Mark Bauerlein Versus The Privilege Police
Tough love for identity politics from the leading Trumpian 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.
So far, it’s been established that Mark Bauerlein, despite his lofty defenses of Learning, Scholarship, Free Expression, and The Great Books, is a common party hack and a willing participant in the far right’s effort to demonize dissent. Republicans don’t seem to care where they get their intellectual excuses from, but Bauerlein lends a purportedly high-minded validation to an increasingly mainstream element of modern right-wing ideology, one driven less by the old standbys of fiscal, moral, and foreign policy concerns and more by base resentment and fear of the eroded status of whites in American society.
You can find an example of Bauerlein’s sour critiques in articles like “Humanities: doomed to lose? How humanities professors are letting identity politics destroy their discipline,” about The Canon and how only white people really get it; I mean, it isn’t quite so explicit, but there’s a fairly apparent subtext, which makes sense, since he’s a professor of English, as he often reminds readers. As reported by Kelefa Sanneh, Bauerlein “views the rise of Trump as a reaction to political correctness, which has, he maintains, made people feel that they can’t express themselves.” So, his point is basically that he wants to be able to say terrible things — oh, and that no one respects the classics. Given that he’s said a lot of bad and stupid things and no one’s stopped him thus far, one wonders what other things he wishes he could say . . .
Of course, Bauerlein is not alone in obsessing over how he believes he’s perceived. Salena Zito at the New York Post claims “liberal coastal elites are so resentful of middle America: It’s because the supposed rubes and rednecks aren’t more resentful of the elites — or, more specifically, the elites’ ‘success.’ They don’t aspire to be like their self-appointed betters.” (Self-appointed? I wish I’d known!)
These anti-liberals’ nihilistic endpoint is perhaps most succinctly stated by Milo Yiannopoulos (from an interview with Dave Rubin): “Trump is a direct creation of the progressive left. He has been brought about, he exists, because of the people we both hate.”
(Bonus points, by the way, for the writer at Bauerlein’s journal First Things who brought up Yiannopoulos, after his defense of pedophilia went viral, in order to admit to being “un-enthusiastic” about . . . Milo’s reading of early Christian history. Glad the journal stands up for “a religiously and morally serious culture.” Sorry, kids. You don’t make the cut.)
While moralizing right-wingers like Bauerlein sputter about whiny liberals’ smarty-pants resentment, their politicians do things like make health-care worse and lie about it. You wouldn’t know it matters, though: what’s people dying got to do with the culture wars?
The egg-heads should just stop being so elitist about stupid facts and harmless contradictions: “After pushing for passage of the House repeal bill, (Trump) criticized it as ‘mean’ several weeks later. A spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said last week that Mr. Trump did not necessarily support cuts to Medicaid, even though his budget and the Senate bill would make such cuts.”
In other words, “This lemonade definitely isn’t piss. Taste it! Ignore those dummies who say they saw me piss in this glass. They’re just too elite for this cool, refreshing drink of not-piss. Who are they to tell you what to think?”
So why do people drink the piss water and still smack their lips? Because it’s easier to pretend Kellyanne Conway isn’t lying to you when you’re savoring her confrontation with a common enemy: lazy poor people — especially the brown ones — and their coastal-elite enablers. One Trump voter expressed this sentiment to Vox after the election, “I really think Medicaid is good, but I’m really having a problem with the people that don’t want to work . . . Us middle-class people are really, really upset about having to work constantly, and then these people are not responsible.”
In their uber-Darwinian worldview, Bauerlein and his allies aren’t monsters, heck, the real villains aren’t even the lazy poor people, because at least they make Bauerlein and his allies feel good about themselves. The real enemies are the people who sometimes make right-wingers feel bad. Bauerlein’s aversion to “identity politics” is a branded feature of the Republican Party’s anti-liberal chorus line. Because there’s nothing better than ranting about how you’re not racist and sexist; you’re just furious other people are calling you racist and sexist.
It’s not hard to draw a line between Bauerlein saying “What it’s really about is planting an idea into Americans that this is our country . . . This is our home! It’s going to have a boundary” and voters driven by “‘fears about cultural displacement,’ a polite way of describing fears of immigrants from other countries and people of other races.” According to the Public Religion Research Institute: “White working-class voters who say they often feel like a stranger in their own land and who believe the US needs protecting against foreign influence were 3.5 times more likely to favor Trump than those who did not share these concerns.”
My previous discussion of white southerners protesting integration continues to be instructive: to them, education of non-white students was a zero-sum game. Applied more broadly, if someone else gained status, they inherently lost status.
