E-Pluribus | April 2, 2024
When life hands identity politics lemons; who's the queen of (election) denial?: and Scotland takes the low road.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Sohale Mortazavi: Rescuing Identity Politics
Just how successful has the left been? By all (or most) accounts, many of our public institutions are still firmly in its camp. Sohale Mortazavi at Quillette argues, however, that the movement has at least stalled, which has some on progressives evaluating what’s gone wrong. But in some cases, Mortazavi says, there seems to be a refusal to face reality.
The left is undergoing an overdue reckoning. Progressive mass movements have achieved little more than mass in recent years.
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This perennial failure has led a number of left-wing commentators and spokespeople to issue diagnoses and critiques of their own political movements.
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Author and activist Fredrik “Freddie” deBoer rose to prominence as a left-wing dissident spotlighting uncomfortable truths other contemporary progressives would rather sweep under the rug. Jocular and biting attacks on progressive pieties and hypocrisies earned him a sizeable media following, and his Substack was one of the platform’s early successes.
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[In his latest book,] DeBoer faults affluent, identity-obsessed liberals for steering progressive movements away from material politics toward the frivolous and symbolic. Progressives are now more concerned with language policing and representation in media than addressing poverty or income inequality. This cultural turn is ascribed not to theorists in humanities departments but rather to a kind of “elite capture” of progressive institutions. DeBoer deconstructs the psyche and socioeconomic position of the American liberal, as well the perverse incentives under which liberals operate as the administrators of progressive institutions. The apparatus of the progressive movement—liberal media, Democratic campaigns and administrations, progressive think tanks, the countless non-profits doing progressive advocacy and providing community services, and, yes, much of academia too—is subject to the influence of not just the donor class but also of the professionals on staff. As such, progressive movements no longer serve the poor or the working class nor even the “marginalized” minority populations for whom they nominally advocate, at least not first and foremost. Progressive politics naturally reflect the values, preoccupations, and interests of those who lead and administer progressive institutions.
[. . .]
This is all well and good, but without addressing the class contradictions and misaligned incentives derailing social justice movements, such advice amounts to asking progressives to Do Better. The book fails to take its own central argument seriously. DeBoer wants progressive activists and organizers to make common cause where, all too often, none exists. He writes: “Everybody has to pay rent. Almost everyone has lean months and hard years. Many people struggle to afford groceries; everybody, at some stage, feels wronged by the boss but unable to do anything about it.” But this is largely untrue for the middle- and upper-class progressives that make up the majority of the activist class. Many, certainly the most influential ones, do not struggle with rent or bills at all. They operate in a different economic reality than the poor and the working class.
DeBoer anticipates this criticism but has no answer to it. Open acknowledgment that few lefty tastemakers have ever wanted for anything is left hanging, and he resumes his call for affluent progressives to emphasize a shared economic struggle they do not, in fact, share. And so, when he urges them to “fight for everyone,” he is really asking them to fight for everyone else. Altruism is not common cause though, and deBoer confuses class solidarity with basic human empathy in an attempt to reconcile the conflicting material interests and cultural values of the professional-managerial class with those of the broader working class. The contradictions of the social justice movement are only acknowledged in the hope that they might somehow be resolved.
Read it all here.
Robby Soave: Ronna McDaniel and the Media's Election Denial Double Standard
Former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel seems to have few fans on either side of the political aisle. But after the rug was almost immediately pulled out from under her at her new NBC News gig, it’s impossible to ignore the double standard, writes Robby Soave at Reason. “Election denial!” is all the rage these days, says Soave, but those shouting it seem to have short memories.
Ronna McDaniel's tenure as an on-air commentator for NBC News is already over: The network fired the former Republican National Committee (RNC) chairwoman this week after enduring a full-on mutiny from other staffers and hosts. MSNBC pundits Chuck Todd, Joe Scarborough, and Rachel Maddow all criticized network heads for bringing McDaniel on board.
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If McDaniel's proximity to the RNC means her credibility as a commentator is suspect, then MSNBC host Jen Psaki should be considered a major liability; Psaki served as White House press secretary under President Joe Biden while negotiating her role at MSNBC. There's nothing particularly new or stranger about this—political communications officials frequently move from government to campaigns to cable news and back again. Anyone who pretends that this was the major issue with McDaniel is lying.
[Rachel] Maddow's criticism of McDaniel gets to the actual heart of the matter: Progressives at MSNBC think that McDaniel's political views and actions with respect to former President Donald Trump are disqualifying. They say that McDaniel was part of Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and for that reason, she has committed an unforgivable sin.
The truth, however, is that McDaniel played an "ambiguous role" in promoting Trumpian election denial[.]
