Liberals and "Internalized Oppression"
I argue that liberals suffer from 40 years of conservative vilification and mockery. We second-guess ourselves, doubt our own legitimacy, try to appease our critics and speak and act with caution.
Commentator Clyde suggests that I might be talking about what oppressed people called internalized oppression.
I am reluctant to use those words; being demonized and scapegoated by your political opponents is not really oppression. Oppression is much more serious; let's not make that word too thin, but making it cover too much ground.
But it is internalized something.
A synergy between right and left works to make liberals doubt themselves.
Take, for example, the charge that the anti-Vietnam war movement was motivated simply by middle-class students' fear of the draft. It came first from the leftwing of the antiwar movement, as a challenge for us to look more deeply at the war. The war wasn't wrong because it relied on the draft, but because it was an imperialist war, being …
Commentator Clyde suggests that I might be talking about what oppressed people called internalized oppression.
I am reluctant to use those words; being demonized and scapegoated by your political opponents is not really oppression. Oppression is much more serious; let's not make that word too thin, but making it cover too much ground.
But it is internalized something.
A synergy between right and left works to make liberals doubt themselves.
Take, for example, the charge that the anti-Vietnam war movement was motivated simply by middle-class students' fear of the draft. It came first from the leftwing of the antiwar movement, as a challenge for us to look more deeply at the war. The war wasn't wrong because it relied on the draft, but because it was an imperialist war, being …