading people and organizations into madness. We can skip over most of the contrivances by which men and, especially, women have been banished from the public lexicon out of regard for incomparably smaller portions of the human race. However, there is one example among the latest that demands attention.
Sometime in the first half of last month (apparently), the Johns Hopkins University Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI) updated its online LGBTQ Glossary to amend the definition of lesbian from "a woman who is emotionally, romantically, and/or sexually attracted to other women" to "a non-man attracted to non-men." As one can infer from that amendment, the term "gay man" remained unmolested: "a man who is ... attracted to other men." Yes, really. In one stroke, Johns Hopkins justified the darkest paranoia of the fiercest feminist. The vision of "erasing women" became literal truth. Men could appear as themselves. Women must appear as Adam's phantom ribs: non-men.
The reaction was intense. The glossary was taken down for review. But consider: the author of the amendment was some person with a conscious care for representation; they must have discussed it with some other such person, if not a committee (though Johns Hopkins had the brass to assert -- defensively assert, not apologetically admit -- that the misogynistic content was "not reviewed or approved by ODI leadership"); and yet it went out to the world. What this is an example of, surely, is not a positive wish to erase women, but the lunatic confusion in store for minds that get drawn into the game of improvising fundamental change. Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to conceive a new reality instead of improving the one we've got. The glossary people could have solved their representation problem with a footnote, but no. They had to dabble in creative decentering.
This essay began with a remark on the sense that one's own time in history is destined to be a watershed. It then drew some specific contrasts between earlier times and the present while straying from the metaphor of a watershed to those of a maelstrom and a trip to somewhere in a handbasket. However, there's a more fundamental difference between today's movements to change the world and past ones. The very word today's in that last sentence is "dead when it is said" for many of the activists who are now active. Their twentieth-century counterparts identified certain great wrongs, such as racial discrimination or the denial of women's rights or wars of choice, and worked to interest others in righting them. Their social vision was genuinely inclusive, not displacive. Their procedures weren't always realistic or free of hypocrisy, but the faults and the virtues converged on some constant idea. True, political engagement could bring social cachet. It could be an end in itself for some. But it was not then chiefly a pursuit of sociopolitical points carried on for the thrill of scoring or the comfort of garnering credit or the distinction of rule-changing. Now it is. It's that game of improvising fundamental change.
The game-playing character of political engagement shows itself both in the details and in a single unifying pattern. In the politics of race, there's the detail of standing the term anti-racism on its head. There's the detail of commanding attention for a while with a proposal to abolish police departments. (It was a predictably short while, now declared past by The New York Times.) In the politics of sex and gender, there's the cascade of details that leaves women's rights behind, returns sexual orientation to the midst of controversy, and subjects society to an endless bed of coals as new articles of faith are brought to white heat and thrown on: trans women are real women; wait, there are no "real" women; wait, sex is not even binary; wait, sex is nothing more than a construct; wait, we shouldn't be talking about sex when gender is the thing -- well, not the thing, but a limitless variety of things defined by individuals. As to the initial surge of transgender politics and the onset of partisan contention on this head, the freelance journalist Meghan Murphy offers a shrewd insight:
In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that same-sex couples had the right to marry. This decision was, as reported by The New York Times, "the culmination of decades of litigation and activism." This changed things for individual gay people, of course, but it also changed things for the gay rights organizations who had been fighting for this decision for years. The charities and NGOs and civil rights organizations once heavily invested in advocating for same-sex marriage no longer had a raison d'etre, and as such lost a key justification for future funding.
Gluing the "T" to the LGB allowed for an easy transition into a new civil rights movement, using the same language and mantras of "born this way" and "accepting people as they are," as well as a need to fight for "equal rights" on this basis.
Indeed, it was the Democrats and Democrat-adjacent organizations that were looking for a new way to galvanize their base and solicit funding, and Republicans were frankly the last to catch on.
Such are the details. The single unifying pattern by which the game-playing character of political engagement manifests itself is the competitive spirit of individual players. Imagine being the first to notice that the term pro-choice can be construed as an affront to those women who are economically compelled to seek an abortion and boldly putting forth pro-abortion as the best term after all. This may be a sucker punch to other progressives, but it makes a splendid breakout for oneself. The principle of rolling competition animates everything. Academics will of course leapfrog to the ideological forefront opportunely. Activists will elbow their way into the vanguard of agitation. Lesser beings will vie to retail new conceits at their freshest. Still lesser ones in spirit or political acumen will scramble to stay abreast of attitudes that can keep them in the swim, bobbing safely on the waves.
Technology is the mother of degeneration. The comparatively sluggish world-changers of the twentieth century were different in themselves, but it probably matters more that they differed in their opportunities. Who, being constantly in touch with a multitude of other people, would not fall prey to an exaggerated sense of collective destiny and a concomitant dread of personal irrelevance? The feeling that a day mustn't go by without some new proof of revolutionary vigor belongs to an age of constant communication.
Andrew Sullivan, an early advocate of legalizing same-sex marriage, maintained a steady, influential focus on that goal. The outcome he helped attain reached beyond a judicial ruling to broad social acceptance of homosexuality. Now he sees that acceptance under threat -- actually declining in a recent Gallup poll -- by association with manic sex-and-gender activism and its more appalling consequences. Manic activism across the spectrum of progressive interests is like a compulsive card game. It undermines lives and corrodes society as the players throw in stakes that don't even belong to them, looking to win the next trick; or the next; or the next.
But history, though stingy with watersheds, is generous with tides. As the night the day, an ebb tide must follow the flood. This is most definitely true of latter-day American manias. The players in the game of improvising fundamental change will lose interest, their passion spent and the surrounding disarray having grown too uncomfortable. When they turn away from the table, it will transpire that all they've really done with their cards is to build a house of them. The first breeze of the morning after will take care of that.
