Recent Forum Topics › Forums › The Public House › Taibbi: has the left lost its mind
- This topic has 19 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated 4 years, 5 months ago by zn.
-
AuthorPosts
-
June 14, 2020 at 9:53 am #116520wvParticipant
Taibbi takes on a tricky subject here. I dont know what to think about it, yet.
============================
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55224.htmA flurry of newsroom revolts has transformed the American press
By Matt Taibbi
June 14, 2020 “Information Clearing House” – Sometimes it seems life can’t get any worse in this country. Already in terror of a pandemic, Americans have lately been bombarded with images of grotesque state-sponsored violence, from the murder of George Floyd to countless scenes of police clubbing and brutalizing protesters.
Our president, Donald Trump, is a clown who makes a great reality-show villain but is uniquely toolless as the leader of a superpower nation. Watching him try to think through two society-imperiling crises is like waiting for a gerbil to solve Fermat’s theorem. Calls to “dominate” marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from heaven at Trump’s crisis management and new unemployment numbers (“only” 21 million out of work!) were pure gasoline at a tinderbox moment. The man seems determined to talk us into civil war.
But police violence, and Trump’s daily assaults on the presidential competence standard, are only part of the disaster. On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described liberals, we’re watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.
The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.
They’ve conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it’s established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” out loud to a data scientist fired* from a research firm for — get this — retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones!
Now, this madness is coming for journalism. Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who’d made politically “problematic” editorial or social media decisions.
The New York Times, the Intercept, Vox, the Philadelphia Inquirier, Variety, and others saw challenges to management.
Probably the most disturbing story involved Intercept writer Lee Fang, one of a fast-shrinking number of young reporters actually skilled in investigative journalism. Fang’s work in the area of campaign finance especially has led to concrete impact, including a record fine to a conservative Super PAC: few young reporters have done more to combat corruption.
Yet Fang found himself denounced online as a racist, then hauled before H.R. His crime? During protests, he tweeted this interview with an African-American man named Maximum Fr, who described having two cousins murdered in the East Oakland neighborhood where he grew up. Saying his aunt is still not over those killings, Max asked:
I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?… Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it’s going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of… It’s stuff just like that that I just want in the mix.
Shortly after, a co-worker of Fang’s, Akela Lacy, wrote, “Tired of being made to deal continually with my co-worker @lhfang continuing to push black on black crime narratives after being repeatedly asked not to. This isn’t about me and him, it’s about institutional racism and using free speech to couch anti-blackness. I am so ####ing tired.” She followed with, “Stop being racist Lee.”
The tweet received tens of thousands of likes and responses along the lines of, “Lee Fang has been like this for years, but the current moment only makes his anti-Blackness more glaring,” and “Lee Fang spouting racist bullshit it must be a day ending in day.” A significant number of Fang’s co-workers, nearly all white, as well as reporters from other major news organizations like the New York Times and MSNBC and political activists (one former Elizabeth Warren staffer tweeted, “Get him!”), issued likes and messages of support for the notion that Fang was a racist. Though he had support within the organization, no one among his co-workers was willing to say anything in his defense publicly.
Like many reporters, Fang has always viewed it as part of his job to ask questions in all directions. He’s written critically of political figures on the center-left, the left, and “obviously on the right,” and his reporting has inspired serious threats in the past. None of those past experiences were as terrifying as this blitz by would-be colleagues, which he described as “jarring,” “deeply isolating,” and “unique in my professional experience.”
To save his career, Fang had to craft a public apology for “insensitivity to the lived experience of others.” According to one friend of his, it’s been communicated to Fang that his continued employment at The Intercept is contingent upon avoiding comments that may upset colleagues. Lacy to her credit publicly thanked Fang for his statement and expressed willingness to have a conversation; unfortunately, the throng of Intercept co-workers who piled on her initial accusation did not join her in this.
I first met Lee Fang in 2014 and have never known him to be anything but kind, gracious, and easygoing. He also appears earnestly committed to making the world a better place through his work. It’s stunning that so many colleagues are comfortable using a word as extreme and villainous as racist to describe him.
Though he describes his upbringing as “solidly middle-class,” Fang grew up in up in a diverse community in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and attended public schools where he was frequently among the few non-African Americans in his class. As a teenager, he was witness to the murder of a young man outside his home by police who were never prosecuted, and also volunteered at a shelter for trafficked women, two of whom were murdered. If there’s an edge to Fang at all, it seems geared toward people in our business who grew up in affluent circumstances and might intellectualize topics that have personal meaning for him.
In the tweets that got him in trouble with Lacy and other co-workers, he questioned the logic of protesters attacking immigrant-owned businesses “with no connection to police brutality at all.” He also offered his opinion on Martin Luther King’s attitude toward violent protest (Fang’s take was that King did not support it; Lacy responded, “you know they killed him too right”). These are issues around which there is still considerable disagreement among self-described liberals, even among self-described leftists. Fang also commented, presciently as it turns out, that many reporters were “terrified of openly challenging the lefty conventional wisdom around riots.”
Lacy says she never intended for Fang to be “fired, ‘canceled,’ or deplatformed,” but appeared irritated by questions on the subject, which she says suggest, “there is more concern about naming racism than letting it persist.”
Max himself was stunned to find out that his comments on all this had created a Twitter firestorm. “I couldn’t believe they were coming for the man’s job over something I said,” he recounts. “It was not Lee’s opinion. It was my opinion.”
By phone, Max spoke of a responsibility he feels Black people have to speak out against all forms of violence, “precisely because we experience it the most.” He described being affected by the Floyd story, but also by the story of retired African-American police captain David Dorn, shot to death in recent protests in St. Louis. He also mentioned Tony Timpa, a white man whose 2016 asphyxiation by police was only uncovered last year. In body-camera footage, police are heard joking after Timpa passed out and stopped moving, “I don’t want to go to school! Five more minutes, Mom!”
“If it happens to anyone, it has to be called out,” Max says.
Max described discussions in which it was argued to him that bringing up these other incidents now is not helpful to the causes being articulated at the protests. He understands that point of view. He just disagrees.
“They say, there has to be the right time and a place to talk about that,” he says. “But my point is, when? I want to speak out now.” He pauses. “We’ve taken the narrative, and instead of being inclusive with it, we’ve become exclusive with it. Why?”
There were other incidents. The editors of Bon Apetit and Refinery29 both resigned amid accusations of toxic workplace culture. The editor of Variety, Claudia Eller, was placed on leave after calling a South Asian freelance writer “bitter” in a Twitter exchange about minority hiring at her company. The self-abasing apology (“I have tried to diversify our newsroom over the past seven years, but I HAVE NOT DONE ENOUGH”) was insufficient. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editor, Stan Wischowski, was forced out after approving a headline, “Buildings matter, too.”
In the most discussed incident, Times editorial page editor James Bennet was ousted for green-lighting an anti-protest editorial by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton entitled, “Send in the troops.”
I’m no fan of Cotton, but as was the case with Michael Moore’s documentary and many other controversial speech episodes, it’s not clear that many of the people angriest about the piece in question even read it. In classic Times fashion, the paper has already scrubbed a mistake they made misreporting what their own editorial said, in an article about Bennet’s ouster. Here’s how the piece by Marc Tracy read originally (emphasis mine):
James Bennet, the editorial page editor of The New York Times, has resigned after a controversy over an Op-Ed by a senator calling for military force against protesters in American cities.
Here’s how the piece reads now:
James Bennet resigned on Sunday from his job as the editorial page editor of The New York Times, days after the newspaper’s opinion section, which he oversaw, published a much-criticized Op-Ed by a United States senator calling for a military response to civic unrest in American cities.
Cotton did not call for “military force against protesters in American cities.” He spoke of a “show of force,” to rectify a situation a significant portion of the country saw as spiraling out of control. It’s an important distinction. Cotton was presenting one side of the most important question on the most important issue of a critically important day in American history.
