The New Hegemony
Human rights are dead.
Human rights are dead.
We all know it, but no one wants to admit it. Rights like the right to travel, peacefully assemble, or decide what goes into your body are conditional on compliance with the medical overstate. Even rights still legally protected, like freedom of speech, are curtailed on all the platforms that matter under the guise of stopping “misinformation.”
The current regime has been unwilling to recognize protests based in human rights. When protestors claim that medical restrictions violate their rights, they are told by those currently in power that the dictates of the medical overstate are more important than their rights. Except in one case.
Protests based in social justice have been allowed to assemble in violation of previous medical guidelines. During the summer of 2020, at the height of COVID-19 lockdowns, there were mass protests across the United States that were publicly supported by medical officials. Virtually every major medical organization released a statement in support of social justice.
Why is this? Once the dominant ideology of the Western world, human rights based in liberalism has been replaced by a new hegemonic power: social justice based in critical theory. Critical social justice has power over every major cultural institution, including media, social media, corporations, universities, schools, churches, etc. giving it a cultural hegemony.
When Americans protest in the discourse of human rights, they might think they are appealing to the shared values of all Americans, but those in power do not share human rights values. If Americans wanted to speak to power in the language it recognizes, they would speak critical social justice.
Those in power have already shown they will cave if protests are done on the basis of social justice. Trying to get those in power to recognize the values they have abandoned would be going about change the hard way. The easier way would be to just base protests in the ideology those in power have already recognized supersedes their dictates, including medical institutions.
In my new book Children’s Justice, I frame it this way: Imagine you lived in Europe under the Catholic church of the Middle Ages. Would you make an argument based in human rights? Of course not. The church would never accept that. You would argue on the basis of Christianity.
The dominant power of modern times is not the church, but a different belief system. That system can be learned and applied to the issues that matter most. If applied, it might lead to change.
Read this post on BrendonMarotta.com here:
https://brendonmarotta.com/8414/the-new-hegemony/
I see what you're trying to do here, and will watch your work with great interest! Two thoughts:
1) If you align yourself with the cause of the day, and then that cause fails, then you fail with it.
2) Is it not really, in the end, all about power and not ideology? Whatever logical arguments you use are mere window-dressing to give an air of respectability. I imagine, in your example of the Middle Ages, that you would find yourself simply ignored by those in power until you were able to credibly threaten their power or increase their power, at which point you would be destroyed / assimilated as those in power saw fit. This result would be 100% uncorrelated with whatever you're saying, whether it was deeply heretical to Christianity or an unimpeachable logical consequence of the core tenets of the religion.