E-Pluribus | May 15, 2024
One or two cheers for conservatives; international propaganda in the digital age; and don't chuck principles over fake meat.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Matthew Yglesias: What the right gets right
While Matthew Yglesias earns a “leans left” from the All Sides media bias rating site, that doesn’t mean he isn’t willing to give conservatives, or at least conservatism, its due. At his very popular Slow Boring Substack, Yglesias gives a frank assessment of left versus right in some crucial areas of political, cultural and social ideology.
[M]ost people on the contemporary American left are skeptical of, if not outright hostile to, the idea of patriotism. If you picture someone with an American flag bumper sticker on their vehicle, you’re probably picturing a conservative guy and his truck. Personally, I’m glad that Joe Biden tries to avoid ceding patriotism to the right, but I do think the reality of the situation is closer to “Joe Biden agrees with conservatives about patriotism” than “the left is into patriotism, too.” The longstanding mild partisan gap here grew under Trump and has stayed wide under Biden.
[. . .]
Conservatives have their own flawed tendency to lapse into nostalgia for the recent past, but I do think they typically have a more clear-eyed view of the reality that the whole of human history is littered with atrocity and cruelty. It’s naive to view our sociocultural antecedents here in the United States as flawless, shining heroes, but it’s also naive to think the violence and brutality of American history is what’s unique about it, rather than the fact that we’ve settled into a prosperous and liberal status quo.
[. . .]
You hear a lot with regard to the Gaza protests that the people complaining are just the same as the people who complained about every good and virtuous social movement of the past. Implicit is the sense that there is no such thing as a social movement that was bad.
But Communism, to cite probably the most important example, was really bad!
And it was really bad even though a lot of earnest and well-meaning Communists were involved in good causes like civil rights and union organizing and opposition to apartheid. The fact that many people with good ideas and good intentions were also Communists and Communism killed millions of people and impoverished hundreds of millions just goes to show that sometimes really bad ideas get mixed in with worthy reforms. A century ago, eugenics had sterling progressive credentials. More recently, and less dramatically, thousands of people were murdered as a result of progressive over-enthusiasm for de-policing.
The thing that conservatives get right about this isn’t just that far-left activists are sometimes wrong about things, but that mainstream liberals are, by disposition, too indulgent of far-left activists. In recent years, it’s become common to hear things like:
If Israel is being cavalier in its treatment of Palestinian civilians, it’s wrong to complain about the substantive ideas of anyone involved in organizing anti-Israel protests.
If police departments are in need of reform, it’s wrong to criticize the rhetoric and demands of reform movement leaders, even if specific claims they are making about police funding or the role of preventative policing in reducing crime aren’t true.
If trans people are under attack from from bigots, it’s wrong to raise questions about edge cases involving prisons or high-level sports competitions.
If climate change is a serious problem, it’s wrong to nitpick apocalyptic rhetoric or false claims about the adequacy of existing technology.
The view here is that the important thing is to position yourself on the side of reform, rather than to ask too many questions about the precise contents of the reform.
But while I do think it’s true that you shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees, it’s actually very important for a reform plan to be based on true facts and workable ideas. The fact that Black lives do matter makes it more, rather than less important, to propose criminal justice reforms that save rather than cost lives. The fact that burning fossil fuels has harmful externalities makes it more, rather than less important, to accurately understand energy economics. Conservatives often err by being excessively skeptical of reform efforts, but they are correct to say that one should be somewhat skeptical, and I think correct that center-left circles sometimes get too squeamish about saying no.
Read it all here.
Anne Applebaum: The New Propaganda War
At The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum does a deep dive into the current wave of propaganda rolling out of China and Russia. The official end of the cold war is decades in the past now, but one gets the feeling it never really went away.
In the aftermath of [Tiananmen Square], the Chinese concluded that the physical elimination of dissenters was insufficient. To prevent the democratic wave then sweeping across Central Europe from reaching East Asia, the Chinese Communist Party eventually set out to eliminate not just the people but the ideas that had motivated the protests. In the years to come, this would require policing what the Chinese people could see online.
Nobody believed that this would work. In 2000, President Bill Clinton told an audience at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies that it was impossible.
[. . .]
While we were still rhapsodizing about the many ways in which the internet could spread democracy, the Chinese were designing what’s become known as the Great Firewall of China. That method of internet management—which is in effect conversation management—contains many different elements, beginning with an elaborate system of blocks and filters that prevent internet users from seeing particular words and phrases. Among them, famously, are Tiananmen, 1989, and June 4, but there are many more. In 2000, a directive called “Measures for Managing Internet Information Services” prohibited an extraordinarily wide range of content, including anything that “endangers national security, divulges state secrets, subverts the government, undermines national unification,” and “is detrimental to the honor and interests of the state”—anything, in other words, that the authorities didn’t like.
[A]long the way, the Chinese regime discovered a deeper problem: Surveillance, regardless of sophistication, provides no guarantees. During the coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese government imposed controls more severe than most of its citizens had ever experienced. Millions of people were locked into their homes. Untold numbers entered government quarantine camps. Yet the lockdown also produced the angriest and most energetic Chinese protests in many years. Young people who had never attended a demonstration and had no memory of Tiananmen gathered in the streets of Beijing and Shanghai in the autumn of 2022 to talk about freedom. In Xinjiang, where lockdowns were the longest and harshest, and where repression is most complete, people came out in public and sang the Chinese national anthem, emphasizing one line: “Rise up, those who refuse to be slaves!” Clips of their performance circulated widely, presumably because the spyware and filters didn’t identify the national anthem as dissent.
Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. The strength of these demonstrations, and the broader anger they reflected, was enough to spook the Chinese Communist Party into lifting the quarantine and allowing the virus to spread. The deaths that resulted were preferable to public anger and protest.
[. . .]
[T]he convergence of what had been disparate authoritarian influence projects is still new. Russian information-laundering and Chinese propaganda have long had different goals. Chinese propagandists mostly stayed out of the democratic world’s politics, except to promote Chinese achievements, Chinese economic success, and Chinese narratives about Tibet or Hong Kong. Their efforts in Africa and Latin America tended to feature dull, unwatchable announcements of investments and state visits. Russian efforts were more aggressive—sometimes in conjunction with the far right or the far left in the democratic world—and aimed to distort debates and elections in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and elsewhere. Still, they often seemed unfocused, as if computer hackers were throwing spaghetti at the wall, just to see which crazy story might stick. Venezuela and Iran were fringe players, not real sources of influence.
Slowly, though, these autocracies have come together, not around particular stories, but around a set of ideas, or rather in opposition to a set of ideas. Transparency, for example. And rule of law. And democracy. They have heard language about those ideas—which originate in the democratic world—coming from their own dissidents, and have concluded that they are dangerous to their regimes. Their own rhetoric makes this clear. In 2013, as Chinese President Xi Jinping was beginning his rise to power, an internal Chinese memo, known enigmatically as Document No. 9—or, more formally, as the Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere—listed “seven perils” faced by the Chinese Communist Party. “Western constitutional democracy” led the list, followed by “universal human rights,” “media independence,” “judicial independence,” and “civic participation.” The document concluded that “Western forces hostile to China,” together with dissidents inside the country, “are still constantly infiltrating the ideological sphere,” and instructed party leaders to push back against these ideas wherever they found them, especially online, inside China and around the world.
Read the whole thing.
Luke Hallam: What’s Bugging Ron DeSantis
Ron DeSantis often earns high marks from the right for standing up to wokeness, Disney being a prime example. Clearly Florida under DeSantis leadership has won some significant cultural victories, but does its recent “lab meat” ban go too far? At Persuasion, Luke Hallam emphatically says “yes.”
The latest front in the culture wars? Meat. Earlier this month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed SB 1084, a bill “prohibiting the manufacture for sale, sale, holding or offering for sale, or distribution of cultivated meat in this state.” By cultivated meat, the bill means the sort of artificially produced “beef” or “chicken” that is grown in a petri dish rather than coming from a dead animal—the sort that is popular with people wanting to reduce their fat intake or manage their carbon footprint.
I enjoy a good burger as much as the next person and I won’t be expunging beef from my diet any time soon. I can also at least conceive of reasons why a ban on fake meat might be defensible, such as to boost the interests of farmers, a form of protectionism that is common (if often detrimental) in democratic politics all over the world. I wouldn’t agree with banning meat for this reason, but at least it would make some kind of sense.
The problem is, this is nothing like the justification DeSantis gave for banning fake meat in Florida. Rather, according to an infographic posted on social media, SB 1084 is necessary to counter the “globalist agenda” through which the World Economic Forum intends to “force the world to eat fake meat and bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.” As evidence for this extraordinary claim, it cites WEF statements to the effect that the global meat industry contributes to harmful CO2 emissions (true) and that fake meat and insects are an “overlooked” alternative (debatable, but probably true). In order to hammer home the feeling that Floridians are up against sinister enemies, the infographic references other steps the state has taken to “protect our farmlands from being bought by the Chinese Communist Party” and “prevent a Central Bank Digital Currency from being recognized in Florida.”
[. . .]
DeSantis’s fake meat ban is a classic example of Hofstadtian politics. The governor is not content to simply point out that, actually, in a free society people should be allowed to eat meat, and isn’t it great that they still can? Instead, he says something like the following: Not only does the WEF think meat is a source of CO2, but they are also in cahoots with nefarious institutions to forcefully take it from you in the very near future. And that justifies an equal and opposite reaction. It’s the same playbook he used when he signed the “Stop WOKE Act” in 2022 to ban critical race theory—broadly defined—in schools. Decrying politicization of education by the left, the right responded by… politicizing education.
[. . .]
I love steak, but would I eat a lab-grown alternative that tastes as good as the real thing? I think I would. And that’s something people should be allowed to decide for themselves. It’s a right that Governor DeSantis just denied them.
Read it all.
Around Twitter (X)
Samuel Alito on freedom of speech and religious liberty from a recent commencement address. Click for video.
A California library has been held to account for kicking out a group last August after a speaker referred to transgender athletes by their biological sex:
And finally, the first tweet in a thread from Steve McGuire on the Princeton protesters. The design they chose for their flyer should have been a red flag… Click for the whole thread.