As Cotton points out in the piece, he was advancing a view arguably held by a majority of the country. A Morning Consult poll showed 58% of Americans either strongly or somewhat supported the idea of “calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces.” That survey included 40% of self-described “liberals” and 37% of African-Americans. To declare a point of view held by that many people not only not worthy of discussion, but so toxic that publication of it without even necessarily agreeing requires dismissal, is a dramatic reversal for a newspaper that long cast itself as the national paper of record.
Incidentally, that same poll cited by Cotton showed that 73% of Americans described protecting property as “very important,” while an additional 16% considered it “somewhat important.” This means the Philadelphia Inquirer editor was fired for running a headline – “Buildings matter, too” – that the poll said expressed a view held by 89% of the population, including 64% of African-Americans.
(Would I have run the Inquirer headline? No. In the context of the moment, the use of the word “matter” especially sounds like the paper is equating “Black lives” and “buildings,” an odious and indefensible comparison. But why not just make this case in a rebuttal editorial? Make it a teaching moment? How can any editor operate knowing that airing opinions shared by a majority of readers might cost his or her job?)
The main thing accomplished by removing those types of editorials from newspapers — apart from scaring the hell out of editors — is to shield readers from knowledge of what a major segment of American society is thinking.
It also guarantees that opinion writers and editors alike will shape views to avoid upsetting colleagues, which means that instead of hearing what our differences are and how we might address those issues, newspaper readers will instead be presented with page after page of people professing to agree with one another. That’s not agitation, that’s misinformation.
The instinct to shield audiences from views or facts deemed politically uncomfortable has been in evidence since Trump became a national phenomenon. We saw it when reporters told audiences Hillary Clinton’s small crowds were a “wholly intentional” campaign decision. I listened to colleagues that summer of 2016 talk about ignoring poll results, or anecdotes about Hillary’s troubled campaign, on the grounds that doing otherwise might “help Trump” (or, worse, be perceived that way).
Even if you embrace a wholly politically utilitarian vision of the news media – I don’t, but let’s say – non-reporting of that “enthusiasm” story, or ignoring adverse poll results, didn’t help Hillary’s campaign. I’d argue it more likely accomplished the opposite, contributing to voter apathy by conveying the false impression that her victory was secure.
After the 2016 election, we began to see staff uprisings. In one case, publishers at the Nation faced a revolt – from the Editor on down – after articles by Aaron Mate and Patrick Lawrence questioning the evidentiary basis for Russiagate claims was run. Subsequent events, including the recent declassification of congressional testimony, revealed that Mate especially was right to point out that officials had no evidence for a Trump-Russia collusion case. It’s precisely because such unpopular views often turn out to be valid that we stress publishing and debating them in the press.
In a related incident, the New Yorker ran an article about Glenn Greenwald’s Russiagate skepticism that quoted that same Nation editor, Joan Walsh, who had edited Greenwald at Salon. She suggested to the New Yorker that Greenwald’s reservations were rooted in “disdain” for the Democratic Party, in part because of its closeness to Wall Street, but also because of the “ascendance of women and people of color.” The message was clear: even if you win a Pulitzer Prize, you can be accused of racism for deviating from approved narratives, even on questions that have nothing to do with race (the New Yorker piece also implied Greenwald’s intransigence on Russia was pathological and grounded in trauma from childhood).
In the case of Cotton, Times staffers protested on the grounds that “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” Bennet’s editorial decision was not merely ill-considered, but literally life-threatening (note pundits in the space of a few weeks have told us that protesting during lockdowns and not protesting during lockdowns are both literally lethal). The Times first attempted to rectify the situation by apologizing, adding a long Editor’s note to Cotton’s piece that read, as so many recent “apologies” have, like a note written by a hostage.
Editors begged forgiveness for not being more involved, for not thinking to urge Cotton to sound less like Cotton (“Editors should have offered suggestions”), and for allowing rhetoric that was “needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate.” That last line is sadly funny, in the context of an episode in which reporters were seeking to pre-empt a debate rather than have one at all; of course, no one got the joke, since a primary characteristic of the current political climate is a total absence of a sense of humor in any direction.
As many guessed, the “apology” was not enough, and Bennet was whacked a day later in a terse announcement.
His replacement, Kathleen Kingsbury, issued a staff directive essentially telling employees they now had a veto over anything that made them uncomfortable: “Anyone who sees any piece of Opinion journalism, headlines, social posts, photos—you name it—that gives you the slightest pause, please call or text me immediately.”
All these episodes sent a signal to everyone in a business already shedding jobs at an extraordinary rate that failure to toe certain editorial lines can and will result in the loss of your job. Perhaps additionally, you could face a public shaming campaign in which you will be denounced as a racist and rendered unemployable.
These tensions led to amazing contradictions in coverage. For all the extraordinary/inexplicable scenes of police viciousness in recent weeks — and there was a ton of it, ranging from police slashing tires in Minneapolis, to Buffalo officers knocking over an elderly man, to Philadelphia police attacking protesters — there were also 12 deaths in the first nine days of protests, only one at the hands of a police officer (involving a man who may or may not have been aiming a gun at police).
Looting in some communities has been so bad that people have been left without banks to cash checks, or pharmacies to fill prescriptions; business owners have been wiped out (“My life is gone,” commented one Philly store owner); a car dealership in San Leandro, California saw 74 cars stolen in a single night. It isn’t the whole story, but it’s demonstrably true that violence, arson, and rioting are occurring.
However, because it is politically untenable to discuss this in ways that do not suggest support, reporters have been twisting themselves into knots. We are seeing headlines previously imaginable only in The Onion, e.g., “27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London.”
Even people who try to keep up with protest goals find themselves denounced the moment they fail to submit to some new tenet of ever-evolving doctrine, via a surprisingly consistent stream of retorts: #### you, shut up, send money, do better, check yourself, I’m tired and racist.
Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, who argued for police reform and attempted to show solidarity with protesters in his city, was shouted down after he refused to commit to defunding the police. Protesters shouted “Get the #### out!” at him, then chanted “Shame!” and threw refuse, Game of Thrones-style, as he skulked out of the gathering. Frey’s “shame” was refusing to endorse a position polls show 65% of Americans oppose, including 62% of Democrats, with just 15% of all people, and only 33% of African-Americans, in support.
Each passing day sees more scenes that recall something closer to cult religion than politics. White protesters in Floyd’s Houston hometown kneeling and praying to black residents for “forgiveness… for years and years of racism” are one thing, but what are we to make of white police in Cary, North Carolina, kneeling and washing the feet of Black pastors? What about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneeling while dressed in “African kente cloth scarves”?
There is symbolism here that goes beyond frustration with police or even with racism: these are orgiastic, quasi-religious, and most of all, deeply weird scenes, and the press is too paralyzed to wonder at it. In a business where the first job requirement was once the willingness to ask tough questions, we’ve become afraid to ask obvious ones.
On CNN, Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender was asked a hypothetical question about a future without police: “What if in the middle of the night, my home is broken into? Who do I call?” When Bender, who is white, answered, “I know that comes from a place of privilege,” questions popped to mind. Does privilege mean one should let someone break into one’s home, or that one shouldn’t ask that hypothetical question? (I was genuinely confused). In any other situation, a media person pounces on a provocative response to dig out its meaning, but an increasingly long list of words and topics are deemed too dangerous to discuss.
The media in the last four years has devolved into a succession of moral manias. We are told the Most Important Thing Ever is happening for days or weeks at a time, until subjects are abruptly dropped and forgotten, but the tone of warlike emergency remains: from James Comey’s firing, to the deification of Robert Mueller, to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, to the democracy-imperiling threat to intelligence “whistleblowers,” all those interminable months of Ukrainegate hearings (while Covid-19 advanced), to fury at the death wish of lockdown violators, to the sudden reversal on that same issue, etc.
It’s been learned in these episodes we may freely misreport reality, so long as the political goal is righteous. It was okay to publish the now-discredited Steele dossier, because Trump is scum. MSNBC could put Michael Avenatti on live TV to air a gang rape allegation without vetting, because who cared about Brett Kavanaugh – except press airing of that wild story ended up being a crucial factor in convincing key swing voter Maine Senator Susan Collins the anti-Kavanaugh campaign was a political hit job (the allegation illustrated, “why the presumption of innocence is so important,” she said). Reporters who were anxious to prevent Kavanaugh’s appointment, in other words, ended up helping it happen through overzealousness.
