The Left is finally, dimly, beginning to grasp that they have inoculated everyone from the charge of racism by virtue of accusing nearly everyone of it.
I just caught the end of a lefty, high-brow (in relative terms) BBC political show (The Marr Show). At the end a black guy, a lefty trade union leader sitting next to Nigel Farage said that he was troubled…(my pause for effect)…that the word ‘racist’ had been so devalued as to mean very little any more. And that was a very bad thing. (Nigel agreed)
Once you can debate without sexist, racist etc being used to shut down everything…where does it end? I mean, you might be able to have adult discussions about issues, which could mean real progress towards tackling the tractable issues.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. The devaluation of “racist” was always inevitable, which is one reason that I never feared cretins trying to make it stick. We see the same thing writ small and large. In the SF/F world, the pinkshirts foolishly thought that by pointing and shrieking and crying raciss would harm me. One Hugo nomination and 10 straight months with at least 100k more pageviews than the leading pinkshirt site has ever had later, it is obvious that their slanderous approach was a complete failure. In the world of UK politics, three straight weeks of every major media institution daily crying racist at UKIP resulted in the first national election in over a century in which neither the Tory nor the Labour party finished first. That is beyond complete failure, it was an epic failure the likes of which have seldom been previously seen.
In a civilized Western world enduring an active decades-long invasion by tens of millions of the half-civilized and uncivilized, it should not be at all surprising that accusations of racism, whether true or false, now tend to do the accused more good than harm. Especially in light of the fact that the core concept underlying anti-racism, the idea that all human beings are fundamentally the same under the skin, has now been completely disproven by genetic science.
Science is always on the side of the realists, no matter their ideology. If your beliefs are in line with both logic and science, truly in line with them, they will eventually triumph in the end, no matter how unpopular they might be today. Prior to the mass invasion of the vibrants, it was possible to claim that the barbarian non-Western populations could be transformed into civilized quasi-Westerners by pretending everyone was the same. A few decades, and more than a few riots, street beheadings, mass rapes, murders, and sex enslavements later, it is no longer possible to credibly claim that multiculturalism, diversity, or anti-racism are intellectually viable positions.
So the Left is beginning to mourn the effective loss of what has been its most important political weapon in the last 50 years. And despite their desperate efforts, I tend to doubt “homophobe” and “transphobe” are likely to serve as adequate substitutes. It would be nice if this meant we could have genuinely dialectical debate, but I tend to suspect it will do little more than change the form of their rhetoric rather than the substance.