I Am Mark Bauerlein, Destroyer of Safe Spaces
Tough love for Snowflake America from Trump’s leading liberal arts academic
Judgment, S0-called is an irregular series in which the law is laid down on political and cultural acts of “criminal” cravenness, hypocrisy, ineptitude, and general stupidity.
To hear him tell it, Mark Bauerlein is a brutally honest and courageous intellectual, a defender of true, democratic principles, an opponent of liberal tyranny, and a champion of free speech. His virtue contains multitudes.
“My liberal colleagues are scared of saying the wrong things all the time. This to me is a perversion of liberalism. One of the greatnesses of liberalism, the John Stuart Mill liberalism, is that we give people space to say the wrong things sometimes, to think the wrong things, and we allow for human frailty. I am a believer in original sin.”
So clearly, he wouldn’t demonize a celebrity for going too far in a publicity stunt critical of the president. This is him in defense of Kathy Griffin, right? As influenced by classic J.S. Mill liberty-style liberalism?
He was masterful, after all, in telling Kelefa Sanneh how he’s “pro-liberalism” when defending Trump’s comments about, say, how all Mexicans are terrible rapists.
And that also must be why he stood up for Milo Yiannopoulos after he was dis-invited from CPAC for “locker room talk” about sex with — how might one put this in a pro-speech way? — nonconsensual minors, so long as they’re “sexually mature.” He didn’t defend that either, huh?
Well, good for him on that last one, anyway. Child rape, it turns out, is pretty bad.
But a joke’s just a joke, right? He must have been the first person to defend SNL writer Katie Rich “when she tweeted that ‘Barron will be this country’s first homeschool shooter.’” Heck, tens of thousands of people petitioned for her to be fired! And unlike Griffin, she was joking about a Trump killing other people, which seems way more up his alley . . .
Aren’t these Bauerlein’s front lines of the culture war? If you really believe in defending free speech, even bad speech, against the PC police, shouldn’t you defend all of it?
Or would it just be easier to admit you’re a contemptuous fossil who cherrypicks free speech when it empowers your own sense of importance?
It must be a lonely battle for Mark Bauerlein, senior editor of First Things, the one tenured, published English professor at a major institution The New Yorker and Slate have been able to dredge up who likes Trump. He is a supposed protector of fearless speech, surrounded by Republican hall monitors. It’s one thing that he just keeps forgetting to defend speech he doesn’t like, quite another how his allies relish every permutation of censorship.
Think of Bauerlein’s righteous outrage when Trump surrogate Mike Huckabee attacked Jennifer Rubin and The Washington Post as Fake News for disagreeing with him.
Or his disbelief when Trump said “the theater should be a safe space” after Vice-President Pence attended Hamilton?
I’m sure Bauerlein was repping Elizabeth Warren when she was told she shouldn’t criticize Jeff “the KKK’s problem is that it smokes weed” Sessions because “think of his wife.”
But Bauerlein didn’t give a shit about any of that. So it’s really just the getting to call Mexicans rapists he cares about? Republicans should be treated with deference and civility, but Democrats need to get their fingers out of their ears?
Got it.
It’s hard to tell if Bauerlein is a classic troll or just doesn’t realize he’s a hypocrite. The problem is when his arguments about free speech are taken at face value, as part of a larger good-faith discourse about how citizens communicate with each other in a changing society and technology continues to erode the nature of private and public, political and non-political. Even people closer to the middle of this debate can agree there’s a difference between being provocative and actively endangering a human being.
Bauerlein’s probably smart enough to know Hatch and McConnell weren’t worried about people’s feelings when Warren attacked Sessions; they were exercising their power. That’s why he doesn’t care if Huckabee calls Rubin Fake News for having a different opinion.
It’s even possible Bauerlein remembers Trump tweeted that attack on Broadway the same weekend his lawyers settled fraud charges at Trump University and forgave his provocation as a political chess move.
Let’s ignore how amazing it is that any academic could support Trump without offering a single coherent defense of why it doesn’t matter he swindled students, mostly elderly students. I mean, Bauerlein can’t pretend Trump didn’t know about all the fraud, but that’s beside the point. The point isn’t that Bauerlein is a political hack — no better rhetorically than the rest of them, despite whatever pretensions he may have as a literature scholar disappointed with the level of discourse in the world — the point is that people keep asking for his opinion as a representative of a strange intersection of Trump supporters and the academy. But Bauerlein isn’t making reasoned arguments about free speech or conservative politics as a rare conservative bird in an English Department; to paraphrase Jill Filipovic, he just likes what Trump says. On some level, it probably validates his sense of misanthropy and contempt for a generation of kids who don’t read so good or something.
This isn’t news, but it bears repeating: people keep trying to understand Trump supporters even though all evidence shows the answer isn’t that difficult. Bauerlein is indicative of the problem, though. People keep treating Trump supporters as economically insecure (Bauerlein is a tenured professor), marginalized (he’s a magazine editor), and intellectually consistent (see everything above). The answer is much simpler.
Tucker Carlson — a sophist and, like Bauerlein, a culture warrior with an asymmetrical interest in debate as a venue for beliefs as opposed to evidence — put it best, describing himself and perhaps unwittingly representing a whole cohort of supposedly smart Trump supporters: “I’m not a deeply moral guy.”
The so-called verdict:
I’d like to throw this case out. Why should we care what people like Bauerlein say? It’s not like Republicans really listen to him, either. He’s an English Professor — i.e. a token liberal arts academic who waves his arms around as evidence that the Party isn’t disdainful of critical inquiry and non-business expertise.
And yet, I can’t quite throw this case out. Maybe it’s the brazen hypocrisy, the muddled arguments full of false dualities — particularly galling, given his old-man complaints about dumb kids these days — the fact that he teaches in Georgia and doesn’t mind his Republican state reps working hard to disenfranchise his students . . . Oh, who am I kidding? How does that make him different from any other Republican? But I guess that’s the thing. He isn’t different despite his lofty rhetoric.
Where he does diverge perhaps is Walt Fucking Whitman. Bauerlein “sees a lot of Whitman” in Trump, which is as deeply disturbing a rejection of reality as I can imagine. Walt Whitman! Ample hills! Barbaric yawps! It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall! American carnage! I’ll let you guess which of those are Trump . . .
As for our next installment: if you thought Bauerlein’s politicization of free speech — well, just the free speech he likes — was bad, just wait . . .
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is based in Houston.