There were no press calls for self-audits after those episodes, just as there won’t be a few weeks from now if Covid-19 cases spike, or a few months from now if Donald Trump wins re-election successfully painting the Democrats as supporters of violent protest who want to abolish police. No: press activism is limited to denouncing and shaming colleagues for insufficient fealty to the cheap knockoff of bullying campus Marxism that passes for leftist thought these days.
The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of “balance,” i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This vision of media stressed accuracy, truth, and trust in the reader’s judgment as the routes to positive social change.
For all our infamous failings, journalists once had some toughness to them. We were supposed to be willing to go to jail for sources we might not even like, and fly off to war zones or disaster areas without question when editors asked. It was also once considered a virtue to flout the disapproval of colleagues to fight for stories we believed in (Watergate, for instance).
Today no one with a salary will stand up for colleagues like Lee Fang. Our brave truth-tellers make great shows of shaking fists at our parody president, but not one of them will talk honestly about the fear running through their own newsrooms. People depend on us to tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we’re afraid to do it?
I’m aware of this tweet suggesting the reasons for Shor’s firing are unknown. I stand by the characterization made in the piece.
June 14, 2020 at 10:07 am #116523znModeratorI always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?… Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it’s going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of… It’s stuff just like that that I just want in the mix.
Shortly after, a co-worker of Fang’s, Akela Lacy, wrote, “Tired of being made to deal continually with my co-worker @lhfang continuing to push black on black crime narratives after being repeatedly asked not to
I can’t speak to this particular incident.
It is nevertheless true that the “what about black on black crime” routine is THE go-to reactionary pushback motif used against BLM. There’s a whole thread on that: http://theramshuddle.com/topic/black-on-black-crime-is-the-reactionary-response-to-anti-police-brutality/
Even raising the issue misconstrues the moment (let alone the fact that the entire “black on black crime” thing is largely this fabrication). The moment isn’t whites killing blacks, it’s police revealing the effects of systemic racism.
In fact if you push the police reaction to black men hard enough, what you find is that the police believe black men are more likely to be criminals. So the entire “what about black on black crime” thing is one of the reasons so many police departments are the way they are.
….
June 14, 2020 at 11:14 am #116526Billy_TParticipantSome good, some not so good stuff in Taibbi’s column.
I know it’s by no means the main point, but I think he’s lost his mind regarding Trump, Russiagate, etc. etc. As did Greenwald, Mate and company before him. They’ve spent more time defending Trump — yes, that’s what it boils down to — than investigations of their own into his administration, and it’s not close. They’ve trapped themselves in this stance, cuz they think any investigation just helps those horrible corporate Dems.
Pizzes me off to no end.
First off, yes, a ton of evidence was produced to prove Trump colluded with Russia. Hell, his son finally had to admit to it, once we saw the emails. Taibbi, like all too many in the media, is hiding behind the irrelevant distinction between “no proof of conspiracy with Russia
to hack the DNC,” versus “collusion with Russia to aid the Trump campaign in the election.” The latter was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. The former was not, as Mueller said in his report.Also, it was Trump, not the Dems, who kept Russiagate in the news. Day after day after day, he tweeted, gave TV interviews about it, whined and moaned about how badly he had supposedly been treated, and endlessly spewed bogus counter-narratives. Trump desperately tried to keep it in the media cycle, thinking he could use this and the “deep state” narrative to his advantage. The Dem leadership actually tried to rein in their discussion under that barrage, because they thought it was hurting them, not him.
Anyway . . . on the larger points, I’ve always been against thought-police garbage, and in the age of Twitter mobs, they can be highly destructive. We could use an Orwell right now. But it seems Taibbi may be painting with a too broad brush, which will please reactionaries the world over, if they bother reading him.
June 16, 2020 at 7:37 pm #116631wvParticipantTaibbi responds to the criticism of his article:
June 17, 2020 at 12:45 am #116650Billy_TParticipantWV,
Have you read Robinson’s piece? Didn’t know he had responded to Taibbi until I saw your video. Thanks for posting.
The Current Affairs piece is excellent. He calmly, effectively, surgically destroys Taibbi’s (IMO) ludicrously broad-brushed complaints, and Taibbi should have quit while he was behind. MT’s rebuttal to the rebuttal was a big ol’ bust. He wasn’t able to adequately address a single point made by Robinson — well, at least not without twisting it like a pretzel.
Will quote a bit from the article tomorrow or later this week. Sad to see Taibbi choosing this hill — and The Hill — to plant his flag.
June 17, 2020 at 9:15 am #116654wvParticipantWV,
Have you read Robinson’s piece? Didn’t know he had responded to Taibbi until I saw your video. Thanks for posting.
The Current Affairs piece is excellent. He calmly, effectively, surgically destroys Taibbi’s (IMO) ludicrously broad-brushed complaints, and Taibbi should have quit while he was behind. MT’s rebuttal to the rebuttal was a big ol’ bust. He wasn’t able to adequately address a single point made by Robinson — well, at least not without twisting it like a pretzel.
Will quote a bit from the article tomorrow or later this week. Sad to see Taibbi choosing this hill — and The Hill — to plant his flag.
==================
Well, my gut tells me, Matt is just kinda defending a friend of his. Which is fine with me, but I dont know that there is really much of an issue there.
I dunno.
w
vJune 17, 2020 at 10:55 am #116660Billy_TParticipantWV,
Have you read Robinson’s piece? Didn’t know he had responded to Taibbi until I saw your video. Thanks for posting.
The Current Affairs piece is excellent. He calmly, effectively, surgically destroys Taibbi’s (IMO) ludicrously broad-brushed complaints, and Taibbi should have quit while he was behind. MT’s rebuttal to the rebuttal was a big ol’ bust. He wasn’t able to adequately address a single point made by Robinson — well, at least not without twisting it like a pretzel.
Will quote a bit from the article tomorrow or later this week. Sad to see Taibbi choosing this hill — and The Hill — to plant his flag.
==================
Well, my gut tells me, Matt is just kinda defending a friend of his. Which is fine with me, but I dont know that there is really much of an issue there.
I dunno.
w
vThat makes a lot of sense, WV. I think your hunch is a good one.
. . .
On the Tom Cotten issue. Taibbi’s stance on that surprises me as well. We really don’t need the NYT to give us the “other side” to the issue of “Should we use our military to violently crush dissent in our cities and towns?” etc. etc. That’s a bit like feeling the need to pair an Op-Ed by the victim of domestic abuse with one promoting domestic abuse.
And Robinson says something in his piece I’ve always felt too. It’s not a “free speech” issue when X or Y or Z is denied this or that platform for their views. It’s a choice by said platform to allocate its extremely limited space/time as they see fit. No one has a “right” to a particular platform/time/venue. If we did have that right, then everyone who was ever turned down for a speaking engagement at Harvard, Yale, the UN . . . or a book deal, or a movie deal, or a music contract, or a spot on the Rams, could claim their rights were violated and they were “silenced.” When the NYT gave Cotten that slot, it had to say No to countless others. Using Taibbi’s logic, those countless others were “silenced.”
etc. etc.
It’s probably a bit of a dead horse at this point, but will add a few thoughts later on the above issues.
June 17, 2020 at 11:08 am #116663CalParticipantRobinson’s criticism of Taibbi’s article is a perfect illustration of what Taibbi is criticizing. I’ll just use Robinson’s first example of the professor who created a controversy by not censoring MLK’s “Birmingham Jail” that intentionally uses provocative language and by showing disturbing images of a documentary about lynching even though some students objected.
A college history class should include material that does make people uncomfortable. Or if some material is inappropriate, the university should make that decision and share that expectation with the professor.
Robinson’s own solution to this situation seems to be part of the problem that Taibbi is criticizing.
