Institutional Pluralism from the Standpoint of Its Victims: Calling the Question on Indiscriminate (In)Tolerance

Borrowing from postmodernity, new Right intellectuals have become adept at plucking core terms from the liberal register, stripping away their history and social context, and making them do the conceptual work of backlash. A recent example is the theme of the 2009 annual meeting of the AALS: institutional pluralism. The phrase has a surface resemblance to traditional liberal values but, in truth, acts as a Trojan horse for discrimination projects that man may find troubling. By putting the phrase in its social context, this essay reveals the ideological interests at work in the idea.