whether it's a good description of their activities
Sure. (Actually, I think there is an important difference between a movement that says, in so many words, "throw away everything old and traditional" and one that isn't willing to be explicit about that. But I'm happy to leave that aside.) And the way it looks to me is not that the SJ movement wants to be rid of classical literature and traditional festivities, but that it wants classical literature taught, and traditional festivities celebrated, in ways that don't upset certain groups in certain ways.
Maybe that's a great idea, maybe it's a terrible one. But it's a long way from saying "out with everything that's old". The sort of "cultural appropriation" some university groups were complaining about at Halloween are actually a relatively new thing. Actual traditional Halloween has ghosts and skeletons and witches and the like, not people dressing up as Mexicans or putting on blackface. And slapping "trigger warnings" on the rapes in Ovid's Metamorphoses might be a waste of time, or might be overindulging people you would prefer not to indulge (though, for my part, I incline towards being generous with accommodations for rape victims) but it doesn't erase Ovid from the canon or stop anyone reading his poetry.
Surely there must be a point at which we have to conclude that this movement [...] is leaning all-the-more towards a largely futile quest to remake [culture] from the ground up.
Surely. But I don't see anything suggesting that we've reached that point, or that we're going to.
even the cultural revolutionnaires were somewhat limited in their effects
They were, but they got a damn sight further than the SJ movement has. I don't know how far that's because they were genuinely more extreme, and how far it's because they had the might of a totalitarian state backing them up -- but it's because they did so much damage that the Cultural Revolution has the deservedly terrible reputation it has. Just by way of reminder, here are a few examples (taken, because I am lazy, from Wikipedia):
Historical sites in every part of the country were ransacked and destroyed. [...] Beijing [...] where thousands of designated sites of historical interest were destroyed. [...]
Red Guards from Beijing Normal University desecrated and badly damaged the burial place of Confucius himself and numerous other historically significant tombs and artifacts. [...]
Libraries full of historical and foreign texts were destroyed; books were burned. Temples, churches, mosques, monasteries, and cemeteries were closed down and sometimes converted to other uses, looted, and destroyed. [...] Clergy were arrested and sent to camps; many Tibetan Buddhists were forced to participate in the destruction of their monasteries at gunpoint. [...]
Public security in China deteriorated rapidly as a result of central officials lifting restraints on violent behavior. Xie Fuzhi, the national police chief, said it was "no big deal" if Red Guards were beating "bad people" to death.
In the course of about two weeks, the violence left some one hundred teachers, school officials, and educated cadres dead in Beijing's western district alone. The number injured was "too large to be calculated." [...]
In August and September 1966, there were 1,772 people murdered in Beijing alone. In Shanghai there were 704 suicides and 534 deaths related to the Cultural Revolution in September. In Wuhan there were 62 suicides and 32 murders during the same period.
So I'll tell you what. When the SJ movement has destroyed one major historical site and murdered one person, get back to me and I'll willingly agree that the SJ movement, having done only three orders of magnitude less damage than the Cultural Revolution, can reasonably be put in the same pigeonhole for some purposes. Until then, I'm quite comfortable not summoning up the spectre of Mao to haunt us as we watch a few overzealous student societies asking for trigger warnings on classical literature.
The lead article on everydayfeminism.com on March 25:
3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism
(The link from "decolonization" is to "Decolonization is not a metaphor", to make it clear s/he means actually giving the land back to the Native Americans.)
I regularly see people who describe how social justice activists act accused of setting up a straw man. This article show that the bias of some SJWs against reason is impossible to strawman. The author argues at length that rationality is bad, and that justice arguments shouldn't be rational or be defended rationally. Ze is, or was, confused about what "rationality" means, but clearly now means it to include reason-based argumentation.
This isn't just some wacko's blog; it was chosen as the headline article for the website. I had to click around to a few other articles to make sure it wasn't a parody site.
But it isn't just a sign of how irrational the social justice movement is—it has clues to how it got that way.
The author came to hate "rationality" because s/he thought "rationality" meant "conventionality".
S/he didn't realize that white cis people don't use rationality either to understand their gender and social role. These are cultural values that parents deliberately program in before a child can become rational and come up with their own version.
Making my own inferences, I'd guess that
1. The author has had many unpleasant social experiences because of zis refusal to adopt a gender, and
2. The author is not a good reasoner, and while arguing over these experiences, often makes bad arguments, and gets told ze is irrational, and
3. The author is unable to distinguish discomfort with zis gender non-choice, from resistance to zis bad ideas, as having separate causes.
The 3 reasons are:
1. Being Rational Has No Inherent Value
2. Rationalism Is a Tool Made to Hurt Us
3. We Are Enough Without Rationalism
Also see the same site's recent article "4 Reasons Demanding ‘Objectivity’ in Social Justice Debates Can Be Oppressive".
ADDED, since I'm 50 karma in the hole anyway:
Ironically, today's "social justice" program demands a radical rationalism.
Social justice used to be a rationalist program on its surface, pointing out the irrationality of prejudice and the illogic in narratives used to justify oppression. But as society adjusted its pre-judgements closer to targets that were rational but still unequal, e.g., from "Women can't do engineering" to "Most women don't want to do engineering", the emphasis switched from being rational about our beliefs to irrationally assuming equality of everyone and everything, not just as a default starting point, but as a mandated endpoint. (Historically, this was tied to an influx of reality-denying continental philosophy into social activism in the 1960s.)
De-emphasizing rationality on its surface requires a more radical rationalism for its practical implementation. Changing social conventions has a cost. When we extend social justice beyond respect for difference that people have no choice over, such as race or sex, to roles that they choose, such as religion or gender, the justification for allowing everyone to defy any particular social convention must be a rational cost-benefit assessment. Many people enjoy the ritual interactions specified by social roles; they are part of their identities and one of their terminal values. A demand to give up these values must fall back onto consequentialist arguments.
(Is constant social pressure on the person doing the defying more important than thousands of irritations to the people who don't know how to deal with zim, and who feel their own identities inhibited in zis presence? I don't know. It's torture vs. dust specks.)
The new social justice program is ultimately to strip from human consciousness all shortcuts, biases, prejudices, pre-computations, and priors. This requires making each individual a rational consequentialist capable of reasoning zer way from every situation to a rational behavior. To know how to use social roles, people require either social heuristics (which will inevitably oppress somebody), or radical ends-based rationality. This is particularly true when people are allowed to unilaterally opt in or out of social roles, so that every situation has a mix of people demanding to be treated differently.
(It isn't clear whether priors are permissible in this rationality.)
Even the oppressed classes must be ideal rationalists (Homo economicus). If women are still allowed to prefer not to be computer programmers, or men are allowed to prefer not to raise children, a free market will make mandated equality cause, rather than alleviate, injustice.
Alternately, we could possibly say that social justice doesn't require radical rationality, provided that we allow no social roles (a commitment to radical individuality). This also imposes a cost in so far as social roles serve to increase social utility.