Here’s Robinson:
Today I’m going to read from Letter From Birmingham Jail. The letter contains the n-word. I am considering saying it aloud because I think it’s important to hear exactly what King wrote rather than my censored version of what King wrote, but I know the word is very painful and if anyone would like to object, I will omit it. Also, I plan to screen a video about civil rights today that contains both the word and a graphic depiction of lynching. The video uses these on the theory that it is important for us to see and hear the uncomfortable truth.” I think actually when you present things this way students will feel respected and are less likely to complain. The problem was actually that the professor did not care what the students thought of what he did and said.
Sorry, 18 year olds don’t get to decide what is censored. Again, if the university and professionals want to make that decision, fine.
Here’s the problem with Robinson’s suggestion: What if a racist student or a student who just wants to be an ass objects to seeing a documentary with disturbing images or objects to reading a poem about a lynching? Do you omit an important part of the course because of one objection?
The link that Robinson contains a sentence about protesters calling for the firing of the history professor in this example AND another professor who refused to delay or cancel exams at UCLA because of Floyd’s death.
_________________________________________
Richard Wright–“Between the World and Me”And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth
into my throat till I swallowed my own blood.
My voice was drowned in the roar of their voices, and my
black wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as
they bound me to the sapling.
And my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from
me in limp patches.
And the down and quills of the white feathers sank into
my raw flesh, and I moaned in my agony.
Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a
baptism of gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs
Panting, begging I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot
sides of death.- This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Cal.
June 17, 2020 at 1:02 pm #116667Billy_TParticipantPersonally, I don’t see it as “censorship” at all to not say one word out of hundreds — much less ask for a bit of an explanation before making the decision to say it or not. My own take, for instance, on reading a literary excerpt to a class, if I were teaching it . . .
Say we’re reading Huck Finn or Beloved. Students are tasked with reading the entire book, as written. But if I’m going to read a part out loud, I find a passage that doesn’t contain the N word, if at all possible. And if it’s not, I choose not to say it in the midst of the rest of the passage. That’s not “censoring” the work, IMO. Students still see the word. They know it’s there. They have it in front of them. They just don’t hear me repeating it. Nothing/ no one is being “silenced.” The authors are not being “silenced.” Their words — all of them — live on in my classroom. I just choose not to repeat that word to them in my own voice.
It would, OTOH, be “censorship” if the books were banned. It would be a form of “silencing” if Cotton, for instance, couldn’t find any place to voice his views. But he’s a powerful senator, and he’s never had that problem. There is no lack of venues readily available for him to publish his various idiocies.
I remember the furor by some on the right when one newspaper decided to stop publishing George Will. He was, at the time, syndicated in more than 400 outlets, and just one decided no mas. I think it was over an article of his that dismissed the prevalence of sexual assault on campuses.
So he’s still got more than 400 outlets publishing after that one says No. But umpteen conservatives raved and ranted about how “liberals” were supposedly denying him his “free speech rights” and trying to “silence” him. If having a weekly column in more than 400 newspapers is being “silenced,” I’d gladly sign up for that.
To me, Taibbi, in his rebuttal to the rebuttal, tries to make it sound like Robinson skipped over any and all rationales for his (Robinson’s) critique of Taibbi. My take is that it was Taibbi who did exactly that. Robinson was detailed and, again, surgical in providing the whys and wherefores regarding that critique.
June 17, 2020 at 2:16 pm #116671waterfieldParticipantIn fact if you push the police reaction to black men hard enough, what you find is that the police believe black men are more likely to be criminals. S
Why do you think that is ?
June 17, 2020 at 2:30 pm #116672CalParticipant“Censored” was a poor choice of words on my part–Taibbi is talking about something more nuanced and I don’t think he used that word at all.
Taibbi’s complaint is that important ideas and discourse are eliminated and hidden because they make people uncomfortable. But that’s exactly the reason why MLK used “nigger boy” in his “Birmingham Jail Letter.” King used that epithet to make people uncomfortable and show the hatred spewed by white supremacy governments in the South.
I guess you can teach that by just avoiding Dr. King’s language, but using the language seems more effective at evoking the outrage Dr. King is trying to communicate.
The video showing images of lynching that the professor received complaints about reveals the same problem. Should teachers avoid showing troubling images like that or the images of the Holocaust that we can probably all recall? Should students get to avoid reading the Richard Wright poem i quoted because it contains a troubling image of someone being lynched when that is exactly what Wright seems to be trying to capture and preserve for posterity?
Taibbi is railing against an effort to remove those types of discussions and ideas from the public discourse. The ridiculousness of this case at UCLA is a good example.
Do you think that professor–probably an adjunct with little power and little pay–will teach that part of US History by using Dr. King’s Letter or a video showing the horrors of segregated America? If I was him, I wouldn’t. It seems like too much of a headache.
Again that’s Taibbi’s point, but to Robinson this is an example of Taibbi being like Fox News.
June 17, 2020 at 3:05 pm #116673wvParticipantRobinson’s criticism of Taibbi’s article is a perfect illustration of what Taibbi is criticizing. I’ll just use Robinson’s first example of the professor who created a controversy by not censoring MLK’s “Birmingham Jail” that intentionally uses provocative language and by showing disturbing images of a documentary about lynching even though some students objected.
A college history class should include material that does make people uncomfortable. Or if some material is inappropriate, the university should make that decision and share that expectation with the professor.
Robinson’s own solution to this situation seems to be part of the problem that Taibbi is criticizing.
Here’s Robinson:
Today I’m going to read from Letter From Birmingham Jail. The letter contains the n-word. I am considering saying it aloud because I think it’s important to hear exactly what King wrote rather than my censored version of what King wrote, but I know the word is very painful and if anyone would like to object, I will omit it. Also, I plan to screen a video about civil rights today that contains both the word and a graphic depiction of lynching. The video uses these on the theory that it is important for us to see and hear the uncomfortable truth.” I think actually when you present things this way students will feel respected and are less likely to complain. The problem was actually that the professor did not care what the students thought of what he did and said.
Sorry, 18 year olds don’t get to decide what is censored. Again, if the university and professionals want to make that decision, fine.
Here’s the problem with Robinson’s suggestion: What if a racist student or a student who just wants to be an ass objects to seeing a documentary with disturbing images or objects to reading a poem about a lynching? Do you omit an important part of the course because of one objection?
The link that Robinson contains a sentence about protesters calling for the firing of the history professor in this example AND another professor who refused to delay or cancel exams at UCLA because of Floyd’s death.
_________________________________________
Richard Wright–“Between the World and Me”And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth
into my throat till I swallowed my own blood.
My voice was drowned in the roar of their voices, and my
black wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as
they bound me to the sapling.
And my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from
me in limp patches.
And the down and quills of the white feathers sank into
my raw flesh, and I moaned in my agony.
Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a
baptism of gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs
Panting, begging I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot
sides of death.=====================
Well, I am having trouble focusing in on what the issue is exactly. Maybe i’m just having a pandemic-fuzzy-thinking week, I dunno.
But i can think of all kinds of ‘gray area examples’ that go in various directions. What if a BLM protest representative is being interviewed about how black men are being victimized…and the interviewer says “what about how black men victimize black women?” Well…shit. Men ‘do’ victimize women, so there is something important about the question. But what is the agenda here? And is the timing of the question right? But shouldnt we be able to discuss all tricky issues? Etc, etc, and so forth.
To your professor example — Maybe the kids arent really ‘deciding what gets censored’ — maybe the professor is just being sensitive, or nice, or open to listening and dialogue about stuff. I dunno. It depends on so many factors, and motivations. For me, the issue can unwind in so many directions it just gets….unfocused. Or i get unfocused. I dunno.
Heck Taibbi even brought up Russiagate. Which is a whole can of worms by itself, which i will not open, here. 🙂
I got nuthin.
w
v
———–
“To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:
1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
3. Charity is immoral.
4. Pay for your own fucking schools.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
———–
“Most people, when they imagine New England, think about old colonial homes, white houses with black shutters, whales, and sexually morbid WASPs with sensible vehicles and polite political opinions. This is incorrect. If you want to get New England right, just imagine a giant mullet in paint-stained pants and a Red Sox hat being pushed into the back of a cruiser after a bar fight.”
