E-Pluribus | May 5, 2021
Here is a round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Declan Garvey: ‘How Is That Conservative?’
Many Republicans (and even a fair number of Democrats) believe “cancel culture” is a real issue, but as the party looks for a theme for the 2022 midterm elections, there’s less agreement on the role government can and should play in addressing it. Declan Garvey writes that as some Republicans take aim at corporations deemed too friendly to “woke” politics, others caution against falling prey to the very illiberal tendencies supposedly being opposed.
…“Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it,” veteran Democratic strategist James Carville told Vox last week. “Large parts of the country view [Democrats] as an urban, coastal, arrogant party, and a lot gets passed through that filter. That’s a real thing. I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks about it — it’s a real phenomenon, and it’s damaging to the party brand.”
Public opinion analyst Harry Enten deemed criticism of cancel culture one of the GOP’s “best political plays” because polling shows it’s bipartisan. “Fear of cancel culture and political correctness isn’t something that just animates the GOP’s base,” he wrote. “It’s the rare issue that does so without alienating voters in the middle.” A late-February Harvard/Harris survey found 64 percent of registered voters believe there to be “a growing cancel culture” that is “a threat to our freedom.”
[…]
“What we don’t know,” Echelon Insights co-founder Kristen Soltis Anderson told The Dispatch, “is what word in that statement is doing the most work. Is it outspoken? Is it woke? Is it progressive? Is it cancel culture? My suspicion … is that ‘cancel culture’ itself is not the driver, but perhaps outspokenness against woke ideology.”
Regardless of the exact terminology, GOP campaigns are taking notice. Kelvin King — the owner of a construction company in Atlanta — launched his U.S. Senate bid against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in early April pledging to fight back against “woke corporations” and “the cancel culture.” Days later, Josh Mandel — a candidate for retiring Sen. Rob Portman’s U.S. Senate seat in Ohio — published an op-ed in the Toledo Blade entitled, “We must combat cancel culture.”
But Republicans are struggling to coalesce around what “combating cancel culture” would actually look like in practice, with some advocating for a dramatic departure from limited-government conservatism while others argue political correctness is a cultural issue, not a public policy one.
Read it all at The Dispatch.
Gerard Baker: Media Mistrust Won’t Inoculate You Against Misinformation
A free press is invaluable to a free society, but a fair and accurate press, while not Constitutionally guaranteed, also goes a long way. Gerard Baker finds that even the discerning consumer of news faces difficulties avoiding misinformation due to thinly sourced stories that are amplified by other media only to be corrected or scaled back later on to much less fanfare. Baker cites several example to illustrate the impact of misleading media narratives on the public’s perceptions.
[I]t remains true that the impressions we form about almost all important events are driven by reporting in these organizations so riddled with disinformation.
Consider two recent examples.
A survey conducted late last year by the Skeptic Research Center asked people of varying political leanings to estimate how many unarmed black men were shot by police last year. More than half of those identifying as liberal thought the number was more than 1,000. The actual number is between 13 and 30, depending on how you count ambiguous cases. Even conservative respondents overestimated the number by at least eightfold.
In another recent survey, more than two-thirds of Democrats and half of Republicans thought that the proportion of those diagnosed with Covid-19 who need to be hospitalized was more than 1 in 5. The actual figure is less than 1 in 20.
These are surely the two most important topics to have entered Americans’ consciousness in the past year. We can reasonably assume that many of those who are misinformed have followed the stories in excruciating detail. In both cases the public in general, and vast hordes of progressive voters in particular, have a profoundly flawed understanding about what is actually going on.
Read the whole thing.
David Palumbo-Liu: Firing the Whistle-Blower
Linfield University, a private university in McMinnville, Oregon finds itself at the center of a growing controversy over the dismissal of a professor for, in the university’s terms, “serious breaches” of duty and insubordination; needless to say the professor and his supporters see things in a different light. While as a private institution, Linfield is able to avoid some of the constitutional entanglements a public university would face, Stanford professor David Palumbo-Liu argues that larger issues are nonetheless at stake.
As reported in The Oregonian, Pollack-Pelzner is known as being “a public advocate for students and faculty who had complained about alleged sexual abuse by board trustees.” He has also publicly reported instances of anti-Semitic statements by Linfield president Miles Davis.
In an article about Pollack-Pelzner’s firing, Inside Higher Ed quotes from an email that Provost Susan Agre-Kippenhan sent to the campus community, explaining that Linfield had taken “the extraordinary step of terminating the employment of a member of our faculty for serious breaches of the individual’s duty to the institution.” This raises the question not only of what Linfield believes an “individual’s duty to the institution” might be but also what duty Linfield, as an institution, has to its faculty, staff and students. These questions cut to the heart of the educational mission.
[…]
It is clear that Pollack-Pelzner’s complaints are reacting to, rather that causing, deep and perennial troubles at Linfield. Instead of addressing its own defects and shortcomings, Linfield has terminated Pollack-Pelzner both as a punishment for his publicly holding the university responsible and as a warning to every other member of the faculty.
Read it all.
Around Twitter
David French draws attention to campus due process case settlements.
Various reactions to Facebook’s continuing ban on Donald Trump:
And finally, just for fun:
