I love the going-over-the-peak-of-a-rollercoaster feeling of these essays on the topic of whether and how America is tilting toward fascism. They start by discussing disinformation, authoritarianism, the perverse prioritization of loyalty above all else, marching in lockstep, and then... are they going to say that the problem is the guys marching in the street with swastikas saying “we are Nazis?” Or are the real Nazis the ones promoting “transgressive sexuality”?
We have had guys marching in the streets proclaiming to be nazis for decades. They’re scary, but they’re a known quantity. The ACLU has long represented nazis and protected their rights to have those marches, and things have been fine. Liberal democracy works. This other stuff is new.
The guys calling themselves Nazis haven't usually been having their marches in honour of the POTUS whilst the POTUS openly states his court appointees should set aside liberal democracy's verdict on his first term, or plotting to assassinate a state governor he's clashed with.
I'm not convinced that's actual totalitarianism either, but it takes an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance to argue that flourishing of alternative sexualities is the real alarming new development towards totalitarianism...
> I'm not convinced that's actual totalitarianism either, but it takes an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance to argue that flourishing of alternative sexualities is the real alarming new development towards totalitarianism...
It probably isn't your argument, but the author devotes enormous amounts of effort to arguing that 'transgressive sexuality' was a precondition to the Russian Revolution (meanwhile, when the actual authoritarians took charge, they wasted no time setting boundaries for relationships based on their concept of the state's needs) and doubles down on it with passages that start off with 'social justice warriors play a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks' and end it with corporate America no longer frowning on homosexuality. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest the actual Bolsheviks had a somewhat different approach to bourgeouis institutions than convincing them that people of alternative sexualities were employees and customers they might wish to retain...
It's not insight from Arendt, it's a religious conservative arguing his laundry list of dislikes, from acceptance of homosexuality to -checks notes- mayors not crushing protests must be totalitarian because -spurious parallel-. Totalitarianism isn't bottom up social consensus, and it definitely isn't the mere absence of social consensus around one's own moral values.
That is not the argument the author is making at all. The portion of the article you’re referring to begins:
> Her point was that these authors did not avail themselves of respectable intellectual theories to justify their transgressiveness. They immersed themselves in what is basest in human nature and regarded doing so as acts of liberation. Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality.
The author isn’t criticizing non-discrimination—which can be justified by reference to traditional “liberal principles.” He’s criticizing things like Mozilla’s firing of Brendan Eich for his political donations, or declaring judges unfit because they are members of Catholic organizations that reject abortion. Those efforts go beyond non-discrimination to trying to stamp out traditional beliefs in ways that are often at odds with liberalism.
As I said, your own views may not match the author's. One doesn't subtitle a passage 'the desire to transgress and destroy' and cite the 'sexual adventurism, celebration of perversion and all manner of sensuality' in great detail as an illustration of its relevance to the Russian Revolution to argue that Brendan Eich ought not to have felt the need to resign. If he was making a freedom of conscience argument rather than a decadence leads to totalitarianism argument he'd hardly be suggesting that it was lamentable that labourers were sufficiently far from village gossips and 'the church binding their conscience with guilt' to find comfort in sex.