― Matt Taibbi, Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season
————
“The basic scam in the Internet age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out fiftieth-story windows, and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
—————-
“Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no felony cases. But when the stakes are in the hundreds of dollars, we kick in 26,000 doors a year, in just one county.”
― Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
————
“Our prison population, in fact, is now the biggest in the history of human civilization. There are more people in the United States either on parole or in jail today (around 6 million total) than there ever were at any time in Stalin’s gulags. For what it’s worth, there are also more black men in jail right now than there were in slavery at its peak.”
― Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
——————————–
June 17, 2020 at 4:18 pm #116681Billy_TParticipantRobinson isn’t saying there aren’t examples of overzealous “activism” here and there that we should look at, including in the classroom. He’s saying that Taibbi is wrong to categorize this as some kind of “movement,” or a sign that “the left has lost its mind.”
That would be my issue with Taibbi’s broad brush as well. It’s also where the “Fox News” comparison comes in, cuz it’s exactly what they try to do, all the time:
Make isolated examples into some kind of “movement” or . . . in the case of the protests, a supposedly dangerous development.
After quoting Taibbi at length, Robinson responds with this:
These are serious accusations. There is a whole new movement, an intellectual revolution, which is conning organizations, threatening people, destroying our belief in free inquiry, and persecuting thoughtcrime. This movement is apparently called “the American left.”
This is a thesis you may have heard before. It is the Fox News view of leftism, which says that leftists are a bunch of intolerant, social justice-obsessed intellectual Stalinists. Like Fox News, Taibbi collapses any distinction between “leftists” and “liberals,” sometimes using one term, sometimes the other, to describe the same group. The headline actually says “The American press,” then he says he’s talking about “the American left,” then says that “among self-described liberals, we’re watching an intellectual revolution.”
We on the Left tend to critique the Fox News view of us for a number of reasons. First, it is clear that much of the Left does not do any of this. The most prominent leftist in the country is Bernie Sanders. The most popular leftist magazine in the country is Jacobin. Do the tendencies Taibbi describes emanate from the pages of Jacobin? They do not. Instead, he is speaking about a “mob of upper-class social media addicts.” Well, who are we talking about exactly? Are we talking about left magazines? The Sunrise Movement? The DSA? I suspect that to the extent that Taibbi is referring to a group of people that can be clearly defined, they are probably liberal members of that “professional managerial class” that leftists distance themselves from. (Taibbi cites things MSNBC does, for example. I assure you the Left does not respect MSNBC.)
But I am already assuming that there is something solid about Taibbi’s argument, and that we can skip to identifying the party responsible. However, I actually think that the thing he’s describing, in many ways simply doesn’t exist. Because when we look at the examples he cites as proof of this all-consuming trend in leftism and the media, we find that they range from “things that Taibbi is just completely misrepresenting” to “things that seem like bad decisions but not really worth invoking the specter of Robespierre to describe.”
Often, I’ve found that when you actually click the links on stories about how the “social justice warriors” or “wokescolds” or “cancel culture” doers are getting wildly out of control, you find that the facts are far more nuanced than critics want you to believe. For example, Taibbi cites an instance of “a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ out loud.” This sounds so extreme that I doubted whether it was true, and indeed it isn’t. The students actually complained because when the (white) professor read “Letter from Birmingham Jail” aloud, he chose to say the n-word rather than censoring it. And when Black students told him they would have preferred if he’d omitted the word, he apparently doubled down and said being white didn’t mean he couldn’t say the n-word. (Students were apparently also upset that he had shown them a video containing the n-word and graphic pictures of lynchings, apparently without having had a conversation about it.)
I could have bolded a lot more of the above, but limited it to just a bit . . . .
June 17, 2020 at 4:24 pm #116682Billy_TParticipantGoing back to the George Will example, which is my own, not Robinson’s or Taibbi’s. To make a case, one would have to show a pattern of “silencing” or “censorship” or “violation of free speech rights.” Without that, it really comes down to less than a tempest in a tea pot.
Given the fact that roughly 422 out of 423 outlets kept publishing George Will, the “pattern” was that, not the one outlet that cancelled him.
Taibbi failed utterly to show any kind of pattern of this sort of thing, via his examples, and could not remotely even suggest that there was some kind of movement afoot on “the left” to do so. Scattered, isolated, and rather dubious and easily contested examples do not make a pattern. But they do make a good day’s work on Fox News.
IMO, we have far, far bigger fish to fry.
June 17, 2020 at 4:34 pm #116683Billy_TParticipantWV,
I know you don’t want to open up that can . . . so I will lift the lid just a tad:
;>)
Taibbi mentioned the Steele Dossier. That, IMO, is a major major straw man. Why? Cuz the Dems never talk or talked about it, and it’s incredibly rare that the WaPo or the NYT or even MSNBC do, either.
Mueller didn’t use it, or bring it up when he testified. Nor did Comey before him, when he started investigating the Trump campaign in July of 2016 (and hid this investigation from America). I can’t recall a single mention of it in the impeachment hearings by any Dem. But Republicans, including Trump, brought/bring up its supposed centrality constantly. They’re still riding that horse in their current investigation of the investigation (Lindsay Graham’s committee).
Taibbi is pretty much echoing a GOP talking point, which no one but the GOP uses.
Buzzfeed published it, so “the left” has lost its mind? This is kind of like saying “the left” is X, Y and Z because Jimmy Kimmel says something something on Late Night.
Sheesh.
- This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Billy_T.
June 17, 2020 at 7:51 pm #116688wvParticipantWV,
I know you don’t want to open up that can . . . so I will lift the lid just a tad:
;>)
Taibbi mentioned the Steele Dossier. That, IMO, is a major major straw man. Why? Cuz the Dems never talk or talked about it, and it’s incredibly rare that the WaPo or the NYT or even MSNBC do, either.
Mueller didn’t use it, or bring it up when he testified. Nor did Comey before him, when he started investigating the Trump campaign in July of 2016 (and hid this investigation from America). I can’t recall a single mention of it in the impeachment hearings by any Dem. But Republicans, including Trump, brought/bring up its supposed centrality constantly. They’re still riding that horse in their current investigation of the investigation (Lindsay Graham’s committee).
Taibbi is pretty much echoing a GOP talking point, which no one but the GOP uses.
Buzzfeed published it, so “the left” has lost its mind? This is kind of like saying “the left” is X, Y and Z because Jimmy Kimmel says something something on Late Night.
Sheesh.
====================
Well, I dont agree or disagree with Taibbi, and i dont agree or disagree with Robinson. My brain just refuses to engage in ‘it’ and I ‘think’ the reason is this — I’ve been reading a lot of commie-memoirs this summer. I dunno why, but thats what I did in April and May. And over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, I read stories about leftists attacking other leftists. Groups forming and then factions and cracks and fissures tear the leftists apart. Heck even the FBI used to laugh about it. It got to where they stopped playing dirty tricks on the Black Panthers and some Commie groups, because the groups themselves were tearing themselves apart.Thats been on my mind a lot. And i see Taibbi as one of us. And i see Robinson as one of us. Two fine leftists.
And i just do not have the will to pick one of them apart. It just seems like something the RIGHT would LOVE to see.
Now you could say “well Taibbi started it” — but i dont care. I just see Taibbi as venting a little bit about some shit that bothers him. Next week he’ll be back to writing great stuff.
w
vJune 17, 2020 at 11:00 pm #116694Billy_TParticipant====================
Well, I dont agree or disagree with Taibbi, and i dont agree or disagree with Robinson. My brain just refuses to engage in ‘it’ and I ‘think’ the reason is this — I’ve been reading a lot of commie-memoirs this summer. I dunno why, but thats what I did in April and May. And over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, I read stories about leftists attacking other leftists. Groups forming and then factions and cracks and fissures tear the leftists apart. Heck even the FBI used to laugh about it. It got to where they stopped playing dirty tricks on the Black Panthers and some Commie groups, because the groups themselves were tearing themselves apart.Thats been on my mind a lot. And i see Taibbi as one of us. And i see Robinson as one of us. Two fine leftists.
