Bawer’s central thesis is that to understand the moral and political confusion at the heart of Western life today, in which many voices are eager to denounce the most open, tolerant, and vibrant civilization ever created and to romanticize violence and thuggery as a cure, one must look first to our schools, and especially to higher education. For the past 30 years, there has been brewing in humanities classrooms a murky stew of sexual rebellion, hatred of democratic capitalism, and contempt for the institutions and traditions of American society. As Bawer shows, young people since the 1980s have undergone an intensive indoctrination to despise their country. In particular, women, people of color, and homosexuals have been trained to see themselves not as individuals with a stake in America’s collective future but as members of victim groups with the right to far-reaching compensation for their perceived injuries, which are dwelt upon to the exclusion of all else in courses that combine self-help therapy with Marxist and other revolutionary dogmas.It's the toxic core of Canada's "human rights" malarkey, too.
I, for one, can't wait to read the book.
"The toxic core of Canada's "human rights" malarkey, too" may be inaccurate, so far as it conflates intellectual fashion with real politics (as yesterday in the Quebec election, as in statutes and court judgments etc.) Being bicultural, Canada has always had faster access to fashionable French books (Fanon, Bourdieu etc.) than Americans dependent on translations. Secondly Canada has a distinct (non-American) politics of grievance and redress (Quebec separatism, Indian residential schools etc.) that is not covered by the American curriculum enumerated by Bruce Bawer -- so that Canadian intellectuals can spare less time for the US curriculum if they spend any on the Canadian. Besides, genuine Canadian grievances (e.g. wartime internment of Ukrainian or Japanese ancestors) are a lighter burden than the US historical heritage (of civil war, lynching, etc.) The different Canadian context suggests we owe more to the hippie generation's concept of freedom than to any doctrines of victimhood (even Marx's condemnation of the burden of the past.)
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