E-Pluribus | May 17, 2021

Where are conservatives headed on liberty, discussing contentious issues without acting like idiots, and when narratives undermine freedom.

May 17, 2021

A round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

Steven Greenhut: Nationalist Conservatives Are Abandoning the Ideas of Liberty

Cultural issues are nothing new in American politics, and, short of an extreme laissez faire form of governance, changing cultural mores will always play a role in deciding how large of role government will play in establishing laws and other bureaucratic methods of attempting to regulate behavior. Steven Greenhut writes that present day conservatives are often too anxious to use the heavy hand of government to override individual freedoms in service to their version of the “greater good.”

"The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of government," George Washington said, "are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people." Not long ago, virtually all American conservatives would have applauded those words—and described themselves as protectors of that limited-government ideal.
These days, the first president's words would be controversial among the growing ranks of national conservatives. They are so disgusted with the nation's cultural trends that they no longer want to bother with preserving that sacred fire. They echo an Old World approach. In Europe, conservatives rarely focus on preservation of liberty, but on using government to promote the religious and cultural traditions of their respective nations.
That's a far cry from our founders, who expressed the ideals defined in the Declaration of Independence—"that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Governments, they wrote, derived "their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Read the whole thing at Reason.

Jesse Singal: We Can Acknowledge Some Critical Race Theory Concepts Are Undercooked Without Turning Into Frothing Obsessed Idiots

In his latest at Singal-Minded, Jesse Singal takes a somewhat reluctant deep-dive into “Critical Race Theory” (CRT). While stressing that “some CRT stuff is useful,” Singal spends a significant amount of time detailing some of the more dubious claims and arguments of CRT. But Singal’s main targets are hair-on-fire opponents and advocates who are more interested in the fight than the underlying societal issues.

The problem is, I don’t think it’s a good idea to ignore the culture wars outright, particularly certain internecine left conflicts, because people’s sense of “Whoa, way too hot over there — I’m staying away” is a root cause of left-of-center stagnation. When Gitlin criticizes progressives and leftists in his book, he’s criticizing them for making the exact same silly or counterproductive arguments they continue making today. That fight over which standards of evidence and argument and appeals to the public should win out is still very much ongoing.
Which brings me to, sigh, “critical race theory.” CRT. A lot of people are panicking over both CRT and the backlash to it, which was sparked in part by Donald Trump’s enthusiastic interest in tamping down on CRT-based trainings in the waning days of his presidency. Conservatives (mostly) insist it is a deeply pernicious worldview that has metastasized within academia and woke-friendly companies, while progressives (mostly) paint this as a moral panic on the part of said conservatives, who only care about academic freedom when it suits them.
[…]
That being said, I also think that a current progressive platitude — that the backlash to CRT-based trainings stems solely from discomfort with diversity itself, or a desire to stoke (in-theory) politically advantageous culture warring — misses the boat a little. Yes, for some people, such as rightwing politicians and the aforementioned wokeness-is-our-biggest-threat crowd, this is true. But there are also some pretty bad, or at least under-evidenced, ideas under the CRT umbrella, and it’s reasonable to not want them taught as true in mandatory trainings.

Read it all here.

Lance Morrow: Can Freedom Survive the Narratives?

Whether it’s “narrative,” the “Big Lie”, or just unrestrained hyperbole, the current political climate is overrun with false or misleading claims and counterclaims. In The Wall Street Journal, Lance Morrow warns that the trend should be a red flag because, while the form may be different in the 21st century than the preceding one, authoritarianism is always lurking at the door.

In all this, there’s the fallacy of stopped time. When fabulating Bidenites, reporters at the New York Times and others on the left refer to “systemic racism,” they mean to conjure the sum of all American white people’s badness going back four centuries to 1619; and, when all that meanness is assembled in one trope (slave owners Washington and Jefferson and Lee and Stonewall Jackson on their bronze horses) to lay it before white America as indictment.
There is no difference between 1619 and 2021. There was no Civil War, no civil-rights acts of 1964 and 1965, no President Obama. White guilt comes with the white skin; the evil is frozen in time—like the sin of Adam, like the woolly mammoth in the glacier. Race trauma is sanctified—permanent, outside time.
Grown-ups, both black and white, find something fishy in this metaphysics. They know that history is a journey. In today’s race politics, there is neither journey nor redemption. There is only the cartoon of blacks in chains. Notice, however, that those victims are attended by white patron saints. Miraculously, the story grants an exemption to the virtuous white elites who have taken on black people as their moral wards—whites who preen and shake their fists and lament the iniquity, inequity and shame of it all. Where’s Charles Dickens when we need him? Robin DiAngelo, author of “White Fragility,” makes a fine Mrs. Jellyby.

Read it all here.