E-Pluribus | Mar. 10, 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: The Miseducation of America’s Elites
Bari Weiss’s most recent piece may not generate a lot of sympathy for her subjects given their affluence and social status, but the power, real or imagined (as some might suggest), of “woke” culture has driven some parent’s of today’s students of high-end private schools underground in fear for themselves and their children’s futures. Is this simply a high-priced persecution complex, or are these presumptive leaders of tomorrow being groomed for subjugation to illiberal philosophy?
Power in America now comes from speaking woke, a highly complex and ever-evolving language. The Grace Church School in Manhattan, for example, offers a 12-page guide to “inclusive language,” which discourages people from using the word “parents” — “folks” is preferred — or from asking questions like “what religion are you?” When asked for comment, Rev. Robert M. Pennoyer II, the assistant head of school, replied: “Grace is an Episcopal school. As part of our Episcopal identity, we recognize the dignity and worth common to humanity.” He added that the guide comes “from our desire to promote a sense of belonging for all of our students.”
A Harvard-Westlake English teacher welcomes students back after summer with: “I am a queer white womxn of European descent. I use [ she | her ] pronouns but also feel comfortable using [ they | them ] pronouns.” She attached a “self-care letter” quoting Audre Lorde: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Woe betide the working-class kid who arrives in college and uses Latino instead of “Latinx,” or who stumbles conjugating verbs because a classmate prefers to use the pronouns they/them. Fluency in woke is an effective class marker and key for these princelings to retain status in university and beyond. The parents know this, and so woke is now the lingua franca of the nation’s best prep schools. As one mother in Los Angeles puts it: “This is what all the colleges are doing, so we have to do it. The thinking is: if Harvard does it, it must be good.”
Read more at Common Sense.
John McWhorter: The Elect: The Threat to a Progressive America from Anti-Black Antiracists
John McWhorter on his It Bears Mentioning Substack site breaks down the three waves of antiracism and how the plot twist between waves two and three has left the heads of many spinning as they seek to navigate the racial minefield that at least some segments of American society has become.
You get First-Wave antiracism and think of segregation as an ancient barbarity.
You’re right.
You get Second-Wave anti-racism — i.e. roughly equivalent to what Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan did for feminism — and think we should all work to truly see black people as equal to whites and deserving of all that whites get.
You’re right.
You see Third-Wave antiracism telling you are morally bound to conceive of ordinary statements like “I don’t see color” as racist that once were thought of as progressive. That if you are white you are to despise yourself as tainted permanently by “white privilege” in everything you do. That you must accept even claims of racism from black people that make no real sense, or if you are black, must pretend that such claims are sacrosanct because the essence of your life is oppression. Whatever color you are, in the name of acknowledging “power” you are to divide people into racial classes, in exactly the way that First- and Second-Wave antiracism taught you not to, including watching your kids and grandkids taught the same, despite that progress on racism has been so resplendent over the past 50 years that an old-school segregationist brought alive to walk through modern America even in the deepest South would find it hard not to turn to the side of the road and retch at what he saw.
You don’t get it. You are right again.
You wonder what in God this new thing is that you are expected to bow down to at the PTA meeting, or when you open up websites of what once were your favorite news sources, or when you listen to callers-in on National Public Radio, or when you quietly submit to “diversity training” at work that leads to nothing you can perceive except the mouthing of vacuous mantras, when you stay quiet when somebody at a jolly gathering with you and your kids casually roasts as today’s fifth-grade outcast some writer you actually have always agreed with and you decide to stay silent.
Read the full piece here.
Freddie deBoer: Canceling Is Powerless
At his Substack, Freddie deBoer examines the power dynamics involved for proponents of cancelling:
Consider this Jacob Bacharach anti-anti-cancel culture piece. Bacharach identifies the anti-cancel culture essay as a genre unto itself, as it is. But of course the anti-anti-cancel culture essay is a genre too, a lucrative one, and Bacarach’s piece demonstrates the same basic misalignment with the pieces he criticizes that all of them have. Critics of cancel culture are talking about rights and procedural fairness; they feel that canceling undermines the rule-bound processes through which our society hands out punishments. To them, the overall goodness or badness of an opinion does not undermine the rule — not the law, but the norm, the custom — that we have long established in our culture that we should have free rein to express ourselves, even if offensively. Anti-anti-cancel culture types fixate on the duty to avoid harm, the moral responsibility to weigh the value of your expression against the natural desire of people to not be unnecessarily offended where possible and to feel safe and empowered in the same discourse space as the anti-cancel culture types.
There’s a good debate to be had about conflicting legitimate communicative needs and desires in a free society. But of course we’re not having that debate, and Bacharach isn’t interested in it either. Look, the United States has pretenses to be a liberal democracy. Under liberal democracy you have rule-bound freedom where efforts to police behavior are passed through defined systems, legal and otherwise, that are regulatory and procedural in nature. Canceling’s critics are complaining about perceived violations to those norms. Of course, people have argued forever, accurately, that all people aren’t actually equal within those formal systems and that they favor the interests of the white, male, wealthy…. Canceling’s proponents will thus represent the tactic as a subversion of those unequal power dynamics. One way or another, the debate that has to actually happen is to decide whether society wants to live under procedural rules about discourse or not, and if so, what those rules should look like if they’re not the ones we have now. But that never happens because one side just wants to call people children and the other just wants to call people racist.
But the deeper problem is the one I’ve already mentioned: canceling is so powerless that Bacharach feels no compulsion to discuss it in terms of power. He literally does not discuss the efficacy of canceling. I scrolled down past the bottom thinking I had missed something. He is interested in undermining canceling’s critics, but he spends no time considering the actual material value of the tactic. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: canceling is a political tactic that is most often defended with reference to its powerlessness, and this is bizarre. Bacharach defines the negative consequences of canceling as “getting nitpicked by an editor, yelled at on social media, or losing an occasional opportunity to rile up an auditorium.” Jacob: if that’s the extent of canceling’s power, why are you bothering to defend it in one of the biggest magazines in the country? “I’m defending this method to hurt political enemies by pointing out that it doesn’t actually hurt” is not compelling. On the contrary, it demonstrates just how unhealthy and bizarre our political culture has become.
Read the full piece here.
