The left understands systemic issues very well in an academic sense, but seemingly less often in a practical sense. This may partly have to do with how left-wing critiques can go so deep that an almost bottomless pit opens beneath the dismantling of moral, economic and political structures and it becomes overwhelming and much easier to fall back into a liberalism that is in many ways conservative. So too it is likely the case that older generations of progressive thought solidify into tradition. Social and political thought can in this way be thought of as a cresting wave, with the vanguard breaker progressively pushing at the Overton window while the swell deeper back hides as a leviathan of conservative tradition.
Yet an impactful progressivism requires not merely the wispy sea foam of rhetoric but so too the pragmatic force of action that builds out structures into society. The left in the past half century seems to have slid from new deal economic populism and aggressive civil rights era social moral imperative into a naive and self-satisfied complacency. The ideas had seemed to have been won - at least on the social and cultural front, if much less so on the economic front as progressive tax rates plummeted, unions nearly died out completely and a neoliberal bargain was struck in which avenues towards equity for all social groups were paved with promises that college-trained jobs would somehow lift all boats. But in the meantime conservatives, who rhetorically speaking are bitter foes of the notions of structural forces and systems of power and all the subversion that line of thinking creates beneath its foundations built to hold the glory of hierarchy and status quo, were actually thinking structurally. Well, is thinking the right term? They wouldn't use such terms. They would prefer to talk about "cultural decay" and a "culture of victimhood" and "those seeking to tear down and destroy the county" and - certainly the religiously zealous among them - literal demonic forces doing the work of Satan. Yet all of that it structural, even if they would not admit. When pointing to the supposed effects progressive change they speak in entirely structural terms. When the institutions they decry as being taken over, or made to crumble, it is the insidiousness of cultural modeling and pathways of access to power that they describe. But rather than merely be content with spreading the message through academic study or journalistic inquiry, they've spent the decades building out non-governmental think tanks, mega churches and media monopolies with an incredibly narrow-minded focus. Not on scientific inquiry. Not on uncovering relationships between power structures or with a mind to level the playing field for all, but rather with an obsessive and scrupulous mission to craft the institutions of democracy to their very specific (usually white, western chauvinist, capitalist and socially conservative) specifications. When the left talks about structural oppression, conservatives scoff and bemoan it as absurd - what about personal responsibility? they ask, usually followed about tales of rags to riches and how everything is possible if one is not lazy, pointing to the throngs of immigrants who surely would not be advancing on our shores by the tens of thousands if not for our American exceptionalism. In practice, the right are just as much structuralists as the left. But if they were to admit that white, male, Christian domination was due merely to structural privilege, and not "pluck", "grit", or simply the "way things ought to be done", their ode to personal responsibility and bootstraps would ring hollow.
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