THE SUPERFICIAL APPEAL OF DECONSTRUCTING NORMS.

Salon contributor Kirk Swearingen offers one.  Trumpism has purchase, he argues, as an easy form of grievance for people accustomed to being insiders.

Well, they were reminded that there was such a thing as white privilege. They had forgotten about it, possibly on purpose.

They were told that, yes, white privilege is a thing, and it's pretty obvious. They fumed and feigned outrage at this accurate report on the state of the real world until they convinced themselves that it was a huge lie and an outrage. Coached by their favorite enablers in the media, they worked themselves up into an emotional lather until they could act their parts somewhat convincingly, even with all the unrealistic lines. Think of the Stanislavsky Method in acting, except this was the Limbaugh Method of acting out.

Of course it wasn't just about white privilege; that's just the most obvious aspect of the advantages that individuals or groups enjoy (or do not enjoy) in our society, without having to show any particular merit. When the renewed discussion of privilege was extended to male privilege, white men — incongruously led by an obese man-boy in orange makeup sporting a spun-sugar combover — embarked on their White Men's Campaign of Endless Grievances.

That's a predictable riff, it being easier to privilege-shame people than to engage in the serious work of encouraging the insiders to be receptive to the efforts of outsiders to participate in the social order, as well as to encourage the outsiders to appropriate the useful features of that order as their own.  Never mind that it's easy, it antagonizes the insiders, and it's wrong.

So many things in our society can be understood by thinking back to high school. Think of nearly any Hollywood film about suburban teenagers, in which the good-looking spoiled brats of the country-club set get their comeuppance in the third act after reveling in all sorts of bad behavior. These days, roughly a third of the country seems to be rooting for the obvious villains in a new version of that story, now unfolding in our troubled being democracy. It could be called "White Men Whining III: The Retribution," but honestly we've already been gifted the best possible title: "Florida: Where Woke Goes to Die."

Joking aside, the privileges afforded by stereotypical or conventional "good looks" — which generally implicate categories of race and class — are undeniable. Like all other forms of privilege, it provides people with entrée, a form of soft power that can corrupt one's thinking pretty quickly. Handsome boys and beautiful girls often age into vapid adults as a result of this privilege; they never had to put any effort into being accepted.

By Mr Swearingen's standards does the Columbine shooting of thirty years ago qualify as a comeuppance?

More to the point, might his defense of changing the Canon and the Curriculum not stand as a rebuke to the idea of denying coherent beliefs, a component of the philosophical rot that often comes bundled with the inclusion?

The fight against "woke" (a term with a longer history than most of us may realize) is strikingly similar to the fight the right previously waged against "politically correctness": It's an existential battle against allowing people to be awakened — by reading novels and history, by attending plays, by watching and listening to actual news — through open discussion of privilege or systemic racism or, to use a different but related term, the underlying and nearly invisible structures of caste in America. It is a fight to stop people from talking about those social structures, or about the combination of religious zealotry and political ideology at work to foreclose women's bodily autonomy. It's a fight to prevent young people from expressing their sexual and gender preferences, to make it more difficult for certain groups of citizens to vote, and to keep books that might make the most hypocritical and closed-minded evangelical Christian pastors uncomfortable off the shelves of public schools and libraries.

I don't know, perhaps if the purveyors of political correctness would lose their censoriousness, and stop hectoring us and calling it dialogue, we might be able to have those open discussions.  Mr Swearingen does nothing to reach out to the disaffected Normals who might not have been those mean-girls-cum-vapid-adults of Ridgemont High with that column.