Ross Douthat writes (link goes to the AEI web site),
But part of the anti-racism movement is seeking much more than just changes to policing. It’s interested in spiritual renewal and consciousness raising — something evident from the revivalism of so many protests in the last week — and its capacious definitions of racism imply, in the end, not reform but re-education, not interracial dialogue but strict white deference, not a liberal society groping toward equality but a corrupt society being re-engineered.
. . .it was the liberal New York Times that hired me and supported me, the liberal New York Times that encouraged James Bennet to build a genuinely diverse and fractious Op-Ed page, and it was the successor ideology’s advance inside this paper that incited the controversy that unjustly cost my friend and former boss his job. So now, in whatever struggle looms for the future of this institution, it’s this conservative’s hope that the liberal New York Times will win.
So Douthat’s response to the purge was to submit a column rather than a resignation.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States had an intense anti-Communist movement bent on discovering and purging every former and suspected Communist sympathizer it could find. The excesses of anti-Communism caused real harm, particularly considering the feebleness of the threat posed by the Communist Party in this country at that time.
In contemporary America, we have an intense anti-racist movement bent on discovering and purging every former and suspected racist sympathizer it can find. The excesses of anti-racism cause real harm, particularly considering the feebleness of the threat posed by racists in this country today.
I go back to what I wrote 18 months ago.
I appreciate living in a society where any widespread movement by colleges or corporations to demonstrate “commitment to Christianity” or to mandate “Jesus training” would be vomited out of the system. That’s what I think should happen to “commitment to inclusion” and “diversity training.”
I feel the same way about organizational “position statements” proclaiming their commitment to racial justice. If we had fanatical Christians running around intimidating everybody, then these organizations would be issuing position statements proclaiming their commitment to Jesus.
UPDATE: A reader recommends this Andrew Sullivan essay, which voices similar sentiments.
What you do is more important than what you say. In the words of Nassim Taleb: “Don’t tell me what to do! Tell me what’s in your portfolio!”
Ross Douthat does not actually stand for what he believes. He probably thinks he needs the NYT more than it needs him, and he doesn’t seem to see the potential of the internet’s to reward creators.
I’ve also heard Bronze Age Pervert (the writer of Bronze Age Mindset) call him a “federal agent.” That could also be true.
I clicked through and got Tom Cotton. For some background.
Tom comes from a rural state, population 3 million and 60% of the economy is chicken farming. The largest town is 200 thousand. Some obscure group labeled him the voice of the new neocon.
I do not think so, he is not qualified to op ed on anything except his own home town news paper. We get a lot of small state delusional senators with little smarts.
Please read:
Cotton was accepted to Harvard after graduating from high school in 1995, and majored in government. At Harvard, Cotton was a member of the editorial board of The Harvard Crimson, often dissenting from the liberal majority.[5] In articles, Cotton addressed what he saw as “sacred cows” such as affirmative action.[6] He graduated with an A.B. magna cum laude in 1998 after only three years of study, having written his senior thesis on The Federalist Papers.[4]
After graduating from Harvard, Cotton was accepted into a master’s degree program at Claremont Graduate University. He left in 1999, saying that he found academic life “too sedentary”, and instead enrolled at Harvard Law School.[4] Cotton graduated from Harvard Law School with a J.D. degree in 2002.[7]
After finishing law school in 2002, he served for a year as a clerk for Judge Jerry Edwin Smith at the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He then entered the practice of law, working at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher for a few months to start paying off his student loans.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Cotton
Harvard. Part of the problem right there. Shut it down.
but it pushes back against the ‘small town’ narrative from the other poster.
Arnold,
I am very glad that you are back and blogging after your short hiatus.
I don’t have much to contribute except that my own experience confirms that some people who are on the political spectrum are hard to discuss things with. In my sporadic Facebook salon I recently encountered people I hardly know who think I need to admit my white privilege. Any pushback on my part is simply my recalcitrance, and a clear sign of my lack of awareness.
Actually, I’m aware of many social problems and issues. I just have different conclusions than some other people about causes and solutions and how to proceed at the moment.
This is amusing until it isn’t. At any rate, I’m not convinced that the “the Great Awokening” facilitates the solution of social problems. It looks more like a struggle for status in a zero-sum “prestige economy” as Jonathan Haidt would put it.
I sense that there is an age cohort effect, as well. I’m older than 50. The commitment to freedom of speech among people half my age seems lower than it is in my generation.
I’ll stop here for brevity. Thanks for keeping the blog alive. “Keep askblog alive”
From the Andrew Sullivan article:
And that’s where Havel comes in. In his essay, he cites a greengrocer who has a sign he puts up in his window: “Workers of the World, Unite!” If he did not put one there, he’d be asked why. A neighbor could report him for insufficient ideological zeal. An embittered employee might get him fired for his reticence. And so it becomes, over time, not so much a statement of belief as an attempt to protect himself.
In other words, bow down or get plowed down. There is no middle ground. The analogies to totalitarian states seem unfortunately apt.
> Any pushback on my part is simply my recalcitrance, and a clear sign of my lack of awareness.
This is a variation on the Kafkatrap: ” “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.”
cf. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122
All you have to do to find yourself in an oppositional discussion with some of the “missionaries” of white privilege is to suggest that “white privilege” is an overhyped and under analyzed notion that is of mixed utility and analytical power.
Just say “But I don’t think it really explains X or Y or Z” and person you are talking to may double down on their argument and ask you to grapple with your fragility.
For some people, if you are not “All in”, you are “Not with the program.” Nuance is not welcome. “Yes, but…” is somehow provocative.
For the record, I admit that some of my privilege is white privilege. For example, my parents met at Duke University in the early 1950s when it was still a “whites only” university. The theory has some use.
A more complicated example: I lived in Nigeria as a visiting researcher for a year and many total strangers were nice to me there in part because I was white. And in terms of safety, armed robbers would rather rob a Nigerian–less risk. Etc. It’s hard to dissect how much of it was white privilege as I was (1) on my best manners, (2) would talk to anyone politely, (3) wore Yoruba native dress and managed to learn about 200 words of Yoruba and speak it with a near native accent. I was “a good mixer,” in other words. And it’s a hospitality culture, where you give things to guests.
= – = – = – =
But here’s my concern–and it’s relevant to the future of us all.
All you have to do to get in trouble is say “but some things aren’t white privilege, some of what you are talking about is class privilege,” and you may be told you are in denial.
My point: you can’t argue with some of the people marching forth under the the new banner of Wokeness , etc. They aren’t interested in learning from anyone who disagrees with them if they can scold them instead. In fact, they may not want to improve their theory. Their theory is a cudgel to advance their own agenda or brighten their day.
You could even say that the vagueness of the theory is a great feature. The vagueness of the theory provides discretion so it can be brandished or left alone as benefits the person making accusations.
Here’s my hypothesis: the tiny dopamine hit of being right-thinking, and gaining in status, overwhelms the opportunity to step back and think. We all need to think: Do some of the current arguments make sense? Are they going to result in progress?
Which reminds me of Robert L Trivers’ research, in which he says that many terrible habits (including drug use and procrastination) are so tempting because the benefits show up immediately and the costs come later and are sometimes diffuse or subtle.
Beware of things where you get the benefit first, and meanwhile you deceive yourself about costs and drawbacks.
(Trivers is an expert on self-deception.)
= – = –
Another big risk: This may not be going away of its own accord.
To change the subject, here is a clip of Jonathan Haidt on the Joe Rogan Experience. It’s excerpted from a longer show.
The main theme is “SJW Culture.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e9VYf9FKHo
For Haidt’s discussion of the “prestige economy of head-hunters” in Philippines, and how they gain prestige at the expense of those outside their community
9 minutes and 48 seconds.
Well, this was the whole Bernie Sanders class not race argument. He lost the primary but this is not a fringe view in the Democratic party.
“If we had fanatical Christians running around intimidating everybody, then these organizations would be issuing position statements proclaiming their commitment to Jesus.”
If we had fanatical Christians running around intimidating everybody, the national guard would go in and crack their skulls, and all these virtue-signalling corporations would cheer. The relationship between the “anti-racism” intimidation mobs and the corporate/academic/media “inclusion” cult is symbiotic.
Agree.
At this point, there is a religious fervor spreading within institutions inclined to support the anti-racism movement.
