E-Pluribus | May 9, 2024
Glenn Loury bares his soul; pluralism on campus; and overcoming the censorship of the media oligarchs.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Pamela Paul: He Knows It’s Important to Admit Mistakes. He’s Made Many.
Pluribus often features articles or podcasts by Glenn Loury, but many may not be familiar with his history. Loury’s new book Late Admission: Confessions of a Black Conservative is up for release soon, and Pamela Paul of the New York Times spoke to Loury about the ups and downs and twists and turns in his complicated life. Paul begins with Loury’s latest controversy: reconsidering the George Floyd story.
Glenn Loury thought maybe the world — maybe he — had been wrong about Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020. Loury had watched a documentary, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” that had circulated largely on right-wing social media, arguing that Chauvin had been wrongly convicted, and found himself persuaded. Was it possible, he wondered, that Floyd had actually died of a drug overdose?
[. . .]
The blowback was swift and harsh.
“Really, you’re going to take Chauvin’s side?” friends emailed Loury. Commenters on his newsletter and social media also took issue. Then Radley Balko, an independent journalist, published a long and meticulous critique of the film, calling it “all nonsense.”
[. . .]
How had he made such a mistake?
“The real story is I hated what happened in the summer of 2020,” he told me. “I think these moral panics we have around these police killings are over the top and it’s bad for the country.” He had supported the filmmakers, he confessed, because they were attacking people he opposed. “I let that cloud my judgment.”
This is far from the first reversal, political or personal, for Loury, 75, one of the most celebrated and reviled Black intellectuals of the past half-century. While public debate has too often devolved into lobbing grenades from entrenched positions, Loury’s tumultuous life, his swings from the right to the left and back again, his remarkable, barrier-busting successes and his considerable frailties and failures, have taught him to always recognize that he could be wrong and to keep an open mind, no matter how vehement his opinions. He outlines this ragged road to wisdom in his remarkably candid memoir, “Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative.”
[. . .]
Through all his political shifts, Loury has been consistent in his abiding concern for Black Americans. He believes there are serious problems in Black educational achievement and Black economic, social and health outcomes. The collapse of family, the spread of gangs.
“There’s something rotten there, there’s something problematic there, there’s a deep, deep, deep something amiss there,” he said. “And I want to say it’s not just them, it’s not just on them, it’s us.” He wants to talk about agency, choice, responsibility.
“I can’t even look at you in the eye when I’m saying this!” he exclaimed suddenly, interrupting himself. “Because it’s so hard to say. I mean, it is blaming the victim at some level.”
I asked Loury: If not affirmative action, if not D.E.I., then what’s the solution? He hesitated, then talked about early childhood education, school reform, investments in mental health, tools to develop the potential of Black families and communities.
At heart, he still believes in what he calls “the Booker T. Washington-slash-Clarence Thomas” idea that slavery was horrible, but it’s over. Between what he calls the two polar paths to Black progress, W.E.B. DuBois, who emphasized equality and integration with white America, and Washington, who emphasized separatism and self-sufficiency, he falls on the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps side.
Read the whole thing.
Yascha Mounk with Eboo Patel on Pluralism
How can universities really best educate and prepare the next generation? As part of Persuasion’s series on the future of universities, Yascha Mounk spoke to Eboo Patel of Interfaith America about the role of faith and pluralism in that process and what that could and should look like on campus.
Mounk: . . . How are these diversity programs put together and why do you think that might make some of the graduates of those programs participants in tribal warfare, rather than facilitating some form of compromise and some form of mutual understanding between the different warring tribes?
Patel: It was like a vise grip in much of higher ed. I think that this is easing right now. I think things are getting better. And I think that it's because there are a set of really kind of solution oriented leaders in lots of places, including DEI departments, that are leading things towards the better. But for a period of time, there was no doubt that the dominant diversity paradigm is what I would call “demonize, demean, and divide.”
You demonize some groups of people based literally only on their identity—because they're white, male, straight. They are only ever bad. You require other groups of people to demean themselves, to only tell a victim's story. I mean, I want to tell you all the ways that I'm inspired by Islam. It is not Islamophobia that makes me a Muslim. It's Islam that makes me a Muslim. I don't want to tell a victim story. That's demeaning. I want to tell an inspiring story. Identities are principally sources of pride, not status as a victim. So you demonize some people, you demean other people, and then you divide everybody. And it's a battlefield approach to diversity.
It's not that I want that perspective entirely excluded. I just don't want it to be the paradigm or the default position, right? I think a much better way of approaching diversity work is what we call at Interfaith America “respect, relate, cooperate.” You respect people across their differences. You build relationships between diverse communities and you cooperate on concrete projects to serve the common good.
[. . .]
I think one of the reasons that religious diversity is an excellent kind of entry point into broader pluralism work is precisely because you have to recognize that people have fundamental differences in doctrine, fundamental differences and disagreements on what Paul Tillich would call “ultimate concerns,” right? How do people come into this world and why? Who gets saved, what makes a good person, etc. You just have to recognize there are deep and fundamental disagreements and you have to figure out ways to work together anyway.
You don't begin principally with the question of power, who is powerful and who's not powerful. You begin principally with the issue of fundamental disagreements and the need to cooperate anyway.
