She neglects to mention the corrosive use of meaningless language that forms the insubstance of Protestant thinking these days. Needless to say, read the whole thing. It's far out!
Propelled by digital technology that spreads rhetorical fads like
herpes, this decade’s lengthy left-wing lexicon has impressively
penetrated both mainstream media and everyday speech, while carrying
ideological baggage so overstuffed that it wouldn’t fit in an airplane’s
overhead compartment. The idiom is persistently negative. Many of the
cringe-inducers I grew up with in the 1960s conveyed enthusiasm: “Way to
be!,” “Outta sight!,” “Far out!,” and “Dig that!” Subsequent
generations have also latched onto effusive expressions, such as
“Awesome!” and “That’s sick!” But the glossary particular to today’s
left is joylessly accusatory: “fat shaming,” “victim blaming,” or “rape
culture” (which indicts not only men but pretty much everything). As we
said in 1970, what a drag.
Front and center in overused progressive vocabulary is, of course,
“privilege.” From Lyndon Johnson onward, we’ve expressed concern for the
“underprivileged.” Shining a spotlight instead on the “privileged”
fosters resentment in people who feel shafted and an impotent guilt in
people at whom the label is hurled. The word functions something like a
rotten tomato without the mess. I myself have been decried in the Independent as “dripping with privilege,” while the writer Ariel Levy was portrayed in The New Republic as “swaddled in privilege.” This is a shape-shifting substance in which one can bathe or nestle.
Whereas a privilege can be acquired through merit—e.g., students with good grades got to go bowling with our teacher in sixth grade—privilege, sans the article, is implicitly unearned and undeserved. The designation neatly dispossesses those so stigmatized of any credit for their achievements while discounting as immaterial those hurdles an individual with a perceived leg up might still have had to overcome (an alcoholic parent, a stutter, even poverty). For privilege is a static state into which you are born, stained by original sin. Just as you can’t earn yourself into privilege, you can’t earn yourself out of it, either.