The flip side question side is what will happen within traditionally conservative institutions. I’ll be surprised if anyone loses their job at the NRA for not kneeling if you will. But if you’re employed within a traditionally left-leaning organization, will be very interesting to see how far things go.
In the US, there really aren’t any “traditionally conservative” institutions left. Every profession, and every for-profit corporation in every industry, subscribes to this stuff.
If I’m not mistaken, you’re an Israeli. I’m sorry to say that the idea of the United States that Israelis like Netanyahu seem to have in their heads no longer corresponds to reality, and hasn’t for quite a while.
When people think of “traditionally left-leaning organization”, they tend to imagine a grievance studies department at a liberal arts college or something.
The thing to keep in mind, however, is that the ruling regimes in practically all big and important American cities are also “traditionally left-leaning organizations”. When they go nuts with negative internalities, in very short order those become externalities, and everybody suffers.
It took 50 years to reverse the damage done to cities in the last round of ideological and political insanity in the aftermath of the Warren Court era. It can be undone in 50 weeks, and probably in some American cities it will be.
I’m really glad that we live in a geographically large and politically fragmented federation. Cities, states, school districts, counties, etc.
You can learn a lot just by watching which cities are horribly misgoverned or poorly administered, especially when “exit” is easy and there isn’t a lot of wiggle room for poor decisions.
It’s sad to see particular places go speedily downhill. At least if we have bad and good decisions in different places in a federal system, the costs are localized and we are more likely to learn what doesn’t work.
We have to be willing to learn. A big problem is principal-agent problems and bad incentives among elites.
“I’m really glad that we live in a geographically large and politically fragmented federation. Cities, states, school districts, counties, etc. ”
Unfortunately, that is a lot of inertial momentum from the past that is quickly fading away as things become ever more consolidated and centralized. Almost every big city has been dominated by Democrats for decades. NYC, DC, Boston, LA, Bay Area, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc. Even in Texas, none of the four largest cities (Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin) has a Republican mayor / “manager”.
What we can actually be thankful for is the establishment of suburban jurisdictions in the last round of urban flight which were sufficiently politically independent from their central municipalities and dispersed enough to provide some insulation – physical and ideological – from the worse craziness.
The suburbs and everything that goes with them, from the provision of low-cost political exit opportunities to the low-density zoning to the car-dependent lifestyle that nevertheless makes people more self-reliant should there be disruption to public transit turned out to be great insurance policies.
Remember that the next time someone argues for more building and more density. If we can’t have sane big cities – and clearly we can’t – then best we can do is contain the disease by putting effective caps on the number of people within them. Political Distancing.
Handle,
Perhaps that speaks of a different “exit” strategy: reinforcement of federalism. Much could be done to fight political centralization.
I live in a mid-sized city in Colorado previously famous for its conservative politics but is becoming more left wing as the population grows. “Every Institution that isn’t explicitly right wing eventually becomes left-wing”
Dave S: dollars to donuts that the population of your city grows predominantly by immigration from other states (California?) rather than naturally. What you see is just ruin voters moving in, not Conquest’s second law.
The above observation highlights an inherent problem with strong federalism combined with democracy and unrestricted internal migration: there is very little stopping people from screwing up one place by voting their sentimental preferences and then moving somewhere else to do it again. Strong federalism, democracy, unrestricted internal migration: can choose at most two.
The important point is the difference between “the successor ideology” (i.e., contemporary, ‘current year’, progressivism) and “liberalism”.
It’s tragic that non-progressives were not able to summon up sufficient will to do what was necessary to prevent this predictable, dangerous degeneration. But no crying over spilled milk. The only question now is whether opponents have the stomach to cooperate and do what is necessary to pursue a Neo-Truman-Doctrine of woke-containment.
If not, we haven’t even begun to see how bad things are going to get.
I do force myself to read the daily (except Sundays) morning email from the NYT and it is usually insulting enough to put me in a properly vicious enough mindset to confront the rest of the news. It’s among the weakest of the daily newsletters, though, so I don’t really understand what all the fuss is about.
Once upon a time libertarians believed in employment-at-will, which I still do, but the days when christian institutions could fire non-believers is long gone. Christian schools get sued for firing occultist teachers and one would be hard-pressed to find any evidence that there are any christians left in nominally christian colleges. But institutionalism is over-rated and as the creative destruction that the left brings only unlocks new opportunity.
