E-Pluribus | October 24, 2023
Selective tolerance; cancel culture in the eye of the beholder; who should decide how much work kids do?
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Jonah Goldberg: Tolerating the Radically Intolerant
Over several decades, “tolerance” became a progressive buzzword in response to perceived (at times, real) close-mindedness on the right. In his latest G-File for The Dispatch, Jonah Goldberg delves deeper into the “tolerance” of the left and finds it disturbingly selective.
Where it becomes fairer to generalize about “the left” more broadly is its tolerance for the radically intolerant. At various universities, presidents and faculty find themselves in an exquisite pickle. They’ve spent years coming up with elaborate theories about why it’s imperative to limit, shape, regulate, bend, fold, and mutilate “discourse” that does “violence” to “marginalized groups” while “privileging” the “voices” of the “oppressed.”
If my prodigious deployment of scare quotes was lost on you, I’ll just be clear. I think most of these theories are on the merits best seen as ornate, polysyllabic efforts to cram 10 pounds of bulls—t into five-pound bags.
But the merits are beside the point, and you’re basically a sucker if you engage them in good faith. The point of these theories is more practical than their peddlers like to concede. All of the social justice prattle is best understood as tools for social engineering and caste-protection. Faculty-speak—“Latinx” and all that crap—boils down to in-group shibboleth manufacturing.
[. . .]
[A]fter decades of chipping away at traditional understandings of free speech, academic freedom, and other “core values,” a lot of these higher ed apparatchiks are retreating like cockroaches frightened by the kitchen light back to those very ideas in order to defend people who are celebrating paragliding rapists and murderers and their broader agenda. Suddenly the people who’ve spent years saying that “offensive” ideas are “violence,” are taking offense at a backlash against many of the same people when they endorse actual violence. The people who insist that “marginalized” people need to be protected from dangerous ideas are appalled by those little Zionist snowflakes who take offense at the free speech of professors and students who want to eliminate the Zionist menace.
It really is head-spinning. We get called philistines and ignorami for championing classically liberal values, but when we say that endorsing the slaughter of babies and old people in their homes falls outside of those liberal values, we get lectures about how we’re the ones who really don’t understand liberal values. If there had been an attack on virtually any other group—save perhaps for the Uyghurs or Klansmen—a fraction as heinous as the 10/7 pogrom, it would not take days for university presidents to figure out how to find the words to condemn it. But because Jews, particularly Zionist Jews, are not members in good standing of the official Coalition of the Oppressed, they struggle to find the right words, if they ever find them at all. And they pretend that the real outrage isn’t to be found in terror or apologies for it, but being made to have to defend liberal values they don’t actually believe in.
Read the whole thing.
Michelle Goldberg: With War in Israel, the Cancel Culture Debate Comes Full Circle
Pluribus defines cancel culture as "generally characterized by disproportionate, punitive, coordinated, personal destruction and discrediting for a real or perceived offense with no offer of redemption." Over at the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg argues that the left has gone too far in promoting cancel culture, as illustrated by the fact that people on both sides of the Israel-Gaza conflict have faced censorship from their progressive allies.
Part of me shudders to view the unfolding catastrophe in Israel and Gaza through the provincial lens of America’s cancel culture debate. In some ways, that debate has now come full circle, because pro-Palestinian voices were being censored long before the phrase “cancel culture” existed, one reason the left was unwise in recent years to prevaricate about the value of free speech. But if someone as evenhanded as Thrall now finds his talks being dropped, we’re in an especially repressive period. And in a time of war, particularly a war shrouded in fiercely competing narratives, free speech is more important than ever.
I don’t like the fact that the statement Nguyen signed gestured only vaguely at Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians. In calling off his Friday evening appearance, 92NY, a Jewish organization, was playing by rules much of the left established, privileging sensitivity to traumatized communities ahead of the robust exchange of ideas. And supporters of Israel are hardly alone in creating a censorious atmosphere; particularly on college campuses, it is Zionists who feel silenced and intimidated. A professor at the University of California, Davis, is facing investigation by the university for a social media post calling for the targeting of “Zionist journalists,” which said, “They have houses with addresses, kids in school,” and included emojis of a knife, an ax and three drops of blood.
Nevertheless, a commitment to free speech, like a commitment to human rights, shouldn’t depend on others reciprocating; such commitments are worth trying to maintain even in the face of unfairness. “Art is one of the things that can keep our minds and hearts open, that can help us see beyond the hatred of war, that can make us understand that we cannot be divided into the human versus the inhuman because we are, all of us, human and inhuman at the same time,” Nguyen wrote on Instagram.
Read it all here.
Tarren Bragdon: Democrats Peddle a ‘Child Labor’ Deception
Societies should prevent the abuse of child labor that was rampant in the West in past centuries, and still plagues developing countries. But things are arguably different today in the US. At the Wall Street Journal, Tarren Bragdon makes the case that parents are the best judges of how much and what type of work is appropriate for their children.
In mid-September, Republican state Rep. Linda Chaney filed legislation that would give more Florida teens the ability to work. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds would no longer be banned from working more than 30 hours a week during the school year. They could also work overtime on Sunday and school holidays, which is currently illegal. If this bill passed, the federal government’s strong child-labor laws would still be in full effect. Teens would be expected to give priority to their education, while simultaneously gaining more opportunities to learn by doing.
The correct response to this reform is to pass it and move on. Instead, Florida is enduring manufactured outrage. One Democratic state lawmaker called the proposal “un-American,” while claiming Republicans want children to replace a shrinking immigrant workforce—as if suburbia’s sons and daughters were going to work all day in the fields. Meanwhile, the media has unleashed a torrent of slanted articles, virtually all of which have a headline that accuses Republicans of supporting legislation to “weaken child labor laws.”
Liberal politicians and their media allies have been repeating the same message since the spring, when several other states took up similar reforms. Iowa passed a law resembling Florida’s bill. Other states, like Arkansas, repealed burdensome “youth permit” regimes that forced teens to get permission from state bureaucrats instead of letting families make their own decisions. Families already let teens play sports, leading to early mornings, late nights and long weekends. Why can’t they let their kids bus tables or deliver groceries at these times, earning money in the process?
Read it all.
Around Twitter (X)
Not the Onion: Michael Eisen, editor of eLife, an open-access science journal, reports that he is being replaced for retweeting… The Onion.
Speaking of satire, Joel Berry of the Babylon Bee reports the White House scooped the Bee yesterday:
And finally, the next time a group of sociologists signs an “open letter,” they may want to consider just how “open” it is: