E-Pluribus | August 29, 2023
The left hops on the banned wagon; a woke coffee shop hoist with its own petard; and a look at contemporary integralism.
A round-up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Cathy Young: The Book Banners on the Left
I published my essay on Pluribus in September 2021 about some concerning trends in the publishing industry, and the problems are by no means confined to one side of the ideological spectrum. Writing for The Bulwark, Cathy Young highlights a recent report from the writers’ association PEN America that clearly implicates the left, along with the right, in the effort to silence or suppress writers with heterodox styles and viewpoints.
[A] major liberal institution that has championed freedom of expression for over a century—PEN America, formerly PEN American Center and part of PEN International, the writers’ association whose notable figures have included John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood—has issued a lengthy report that strongly comes down on the side of taking illiberal progressivism seriously.
Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm, written by the PEN America research team with a trenchant introduction by playwright Ayad Akhtar titled “In Defense of the Literary Imagination,” is a thorough examination of the chilly climate in publishing and the issues and controversies that have created it. Booklash is particularly valuable because PEN America really cannot be accused of having a right-leaning or even centrist bias: the organization enthusiastically champions racial and gender diversity and has strongly denounced censorship moves from the right, such as red-state policies facilitating school library book removals.
Indeed, the report acknowledges the context of rising right-wing authoritarianism but unabashedly, and correctly, stresses that this context makes it more important to acknowledge troubling illiberal trends on the left[.]
[ . . . ]
The report offers a thorough and persuasive analysis of how this climate emerged: a perfect storm of social, political and technological shifts. A social justice revival focused on identity politics and oppressive cultural dynamics coincided with the rise of social media, which enabled instant—and sometimes massively collective—feedback from readers, or in many cases outraged non-readers who went by a plot summary, to authors and publishers. Just like awareness of racism, sexism, and other bigotries, reader empowerment certainly has positive aspects but can also take toxic forms—and often does.
Read it all.
John Sexton: Mina's World Was A Leftist Coffee Shop Destroyed by Leftist Ideology
While liberalism is at times parodied as “Can’t we all just get along?,” John Sexton of Hot Air relates a story out of Philadelphia where the answer to that question, even amongst leftists themselves, was an emphatic, No.
Sonam Parikh and Kate Egghart then spent 3 years cleaning and preparing the site to open their coffee shop, Mina’s World.
[ . . . ]
[T]he fledgling company hired four employees all of whom were trans and/or black. Those employees soon decided they were unhappy with conditions at the shop and demanded a “radical accountability process” from the owners.
[ . . . ]
The owners made a cringey video apologizing for their role in gentrifying the neighborhood and promised to turn the store into a co-op, meaning the four employees would become co-owners.
[ . . . ]
However, the employees plans to seize the means of production didn’t go as smoothly as they had hoped. Kate Egghart’s mom, EJ Egghart, decided enough was enough. She had bought the building and had been allowing Mina’s World to operate rent free. Plus she was paying the electrical bill for “The People’s Fridge.” She also paid their insurance and did their books. In an Instagram post she explained that the “current business model of low coffee pricing, high labor” costs wasn’t sustainable. They were literally buying top tier beans and selling coffee at discounted prices so low-income customers could afford it. (There’s an old joke: Whatever we lose on each sale we’ll make up in volume.)
So instead of allowing the co-op to proceed, EJ Egghart put the building up for sale. The employees accused EJ of being rich and responded by creating a GoFundMe campaign to buy the building. They were seeking to raise $200,000.
[ . . . ]
They eventually raised just over $10,000 but by that point it didn’t matter. The cafe close for good on July 1, 2022. The four employees announced they would be keeping the money[.]
Read it all here.
William Galston: What Is Integralism?
Religion played a significant role in the founding of and development of this nation and its government (see the First Amendment), but that by no means indicates a consensus among the religious about religion’s role in the functions and operations of the government. William Galston at Persuasion writes of the revival of Integralism among some prominent Catholic conservatives and what it bodes for the future of liberalism in America.
Religious liberty has been called the “First Freedom,” and permitting religious diversity within society is the grain of sand around which the pearl of political liberalism developed. Surely a government that can tell us what to believe about God and how to worship God is a tyranny.
More broadly, liberalism embodies a basic distinction between the public and private realms. Government may act, within limits, in the public realm, but it may not invade the private realm, the zone of protected individual liberty. Although liberals argue about precisely where the line between these two realms should be drawn, they agree that the distinction exists and is morally fundamental. Catholic integralists reject freedom of religion, and they are prepared to use government power in the name of public morality to control what liberals consider private and individual decisions.
This clash between neo-integralism and the American political tradition makes it all the more striking that this avowed anti-liberal doctrine has gained a following in America, especially among young Catholic intellectuals. In recent conversations with students, I have been surprised by how many of them have heard of this doctrine and are attracted to it. Political liberals must try to understand why.
In a 2019 article entitled “Against David French-ism,” Sohrab Ahmari, a recent convert to Catholicism, offers some important clues. For him as for many other members of the New Right, the culture war is the heart of the matter. Although liberalism claims to be religiously neutral, Ahmari says, it has sparked a cultural revolution that leaves no room for traditional Christianity. In language which echoes the influential treatise by Waldstein, he says they must “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”
Ahmari rejects the idea that either law or public culture can be a neutral space that accommodates deep differences of morality and religion. In an italicized sentence, he channels what he takes to be the demand of those who take personal autonomy to its logical extreme: “For us to feel fully autonomous, you must positively affirm our sexual choices, our transgression, our power to disfigure our natural bodies and redefine what it means to be human, lest your disapprobation make us feel less than fully autonomous.” He also provides a timely example of what this means: “Individual experiments in living—say, taking your kids to a drag reading hour at the public library—cannot be sustained without some level of moral approval by the community.”
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter
Here’s part of a thread from Billy Binion on a story about police abuse of power in Louisiana. Click for the whole thing.
Pardon the disturbing photo, but here’s an update on a story seen here before out of Canada, via Wesley Yang:
And finally, given Twitter’s (excuse me, X’s) past reputation and Elon Musk’s self-proclaimed free speech absolutism, it’ll be interesting to see what this new version of “open, accurate, and safe political discourse” looks like: