Martin Luther King — or, at least, the man as publicly imagined — would be aghast if he saw how the politics of collectivist grievance-bloc identitarianism — ‘Bioleninism’, to give a nod to the subject of our previous post — has come to dominate American life in the decades since he died. People should be “judged by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin”? That’s nowhere in sight, and it hasn’t been for quite a while now. People are judged, and sorted into bins, simply by their base-level object-classes.
“But what of individual character?”, you might well ask. The answer is just another question:
“Character? How many divisions has it got?”
4 Comments
Interesting. Naivete is something I haven’t seen from you before, Malcolm.
Yes, I was expecting someone to say that.
The point here is not to do with MLK himself – I am well aware of the actual story there — but rather with the enormous hypocrisy in the ambient culture regarding the dissonance of his official message (and most-quoted speech) with the actual agenda of those who so ostentatiously invoke his name.
Perhaps I was too opaque about this. I have made a small, clarifying edit.
Okay, understood.
Although I have the subjective impression that the classically liberal elements of MLK’s rhetoric (and maybe MLK himself) are not as prominent in the various guises of progressive propaganda as they used to be. The tribalism (racial, ethnic, religious & lifestyle) is much more forthright now, and has been since even before Trump.
Oh yes.
I do think that MLK, regardless of the, er, “complexity” of the man behind the scenes, really did see the cause in far more genuinely liberal terms, and in a way much closer to the natural-rights principles of the Founding than anything on offer from that side of the aisle these days. It was a long time ago now, and things were very different.
Before you know it, he may even become a liability.