The website Bill whittle mentions and from whence he found what he calls “the greatest sentence ever” is here.
The most pernicious “theory” of the left, to my lights, is what they call “Critical Legal Theory.” Its roots go as far back as the 1960’s although I had never heard or read anything about it before the mid-1990’s. I now know it was alive in the early 1970’s when I was in law school even though it traveled incognito in those days. My criminal law professor spent a lot of class time arguing that criminal law was just politics. This was confusing because I couldn’t understand the political connection with robbery and murder. Naive me, I thought criminals were dangerous and needed to be locked up no matter their politics. But without ever giving a formal name to his thinking he explained that robbery and murder could not be explained by anything so simple as bad behavior by anti-social members of society bent on doing evil to others for their own personal gain. I’ve since realized that he was anonymously practicing “critical legal theory,” which openly rejects logic and reason as its guidepost.
Here’s how Cornel Law School defines critical legal theory, or “studies” as they refer to it:
Critical legal studies (CLS) is a theory that challenges and overturns accepted norms and standards in legal theory and practice. Proponents of this theory believe that logic and structure attributed to the law grow out of the power relationships of the society. The law exists to support the interests of the party or class that forms it and is merely a collection of beliefs and prejudices that legitimize the injustices of society. The wealthy and the powerful use the law as an instrument for oppression in order to maintain their place in hierarchy. The basic idea of CLS is that the law is politics and it is not neutral or value free. Many in the CLS movement want to overturn the hierarchical structures of domination in the modern society and many of them have focused on the law as a tool in achieving this goal.
OK, reading that I’m starting to get it. I got it even better later on in this descriptive piece…
Although CLS has been largely a U.S. movement, it was influenced to a great extent by European philosophers, such as nineteenth-century German social theorists Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Max Weber; Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt school of German social philosophy; the Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci; and poststructuralist French thinkers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, representing respectively the fields of history and literary theory.
I get it completely now. Critical legal theory wants to replace republican forms of government with rule by a criminal gang. The love of theory is the root of evil.
I know about CLS. My wife’s a lawyer and in the 1980s she had a lawyer friend, an attractive light-skinned black woman who was bewitched by the postmodernists. This woman was raised in a middle class black family, reasonably personable and of average intelligence. But being a black with a law degree she was recruited to be a professor at a time when universities were desperate to have black law professors. She worked at Harvard and Stanford. She was wined and dined on Martha’s Vineyard by rich white liberals. Of course in order to get all the goodies she had to play into the white liberal’s game and parrot the jargon of CLS or Critical Race Theory. She traded on her supposed victimhood, though she’d never been victimized as a black person in her life.
Now the problem here was that she’d never been taught to write. She was barely able to write an intelligible English paragraph. She’s submit writings to my wife and we were appalled by their sheer incompetence. She were sprinkle postmodernists jargon in her writing though I get the feeling she had no idea what they meant. Her reasoning and thinking skills were meager to say the least. But she was a Harvard Law Professor. She was obsessed with race. The New York Times when reviewing her book (you can tell they were trying hard to find any excuse to praise her) said: “Sometimes you know what she means.”
When I think of Obama I think of her…somebody with academic credentials, well-spoken but with an infantile understanding of ideas. Obama is like the officials in Jean Genet’s “The Balcony” where people are taken to be persons of importance because of their official uniforms when in fact they are morons recruited off the street and dressed the part.
Your story illustrates one of the failings of racial preferences, which goes under the euphemism of “affirmative action.” It elevates people for the color of their skin rather than their aptitude and level of achievement. As a result many attain an employment or academic level far in excess of their ability to perform. Everyone is hurt by this. The person who is qualified but of the wrong race is prevented from achieving all that he is capable of, the people who must depend on the incompetent person of the right race have to carry an unbalanced burden, and the beneficiary of the preference, if she has a modicum of personal pride, is frustrated by her repeated failures and missed oppportunities. The human tendency to look for excuses for failure leads them to become obsessed with race and find ways to lay blame on others, all on the “theory” that racism remains rampant in America and is the cause of their problems.
Everyone must deal with a certain amount of failure in their lives, but the occasional successes are vital to sustaining our spirit and the mental toughness to forge ahead.
The “theory” of affirmative action is that is it necessary to rectify past wrongs to a certain class of people, and give them the tools they need to overcome handicaps thrust upon them through no fault of their own. The reality of affirmative action is that it spreads misery for all involved everywhere and every time it is practiced. No amount of bad outcomes can ever persuade liberals to give up on one of their favorites theories. Their love of theory is the root of evil done in their name.