Transgressive / Adversary Culture

 https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/01/descent-of-the-adversary-culture.php

Mostly here as a link to other interesting posts on the subject line of "we oppose everything that doesn't worship us and our views (remember, under BLM, "Silence Is Violence")

This is from a post by NR on "succession of American academic culture":

The sensibility pervasive among our educated class — it is fair to call it the liberal sensibility — not only functions to obscure concrete actuality but works as a potent force for uniformity, eroding the sources of variety in order, as Minogue puts it, “to provide every man, woman, child, and dog with the conditions of a good life” as conceived by liberalism. Thus liberalism constantly endeavors to minimize or abolish conflict. Have men fought over differences in religious doctrine? How foolish: such differences are unimportant. But men have fought over honor. That too is irrational. Nations themselves seem to be an important cause of conflict. Let us then abolish them, and move toward an international world state. Racial conflict is virtually universal. Irrational again: there is no difference among races, though they differ in appearance. Conflict arises out of inequalities in wealth or nurture or education. We must extirpate differences here by abolishing aristocratic schools and so forth, and by progressive taxation.

A question that I've often attempted to answer from First Things:  

The elite endorsement of BLM radicalism and tacit approval of street violence raise a vexing question: Why are society’s most powerful opinion-makers supporting a revolt against mainstream legal, political, and cultural institutions? Aren’t these elites themselves, in a real sense, the system? How is it that those so richly rewarded by our society have come to ally themselves with society’s angriest critics?

What are the elites searching for and at least declaring that they are finding? This from the linked taking a trip to Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua. 

My fellow guests glared at me when I asked skeptical questions: What about the Sandinistas’ contempt for human and political rights? What about their attempt to turn the Catholic Church into an arm of the state? No answers came, and I began to suspect the motivations of hosts and their guests went beyond selfless concern for suffering peasants. Many had traveled to Central America on ideological pilgrimages with organizations such as Witness for Peace. As they recounted their experiences, their eyes lit up and their voices quickened, as if to say, “I once was lost but now am found.”

Leftism believes it is providing "redemption" to the liberal elite ! 

Sociologist Paul Hollander came to the United States after escaping from communist ­Hungary in 1956. Having first-hand ­experience with a totalitarian regime, he was baffled to encounter American intellectuals who were sympathetic to communism and endorsed its revolutionary aims. Some even championed ­Stalin, Castro, and Mao. Hollander saw that they were captive to an oppositional habit of mind, which led them toward a hypercritical repudiation of our nation’s institutions. Worse, this habit of mind led them to misperceive and idealize systems like the one he had fled, while overlooking or denying the virtues of their own society.

... and you shall know them by what they oppose. Opposition to "America" (really Western culture)  has been transformed into virtue in the minds of the left. 

Humans have an innate desire to seek redemption, to seek the sacred: 

As if to vindicate Trilling and Hollander, amid the destruction, a new, quasi-religious source of meaning has sprung up. In a city where many churches remain closed in response to COVID-19, activists have barricaded a several-block area and erected a shrine to George Floyd. In describing the site, which has drawn pilgrims from around the nation, a local official ­unwittingly articulated the impulse at the heart of the adversary culture: “We have an obligation to keep sacred what is sacred.”

Today the nation that used to be America inaugurates a man who gained power by his own admission using "The greatest voter fraud organization in history". 

From this low point, it appears the "Adversary Culture" has "won" by devious means. What would you expect from a culture that reveres Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ortega, etc ?