And i just do not have the will to pick one of them apart. It just seems like something the RIGHT would LOVE to see.
Now you could say “well Taibbi started it” — but i dont care. I just see Taibbi as venting a little bit about some shit that bothers him. Next week he’ll be back to writing great stuff.
w
vWV,
I deleted various responses a host of times, trying to make this more Old Hacker size, while still effectively expressing my thoughts, and I just couldn’t do it. Things kept spinning away from me and growing and growing, etc. So I’ll just write this and then try again tomorrow or the next day to clarify. Or not.
;>)
I think Taibbi is doing just what you say we shouldn’t do. Attack our own. That’s kinda my whole point throughout this thread. I know you don’t want to get into “it,” but, for me, there’s no escaping that. I want “leftists” to deal with imminent threats, real threats, real crises, and nothing Taibbi wrote about rates as that, IMO, and most of it seems to be petty in-fighting. And it helps the right. It helps the right’s propaganda tropes that “the left” is intolerant and “Stalinist,” etc. etc. . . . and that it isn’t diverse, and can all be lumped in together, from the corporate Dems to we socialist/left-anarchists who read Kropotkin, Morris, Reclus, Nearing, Luxemberg, etc. etc.
It’s an echo of a quandary of an enigma of a dilemma, but Taibbi, Dore, Ball, Mate and company need to realize that their apparent reluctance to go after Trump seriously, dangerously helps the “far right.” Their belief that they can’t do it, that they have to concentrate on the DNC and the MSM, instead of the people actually in power, just makes it that much more difficult to mount an effective opposition. Hell, if leftists don’t fight against the “far right,” who will? And they aint doing that when they spend all their time going after “corporate Dems,” etc. etc.
I’ll leave it there.
July 10, 2020 at 7:04 pm #117839znModeratorThe Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism
The critics of progressive identity politics have got it all wrong: They’re the illiberal ones.Osita Nwanevu
It was always a given that 2020 would be a year to remember. Even so, it continues to surprise. It seems likely that June will go down as one of the pivotal months of our political era, a period when our streets, our press, and some of our major institutions were rocked by the force of progressive identity politics. Conversations over the implications of all that’s happened in recent weeks will continue for some time. One of the more active debates is whether our recent social controversies should be seen as further evidence for the advent of what the writer Wesley Yang has called a “successor ideology” that might supplant liberalism altogether.
This was the conclusion of an essay on upheaval in the media from journalist Matt Taibbi. “The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation,” he wrote. “They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.” In another recent essay, New York’s Andrew Sullivan charged that progressives now believe “the liberal system is itself a form of white supremacy” and that “liberalism’s core values and institutions cannot be reformed and can only be dismantled.”
Versions of this argument have been circulating for over half a decade now. In a 2015 piece, New York’s Jonathan Chait warned readers to take a series of then-recent campus controversies seriously. “The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over,” he wrote. “It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism.”
Now, it really would be quite remarkable if American students and activists had, within the space of five or so years, constructed or wandered into a real and novel alternative to the dominant political ideology of the last few centuries. But they haven’t. The tensions we’ve seen lately have been internal to liberalism for ages: between those who take the associative nature of liberal society seriously and those who are determined not to. It is the former group, the defenders of progressive identity politics, who in fact are protecting—indeed expanding—the bounds of liberalism. And it is the latter group, the reactionaries, who are most guilty of the illiberalism they claim has overtaken the American Left.
The word “liberalism” has grown many bizarre and contradictory appendages and meanings over the years, particularly in the United States, but the original ideas central to it are fairly clear. Liberalism is an ideology of the individual. Its first principle is that each and every person in society is possessed of a fundamental dignity and can claim certain ineradicable rights and freedoms. Liberals believe, too, in government by consent and the rule of law: The state cannot exercise wholly arbitrary power, and its statutes bind all equally.
Overall, the liberal ideal is a diverse, pluralistic society of autonomous people guided by reason and tolerance. The dream is harmonious coexistence. But liberalism also happens to excel at generating dissensus, and some of the major sociopolitical controversies of the past few years should be understood as conflicts not between liberalism and something else but between parties placing emphasis on different liberal freedoms—chiefly freedom of speech, a popular favorite which needs no introduction, and freedom of association, the under-heralded right of individuals to unite for a common purpose or in alignment with a particular set of values. Like free speech, freedom of association has been enshrined in liberal democratic jurisprudence here and across the world; liberal theorists from John Stuart Mill to John Rawls have declared it one of the essential human liberties. Yet associative freedom is often entirely absent from popular discourse about liberalism and our political debates, perhaps because liberals have come to take it entirely for granted.
For instance, while public universities in America are generally bound by the First Amendment, controversial speakers have no broad right to speak at private institutions. Those institutions do, however, have a right to decide what ideas they are and aren’t interested in entertaining and what people they believe will or will not be useful to their communities of scholars—a right that limits the entry and participation not only of public figures with controversial views but the vast majority of people in our society. Senators like Tom Cotton have every right to have their views published in a newspaper. But they have no specific right to have those views published by any particular publication. Rather, publications have the right—both constitutionally as institutions of the press, and by convention as collections of individuals engaged in lawful projects—to decide what and whom they would or would not like to publish, based on whatever standards happen to prevail within each outlet.
When a speaker is denied or when staffers at a publication argue that something should not have been published, the rights of the parties in question haven’t been violated in any way. But what we tend to hear in these and similar situations are criticisms that are at odds with the principle that groups in liberal society have the general right to commit themselves to values which many might disagree with and make decisions on that basis. There’s nothing unreasonable about criticizing the substance of such decisions and the values that produce them. But accusations of “illiberalism” in these cases carry the implication that nonstate institutions under liberalism have an obligation of some sort to be maximally permissive of opposing ideas—or at least maximally permissive of the kinds of ideas critics of progressive identity politics consider important. In fact, they do not.
Associative freedom is no less vital to liberalism than the other freedoms, and is actually integral to their functioning. There isn’t a right explicitly enumerated in the First Amendment that isn’t implicitly dependent on or augmented by similarly minded individuals having the right to come together. Most people worship with others; an assembly or petition of one isn’t worth much; the institutions of the press are, again, associations; and individual speech is functionally inert unless some group chooses to offer a venue or a platform. And political speech is, in the first place, generally aimed at stirring some group or constituency to contemplation or action.
Ultimately, associative freedom is critical because groups and associations are the very building blocks of society. Political parties and unions, nonprofits and civic organizations, whole religions and whole ideologies—individuals cannot be meaningfully free unless they have the freedom to create, make themselves part of, and define these and other kinds of affiliations. Some of our affiliations, including the major identity categories, are involuntary, and this is among the complications that makes associative freedom as messy as it is important. Just as the principle of free speech forces us into debates over hate speech, obscenity, and misinformation, association is the root of identity-based discrimination and other ills. The Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County banning employment discrimination on the basis of LGBTQ identity last month was a huge step forward, but in practice, workers of all stripes often lack the means and opportunity to defend themselves from unjust firings—all the more reason for those preoccupied with “cancel culture” and social media–driven dismissals to support just-cause provisions and an end to at-will employment.
What about the oft-repeated charge that progressives today intend to establish “group rights” over and above the rights of the individual—that, specifically, minorities and certain disadvantaged groups are to be given more rights than, and held as superior to, white people? If this were the case, the critics of left “illiberalism” would truly be onto something: Individual rights are, again, at the center of liberal thought.
But that divergence isn’t anywhere to be found in any of the major controversies that have recently captured broad attention. A minority chef who says she wants to be paid as much as her white colleagues has not said that white people are inferior; an unarmed black man under the knee of a policeman and begging for his life is not asking to be conferred a special privilege. The goal is parity, not superiority. The heart of the protests and cultural agitation we’ve witnessed has clearly been a desire to see minorities treated equally—sharing the rights to which all people are entitled but that have been denied to many by society’s extant bigots and the residual effects of injustices past.
Ultimately, it’s the realities of our collective past that make the notion that progressives are dragging the country toward illiberalism especially ridiculous. Over the course of two and a half centuries in this country, millions of human beings held as property toiled for the comfort and profit of already wealthy people who tortured and raped them. Just over 150 years ago, the last generation of slaves was released into systems of subjugation from which its descendants have not recovered. August will mark just 100 years since women were granted the right to vote; Black Americans, nominally awarded that right during Reconstruction, couldn’t take full advantage of it until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The litany of other inequities and crimes our country has perpetrated and continues to perpetrate against Native Americans, immigrants, religious and sexual minorities, political dissidents, and the poor is endless. All told, liberal society in the U.S. is, at best, just over half a century old: If it were a person, it would be too young to qualify for Medicare.
Critics of progressive identity politics frequently argue that progressives seem congenitally incapable of recognizing the progress our country has made. But to take that progress seriously is to recognize that much of what has recently been dubbed progressive illiberalism these past few weeks and years has been the stirring of a diverse nation at what is inarguably liberalism’s zenith. Any given vandal taking down a statue of Grant or Lincoln or Washington is more committed to the cardinal liberal principles than any of those leaders were; most Americans today take the rights and autonomy of minorities and women entirely for granted, and they simply did not. Our noble defenders of historical statuary will continue to argue loudly that they could not, and issue complaints about holding the major figures of our past to today’s standards, our need for heroes to venerate, and all the rest. But whether or not one agrees, our social tumult should be seen, on balance, as evidence of our country’s movement forward—toward the liberal ideal and not away from it. One cannot claim otherwise without doing violence to a morbid, violent history.
That history isn’t finished with us; the material disadvantages facing minorities remain grotesque. The net worth of the median white family was roughly 10 times the net worth of the median Black family in 2016; The New York Times’ David Leonhardt wrote recently that the wage gap between white and Black men remains roughly as large as it was in 1950. Then there are all the challenges that sit atop material disadvantage, which shouldn’t actually imply that they are prior in importance, even if they appear to occupy the bulk of the media’s attention at times. But until policymakers get serious about making them economically whole, and inevitably long after they do, minorities making their way through the world will have to contend with an inescapable reality: Even absent conscious animus, white people can be blind to the way their actions impact minorities and the barriers they continue to face.
That isn’t a problem that can be addressed by law or within formal politics: All we can do here is think critically about our personal lives, our culture, and the places where we live and work and consider how we might make them more equitable—from making meaningful efforts to hire, admit, or represent the historically underrepresented to establishing norms that ensure they can be heard and respected. Obviously, these are the subjects most grating to critics of progressive identity politics; at this point, their grievances against affirmative action, in particular, are both well-known and well-worn and will not be relitigated here. Far more interesting is the reactionary turn against etiquette.
Not long ago, conservative columnists moaned endlessly about the decline of manners and patriarchal chivalry—killed off, they grumbled, by the feminists and “relativists” of the left. Naturally, now that we’ve arrived at what is functionally the Appomattox of the twentieth century’s culture wars, we’re urgently being told by a new set of elite thinkers that customs and mores are inherently dangerous and incompatible with the liberal project.
In his essay last month, Chait charged that progressives now “interpret political debates as pitting the interests of opposing groups rather than opposing ideas.” But that, at bottom, is what political debates are. Ideas don’t float into the political arena on their own. They’re advanced by people shaped by particular backgrounds and a thicket of material and social interests. That doesn’t mean that ideas can’t be knocked down on their own merits or that truly individual selves can’t be recovered or created when people are unburdened from the weight of limiting circumstance. What it does mean is that people should not be pathologized or condescended to for banding together to make particular claims or defend particular values. This is the root of not only identity politics but all political activity. It is what we are all doing all the time.
Inevitably, the new wave of progressive identity politics has produced and will continue to produce overreach and excesses. Will there be genuine crises? Well, within living memory, the fringes on the left and within the civil rights movement took up arms to make themselves ready for a hot war with the rest of American society. It seems likely that society can sustain toppled statues and rechristened institutions.
How should we refer to these new, committed critics of progressive identity politics? A few weeks ago, The New York Times’ Bari Weiss included many of them in the discourse in a three-tweet thread recommending writers and thinkers for those “looking for people to explain this moment.” It was Weiss who famously dubbed a particular cadre of these figures the “Intellectual Dark Web” in 2018. That name, a clunker even then, simply won’t do for the group as a whole now. For starters, there’s nothing particularly dark or inaccessible about major publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic, where their writings or the substance of their opinions are often found. The phrase also seems to imply it’s merely describing a scene or a location for certain debates, when Weiss had actually identified the leading lights of a particular ideological disposition—one we might call “reactionary liberalism.”
It’s “reactionary” liberalism not just because many of the figures in this sphere happen to be right of center on certain social issues, but also because they are incredibly reactive. Viral stories and anecdata that people focused on the major issues of our day might consider marginal are, for Weiss and her ideological peers, the central crises of contemporary politics: If Twitter were to shut down tomorrow, most of their political world and its concerns would simply vanish. That’s not to say that their preoccupations now aren’t undergirded by certain fundamental commitments—for one, they are devoutly attached to distinctly American speech norms, which they understand as essential to liberalism and the main barriers separating free society from Stalinesque repression.
Ask them to explain how liberal democracy has managed to thrive in Europe, a continent where laws against hate speech and Holocaust denial are common, or how New Zealand has retained a “chief censor” for decades without becoming a totalitarian state, and they’d likely be unable to, if they chose to respond at all. The point here is not that the speech regimes of other countries are better than our own—there are, in fact, many reasons why contemporary American permissiveness may indeed be the best—but that reactionary liberalism denies nuance and the very existence of other reasonable perspectives on these and related questions, hence the charge that their progressive opponents are, again in Chait’s words, pushing ideas “incompatible” with liberalism.
Slippery slope thinking, fallacious to most, is the reactionary liberal’s primary means of understanding the world around them, and their tendency to catastrophize produces a state of alarm about the spread of dangerous ideas as constant and hysterical as the stereotypical liberal arts student’s. Thus, White Fragility, the widely criticized and lampooned book by social justice educator Robin DiAngelo, can be characterized by Matt Taibbi as not merely counterproductive, misguided, or even harmful but actually “Hitlerian.” More broadly, the attention we’re now paying to the legacy of bigoted laws and institutions and inadvertent slights against minorities can be described by Andrew Sullivan as utilizing arguments “incredibly close to the language once used against Jews,” transmogrified by bad faith into the notion that all white people are intrinsically and immutably evil.
This isn’t a mindset conducive to rational discourse. And reactionary liberals are actually no more invested in the ideal of a marketplace of ideas governed wholly by reason than anyone else. All of their supposed enthusiasm for debate and heterodoxy is typically marshaled in defense of a handful of opinions—on transgender identity, feminist sexual politics, and the nature of racial disadvantage—which, far from having been chased into some intellectually “dark” corner, are relatively common and largely shared by the most politically powerful people in America today.
They also share an incuriosity about history and its actual implications. At times, it can seem that the past is useful to them primarily as a source for wild allusions: to the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, and so on. It would be a bit more difficult to carry on as they do if they were genuinely informed by it. For instance, the idea that a cluster of controversies at college campuses here and there could foretell the end of the liberal university, or liberalism, or the West simply isn’t credible to those who understand the remarkably cyclical nature of student unrest and protest in this country over the last century.
Similarly, the residual effects of systemic bigotry are easier to understand and take seriously if one appreciates how historically recent straightforward racial subjugation and discrimination are. The efforts to hand-wave that history away can be unintentionally enlightening. Five years ago, the Times’ David Brooks wrote about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s then-recent memoir Between the World and Me—one of the works shaping the latest installment of our ongoing National Conversation about race. The column itself was, from its very title (“Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White”), an early example of a now common discursive mode.
Brooks began his review generously, writing that the book had been “a great and searing contribution” to race discourse and “a mind-altering account of the black male experience.” But he came away with reservations. “I suppose the first obligation is to sit with it, to make sure the testimony is respected and sinks in,” he wrote. “But I have to ask, am I displaying my privilege if I disagree? Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions? Does a white person have standing to respond?” This last question was almost surreal in its condescension—what should one make of the notion, presented several paragraphs into his twice-weekly column for the paper of record, that David Brooks would have to request permission to enter a debate simply for being white? He didn’t, of course, so his response shortly followed.
