E-Pluribus | Apr. 13, 2021
Here is a round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Bari Weiss: What Should Be Done to Curb Big Tech?
Yesterday’s round-up included David French’s stinging rebuke of comments by Justice Clarence Thomas on Big Tech corporations and free speech. Bari Weiss, who is by her own admission torn over the broader issue, finds Thomas’s inclination towards the (apparent) constitutionality of stronger government control compelling enough to warrant further consideration.
The case for the former — government, stay out — has been made powerfully by former Michigan congressman Justin Amash and the libertarians of Reason Magazine. Their argument is the classic one: the solution for bad speech is more speech, not censorship or regulation. If you want a sense of what it would look like to get the government involved in tech, well, just pay a visit to the DMV. Or watch Lily Tomlin’s classic SNL sketch about the phone company: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”
But others, most notably NYU law professor Richard Epstein, have made a strong case for the latter. Epstein has argued that these internet behemoths need to be understood as public utilities or common carriers. Just as a railroad can’t refuse to transport a person because they believe the Earth is flat, or a phone company can’t drop a call if the person is talking about Pizzagate, neither should online monopolies have the power to do so.
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The Epstein argument seems to have gotten a powerful boost earlier this week from Justice Clarence Thomas.
In President Joe Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, handed down on Monday, the Supreme Court tossed out a lower court ruling which held that, in blocking people on Twitter, President Trump violated their First Amendment rights. The case doesn’t matter: Trump’s no longer president, so the whole thing is moot. What matters is the concurrence written by Thomas, which laid out a roadmap for possible government regulation of companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Read it all here.
John McWhorter: Excerpt #7 from The Elect
In the latest installment of John McWhorter’s book The Elect: The Threat to A Progressive America from Anti-Black Antiracists, McWhorter tries to make sense of how good, intelligent people can possible subscribe to, as he sees it, such a harmful and counterproductive belief system. For the Elect, both black and otherwise, McWhorter believes the spiritual and emotional pull of “electism” itself is a powerful force.
Electism is one more in an endless succession of political philosophies offering this sense of coherence. It can exert even more of a siren call than many, such as Marxism, in its more immediate object of attention. The Marxist works for an abstract proletariat often difficult to motivate or even quite identify in real life. The Elect works for, as it were, George Floyd — he was no abstraction.
To be sure, to be a proper Elect is to embrace a self-flagellational guilt for things you did not do. Yet even this, oddly, feels good. It is a brand of the “Western masochism” that philosopher Pascal Bruckner has taught us about. Pundit Douglas Murray nails it on this: “People imbibe because they like it,” he tartly puts it. “It lifts them up and exalts them. Rather than being people responsible for themselves and answerable to those they know, they become the self-appointed representatives of the living and the dead, the bearers of a terrible history as well as the self-appointed redeemers of mankind. From being nobody one becomes somebody.” Murray was referring to the left’s take on Islam, but the analysis applies just as well to today’s Elect take on black people.
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The sharing part is key. To be a black Elect is to have a sense of belonging. This is attractive to the white Elect as well, but it can exert an especially powerful pull when one is black. Electness tilts educated, and many educated black people wrestle with a sense that they may be seen as having left their community behind, that they are not engaged in what used to be called The Struggle. One way to ease that sense of being a prodigal is to adopt an identity as a beleaguered black person, where you are united with all black people regardless of social class or educational level by the common experience of suffering discrimination.
But the theme here is that being Elect can be, for a black person, like a warm blanket. You belong to something. Anyone who questions how “black” you are because of your speech, appearance, interests, or upward mobility is likely to hush up if you’re on the barricades with them decrying the racism of your university — or later, your workplace, town, or country. Marx warned, in his Inaugural Address to the International Working Men’s Association in 1864, of a “solidarity of defeat,” where what energizes people’s sense of themselves as a group is obstacles forced on them from an enemy above. Marx thought of this as a holding pattern and urged true revolution; black America can seem oddly stuck in almost brandishing the defeat as a badge of pride. But this is understandable as a kind of therapy. Humans seek pride where they can get it.
Read the whole thing on It Bears Mentioning at Substack.
James Angelos: No Change, Please, We’re German
The trend towards illiberalism is by no means confined to the United States, and the upcoming retirement of Germany’s longtime leader Angela Merkel will provide that country with an opportunity to clarify the future of democratic values there and throughout Europe. James Angelos writes at Persuasion that one of Germany’s challenges has been developing its economic relationships with China and Russia while attempting to hold those authoritarian regimes accountable for their excesses.
For those espousing liberal democratic values, a continuation of Merkel’s policies would seem, on its face, a positive development. During the Trump administration, much of the U.S. press depicted Merkel as one of the last steadfast moral leaders in the face of rising authoritarianism around the world. In contrast to Trump, Merkel was indeed a model of responsible governance. But behind the pro-democracy rhetoric and veneer of German moral leadership in global affairs in recent years lies a great deal of moral and strategic ambiguity.
A sober assessment of German policies shows a country not guided foremost by advancing liberal democratic values globally, but by an almost ideologically neutral pursuit of its commercial interests — namely, gaining access to foreign markets for its export-driven economy. In December, for instance, when Germany was head of the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, Merkel pushed to conclude an EU-China investment pact despite grievous rights abuses by the Chinese government, including the crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, and the internment and forced sterilization of the Uyghurs in the far western region of Xinjiang. Germany’s push to finalize the EU pact came despite opposition from the incoming Biden administration, which seeks unity with the EU in confronting China’s abuses. In March, the EU applied relatively modest sanctions on four Chinese officials in what largely amounted to a face-saving measure (though the Chinese government responded with stronger counter-sanctions, leading to an escalating spat).
Read it all at Persuasion.
Around Twitter
A little Jonathan Chait, a little Will Saletan, and a lot of David French in today’s Twitter round up.