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In its write-up of McDaniel's sudden rise and fall at NBC, The New York Times credited her for rejecting "Mr. Trump's most far-fetched election-theft scenarios." Nevertheless, the Times chided her for casting any doubt on the validity of the outcome whatsoever, reminding readers that she once said Biden hadn't "won it fair" and had gestured at various fraud allegations.
In merely whining about the supposed unfairness of election, McDaniel is in good company, of course. Indeed, much of the mainstream media seems to have completely memory-holed the fact that numerous Democratic officials and progressive pundits said the 2016 election—won by Trump—was unfair due to alleged Russian interference, voter suppression, and hacks and leaks emanating from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Clinton herself infamously declared Trump an "illegitimate president."
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To be abundantly clear, neither Clinton nor Abrams nor any of these other figures are morally equivalent to Trump, who took active steps to contest his loss in court. But they did gripe about their losses, and help inspire public doubt in the validity of their outcomes. According to Roll Call, 62 percent of Democrats believe Trump's 2016 win was illegitimate because of Russian interference—even though the most sensational claims about vast foreign influence on social media were substantially debunked.
Read it all.
Kathleen Stock: Scotland’s hateful hate-crime law
If there’s something rotten in Denmark, then there’s something downright putrid in Scotland: it’s new hate crimes law. Writing at UnHerd, Kathleen Stock says the law itself should be opposed by anyone who truly cares about free speech.
If the Scottish establishment is to be believed, ordinary Scots are positively frothing with hatred at the moment. Already Police Scotland record “non-crime hate incidents”, based solely on an onlooker’s perception of hatred, as a matter of course. But this hasn’t been enough to stem the tide of venom north of the border. So on Monday, the Hate Crime and Public Order Act will come into force, intended among other things to criminalise the “stirring up” of hatred towards several protected characteristics, including race, age, disability, religion, and transgender identity.
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Many commentators are concerned that the whole Act will chill legitimate free speech, either via actual criminal sanctions or via misinterpretations of the law by police and others; and there are particular worries about speech that is critical of religion, either of the traditional or transactivist kinds. But the smooth-tongued rainbow mandarins paid to dictate equality policy to a mostly vacant-eyed political class have told everyone to take a deep breath and relax. As the chief executive of Equality Network in Scotland Rebecca Crowther soothingly told Sky News: “This legislation is not going to catch people online saying things that I might disagree with, that you might disagree with, things that might upset me, things that might upset others in the community… What it does legislate against is when that freedom of speech strays into something that is abusive, that could cause fear and alarm, and that also incites hatred or incites people to act on that hatred.” Meanwhile Yousaf himself has said that he has “full confidence” that the police will look beyond “vexatious” complaints.
But what this trite sort of response obviously ignores is that, as social norms change, it is increasingly difficult for people to distinguish between that which is merely disagreeable and upsetting, and that which is genuinely hateful and abusive. It is an irony of the present situation that so many seem to think that biology is socially constructed but that the meaning of hatred is natural and fixed. In fact, what counts as an adequate expression of a particular emotion is at least partly culturally determined, and these days the category of hatred seems to be a lot more expansive than it used to be. Previously, its presence was indicated by otherwise random-looking outbursts of violence towards outgroups, and the use of aggressive slurs. In present day Scotland, however, it seems detectable from saying things like “choosing to identify as ‘non-binary’ is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat” — a recent statement by the Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser, subsequently recorded by police as a non-crime hate incident, a verdict he now intends to contest in court.
The wording of the Act tries to solve this problem by referring to what a “reasonable person” would think: so that, for instance, it is a necessary condition of committing a stirring-up offence that either one “behaves in a manner that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive”, or “communicates to another person material that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive” — and, in doing so, intends to stir up hatred against a protected group.
[But y]ou can only exercise reasoned judgement about the aptness or otherwise of another person’s emotional state if you are also adequately informed about what he or she is getting aerated about in the first place. And yet, this is precisely the level of information lacking these days from the average person’s perception of things like “abusiveness” or “hatred”. Instead, large numbers of citizens have been socially conditioned to take the barest presence of formerly standard features of ordinary discourse — expressed scepticism about certain popular values; unfamiliarity with middle-class speech codes; demurrals from progressive articles of faith, and so on — as automatically implying a hateful attitude, and to proceed to the nearest third-party reporting centre on that basis.
A reasonable person wouldn’t have gone along with any of this, and yet in Scotland crazily myopic and illiberal measures continue to be waved through, with stunning condescension on the part of their smug originators.
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter (X)
Here’s Conor Friedersdorf and Mark Cuban on what seems like an easy concession for DEI advocates, but appears to be anything but:
It seems today that governments prefer more subtle means of silencing unwanted speech, but The Future of Free Speech’s Jacob Mchangama highlights the comeback of brute force censorship:
And finally, Christopher Rufo updates Karl Marx: