The End of Progressive Intellectual Life – Tablet Magazine
If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star. That s because, in the third decade of the 21st-century, intellectual life on the American center-left is dead. Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the life of significant contention is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds. Having crowded out dissent and debate, the nonprofit industrial complex Progressivism, Inc. taints the Democratic Party by association with its bizarre obsessions and contributes to Democratic electoral defeats, like the one that appears to be imminent this fall.
Michael Lind. ICYMI.