E-Pluribus | Apr. 27, 2021
Here is a round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Ross Douthat: The Two Crises of Conservatism
In his latest column, Ross Douthat writes that conservatism is struggling to hold the line not only against progressivism and secularism but against extremists with the movement who too often undermine the cause. While there’s no one solution, Douthat, agreeing with David Brooks, says that recognizing illiberalism within its own ranks is one step that should not be overlooked.
Needless to say the right hasn’t always fought these battles well or wisely. But the fights have given conservatives a clear stake in the liberal order, a reason to be invested in its institutions and controversies even if, on occasion, they might doubt that some of its premises are true.
So the question, then, is what happens when the reasons for that investment weaken, when the things the right imagines itself conserving seem to slip away?
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This set of problems explains the mix of radicalism, factionalism, ferment and performance art that characterizes the contemporary right. What are we actually conserving anymore? is the question, and the answers range from the antiquarian (the Electoral College!) to the toxic (a white-identitarian conception of America) to the crudely partisan (the right to gerrymander) to the most basic and satisfying: Whatever the libs are against, we’re for.
On the center and the liberal center-right, meanwhile, there’s a sense that the way out of this mess is for decent conservatives to recommit to the liberal order — “to organize and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side,” as my colleague David Brooks put it this week.
Read it at the New York Times.
Sean Keeley: Don’t Let the Woke Own Liberal Education
In a review of Jonathan Marks’ new book Let’s Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education, Sean Keeley says Marks makes a lowkey but levelheaded argument for striking the middle ground between throwing in the towel and throwing bombs over the state of higher education.
After all, what is the purpose of liberal education? In addressing the question, Marks dismisses a host of unsatisfactory platitudes. Liberal education is not about preparing students for the 21st century through “integrative” or “entrepreneurial” or “dynamic” approaches to problem-solving. Nor should the campus be an unregulated battleground of ideas that students must traverse on their own: “We’ve been asking students to love a Wild West of speech in which they’ll derive truth from the clash of white- and black-hatted partisans,” Marks complains. “That approach barely distinguishes college campuses from public parks.”
Instead, liberal education’s job of creating “reasonable people” entails shaping not just students’ intellects but their characters. It means, more particularly, ensuring that they end up “ashamed of the right things.”
The focus on shame is striking. Marks touts “constructive shaming,” meaning the duty to goad students into rejecting easy, comforting answers. A healthy sense of shame, Marks observes, marks the difference “between those who consider reason an instrument to get the better of others and those who consider reason an authority.” The former are clever sophists who wield reason as a cudgel on behalf of their unchanging prior assumptions. The latter are those “reasonable people” who will resist bad arguments and entertain changing evidence.
The question, naturally, is how universities can form such people. Marks does not think the obstacles lie primarily in the students themselves. He rejects the condescending view of today’s students as inherently safety-obsessed, attention-deficient, or viewpoint-intolerant. The problem, rather, is institutional: Those on the activist fringe dictate policies on hiring, speakers, and curriculum, while those who disagree look the other way, saying, in effect, “We don’t want no trouble.”
Read the whole thing.
Cathy Young: Does Liberalism Need Identity Politics?
Writing at Symposium, Cathy Young takes on some of the left’s biggest causes of late and suggests that while they often enjoy the support of liberals, just as often the causes themselves are anything but liberal in the true sense. While identity politics is sometimes seen as the coin of the realm among liberals, the paradox is that there’s often a requirement that one expresses one’s identity in an acceptable way, hardly a liberal ideal. In her rather long piece, Young takes this on as well as ideas such as speech-as-violence to build her case that liberals need to get back to their roots: “freedom, justice, and individual rights.”
Levy may be correct when he says that the race-conscious message makes it easier to mobilize outrage into protest, not only from blacks but from liberal and moderate whites who react with anger and shame to the oppression of blacks. But does this translate into more long-term support for essentially liberal laws and policy changes curbing police powers, or does the race-conscious messaging ultimately tell many whites (and members of other groups) that this is not their problem? Does it, in the end, polarize more than it mobilizes? That remains to be seen. While BLM registered support from as many as two-thirds of all Americans in the wake of Floyd’s death in late May of 2020, its approval appeared to slip to around or below 50 percent by the end of summer. Sarah Longwell, NeverTrump Republican consultant and publisher of The Bulwark, reported a backlash among centrist white women in her focus groups after the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 23 of that year; they felt that, as one woman put it, “If he was white no one would have cared.”
But even if BLM’s focus on identity can be used to further liberal goals, its other aspects — namely, its intolerance of criticism and dissent — makes it profoundly illiberal. This has been especially evident since last summer’s “racial reckoning,” with case after case of people hounded out of their jobs for voicing some variation on “All Lives Matter.”
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Another problem is that intersectional discourse on the “multiply burdened” never thinks outside the box of stereotypical hierarchies of oppression; it thus remains astoundingly blind to situations in which the burden may fall on a traditionally “privileged” identity, such as being male. This is especially true of the intersection of race and gender, since black men and boys fare worse than black women and girls on many metrics from education to violence at the hands of law enforcement. According to a 2019 study, a black man’s lifetime risk of being killed by a police officer is 2.4 times higher than for a white man and as much as 40 times higher than for a black woman; for a black woman, that risk is 1.4 times higher than for a white woman. Yet proponents of intersectionality are more concerned about the fact that sexual assault by cops, the victims of which are primarily women, gets too little attention in discussions of police violence.
And that’s the theory. In practice, intersectionality usually ends up doing precisely what its defenders fervently deny: constructing new hierarchies in which presumed oppressed status confers higher rank.
Read the whole thing at Symposium.
Around Twitter
Thread of thoughts on free speech on the left from Youtuber Natalie Wynn:
What does “culture war” really mean anyway?
James Carville on “wokeness”:
