E-Pluribus | May 4, 2021
Here is a round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Cathy Young: “Political Correctness” Déjà Vu
In an effort to deny the existence of or at least the seriousness of “cancel culture,” some are dismissing the phenomenon as nothing more than a recycling of the political correctness of late last century. But Cathy Young writes that the similarities, far from undercutting cancel culture, bolster the argument that political correctness has been resurrected and that cancel culture is just the latest iteration of an insidious illiberal tendency.
If you believe that left-wing illiberalism is a problem in 2021, then “there was a huge alarm about political correctness in the 1990s and the sky didn’t fall” is an especially bad argument. From where I stand, the problem is that in the last decade, for all sorts of complicated reasons, “political correctness” spread from campus to large sectors of the culture outside universities. The college kids who argued in 1998 that the conservative conference at Columbia had to be stopped because its agenda “exacerbates human suffering” and that “it’s not possible to discuss rationally matters of life, death, equality and hatred” are now using such logic to shut “wrongthink” out of the mainstream media. The creepy diversity training has migrated to corporations and government. The jargon of “privilege,” “allies,” “safe spaces,” and “racism is prejudice + power” is the “new normal” for us all.
In a 1993 critique of women’s studies in that notorious right-wing rag, Mother Jones, Karen Lehrman wrote that class discussions in many courses are filled with either “unintelligible post-structuralist jargon” or “consciousness-raising psychobabble”: “Regardless, the guiding principle of most of the classes is oppression, and problems are almost inevitably reduced to relationships of power. ‘Diversity’ is the mantra … but it doesn’t apply to political opinions.” That’s not a bad description of where we are as a culture; just substitute critical theory jargon for the no-longer-trendy post-structuralist kind.
Read it all here.
Nadia Gill: Who Are You to Tell That Story?
In an age when charges of “cultural appropriation” are slung like arrows and actors and authors are excoriated for attempting to convey experiences outside of their own demographic, Oscar winner Chloé Zhao’s current career trajectory provides a welcome corrective. Nadia Gill writing at Persuasion contends that Zhao has managed to communicate truth, one of the fundamental aims of an artist, without relying on her personal identity as currency.
Zhao, 39, was raised in China and educated in London and New York. Nomadland is her third successive film that focuses on life in the American West. On the surface, Zhao has little in common with her protagonists, who include a pair of Native American siblings struggling with life on a reservation, a rodeo cowboy recovering from a traumatic brain injury, and, most recently in Nomadland, a 50-something teacher who adopts a nomadic lifestyle after losing her job. But this did not stop her from daring to tell their stories. In fact, the very thing that makes Zhao such an interesting filmmaker is the steady hand she brings to films whose protagonists experience a world wholly unlike her own.
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Zhao says that her directing method allows her to more accurately portray lives so different from her own. She blends the real and the fictional by casting nonprofessional actors, incorporating their real-life stories into her scripts, and encouraging on-screen improvisation. “By staying close to real life, I can help myself, an outsider, to make a film from inside,” she says.
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In fact, Zhao’s meteoric rise shows that it is possible to portray the lives of those with different identities and experiences in a way that honors subjects and enlightens audiences. We should look to her as an example of how to do so effectively. In an interview last year, Zhao explained her philosophy: “I find that sometimes when I go into a community that’s not my own, or a community that has a lot of issues attached to it, I have to resist wanting to say something about how I think they could be better, or how I think the government has wronged them.”
Read the whole thing.
Stanley Kurtz: Cornyn Is Mistaken on Civics Bill
Writing at National Review, Stanley Kurtz warns that Senator John Cornyn co-sponsorship of the Civics Secures Democracy Act is misguided. While Cornyn contends that the Act will discourage Presidents Biden’s promotion of the New York Times’s 1619 Project as history and Critical Race Theory in curriculum, Kurtz says the nation’s experience with Common Core shows just the opposite is likely to occur.
Cornyn’s response expresses outrage at Biden’s new rule on Critical Race Theory. Cornyn then goes on to claim that the Civics Secures Democracy Act will actually prevent Biden from imposing Critical Race Theory on America’s schools. Cornyn tries to establish that point with two arguments.
First, Cornyn claims that his bill “actually prohibits the Biden administration from establishing federal curriculum, like CRT.” Unfortunately, this is both mistaken and misleading. It’s true that the bill includes a “rule of construction” stating that “nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize the Secretary of Education to prescribe a civics and history curriculum.” Notice that this is not a “prohibition.” It merely says that nothing in the bill shall be construed to “authorize” the secretary of education to “prescribe” a civics and history curriculum.
More important is the fact that precisely the same sort of rule was operative when Obama pressed Common Core on the states. Sadly, that rule did precisely nothing to block Common Core. The danger that I and others have long warned of in both Common Core and the present case is that of a de facto national curriculum, not a legally literal one. The conditions imposed by Obama on his Race to the Top grants may not have met the legal requirements for “prescribing” a formal “national curriculum,” at least as adjudicated at the time. Nonetheless, they were perfectly sufficient to take control of the direction of American education in math and reading. Similarly, well before Biden reaches the current de jure legal definition of prescribing a national curriculum, he can easily impose action civics and Critical Race Theory on the nation via the multibillion-dollar carrots authorized by Cornyn’s bill and the national tests that states would be required to administer to their students by that bill. The content of Biden’s rule on Critical Race Theory makes that all too clear.
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In other words, Biden’s education secretary does indeed have discretion to decide on which states, nonprofit organizations, higher-education institutions, etc., should win competitions for grants. And the new Biden rule creates guidance that meshes with the priority criteria already in the Civics Secures Democracy Act. The result will be that the Cornyn bill, in practice, will be used by the Biden administration in just the way Obama used Common Core — and with the additional ability to cut off funding to states whose students are not learning the curriculum effectively imposed by the mandated national test. The massive civics grants will serve as politically irresistible carrots that will commit states to forcing ideas such as the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory onto their school districts — even the most conservative districts in deep-dyed red states.
Read it all here.
Around Twitter
Another debate erupts at a college over the quotation of a racial slur:
A warning from Freedom House about Hungary’s and Poland’s anti-democratic slide:
Short thread on the jailing of another Russian dissident:
Cathy Young on another attempt to discredit the idea of illiberalism on the left:
