Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
A Meditation on Politics and Speech
Jonathan Chait just published a lengthy think-piece in the New York magazine about political correctness, identity politics, and the left’s newfound skepticism about free speech. I won’t bother to reproduce it here, because a) it’s mostly a series of interconnected anecdotes that don’t lend themselves to fisking, and b) there’s not really anything in it conservatives haven’t been grumping about for the past few years. Still, it’s nice to see that even flaks who make their living calling Republicans murderers for not being fond of Obamacare can have a sensible thought once in a while.
Chait is correct — though it galls me to admit it — in saying, along with fellow-travelers Frederik DeBoer (who wrote a similar essay last year) and Andrew Sullivan, that the modern social-justice left has in large part devolved into a whinging comparative-oppression Olympics where the laurels go not to the strong or swift but to those who reach for the smelling salts quickest, and whose swoons onto the nearest fainting couch are most theatrical and filled with au courant buzzwords. He is also correct in recognizing that there is a powerful trend in modern progressivism turning away from small-l “liberal” abstract values like free speech and towards a hard-nosed consequentialism where the ends truly do justify the means. On this point Chait actually gets off something resembling a zinger:
[Political] correctness is not a rigorous commitment to social equality so much as a system of left-wing ideological repression. Not only is it not a form of liberalism; it is antithetical to liberalism.
Boom! Take that, Tumblr-activists! But lest I be accused of going all soft with all this “agreeing with Jonathan Chait” business, let me say that I am also fully on board with Kevin Williamson’s critique in National Review Online.
Jonathan Chait’s recent critique of political correctness insists that the phenomenon has undergone a resurgence. It hasn’t; contrary to Chait’s characterization, it never went away. The difference is that it is now being used as a cudgel against white liberals such as Jonathan Chait, who had previously enjoyed a measure of immunity.
By the way, the accuracy of this is mind-bendingly obvious. You know that zinger from two paragraphs ago? Check out the very next sentence:
[Political] correctness is not a rigorous commitment to social equality so much as a system of left-wing ideological repression. Not only is it not a form of liberalism; it is antithetical to liberalism. Indeed, its most frequent victims turn out to be liberals themselves. (boldface added)
Ugh.
But anyway, the common reaction to this essay and others like it has been a universal rending of garments among the sensible set. Such uncouth debating tactics can’t be the sign of a healthy polis, or so the argument goes, political and social debates are won with reason and logic instead of vitriol, passion, piss, and vinegar.
In theory, I agree with this. I’ve spent too much of my time memorizing ridiculous bits of trivia about politics and history not to. In my ideal world we’d all sit around like philosopher kings and dispassionately debate the great political questions, swapping sides every once in a while just for fun and balance. There’d be puppies and ice cream and everything would be wonderful.
Unfortunately, to paraphrase von Moltke, no theory extends beyond first contact with reality.
In reality, people aren’t dispassionate about politics — they are ridiculously passionate. Whether they’re living in an Occupy Wall Street hovel, storming the ramparts of establishment RINO-dom with the Tea Party, setting up a SuperPAC to advocate for sentencing reform, or just posting a witty, eloquent, and insightful essay to a center-right website known for its civility, intelligence, and excellent web design *AHEM* IHopeTroySenpaiNoticesMe *AHEM*, everything political is done because someone got it into their head that the way things are just ain’t cutting it, and gosh-durn it if everyone’d just listen to me we’d fix everything! This is because politics isn’t really a Latin word derived from the twin roots poly meaning “many” and ticks, which are blood-sucking insects. No, politics actually means “of or relating to the citizenry.”When we talk about politics, we’re talking about who we are, what we think, feel, and believe, and the way we live our day-to-day lives. Some of that gets expressed in scholarly debate about marginal tax rates, carbon offsets, and the finer points of the latest G-20 meeting, but for the most part politics is inescapably direct, visceral, and personal.
Ricochet contributor and National Review mainstay Jim Geraghty has touched on this several times. First there was the wonderfully-titled “Winter in Raging Whiner Nation” a fortnight ago about the lovely “black brunch” bunch:
There is no actual “activism” here. There is no attempt at persuasion here. There is no thought here. There is only resentment and anger and a desire to lash out at anybody who isn’t one of them. There’s no agenda or plan to actually improve things. There’s no call to action. It’s just rage-whining.
My fellow men and women of the Right . . . yes, we have our bad days. Yes, there are times somebody on our side embarrasses us or does something stupid. But we can all thank our lucky stars we don’t have idiots, losers, and misanthropic rage-mongers like this claiming to act in the name in our cause.
Then the subject popped up again today in his Daily Jolt newsletter, discussing the very same Jonathan Chait piece. Geraghty quotes an Ace of Spades blog post from 2012:
As I’ve said so many times: There is a subset of “politics” which isn’t politics at all, but some very dark and twisted psychological baggage which would be anti-social to vent, except in a supposedly “political” context. The supposed intellectualization, abstracted nature of the discussion renders what would otherwise be the rantings of the mentally unwell into something fit for polite company.