One can get by better ignoring the USA based news outlets altogether. Life is short. The Guardian daily brief, supplemented with the CBC.CA for a more centrist perspective, are better sources for clues to understanding the leftist mind. And you get more of the same from the obligatory daily visits to DW, El Pais, and France24.
Overall the best daily newsletter is from Alibaba’s South China Morning Post. Excellent article in it today on innovation in batteries. And, ironically, an entertaining article very similar to Douthat’s on how a social media influencer (whatever that is) is being fat-shamed. Oh, the humanity.
“Once upon a time libertarians believed in employment-at-will, which I still do, but the days when christian institutions could fire non-believers is long gone. ”
The issue is anti-discrimination laws.
I have argued that it is coherent, principled, and simply fair to oppose all such laws (see Epstein’s Forbidden Grounds), or in the alternative to extend the umbrella of their protection and principles of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity to everyone for every category of cause which contradicts the values and requirements of maintaining a genuinely open society of equal rights and dignity.
What we actually observe is many people calling themselves some qualified variety of libertarian (really ‘self-hating libertarians’ is right) code-switching on a dime depending on compatibility with progressive orthodoxy.
All kinds of exceptions must be made and pretzel-knots ties on behalf of laws and aggressive state action taken on behalf progressive-favored identity-groups, but then they loudly insist on the sacredness of the right of any ‘private’ institution to fire anyone for expression or opinion, to condition access to the dominant channels of communication or manipulate the presentation of information any way they want without any legal hazard.
Recently, many libertarians have criticized progressive epidemiologists for precisely this kind of reputation-erosion and credibility-shredding inconsistency and hypocrisy. Protests for me, not for thee. When the right marches, there is nothing more important than preventing the spread of the virus, and the protesters are grandma-killing, tribal-groupthink barbarians. When the left marches, “What virus?”
My point is that libertarians sound the same way and earn just as little respct when rationalizing tenure-level anti-discrimination protections and guarantees for some, but insisting on nothing at all for others.
Excellent comment. As always.
I am quite sure that Douthat excuses himself for doing nothing but writing a column as his “friend” got fired as the best course of action to save the “liberal” NYTimes.
Douthat does a little pro-forma tut-tut, but he knows how to preserve his gig. For example, he throws in the dog whistles of referring to “the Trumpian chaos” of the deployment of National Guard to DC, and to “the debacle in Lafayette Park” which are Leftist misrepresentations of the events.
If he had any integrity, he would resign.
As for Arnold’s reference to “the feebleness of the threat” posed by the Communist Party in the 1950s, remember we were at war in Korea, and the CPUSA was an agent of the Soviets, out to do whatever they could. A little earlier, they had stolen the atom bomb, without which Stalin would likely never have allowed North Korea to attack the South.
James Lindsay is much more familiar with the woke crowd than Sullivan or Douthat. Here is his twitter:
https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames
There are no reforms left.
All of these essays say something like “we moderate liberals want to implement reforms to achieve progressive ends, if only progressives weren’t so passionate in their totally justified causes, goals, and ideas we could get these moderate reforms passed.”
What reforms?
There are no reforms left. That is, there are no reforms left that are:
1) Politically possible.
2) Scalable in effect to a level that matters or is remotely consistent with the level of passion being applied (kind of like the Null Hypothesis).
3) Would be a sustainable improvement for society in general and not just a select group.
If you’ve got ideas for reform and were indignant at my suggestion, I suggest that the reason you reform hasn’t happened yet is that it fails one of those three.
I could for instance come up with a criminal justice reform I think would pass #2 and #3, but I absolutely know it wouldn’t pass #1.
I’m sure if the progressives could power through #1 they would run into #2 and #3. I know this because BLM did power through in some cities five years ago and that is what happened.
And people like Douthat will never say “your reform ideas are dumb and the problem isn’t that moderates make pushing through #1 hard, its that they would fail if you got them”.
You can’t tell progressives they are totally right about everything but “politics” is holding things up. That is weak tea. If so, politics must be smashed.
Does anyone else have the sense that Peter Thiel is the head of the resistance, so to speak?