[. . .]
I think one of the reasons interfaith work leads into the very important pluralism work of today, which is around political differences, is precisely because our approach to this is largely the same. Members of the Catholic faith and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints have very different views on, for example, what the proper ecclesiology is. But they also both have large social service networks and disaster relief organizations. And therefore, in some instances around disaster relief, around refugee resettlement, they put their doctrinal differences aside and they work together on civic causes. I think it's the exact same approach when it comes to politics. People who vote for Donald Trump and Joe Biden clearly have hugely important differences and disagreements. I am not neutral on those, right? And yet I do not want basketball leagues to split up. I don't want YMCAs to split up. I don't want fire departments to split up because of who people voted for.
Our big thing is, in order to have a diverse democracy, you have to be able to disagree on some fundamental things and work together on other fundamental things. Those things that we work together on are civic things that are in a different place in American life than our disagreements, whether they are religious or they are political in nature. And look, I have limits: I'm not buying a brownie from the Nazi bake sale. But otherwise I am learning how to cooperate with people and in the right time I might raise a conversation about those political differences.
Read it all here.
Sohrab Ahmari: Censorship in the New Regime Is Corporate
While the First Amendment is a bulwark against government censorship, the government is not the only powerful entity interested in censorship. And just because engaging in censorship might be legal and constitutional doesn’t automatically make it good. Sohrab Ahmari writes at TomKlingenstein.com about the corporate oligarchy he sees as a threat to true freedom of expression and even freedom of the press.
October 14, 2020. It’s one of the dates etched in my mind, alongside my wedding anniversary, my kids’ birthdays, and my reception into the Catholic Church. Unlike those happy occasions, however, October 14 is associated with a dark memory. It was the day the New York Post, where I was the op-ed editor at the time, published the first exposé on Hunter Biden’s laptop — and was censored by Facebook and Twitter and had its official account suspended on the latter platform.
Here is the opening paragraph of an October 15 column that may well have constituted the paper’s first intervention in response to the censorship it suffered: “This is what totalitarianism looks like in our century: not men in darkened cells driving screws under the fingernails of dissidents, but Silicon Valley dweebs removing from vast swaths of the Internet a damaging exposé on their preferred presidential candidate.”
I can still feel the genuine dread that inspired these words. The 35-year-old me that penned them would have agreed with Glenn Elmers and Ted Richards when they argue that the United States has entered a phase of soft despotism, even soft totalitarianism, at least with respect to the media. And I still agree with that assessment. What’s changed, or perhaps deepened, is my understanding of the precise nature of this despotism, and what it would take to overcome it.
The fundamental problem is the enormous concentration of media and technological prowess in a relatively few oligarchic hands. These media and tech overlords and their managerial servants, as we now know, are all too willing to collude with the state apparatus to censor inconvenient truths. But I fear that by focusing primarily or even solely on such collusion, opponents increasingly ignore the bedeviling privatized quality of the current tyranny.
[. . .]
In the wake of the Hunter censorship episode, Republicans briefly seemed to embrace reforms that would go to the heart of the problem: the fact that our digital public square is controlled by a handful of private tech firms wielding an all but limitless power to determine the parameters of permissible speech. The Hunter Files, along with the censorship of pandemic dissidents, cast a cold light on the ability of Big Tech to use its market power to achieve what the midcentury economist John Kenneth Galbraith called “conditioned power”: the power to shape what millions of people get to say, know, and think.
Systematic reforms aimed at curbing this combination of compensatory and conditioned power were on the table. Foremost was reforming or overturning Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the well intentioned but outdated Clinton-era law that allows social media platforms to censor content—that is, to act like traditional publishers—without bearing any of a traditional publisher’s liabilities.
Then, too, no less a figure than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas floated the idea of treating social media platforms like common carriers. The ancient common law principle holds that providers of mass services like toll bridges, say, cannot unreasonably discriminate against users. Applying it to Big Tech would have offered a solution to the problem that was elegantly in keeping with the Anglo-American legal tradition.
Last but not least, there was a great deal of antitrust talk. Even laissez-faire ideology, after all, permits breaking up firms that unduly monopolize their respective markets. That’s certainly true of Big Tech firms, especially in their dealings with much weaker traditional outlets (like the Post). As antitrust experts like Lina Khan, President Biden’s competition czar, have documented, firms like Twitter and Facebook sit on both sides of digital-advertising and content transactions, hindering competition to an obscene degree.
As advertising platforms, Big Tech companies force news outlets to compete with them on their own territory, even as they also attract eyeballs and subscribers away from the outlets that put capital and sweat equity into producing original journalism. And those subjugated, the traditional outlets, dare not fight back lest they lose still more ground. Rather, each outlet tries individually to do the best it can, given this structural asymmetry, with varying degrees of success. Many simply fail.
Read it all.
Around Twitter (X)
Via Colin Wright, a pre-med biology class at Yale contends that sex is, among other things, “a becoming or enactment—a performance of the self.” And no, he’s not making that up.
The Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression (FIRE) with an update on a couple of student journalists arrested at Dartmouth:
And finally, a challenge from Conor Friedersdorf for universities to put their climate dollars where their mouth is:
“Performative” biology?
WTAF.