Except sometimes this doesn’t work, and it’s all too obvious that We’re Not Really Talking About Politics Here Anymore, Are We?
Setting aside the question of whether or not the right has any rage-whiners gumming up its ranks, I’m afraid to say I think Mr. Geraghty and Ace have things completely backwards. Politics isn’t some rarified domain that gets sullied when people get upset. Just the opposite. All activism and all politics comes at root from being deeply upset about something, and when we talk about politics We’re Never Really Talking About Politics.
James Madison wrote that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary,” and that lesson can be applied to politics more generally. The liberal trying to end poverty, oppression, and want and the conservative fighting crime, red tape, and radicalism are both struggling against something that they perceive as wrong with the world. Ever notice how there are no huge mass-movements holding million-man marches on the mall about how wonderful everything is? No politician (except possibly Warren G. Harding) takes as his barn-storming, fire-breathing stump speech theme “Everything is vaguely pleasant and cheerful, so elect me to do precisely nothing!” The world is imperfect and fallen as are we all, and so for our sins we have to sit down here and squabble about how to make our ill-fitting, jigsaw-puzzle hearts fit together with the world and each other.
If you prefer a more empirical and modern approach, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt (hmmm, that’s suspiciously close to “Chait” and they’re both white dudes… have we ever seen the two of them in the same room at the same time?) published a book in 2012 called The Righteous Mind detailing the quite real differences in how self-described “liberals” and self-described “conservatives” thought and reasoned about themselves, their values, and the world. The conclusion Haidt came to was that political differences were never just about marginal tax rates, but were drawn from deep moral frameworks embedded within our personalities. From Wikipedia, the primordial font of all knowledge:
In the 1990s [Haidt] developed the Social Intuitionist Model of moral judgment, which posits that moral judgment is mostly based on automatic processes – moral intuitions – rather than on conscious reasoning. People engage in reasoning largely to find evidence to support their initial intuitions. Haidt’s main paper on the Social Intuitionist Model, “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail,” has been cited over 2700 times.
What can we learn from all this, and what does this have to do with Jonathan Chait complaining about political correctness?
Well, we can learn that however ridiculous the screeching mobs of black-brunchers and Twitter social justice warriors are, it doesn’t really make sense to say that what they’re doing isn’t politics. It may not be politics as we wish it could be, but it most certainly is politics. The fact that people are yelling this loudly and acting this strangely just means they really, really, really care about their pet causes. We can also learn not to give in. Appealing to dignity and civility and all that rot is wonderful if everyone agrees about certain fundamental things. If instead there are enough significant differences between factions, all of that has a nasty tendency to fly out the window. Welcome to civilization, folks. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. And free speech ain’t really free either.
Image credit: Evan McCaffrey / Shutterstock.com
Published in General, Politics
Great post.
Should go to main feed. Good job, Adam!
Back in the Nineties, in the first wave of political correctness, someone wrote that what they objected to in academia wasn’t merely the absence of our politics, but the absence of non-politics.
I think the claims of “micro-agressions”, the hyper-sensitivity, the overt discrimination against certain groups, and the melodramatic claims and demands, while resembling politics as usual, has really reached a hysterical pitch that in my mind constitutes a verbal French Revolution. People’s metaphorical heads (as in their reputations) are being chopped off by the PC guillotine. Not on the right of course, but we’re just dismissed out of hand as hopeless and evil. I do like your definition of politics. It sure does seem like a lot of little bloodsucking insects burrowing into your skin, making the point that poly tics has always been nasty, but there’s something more unhinged about the political realm now. It’s divorced from reality, civility, decency and willingness to listen. As with the French Revolution, no one can attain the level of purity that they demand. Chait’s article shows that it’s all beginning to crack. This kind of thing really can’t be sustained.
A serious topic worth serious consideration. In spite of that, I can’t help feeling a little tingle up my leg when the tiger turns on its passenger. To mix metaphors, I don’t have a dog in this fight.
Ever had this pulled on you? I have, although it took me a while to figure it out. And I knew about it, silly me! It can happen to you.
During the 2012 election season it was pointed out that since I was a white, heterosexual, male I couldn’t understand other points of view. As I was a captive out of state houseguest I just drank the host’s booze. Otherwise, they were quite nice.
AK,
Your flawless logic constitutes a micro-aggression. Quick to a nearby fainting couch…
Or you could just check out Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project, which I personally find more impressive than Chait/Haidt :-)
Hmm..I checked on the link…looks like another Midge score! Thanks for an interesting reading reference.
In 1964, when I was but twelve, Goldwater began getting more and more brutal TV and general press coverage as he became a real prospect and then, the nominee. Probably everyone on this site, even those born almost thirty years later, know the outline of that year’s story. But one or two odd things sometimes get lost:
1. The direct connect to the material in Midge’s link was a famous/notorious 1964 “remote psychoanalysis” of Barry Goldwater, something scientifically impossible and unethical even by their own shoddy standards as a professional organization. Some of that attitude was so prevalent on the smug left that it leaks out all over: the crazy general in “Strangelove”, radio commercials for the US committee for the UN that said “Sure, we could do without the United Nations and its proven record of peace. But who’d be crazy enough to try?” At the time, no one had any trouble figuring out “who” was meant.
