Springtime for Snowflakes Quotes

“Political correctness is a code to silence dissent as western society is razed. The culture wars will erupt into violence, pitting those who defend western values vs. leftists, their 'allies', and the rulers who want to consign western civilization to oblivion.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Art should not be run through ideological councils or committees for approval or banishment.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Further, when markers of race, gender, gender fluidity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion and other factors are the only criteria considered in hiring or admissions, students are cheated, as are those chosen to meet diversity measures on the basis of identity alone. Nothing is more essentialist or constraining than diversity understood strictly in terms of identity.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Well before the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Ludwig von Mises showed that far from representing the only rational economic system that could remedy the “anarchy” of the market, the socialist planned economy is utterly irrational. Its irrationality is due to the elimination of the essential indices for determining rational production and distribution – namely, prices.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“People don't often say what they think but rather what they think is permissible.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Socialist ideology rationalizes individual failure by laying it at the feet of the system itself, rather than connecting it with its proximate cause, the individual.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“First, as I showed in Chapter 5, the term “cultural Marxism” refers to a particular Marxist theory and strategy inaugurated by Antonio Gramsci – working to establish “cultural hegemony” in order to effect socialist revolution. Second, the substitution of special identity groups advocated for by social justice activists for the working class championed by Marxists does not lead to an identical or nearly identical politics. With the working class as a lever, Marxism proposes to overcome its nemesis – the capitalist class, which maintains the class system, including a class-based system of production and resource allocation. Social justice, on the other hand, aims at little more than debunking particular identity groups from atop a putative social hierarchy, knocking them from their supposed positions of totemic privilege, and replacing them with members of supposedly subordinated groups. Third, in Chapter 5, I told why Marxism and postmodernism can’t be equated. I’ll restate it here. While postmodern theory is anti-capitalist, it not only rejects capitalism but also other “totalizing” systems, or “meta-narratives,” including even the major system proposed to counter capitalism – Marxism itself.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“I walked into a hipster coffee shop and asked for a cup of 'gender fluid'. The cashier just pointed to the barista.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“epistemological premise derived from postmodern theory holding that language constitutes social (and often all) reality, rather than merely attempting to represent it. Under social and linguistic constructivism, language is considered a material agent – its uses, as tantamount to physical acts.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Further, when markers of race, gender, gender fluidity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion and other factors are the only criteria considered in hiring or admissions, students are cheated, as are those chosen to meet diversity measures on the basis of identity alone. Nothing is more essentialist or constraining than diversity understood strictly in terms of identity. Such a notion of diversity reduces 'diverse' people to the status of token bearers of identity markers and relegates them to the status of token bearers of identity markers and relegates them to an impenetrable and largely inescapable identity chrysalis, implicitly eliding their individuality. (p. 104)”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“remedy the “anarchy” of the market, the socialist planned economy is utterly irrational. Its irrationality is due to the elimination of the essential indices for determining rational production and distribution – namely, prices. Von Mises showed that prices represent the incredibly thick and vital data sets required for allocating productive resources for commodity production and calibrating these to demand. Socialism is irrational because by beginning without prices for the machinery of production, no rational criteria could ever emerge for allocating resources to specific production processes. And when unpriced consumer goods are added to the mix, the chaos multiplies – unless, that is, political force is applied, and it always is. Eliminating prices, the socialist economy cannot provide the feedback loops required for determining what to produce or how much of it to produce. Cancerous, over-sized productive capacities in one sector of the economy are paralleled by relatively anemic productive capacities in another, and so on. And resorting to the labor theory of value won’t fix the problem. The socially average amount of labor time required to produce a commodity, even if it determines a commodity’s value (a doubtful claim in any case), is by no means an adequate index for determining the amount of resources to devote to its production. This means that socialism fails not only at resource allocation but also at the economic representation of the people it claims to champion. Absent price mechanisms, economic “voters,” or consumers, have no way to voice their needs and wants. Production and distribution must be based on the non-democratic decision-making of centralized authorities. Those who really care about the working masses must reject socialism for its incapacity to establish economic democracy, its most fundamental reason for being.