William Voegeli wrote an important book, Never Enough which I highly recommend.

In National Review he writes Why the Liberal Elite Will Never Check Its Privilege

It turns out that “social justice” amounts to noblesse oblige, simultaneously strengthening the obligations and social status of our meritocracy’s credentialed gentry. Literary scholar William Deresiewicz, a self-described democratic socialist, says that the rise of political correctness means that privilege laundering pervades the entire college experience, not just the admissions process. The ultimate purpose of political correctness, he contends, is to “flatter” the elite rather than dismantle it. In effect, socioeconomically advantaged students, professors, and administrators use political correctness to “alibi or erase their privilege,” to “tell themselves that they are . . . part of the solution to our social ills, not an integral component of the problem.” The social-justice warriors’ stridency belies, even to themselves, the fact that their aims are so limited.

For Reeves and Halikias, the protests that drove Charles Murray from Middlebury College had less to do with alleging and then thwarting racism than with “rich, ‘progressive’ protestors refusing to hear a lecture on the roots of their own privilege.” (The topic of Murray’s speech was to have been the growing gulf between the upper class and the rest of America.) Tellingly, Middlebury is even more selective and affluent than Hamilton College. Tied with Swarthmore as the fourth-highest-rated liberal-arts college in the U.S., Middlebury rejected 83 percent of its applicants in 2015. Fifty-five percent of students received no need-based financial aid, not surprising given that the median family income of those students is $244,300. Only 2.7 percent of its students come from families in the bottom fifth of America’s income distribution, and 24 percent come from the bottom four-fifths. At the other end, 4.4 percent come from the top thousandth, and 23 percent from the top hundredth.

Conservatives are right to be appalled by vituperative social-justice warriors. It’s oddly reassuring, however, that the “No justice, no peace” shock troops are as fraudulent as they are insolent. People’s true beliefs can be revealed by their words or, far more reliably, by their actions. Until kabuki radicalism gets around to requiring privileged students, parents, and colleges to surrender some of their own advantages rather than denounce privilege in general, the social-justice crusade deserves to be regarded with more contempt than alarm.

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