Damon Linker at Persuasion:
In striving to make sense of the mind-warping incoherence, corruption, and self-destructiveness of the second Trump administration, my mind often wanders back to my time in college and graduate school during the 1990s. Back then, perhaps the most pressing intellectual question we pondered about the present was whether we were on the cusp of entering a “postmodern era.”
That famously slippery phrase had many meanings and implications, but this was its core: The time of grand, unifying, “hegemonic” narratives was over. A so-called “hermeneutics of suspicion” and impulse toward “deconstructing” received theories had revealed all attempts to reach a universal, permanent truth as power-grabs attempting to conceal fundamentally political motives. Broad swathes of the left latched onto the work of French theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard as a contribution to the liberation of individuals and groups from the white, male, heterosexual writers of the West—and from the grand narratives that justified their domination.
At the time, the most cogent critics of these prophets of postmodernism could be found on the center right. The philosopher Allan Bloom’s surprise 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind, for example, suggested that what he called the “Nietzscheanization of the left” was bound to end badly.
More here.
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