Here is a round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
John Hart: Economic Freedom Is Great for the Planet
Progressives often claim the mantle of protectors of the environment, but often solutions put forth involve limits on freedom and other actions by the heavy hand of a central authority. John Hart makes the case at The Dispatch that authoritarianism has a terrible environmental track record, and that economic freedom (though clearly imperfect) is far more likely to continue to lead to positive steps.
Author Nick Loris examined economic data and case studies from nearly 180 countries and notes that free economies are twice as clean as unfree economies. He cites Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which measures a country’s environmental health and ecosystem vitality using more than 30 environmental indicators and assigns scores ranging from 0 to 100. Mostly free economies scored an average of 71.72 while mostly unfree economies scored 35.17.
Loris describes a process Adam Smith would recognize, “Economic growth initially leads to greater unwanted industrial byproducts as industrialization results in pollution and people and institutions prioritize jobs and income over the health of the environment. Over time, however, that wealth means more resources are available for environmental protection … People with more wealth can afford products and technologies that make life easier, healthier and cleaner.”
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Progressives want to frame the climate debate as a fight about environmental justice. There is no greater source of environmental injustice in the world today than central planning. Socialist policies are reliably cruel, especially to poor and marginalized communities. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez devastated his nation’s economy and environment with his socialist experiment, a trend that has continued under his successor, Nicolás Maduro. Loris explains, “Hugo Chavez replaced specialized industry expertise with cronies. His regime diverted revenues that a private company would invest in new capital, technologies and skilled labor to remain competitive toward military and social programs instead.” The country has now become so poor that even though it is awash in oil, people are dismantling equipment to sell the metal scraps just to survive. As Emanuelle Ottolenghi has written about in The Dispatch, the illegal mining happening under Maduro is leading to deforestation and dangerously polluted waterways.
Read it all here.
Jon Miltimore: How Stalin Canceled ‘Hamlet’ in the Soviet Union — and What It Can Teach Us about Cancel Culture
While the First Amendment clearly proscribes government censorship in the United States, Jon Miltimore of the Foundation for Economic Education uses Joseph Stalin’s hatred of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and his fear-induced, de facto ban of the play in the Soviet Union to illustrate that there are other ways achieve the same effect.
Stalin’s canceling of Hamlet showed government bans aren’t the only ways to suppress free expression, or even the most effective. As Shostakovich observed, Stalin’s ability to cancel Hamlet with a mere word was a far better demonstration of power than an official state ban. It required no law or formal announcement. All it took was a quiet word and fear, an emotion that Americans today are familiar with.
A recent Cato study shows self-censorship is surging in the US, with two-thirds of Americans saying they are afraid to share ideas in public because of the political climate, which is increasingly dominated by “wokeism.”
These fears are not irrational. The examples of Americans fired, shamed, and canceled for being on the wrong side of woke culture are legion. The phenomenon last year prompted a letter in Harper’s Magazine signed by dozens of leading academics that condemned the intolerant climate of ideas.
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This climate doesn’t end with writers and academics afraid to offer certain opinions, however. It extends to corporate boardrooms and executive committees, where individuals are being pressured to decide which art is acceptable and which opinions are fit to be shared on platforms.
To be on the wrong side of the debate invites personal destruction. It’s simply easier to agree to remove “harmful” art or fire that employee who raised the ire of the Twitter mob.
Read it all at the Foundation for Economic Education.
Will Saletan: The Cynical Republican Attack on “Critical Race Theory”
In an essay at Slate that might not make anyone happy, Will Saletan says Republican efforts to (in his telling) undermine any conversations on race and racism are misguided at best, but more often cynical propaganda. Saletan acknowledges that so-called “critical theories” can sometimes go too far, but says Republicans would do better to engage and meet their critics on the field of ideas rather than dismiss them out of hand. Where Saletan might be overly optimistic is in assuming that proponents of such theories have any interest in compromise, preferring to use the very theories they are espousing to discredit opponents before a conversation can even begin. Even so, his arguments are worthy of consideration.
The point of these remarks was to make people think: not just white people or Americans, but people all over the world. And that’s what a good critical theory does: It opens our eyes to things we hadn’t noticed. When we think critically about class, we begin to see how low prices, which benefit us as consumers, are often built on a system of global competition that drives down wages. When we think critically about gender, we become aware of social dynamics in schools, households, and workplaces that widen gaps between men and women. When we think critically about race, we begin to understand how seemingly neutral legal or economic structures, from credit scores to sentencing laws, can reinforce stratification. When the secretary of transportation says systemic racism is built into some highways, he’s right.
Republicans are correct that critical theories can go too far. Like all theories, they can harden into dogmas. We start out seeing class, race, or gender where we hadn’t noticed it before, and over time we come to see it everywhere, to the exclusion of other factors. Some might reject unwelcome arguments because the speaker is white or male. Others might recognize ethnic prejudice in proposals to limit immigration but fail to consider how immigration, by increasing the number of people competing for jobs, can suppress wages. Others might be so repelled by sexism in abortion laws that we deny the humanity of a fetus.
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When critical theory becomes dogmatic, the best response isn’t to reject it, but to challenge and refine it. A good example is the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which Thomas-Greenfield saluted in her remarks. Originally, the project’s text claimed that the onset of American slavery in 1619 was the “true founding” of the United States and that preserving slavery was “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence.” But after historians pointed out that these claims were exaggerated, the text was changed to concede that slavery was a primary concern only for some colonists. That’s the difference between bad critical theory, which uses one factor to explain everything, and good critical theory, which acknowledges many factors.
The key is to think critically about everything, including critical theories. Instead of adopting an ideology and applying it to whatever comes along — dismissing every military intervention as imperialism, for example — we have to look for our blind spots. When liberals say schools should stay closed for COVID, the rejoinder might be: How many hours of unpaid labor are we dumping on mothers of kids in remote learning? When colleges stop using standardized tests in admissions, on the grounds that they give wealthy kids an advantage, one could ask: Do alternative admissions criteria, such as extracurricular activities, give wealthy kids an even bigger advantage? When activists say police should be defunded because they’re inherently racist, we might inquire: Do smaller police budgets make life in communities of color better or worse?
Read it all here.
Around Twitter
Short Glenn Greenwald thread on censorship and journalists:
Are Republicans going too far and attempting to stifle protests?
Charlies Sykes at The Bulwark says ‘yes’ to the preceding question:
Here are some Twitter musings on David Brooks’ column about illiberalism on the right:
The Virginia GOP rejects a religious accommodation for Jews who are limited in their ability to participate in its convention:
E-Pluribus | Apr. 23, 2021 was originally published in Pluribus Publication on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.