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I get where this is coming from, but I'd say there is tbh, two in fact, w/ the fascist trick being to conflate them:
1. egalitarian ethics; any sort of exercise of ethical nous underpinned by any sort of egalitarianism.
2. bourgeois propriety at its most rigid moral absolutism. https://twitter.com/BenHCarrington/status/1353908181370425344
1. egalitarian ethics; any sort of exercise of ethical nous underpinned by any sort of egalitarianism.
2. bourgeois propriety at its most rigid moral absolutism. https://twitter.com/BenHCarrington/status/1353908181370425344
The trick is to conflate the rigid moralistic pietism of a Law and Order stage of moral development (c.f. Kohlberg) as reconstructed by the ethical principles of the civil rights era (these being products of a post-conventional stage of moral development) with all egalitarianism.
Where the former has modernised itself to purge the absurd moral absolutes of trad pietism like "buttsex is a sin" & is so vastly improved, it's still subject to the pitfalls of a fundamentally immature approach to ethics, codifying it as rules that are contradictory & gameable.
The contradictory & gameable nature of such a system is why the trad pietists are so entrenched in *their* version of course, as it enables them to post-rationalise anything they want to do as righteous & to game it for status with the very "virtue-signalling" they snipe about.
Everything they project onto "political correctness" is of course 200% true of their own craven use of moral absolutism to justify anything they want ad hoc--and of course to make prejudice a "virtue" to be proud of. They invented the egoism-as-propriety game.
Still, it'd be disingenuous to deny that kids raised *after* the civil rights movement aren't going to go through that Law & Order stage of moral development only with an updated set of rules, and even that some will get stuck at that stage due to the gameability of the system.
So, we *do* have a modern (liberal bourgeois) propriety that recapitulates some of the issues of trad pietism. It's pot pulled out of a housefire calling the slightly singed kettle black though when trad pietism decries this... let's call it Progressed Correctitude.
And it's not only disingenuous coming from those 200% wedded to their own Correctitude (which is steeped in bigotry to boot), it's all a vicious rhetorical gambit to demonise *all* egalitarian ethics as being no more than that callow absolutism--which is, mind, just a phase.
The rhetorical gambit is to take this signifier--which *does* have this referent, this immature mode of still-developing ethics--and apply it to any and all practise of ethical nous underpinned by egalitarianism. So all egalitarian virtue becomes a demonised Enemy of "Freedom".
Their trad pietism with its contradictory moral absolutes is basically a license to do anything: if the rulebook might condemn you for murdering a gay, you can simply refer to the rule damning gays, insist that duty to defend "the fabric of society" trumps the "do not kill" rule.
Their trad pietism with prejudice enshrined in it can be interpreted to demand not just the persecution of those deemed transgressors but the evangelisation of such extremes. It gives not only license to preach fascism but can be read as requiring it. A reformed pietism does not.
So that demonisation of "PC" (which becomes "SJWs" which becomes "Cancel Culture") becomes functionally a rhetorical trick to damn any and all acts of egalitarian ethics opposing the preaching of fascism as a monstrous (liberal bourgeois) Thought Police, enemy of "free speech".
So it's ultimately about more than just reinforcing right wing ideology. It's worse. It's about demonising any sort of principle/praxis of egalitarian ethics as a foe to be quashed. It's about making a "virtue" of opposition to that, so it's about *radicalising* the right wing.
Where that Law & Order mindset functions on received morality, note, the trad pietism is not a stable monolithic system. Part of the driver here is that the immature moralist lacks the autonomy of a post-conventional stage that allows one to handle moral censure with less angst.
I.e. if any of the intersecting communities they abide in kick off on them en masse, even if it's not the trad pietism they were raised in, they still feel shamed, morally inferior. Because morality is *received* for them, they lack the autonomy to just reject a moral as bogus.
I mean, they can do it *rationally*, pointing to some trad pietist rulebook, rejecting the legitimacy of the rulebook they're being judged by, but they can't not respond as a chided child to the authority of a whole community judging them. Cue the get-out clause of ressentiment.
I.e. Hostility directed at an object seen as the cause of one's shame, blamed for it. A sense of weakness, an inferiority complex, even jealousy in the face of this "cause". A rejecting/justifying value system, a morality, attacking or denying that imagined source of one's shame.
So the trad pietist, raised in a community with prejudice enshrined in its morals, blithely expresses that prejudice in some other community which has assimilated principles of egalitarian ethics, & has a crisis of shame when being called out. And they blame those censuring them.
The notion of "PC" has been floating around for decades for those out of step w/ the modern morals of some community to latch onto as target of that ressentiment. I'd say it was tainted with crankery, and "SJW" was adopted because it laundered that into something more acceptable.
Leftists compromised in their egalitarianism by upbringings within a fratriarchal culture latched onto "SJW" and "identity politics" as rhetoric validating their ressentiment--because the reformed pietism that's *one* referent *was/is* a dubious liberal bourgeois propriety.
That failure to hold true to socialism--to see that socialism without egalitarianism is only nepotism--gave the whole notion a legitimacy beyond the reactionary right that it didn't have when cast as "PC". So you get brocialism & class absolutists at odds with egalitarian ethics.
And once you have "SJWs" and "identity politics" in the discourse, well then the chattering class liberal centrists can come along to assimilate that demonisation (of their own propriety, mind) in a regressive reform of their pietism around "free speech" versus "Cancel Culture."
There's an intermediary step in there maybe worth a note too: remember that brief period when that reformed pietism was being talked of internally as "call-out culture"? I'd say one might look at that as a sound attempt to name & tackle the issues of over-zealous pile-ons. But...
That term was far too reasonable, far too specific, not rhetorically powerful enough. Fortunately for the ressentiment brigades, the acknowledgement of reformed pietism it embodied was echoed in the *wry self-deprecating in-joke* of "cancellation".
I mean, the way it looked to me, as that phrasing emerged, "X is cancelled!" was most often just a frickin wry comment at another fave proving to be problematic, like, "Oh, great. X turns out to be a dick," if it wasn't outright parody, aping outrage over a non-offence as a joke.
But yeah, leave it to the chattering class not to grasp the actual usage of online parlance and instead sub that "cancel" into the term "call-out culture" to cast the exercise of free speech as the silencing of it, invoking the spectre of oblivion, erasure, total extinction.
Anyways, yeah, I think it's worth looking at those various rhetorical weapons in terms of the history of their emergence, the dynamics of discourse going on as one takes over from another. The OP is right in IDing the *bad faith*, but the shifting of referents is worth unpacking.
