As the liberal mind came to dominate Western culture, it turned out to be marvelously fertile in discovering more and more abstract classes of people constituted by their pain, people whom “we” had treated badly. These included not only the poor, but also indigenous peoples, women, victims of child abuse, gays, the disabled – indeed, potentially just about everybody except healthy heterosexual white males.
DBx: Yep.
Minogue immediately explains that he is here not denying wrongdoing by we Westerners or that some people have been unjustly discriminated against and harmed. His point, instead, is that liberalism metastasized in many minds into an illiberal project of exaggerating harm where it did exist, and even imagining it where it didn’t exist, in order to create abstract groups of victims who allegedly require salvation by these new ‘liberals.’ As Minogue writes later (page ix) of this 1999 Preface – writes about what is more accurately today called the progressive mind – “the politics of the liberal mind is a melodrama of oppressors and victims.”
