Sometimes history is a useful thing to know. Back in September 1993, Todd Gitlin, a former leader of Students for a Democratic Society (now how’s that for history!), and not someone anyone would mistake for anything like a “rightist” or “conservative,” discussed political correctness and identity politics.
He made some important observations in an article he authored for Harper’s magazine.
He noted what for a leftist seemed a “a troubling irony: the right, traditionally the custodian of the privileges of the few, now speaks in an apparently general language of merit, reason, individual rights, and virtue that transcends politics, whereas much of the left is so preoccupied with debunking generalizations and affirming the differences among groups (real as they often are) that it has ceded the very language of universality that is its birthright.”
This, some of us might note, is the underlying problem with “diversity, equity and inclusion” principles. The issue is not whether we have an obligation to rectify injustices. The issue is that we lost, in the process, any claim to other important principles, such as merit.
Though it seems ancient history now, for many of us who were college activists in the 1960s and 1970s, the principle was the unfairness of equally talented people not being treated fairly. We assumed the existence of equal talent and assumed that the unequal outcomes were related to suppression of that equal talent.
Some might have argued for outcomes not based on merit, talent, skill. I don’t recall hearing that as a policy prescription, but certainly some might have called for it.
But that is where reason and merit part ways. “In the academy but also outside it, standards and traditions are now viewed as nothing more than camouflage for particular interests,” Gitlin noted. In other words, “objective” standards either do not exist, are affectations of political power and not much more and therefore “do not matter” or should not be used.
That was not how I recall the movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, which was about the application of universality where particularism had reigned; the fulfillment of promises about equality before the law and in governance.
There was, of course, much feeling about lessening inequality, though much less emphasis on “equal” outcomes (fairness probably comes closer to the thought), which might strike most of us as contrary to our lived experiences.
Our experiences with amateur and professional sports likely come closest to our understanding that talent really is unequally possessed. Many of us in business or technology might have similar views about other elements of skill as well: they are unevenly distributed.
Gitlin’s observation might be equally relevant in 2025 as it was three decades ago: “We find ourselves today in a most peculiar situation: the left and right have traded places, at least with respect to the sort of universalist rhetoric that can still stir the general public.”
In other words, some focus on particularism, not universalism; that which divides, not that which unites.
All of which is a long way from the “anthem” some of us relished back then, in a song by the Youngbloods: “Come on, people now, smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now.”
Whatever else you think might be implied, those lyrics speak to universalism, unity, connection, caring and respect. Somewhere along the way, many leftists seem to have lost the plot.