E-Pluribus | Mar. 11, 2021
Here is a round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Ramesh Ponnuru: Taking 1619 Out of the Schools
Progressives who say conservatives are hypocritical about cancel culture point to some states’ efforts to restrict or eliminate schools’ use of the New York Times’ 1619 Project on slavery in the United States as a prime example. Ramesh Ponnuru at National Review explains why he believes the criticism is overwrought.
Republican legislators in several states have tried to keep 1619 Project materials out of the classroom. Bills to this effect have been denounced as “censorship” or “cancel culture”: see here, here, and here for example.
It might well be a bad idea for state legislators to get into the habit of micromanaging classroom instruction. But I think there are some complications that should keep us from leaping to any of the C words. The schools are creatures of the state governments, which have an interest in seeing to it that the schools they fund are providing accurate instruction. If high-school chemistry classes were teaching alchemy, the state legislature could reasonably step in. Fans of the 1619 Project would of course reject the comparison, but the point is that there’s nothing wrongly censorious or suppressive in principle with regulating school funding to affect classroom instruction.
Read his full piece here.
Digging Up Old Tweets: Unfair Criticism or Accountability for Presidential Nominees
While past writings and statements of cabinet nominees seeking confirmation to federal government positions have provided fodder to their opponents for decades, current confirmation battles over President Joe Biden’s nominees have a particular 2020s flavor: old (and not-so-old) Tweets. Republicans successfully provoked the withdrawal of Neera Tanden with the tactic and seem intent on repeating that success. These episodes are sure to fuel the debate over what is legitimate accountability and what is simply an attempt to unfairly undermine otherwise qualified individuals based on (as their boosters would argue) a few intemperate tweets. The Washington Post reports:
After successfully blocking one of President Biden’s Cabinet nominees last month over her social media posts, Republicans are running a similar playbook against others, highlighting antagonistic tweets to argue they’re too partisan to serve.
In separate confirmation hearings over the past week, GOP senators have read aloud Twitter missives from civil rights lawyer Vanita Gupta and national security expert Colin Kahl that were critical of Republican lawmakers, conservative judges and the Trump administration’s policies — at times in personal terms.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) even displayed on large poster boards Kahl’s tweets lambasting the GOP position on Syria and Yemen, along with one quoting from a New York Times op-ed that argued Republicans had displayed “death-cult fealty” to President Donald Trump over his handling of the coronavirus.
[ . . . ]
“In their playbook, for those [who] want to attack her, it’s a way to deflect from Vanita’s incredible record,” said Lena Zwarensteyn, a senior director at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, where Gupta served as president for the past four years. “Our opponents try to say people aren’t respectable or nice enough or their tone is off, which is really a way to ‘keep them in their place.’ It’s really important to acknowledge who is being attacked and what is the motivation.”
Republicans said the tweets went directly to the question of judgment. Cotton accused Kahl — who had called the GOP the “party of ethnic cleansing” after Trump ordered a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria in 2019 — of a “long record of volatile outbursts” that would harm his relationship with Congress and stifle debate in the Pentagon. Cotton has drawn scrutiny for his own public statements, including a widely criticized op-ed published last year that advocated using military force to crack down on racial justice protests.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, cited a tweet from Gupta calling the Republican National Convention a forum for “racism, xenophobia and outrageous lies,” and another calling conservative Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whom Trump nominated after the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “illegitimate.”
“The whole story is here.
David French: Joe Biden Prepares to Turn Back the Clock on Campus Due Process
Though much of the focus on illiberalism revolves around freedom of speech, other civil liberties are under fire as well — at least in certain circumstances. David French at The Dispatch addresses the Biden administration’s pending roll back of a Trump administration effort to shore up due process rights of those accused of sexual assault on college campuses.
So why were the Trump reforms controversial? To understand, we have to go back to the reason for the Obama reforms in 2011. At that point, many campus administrators and activists were in the grips of two firm beliefs — that women on campus faced a staggering wave of sexual assaults and that women rarely make false rape reports. The narrative was terrifying.
[ . . . ]
Acting under this impression, campus administrators (and the Obama administration) issued their marching orders: Crack down on campus sex abuse. That meant streamlining adjudications. That meant denying due process. After all, wasn’t there a 90-plus percent chance that the accused was guilty?
But the Obama crackdown suffered from both conceptual and factual flaws. The conceptual flaw is easy to articulate — it’s a simple constitutional reality that no offense is too heinous for due process. Indeed, due process is often more vital when the offense is heinous. It’s the only thing that slows the rush to judgment.
[ . . . ]
We don’t yet know how the Biden administration will choose to revise the Trump regulations. During his campaign he pledged to restore the Obama administration’s 2011 guidance, but he can’t truly rewind the clock. Too many courts in too many jurisdictions have rejected the old regime.
We do know, however, that a sad irony of the Biden plan is that if Joe Biden was a student — and the Obama guidelines he supports applied — Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegation would have likely ended his career. After all, he would have no right to a detailed description of the charges against him, he would have had no ability to discover exculpatory evidence, and he would have enjoyed no right to cross-examine his accuser. (And there would have been no national media applying any independent scrutiny to her claims.)
Read the full post here.