But don’t take my word for it. Here are Bauerlein’s own words, as part of an anecdote about one well-compensated, young, black professor decades ago: “To watch individuals who enjoy such lavish professional rewards denounce American racism, sexism, and homophobia is either comical or pathetic.” I’ll let that word-soup (also definitely not piss) marinate there for a bit while you remind yourself that Bauerlein — and his ilk — definitely aren’t the ones obsessed with identity.
Bauerlein, after all, is so eager to ask, “Why has identity become such a fixation?” I wonder what he would make of the black off-duty cop recently shot by police while responding to a crime. Would Bauerlein focus on the reporter who broke the story — for making this about identity politics, duh— or the policeman who shot his co-worker?
Perhaps that hypothetical is too extreme. And yet, Bauerlein does seem to care more about “identity politics” than racism: “And I think on the left, you have an alarm: What if white men start playing the game of identity politics the way we have for the past 40 years? That is going to go very badly for everyone.” This is a guy who wrote a book on lynching, in case your first thought, like mine, was, “The KKK, motherfucker!”
Bauerlein does graciously admit that “White men have been playing it all along.” However: “Right now the undergraduate population is close to 60 percent female. Women get more PhDs than men do. Medical school is now half female and half male. Law school now has more women entering.” (Don’t worry, he thinks too many black people are going to good schools, too: “If you walk into any admissions office at a selective college, you will see hives of mendacity going on in order to play the identity politics game.”)
So yes, he knows about structural and historical injustices, but there are no race or gender equality issues in America worse than “identity politics” because more people from previously under-represented groups are going to school than white Christian men.
Can’t you imagine Bauerlein as a hacky shock comic? Campus rape is bad and all, but it really just demonstrates more women are going to college. And don’t I know it! I keep hearing about campus rape because these college-educated women are stealing all the liberal-elite media jobs. (Not an actual quotation . . . yet.)
Because he worries young people today just aren’t smart enough to pick up his subtext, Bauerlein feels the need to tell interviewer Isaac Chotiner explicitly, “Believe me, I don’t feel white privilege at all.”
As ludicrous as Bauerlein’s continued assertion that we should just all ignore racism — or at least separate it from “greed, wrath, and…other sins” as if they can’t be combined — the Republicans see these debates as useful cover for their legislative agenda: condemning 30,000–80,000 Americans to preventable deaths, every year. Racism and sexism and xenophobia might be the engine for some Trump voters, but all that resentment-and-eroded-status spite-voting has consequences, and not just for people who have to worry about contemporary poll taxes.
As one Trump voter put it after the election: Taking Obamacare away “would affect so many people’s lives . . . I mean, what are you to do then if you cannot pay for insurance?”
When non-wealthy GOP voters have those concerns, though, that’s the party’s cue to shoot another round off: “Brown people keep talking about identity!” Or “Radical Islamic Terrorism! Radical Islamic Terrorism!”
(And what about the poor white terrorists who can’t catch a break? A typical white terrorist is the most common terrorist in America, but has to kill seven times as many people to get the same media coverage as a Muslim terrorist. How can they overcome all of that unfair news coverage to have their message heard?)
Despite Bauerlein’s concerns that white people are always being forgotten and insulted, Republicans still remember to lie to them about Medicaid cuts. Or they go back to the status game: Kentucky’s governor wants to “require nondisabled recipients to work or do community service for free dental and vision care.”
Maybe Bauerlein’s own Georgia will pass something similar, so the super-poor can have the privilege of picking up litter around Emory to earn their molar fillings. After all, those lazy poor folks may have been cosseted by identity politics, and, as he’s said, “There are some things in politics that you say, ‘This runs against what I believe’ . . . You have to suck it up.’”
The so-called verdict:
Policies do, as it happens, matter. Medicare can get taken away. The GOP and its enablers want you to forget that, though, by focusing on “cultural anxiety” and “identity politics” and “coastal elites.” If only those mean libtards didn’t ask you to think twice occasionally about the things you say to dehumanize other people, you might not have to perform home surgery on grandma’s neck cyst. After you patch up grandma, you might be tempted to ask Bauerlein if the culture wars resentments and white identity he’s obsessed with is worth the pain and suffering coming the way of people who were talked into voting for Trump.
I imagine Bauerlein might actually want to hold his tongue.
Check back for our next and final installment, when we discuss how Bauerlein at least thinks the world of his students . . .
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is based in Houston.
