Over at American Thinker, Paul Austin Murphy has a piece called "Postmodernism is Leftism" that perfectly articulates things I've felt for a long time. The thesis is that as socialism fell out of favor in the late 60s, philosophers committed to a leftist worldview constructed a new set of ideas, consciously or not, that kept socialist ideas alive.
He builds his article on a book by Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault . Hicks ties part of his thinking to a religious commitment to socialism. “You feel that socialism is true; you want it to be true; upon socialism you have pinned all your dreams of a peaceful and prosperous future society and all your hopes for solving the ills of our current society.”
Whatever the motivation, Murphy writes "It can be said that skeptical epistemology, deconstruction, etc. are all means to achieve the political ends which can't be sustained by truth, evidence and argumentation."
I've written here many times that the denial of objective truth cannot lead anywhere good. I've objected to postmodern nonsense time and time again. If there is no objective truth, and truth is a "mask to power", than all that is left is raw battle for power. If an existing political and social order is to be replaced, it first has to be delegitimized and destroyed. If that cannot be done by argumentation, then it is diabolically cunning to cut the roots away from the very concept of argumentation and truth.