This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America….
The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow. This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.
“Excessive realism”—a remarkable phrase in the service of a remarkable argument. Visceral and unsparing accounts of American history and contemporary inequity are condemnable not because they are wrong per se, Brooks suggested, but because their accuracy might be disillusioning. Historically and empirically grounded as they might be, they risk attenuating our sense of ourselves as already liberated individuals ready to scale the meritocratic ladder capitalism has set out for us.
One testament to the power of those accounts is that they’ve worked on David Brooks. He wrote a column endorsing reparations for slavery and explaining his conversion on the issue last year, and in a piece last month titled “How Moderates Failed Black America,” he recommended the work of writers like Frank Wilderson—who has argued that “the spectacle of Black death is essential to the mental health of the world”—for insight as to how deeply and justifiably faith in the American dream has collapsed among many Black people. “The gospel of the American dream teaches that as people make it in America they will feel more accepted by America, more at home in America,” Brooks wrote. “This is not happening for many African-Americans.”
It isn’t happening because the ladder of American meritocracy is, in fact, a busted drainpipe. And reactionary liberalism offers us few useful ideas for how we might truly move the country forward. While progressive activists believe American society comprises intelligible, if often hidden, systems of movable parts, the reactionary liberal urges us to see it instead as a jumble of bits and pieces—a muddle that defies both systematic understanding and collective action, and which the atomized individual is better off wading through on their own. This is the suspicion of collective consciousness seemingly at the heart of elite preoccupation with “tribalism” and “polarization”; it is the source of the universal tendency of reactionary liberals to label the criticisms they face on the internet as the work of rampaging “mobs” animated by “groupthink.”
The ideological implications of this mindset can be read between the lines of Andrew Sullivan’s recent piece on the Bostock decision, which, he argued, toppled “the last major obstacle to civil equality for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people.” “This comprehensive victory obviously presents the major institutions of the gay-rights movement with a dilemma,” he mused. “What do they exist for after this? What conceivable project is now worth the huge amounts of money that sustains these groups?”
Well, for starters, the problem of nonemployment discrimination against LGBTQ people remains unresolved even if Bostock makes it likely that the courts will continue to expand protections over time. And again, even those who would have solid standing in suits over LGBTQ discrimination might not have the means to actually bring those cases. All of this sits atop other material and social inequities LGBTQ people will surely continue to face for some time. Nevertheless, in Sullivan’s view, the work of activists is essentially over, and the problems that remain are trivial.
Bullying will never go away; nor will calling people names; nor grotesque generalizations about an entire group of people. Nor, for that matter, personal insecurity and self-doubt. But the answer to this is not deepening an embrace of victimhood, but developing the strength to withstand these slurs, to pity the bigoted rather than be intimidated by them. As Eleanor Roosevelt is believed to have said: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
One of the remarkable truths of gay history is how so many, under social and legal pressures exponentially greater than today, were able to withhold that consent. They were objectively victims, but subjectively free.
Here again, as with Brooks, we see the “objective” and materially real supplanted by a putatively productive idealism. Those who felt inferior even when civil equality was a distant dream, it’s implied, simply lacked individual resolve. For Sullivan, the problems of identity are primarily matters of individual grit—struggles that can be overcome largely by mental exercise. And efforts to construct or draw upon a politics of mutual empathy should be understood as signs of weakness—hence his lament, elsewhere in the piece, over the possibility that the major LGBTQ advocacy groups “will simply merge into the broader intersectional left and become as concerned with, say, the rights of immigrants or racial minorities as they are with gay rights.”
The general tenor of these arguments should be familiar. The rhetoric of toughening up and relying on individual willpower also features not only in our discourses about racism and sexism but in our debates about the plight of the working class and the poor. This is the ideological ground reactionary liberalism emerges from, and given this, the folly of believing identity politics can be conceptually detached from our other concerns should be plain. What is ultimately at stake in our debates about identity is the very principle of solidarity.
One might imagine that opposing the reactionary liberal project would unite the American left. But the last several weeks of identity political debates have led some to odd places. Much of Matt Taibbi’s essay on the recent controversies in journalism, for instance, is spent berating staffers at various publications for launching “internal uprisings” against their bosses. “The New York Times, the Intercept, Vox, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Variety, and others,” he noted ominously, “saw challenges to management.” It would be a strange thing for the left if its major thinkers got used to deriding workers demanding changes to how their firms are run. Giving workers the power to democratically establish what is important to them and run firms themselves—goals of the democratic socialist project—would mean giving workers the power to make firm-level decisions, including identity political decisions, with which outside observers might disagree.
Within the present economy, more and more companies are beginning to make strategic and superficial concessions on race and other issues. How important can a movement be, it’s often been asked, if the most heinous corporations and institutions in the world can glom onto it and earn praise for meaningless statements and gestures? But it’s not obvious why those efforts should call the value of identity politics into question any more than panels on inequality at Davos, or the right-wing presidency of a man who ran on protecting workers from the predations of financial and corporate elites should raise doubts about the legitimacy of class politics. The powers that be wouldn’t attempt to take advantage of and redirect the energies of these ideas if they weren’t already potent and compelling.
It should be said that when driven by activists and their communities, even symbolic action can be productive. For one, it can help groups understand and organize themselves as political constituencies with a certain amount of power. And the ideas driving symbolic action matter. It is true, for instance, that pulling down a Confederate monument does absolutely nothing in itself to improve the material position of any struggling person in this country. But our debates over monuments have really been debates about how we should understand our history, and they seem to be succeeding in advancing a sense that the roots of racial disadvantage are very old and very deep—undermining arguments that inequality can be meaningfully addressed by incremental economic policy and individual determination.
Socialists have always been best positioned, ideologically, to challenge those arguments and test the commitments of liberals to their own first principles. While it may be just to posit that each person has a fundamental dignity and certain rights, they contend, true autonomy, if it is possible at all, is surely a fiction under the domination of capital. Moreover, they argue, the democratic rights that we tell ourselves we possess in the political realm are nowhere to be found in the places where we spend most of our lives and attempt to secure the material resources our lives depend on: at work under the arbitrary, unaccountable authority of bosses and managers.
As such, leftists are the very last people who need to be reminded that corporate P.R. is just P.R.; press releases are not actually going to satisfy those intent on fully remaking the economy, and socialists who take the concerns motivating Black Lives Matter seriously have been among the strongest critics of what some have called the “anti-racism industry” that suggests inequality can be remedied primarily by self-help—the nicer side of the same small coin as grin-and-bear-it individualism. That realm of discourse can be challenged without belittling underrepresentation and personal indignities or denying that they can have material consequences.
As we work through what to make of the successes of progressive identity politics, we shouldn’t forget that progressive identity politics were not supposed to succeed. Not long ago, critics predicted that as legitimate as the core grievances motivating activists were, dust-ups on campus, rhetoric condemning “white supremacy,” and property destruction accompanying protests against police violence would ultimately alienate the broader public and prevent ordinary people from joining identity political causes. It is empirically plain now that these arguments were wrong and that the past several years of activism have produced a large and rapid positive shift in American public opinion. We will spend many years working through how it happened, but one factor already seems crucial: The critics of progressive identity politics were not only unpersuasive but fundamentally uninterested in persuasion. Even now, white liberals sympathetic to Black Lives Matter are disdained and mocked, and those most committed to denouncing the zealous rhetoric of progressive activists have never paused to assess the effectiveness of their own histrionics.
The failure of these critics has only deepened their sense of themselves as martyrs—the last disciples of the one, true liberalism, who will be vindicated once a grand backlash against progressives finally arrives. There are good reasons to believe it won’t: Cultural antagonism on the right will continue to drive middle-of-the road Americans away, and progressive millennials and Gen-Zers will continue aging into the center of American politics and American life. But for all the positive changes we’ve seen and will continue to see in the consciousness of the American people, progressives are still far from being able to declare victory. The material work of creating a just society has barely begun.
-
AuthorPosts
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.