This is a presentation made at the 5th ICHJA conference in Korea.
We argue that an important first step in the pushback against cultural socialist hegemony is in recognizing and publicizing the ways in which it is being exercised and in understanding the contours of the contemporary moral landscape which facilitate the hegemony. There needs to be a reclaiming of corporations, national institutions and regulatory bodies which have been ideologically captured and become vehicles for the pursuit and promotion of cultural socialist agendas. And, if greater common ground is to be found between liberals and conservatives, it is the latter group who must establish it and look to defend it, challenging the former’s monopoly on the idea of what constitutes “kindness” and enriching it by offering a more diverse palette of values and virtues allowing a more inclusive moral debate.
References
Applebaum, Anne (2021) The New Puritans, The Atlantic, August 31.
Haidt, Jonathan (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion (1st ed.). Vintage Books.
Kaufmann, Eric (2024a). The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism. Bombardier Books. (Published in the UK by Forum as Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution).
Kaufmann, Eric (2024b). The Woke Emotional Regime: Why our Moral Topography, not just our Moral Cartography, Matters, https://erickaufmann.substack.com/p/the-woke-emotional-regime.
Lukianoff, Greg and Jonathan Haidt (2015). The Coddling of the American Mind, The Atlantic, September.
Mounk, Yascha (2023). The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. Penguin.
Turfus, Colin (2023). The Illusory Quest for Shared Values.
