Deconstructing Marxist Critical Theory
Marxism always indoctrinates its victims to think in terms of classes of people, with the specific intent of preventing them from perceiving people as individuals, with individual rights, individual responsibilities or individual worth. The goal is to elevate or demonize people based on their class (social class, wealth, race, sex, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, etc,) instead of evaluating each person based on that person's specific actions, talents and abilities. It's a high-technology, weaponized form of 'divide and conquer.'
FTA: It is likely that the current intellectual poverty of the left is also a byproduct of critical theory's basic tenets. When racial studies programs were originally formed, it was taken as a given that the goal was not honest research, but rather the production of a continuous moaning and howling over grievances. That is precisely what critical theory was meant to produce. Papers written by black students asserting that whites (or cops) acted as a single, corporate, nefarious body could never have passed muster if viewed critically. Neither could the feminist re-invention of the Western world as a "rape culture." However, since the goal of racial and gender studies programs never was truth, but merely the raw articulation of a certain kind of outrage, normal academic standards never applied. Reason was not the goal, but an impediment to the goal.
Measure people not by the quality of their arguments, but by the pungency of their hatred, and you will get exactly what we have gotten: generations of narcissistic nihilists who see themselves as right by virtue of the intensity of their feelings. For decades now, valid-looking academic credentials have been awarded for little more than unsupported posturing. Many of these ideological monsters are now "educators" themselves. Many others swell the bureaucracies of government.
If we are to overcome these people, we cannot lose sight of the methodology that created them. Attempting to argue with anyone who helps himself to the idea that anyone who disagrees with him is wrong a priori is obviously futile. Nevertheless, one sees innumerable instances in print, on television, and in social media of some frustrated conservative attempting to do just that. We must stop wasting our time! If progressives were amenable to reason, they would not be progressives.
The rational response to a madman is not to argue with the progressive, but to firmly separate him from any means of doing harm. Progressives must be removed from power, including, at a low level, taking away the public funding that allows them to make careers as full-time street agitators. While it may make us uncomfortable to deprive people of the freedoms to which Americans ought to be entitled, we must face certain facts. When someone explicitly makes war on any and all of our existing institutions, it is foolish to imagine that he is, somehow, just our fellow countryman with different opinions. Such people are as much our enemies as any foreign invader.