2. A minor but real note that I actually remember first hand: until Goldwater was a serious candidate, he’d actually had several years of fairly positive, friendly network television exposure. He was a frequent guest on late night shows, where he was a cross between Rick Perry at his shrewd best and John McCain in his sarcastic prime, when the press loved him, too. He was conservative, of course, like that east coast guy with the funny accent, Buckley, but so was most of the country back then, and he was a livelier sort of conservatism than most people were used to seeing. It’s a weird, predictable thing: reporters and feature writers who’d covered them both almost invariably liked Goldwater as a man and as a person, and almost all of them had a visceral distaste for Lyndon Johnson, and they admitted it, then and now, but of course it didn’t stop them from loading the howitzers when called on.
Gary,
I remember the Goldwater years. Prior to the election, reporter Walter Lippmann was respectful of Goldwater. Once Goldwater became the Republican candidate, however, Lippmann’s take on him turned on a time. All of a sudden, Goldwater was little short of a Nazi.
Whenever somebody complains about microaggression I can’t help but get the impression that they have a complete lack of experience of macroaggression.
I remember listening to a podcast from the Hoover institution where the guest, a retired Army Col., made the point that for the past several years America has generally governed by people who have never been punched in the face. I found that insight to be very useful when analyzing this administration’s foreign-policy. I think it’s generally applicable to our chattering class as well.
Fools like McCain cannot understand why their Maverick, Collegial, Aisle-Crossing relations with the left become worthless once they are in a position that matters — like running for President.
The next time McCain crosses the aisle, I hope it is in flames, tied into a rolling chair, and propelled by a good solid kick, to sow discord in the enemy ranks.
How the hell is this not on the main feed? Adam, I think the editors are perpetrating and microaggression against you.
Perhaps “On this point Chait actually gets off” was deemed a CoC violation.
Nice article. I just hope the PC police take it so far that nobody cares about them anymore.
Reposted from elsewhere.
Has Jonathan Chait had his “come to Jesus” moment? He’s never been shy about trying to shut down speech before when it was something he disagreed with. He writes against ad hominem arguments, and yet he’s always been a reliable source for such things.
What Chait seems to be noticing, however, is that the Marxist left is now turning on faithful liberals (among which he counts himself) and he doesn’t like it.
As politics invades every aspect of life, expect things to get even worse. The only solution is to push back against the impulse to politicize everything. But I’m not sure that’s possible anymore.
Political Correctness is a form of tribalism: it is one way we identify “the others” so we can join together and kick the crap out of them. We on the right hate the current form because it currently dominates our culture, and we’re the ones typically getting kicked. Now, the leftish subtribes are struggling for bandwidth by trying to out-whine each other, resulting in some marvelously entertaining cat-fights. It is all good to enjoy the spectacle, but we are not immune. All tribes are susceptible and, unfortunately, all too much of the internecine warfare on the right fits the same bill.
I’m happy to see that this situation has been corrected.
Whenever I ponder this topic, I think of how inefficient the University experience is for social science, ethnic/gender/trans studies . . . maybe the whole of liberal arts. Any eighteen year old should be able to manage the posture, performance, vocabulary, and hierarchy of these finely calibrated sensitivities in a single semester. No need to even study deconstruction. Just one semester and then go occupy.
I’ve been trying to get people to read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind . It is a terrific book for those interested in this subject.
Great read!
Excellent piece. Makes me think, and I love to think.
I understand the point the author is making here. However, I don’t see any solution for dealing with the fundamental differences and I refuse to endorse an environment where both sides allow emotions to spin out of control and come to blows. I am proud of the fact that Conservatives take the high road and try to argue the facts unlike Liberals who just try to settle arguments by screaming loudly and using ad hominem attacks.
The fact that liberals like Chait are reaching these conclusions gives me hope that the insane level of political correctness in the current culture has an expiration date. It seems that if you hang around left wing circles long enough, eventually you’ll make a misstep, run afoul some perpetually offended person, and find yourself the accused. It therefore stands to reason that at some point the number of people who no longer buy into the insanity should reach a tipping point that renders it an ineffective or unaccepted tactic.
Then again, as long as the relatively less illberal liberals continue to perpetuate the underlying premises that western society is thoroughly racist, sexist, etc, complaining about overaggressive tactics to remedy those agreed-upon injustices will seem like splitting hairs.
I endorse this recommendation. We need lots of folk on our side to pay some serious attention to this work.
Soros is funding a very serious group of intelligent operatives who are implementing this work in the soundbite testing for issues ads to be run in the 2016 cycle. The GOP will be caught flat-footed again.