"The Postmodern Intellectual Roots Of Today's Campus Mobs

Crispin Sartwell
   I go on about the link between pomo and the PC left a lot--the link was explicitly avowed in the paleo-PC era, but less so now. Even the term "political correctness"--which used to be politically correct--is not so now. Now the politically correct term is roughly "social justice"...ism? osity? Something...
   I don't think that Sartwell is right to say that anyone ever thought that not dropping n-bombs was all you had to do to not be racist. Nobody I've ever known thought that. Not sure why anyone would think that...but NBD.
   I'd also add that it's not just postmodernism that's at the intellectual core of PC--rather, there are lots of bad ideas, mostly from recent Continental philosophy--postmodernism, poststructuralism, aspects of critical theory... 'Relativism' (the term) is a bit passe now, and 'social construction' (largely the same idea) is much hotter--but that's probably the fault of American sociologists, not continental philosophers... There's also a dash of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis in there...  Do bad ideas just never go away? Anyway...I've done that song and dance too much already.
   I think the Sartwell piece is largely right, but mostly I'm happy to see such things appearing in important places--even if it will be dismissed by "progressives" for appearing on the WSJ editorial page.