tl;dr – What is a good name for the thing people are criticizing with labels like "CRT" or "SJW" or "woke" (or in olden times "PC")?
There's a certain flavor of activism/politics that has picked up steam in the Left in the last 10 years, and especially the last 3 or so. The ideas aren't new, of course, but I think it's fair to say their market share has grown quite notably in recent years.
The core is:
* Concern with identity-based oppression: a lot of problems in the world are because some group with power is oppressing some other group (white->POC, cis->trans, rich->notrich, het->gay, etc, etc, etc) Ideas like intersectionality and so on.
* To address the above, question core liberal ideals that have failed us: if equal treatment under the law ends up not being so equal, then maybe stop trying and instead do something to enforce outcomes. Think: Kendi's anti-racism, as he so eloquently describes it. Or think: the "critical" in "critical theory".
Some additional comments: there's an emphasis on whose narratives we listen to – after all who best to talk about the problems faced by the oppressed group other than someone from that group? The oppression is systemic – not necessarily someone deliberately oppressing. It infects us all. Anticapitalist, usually.
So: leftist idpol, but with a skepticism of liberal values (here by "liberal" I don't mean Left as the word sometimes does in US politics)
It seems uniquely difficult to name and categorize political philosophies like this; it's never going to be a clean taxonomy, in a sense, where each person rigidly adheres to a menu of positions. Add to that a lot of the names given to these kinds of things are pejorative.
Given that, is there a good name for this? "Critical theory" & "western Marxism" describe adjacent scholarly traditions, but maybe not the pop-politics part of it, so maybe not ideal? "cultural marxism" is used for ~this, but is probably not accurate (it's not all that Marxist, etc) and might make people think you're an anti-semitic conspiracy-monger. "critical social justice" maybe?
@LouisIngenthron It's not just that, though – it's also the other things I mentioned. Activists that are very different from the thing I'm describing are also fighting for "civil rights".
@LouisIngenthron Further: I think this philosophy sort of took off in part because the civil rights movement and associated "colorblind" laws don't seem to have worked all that well – we still have lots of disparate outcomes. This way of thinking is sort of trying to make sense of why "civil rights" aren't enough.
@ech Nonsense. MLK espoused CRT. None of this is new; there were just bigger priorities back then. It's the continuation of the same work from before.
@ech I think my main point is, the true path to civil rights is incremental, and what you're describing is simply the increment we need to deal with next.
@LouisIngenthron Sure; that's the idea of it. But what do we call this particular phase, or "increment" as you put it?
@ech Well, we can't call it anything if we let the right co-opt every term. So, as far as I'm concerned, the terms you listed (CRT, woke, SJW) are still valid.
@LouisIngenthron Yeah, maybe you're right. Kind of a shell game otherwise, I guess.
Yeah there's no sense in ceding vocabulary to right wingers that want to twist everything.
@LouisIngenthron Yeah, like I said the ideas aren't new, for sure. I do not mean to imply that nobody had these ideas before the civil rights movement; I don't think I said anything to indicate that!
(CRT wasn't named when MLK was around; I'm well aware that the question of how much MLK's work aligns with CRT workers is the subject of vigorous debate. I think my point remains either way.)
If you want a non-pejorative term, I think "social justice", used as an adjective, it pretty close. If we were to describe someone, for example, as a 'social-justice progressive', it seems like the sort of label they would welcome, if they really were aligned in this way.
The term social justice pretty well captures the identify-based, equity-over-equality orientation, as well as the narrative and anti-capitalist stuff.
@mikejackmin sounds good. It certainly suffers from the problem that a lot of people who care about (lowercase) social justice are very opposed to Critical Social Justice. But yeah you might be right this is a good term.
I suppose that pretty much everyone is in favor of social justice, we just have very different ideas about what that means. The idea of equality under the law seems like a good way to divide them - some see it as foundational to their idea of what social justice means, others see it as a means of oppression ("The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread).
@ech They're all just subsets of the crusade for "civil rights", so you can use that term for lack of a better one.
Doesn't matter how many labels the right corrupts, it still just boils down to trying to make sure everyone gets a fair shot in life and isn't unduly burdened by the state because of the circumstances of their birth.