Framework independently turns and outweighs the case- their faux radicalism is responsible for massive environmental destruction and wealth inequality- they have no hope of changing the structures they critique

(Gregory, Adjunct Prof. of Philosophy @Baruch and Michael J. , Associate prof. Political Theory @William Patterson http://logosjournal.com/2015/thompson-zucker/)

These four elements of the new radical intellectuals and the movements they have influenced are in direct contradiction to the rational radicalism that we implicitly espouse here. On our reading, there is not only a theoretical but also a deeply political difference between what these theorists search for and the Enlightenment-inspired radical view of a social order marked by solidarity around common goods, civic virtue oriented toward the defense of the public welfare, well-ordered political institutions with public purpose as their aim, constitutionalism that secures individual as well as economic rights, and the democratization of social and economic life as basic criteria for social justice. The alternative move, marked by identity politics, anti-statism, direct and participatory democracy, and neo-anarchism, has succeeded in fragmenting and marginalizing left movements and politics. Perhaps even worse, these “new movements” lack any real constituency, have scarcely any concrete political demands, and are purposefully self-alienated from the levers of real power and policy.[22] As a result, a real, politically consequential left has withered. The political culture of western democracies are marked more by a general value-consensus around liberal-capitalism than any time since the late 1950s. Movements that once saw the true mechanisms of politics – the need to influence parties, to push for legislative reform, to insist on the expansion of the democratization of economic and political institutions, to forge ideologies that were rooted in national culture – have simply disappeared. Nietzsche’s insistence that aesthetics replace the political has now become manifest in this new radicalism. Now, so-called academic “radicals” can be seen to have betrayed politics: they dismiss the reality of the political process and instead call for an obscure and abstract “resistance.” Perhaps the basic thesis can be laid out that where there is no strong labor movement, there can be no robust left politics, and even less relevant left political theory. But whatever the explanation for the increased irrationalism of current left theory, we believe that these intellectuals should be held accountable for the ideas they promulgate. Staggering is the extent to which these radical mandarins self-confidently strut their stuff, even as political defeats mount for leftist politics with the increasing victory of “right to work” legislation, the dismantling of environmental protections, the increased power of corporate interests, and an expanding wealth and income divide. We take seriously the notion that there is a responsibility for intellectuals to debate and critique ideas that have public consequence; the effect of these thinkers and their ideas on the left we see as a primary concern. As Christopher Lasch once remarked, “Cultural radicalism has become so fashionable, and so pernicious in the support it unwittingly provides for the status quo, that any criticism of contemporary society that hopes to get beneath the surface has to criticize, at the same time, much of what currently goes under the name of radicalism.”[23] With this in mind, reviving the tradition of rational progressive politics can be saved only once these new radicals and their approaches have been interrogated and critiqued. Confronting the fashionable nonsense of the present requires that these their ideas be scrutinized against the more rationalist claims that have given shape to radical and critical thought since the Enlightenment, not to mention the common sense that the thinkers we address have sought to evade. We believe that the success of these thinkers and ideas marks a real and disturbing departure from the more rationalist, more realist understanding of progressive and radical politics that marked the more successful movements of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century.