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“But James Damore, whom Google dispatched from its employment and premises without the slightest consideration of his argument or employment rights, could not argue that sexual difference exists at all. In referring to sex difference as a reality, Damore fell victim to yet another contradiction within leftist social justice identity politics and ideology. Unless transgender activists and ideologues conveniently say otherwise, gender has nothing to do with biology.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Transgender theory can be traced to postmodern theoretical ancestors. Again, a radical social and linguistic constructivism is its basis. According to transgender theory, gender – or even, as the story currently goes, “sexual difference” itself – is determined not by chromosomes, anatomy, hormones, or physiology. Such words can only be used ironically or with derision in a Gender Studies or Women’s Studies classroom. Instead, gender (or even sex difference) is determined by beliefs about sometimes inconveniently “non-conforming” phenomena, and ultimately, by language, by names. Within transgender theory, empirical sex difference or sex has become insignificant and “problematic” at one and the same time.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“The primary characteristic of totalitarian ideologues is essentially moral arrogance, a complete lack of moral humility, and the certain conviction that they themselves are justice incarnate. They thus believe that they are completely justified to exert their will to achieve their desired ends 'by any means necessary'. Such ideologues rejoiced when God was declared 'dead', as such, because now they could assume the authority of God for themselves.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Romantic utopianism is the opiate of the leftists.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Diversity is a code word for uniformity of thought.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Given the choice, people will generally prefer chaos to the ordered chains of tyranny.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Promote liberty over enforced values, esp. when those values abrogate liberty and otherwise have little to recommend them other than force itself.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Successful reformation must allow social justice ideology to remain in existence while it is removed from its current position as policy-maker, arbiter of expression and inquiry, and censor. Only by relegating social justice to the position of one among many other belief systems can the university successfully absorb the creed without remaining hostage to it.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Likewise, if we want to foster real diversity in higher education, we had better consider not only diversity of identity but also diversity of thought and perspective. It is this kind of diversity that we are supposed to recognize and foster in the first place.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“I argued that fetishizing identity inevitably leads identity politics devotees into cul-de-sacs. Identity politics serves to reinforce and “reify” (or make into things) identity categories – to solidify the very categorizations that are considered sources of oppression. I argued that by making equality with other “privileged” groups the sole object of political activity – rather than overcoming of the constraining categories of identity – identity politics contributes to the strength of identity categories, and thus, lends force to their subordination. In other words, where the members of subordinated identity groups are concerned, most leftists do much more harm than good.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Then, in a bookstore of a Bethesda (Maryland) mall, I chanced upon the unlikely shelving of a striking title: One Dimensional Man (1964). It entranced me. Herbert Marcuse argued that both capitalist and communist societies were totalitarian. Barely touching on the Eastern bloc, however, he directed his scathing critique almost exclusively at the West and the U.S. in particular. The “technological rationality” of “administered life” in “advanced industrial society” infiltrates existence and effectively mass-produces and controls everything. In meeting needs and even in providing affluence for some, it eradicates individuality. The system determines needs and then satisfies them, making for a “willing” conformity with its own demands. The administered society is “totalizing” – nothing, not even criticism of it, escapes its reach. I thought of my hero, Bob Dylan; he refused the role of political spokesman, writing sometimes bizarre, surrealistic, reflective, and lovelorn songs instead. But by Marcuse’s reckoning, even, or especially, the caustic criticism of his early folk career had been commodified and coopted. My”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“posthumously”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Fame is not really real,” he said, a statement that he would echo many times. “Nobody is real except the people we're close to.” He cited a passage from Milton’s lyric poem, “Lycidas”:”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“progenitors”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“adulterated”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“repudiation.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“Bolshevism!”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“dossiers”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“hominem”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage