E-Pluribus | September 13, 2021
E-Pluribus | September 13, 2021
Vaccines, freedom and choice; can philanthropy fight racism; and is the Woke elite's grip starting to weaken?
A round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Nick Gillespie: No, Biden, This Is About Freedom and Personal Choice
The rapid and deadly onset of the pandemic last year resulted in widespread use of emergency powers by governors as well as executive action at the federal level to deal with the crisis. In response to President Biden’s decision last week to compel private employers to make sure their employees are vaccinated against COVID or tested weekly, Nick Gillespie writes at Reason that there is no justification for the continued encroachment on personal liberties in the name of public health.
The rapid development and deployment of safe and effective vaccines—a medical miracle that could have gone months faster had the Food and Drug Administration not acted as ploddingly as a wizened old draft horse—makes possible the return to normalcy that was promised in the early days of the pandemic. We are now capable of setting and enforcing our own risk limits on what sorts of activities we want to do. The information is out there and individuals, employers, and establishments can set and are setting their own rules based on what they want. If we don't all agree, that's not chaos, that's freedom in all its unregimented, varied glory. It allows comedian Patton Oswalt to cancel shows in places that won't follow his protocols while letting other performances to take place under less-stringent conditions.
As important, the "vaccine-hesitant" are hesitant for all sorts of reasons. Poorer people tend to be less vaccinated than average, and so are blacks and Hispanics and younger people, and, weirdly, people with doctorates. A flat, imperious mandate that doesn't speak to these groups' differing concerns will only sharpen political and cultural divides even as Biden claims to be acting in the name of national unity. This is already happening, as individuals and groups are becoming less nuanced in their responses and simply signing up for whatever political tribe they feel bound to. Hence, a sizeable chunk of conservative Republicans are not simply anti-vaccine mandate but anti-vaccine, and the ACLU, which only a few years ago denounced most vaccine mandates, has now fully embraced them. While done in the name of protecting "all Americans," Biden's mandate clearly escalates ongoing culture wars.
Read it all here.
Peter Savodnik: The American Aristocracy Tries to Fight Racism. It's Not Working.
Clearly philanthropy is nothing new among the ultra-wealthy, but Peter Savodnik contends that one particular genre of charitable giving that has gained popularity recently is failing miserably. To make his point, Savodnik relates the experience of Whittier College, an east Los Angeles liberal arts college that received a $12 million gift from MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife), a gift apparently based on what Scott believed or hoped the school’s new president Linda Oubre might be able to accomplish in the fight against racial and gender inequity.
In November 2020, when MacKenzie Scott’s people emailed Linda Oubre, the president of Whittier College, to ask for the school’s bank information so they could deposit a gift of $12 million, no strings attached, Oubre thought it was a scam. The small, liberal-arts college in east Los Angeles had never received a donation that big.
On December 15, 2020, Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, made it public. She announced she was giving nearly $4.2 billion to 384 nonprofits and colleges, including Whittier.
Since getting divorced and becoming one of the world’s most generous philanthropists, Scott, who’s worth just south of $60 billion, has been vague about her philanthropic vision. What is clear is that she has given away far more money than most countries spend on foreign aid. (In 2017, Norway’s budget was just over $4.1 billion; South Korea’s was $2.2 billion.)
[…] American philanthropy is no longer simply about building libraries or hospitals, finding vaccines, or funding schools. It is about directly writing checks to the people with the identities that philanthropists claim to care about.
In that way, the gift from MacKenzie Scott was very much of the moment. It had little, if anything, to do with Whittier College and everything to do with Linda Oubre.
The problem is $12 million is a lot of money — if not to MacKenzie Scott than to a small college. That can make a big, positive impact. Some of the $12 million is funding scholarships for needy students, for example. But it can also have unintended consequences. It can empower a college president. It can transform the culture of an institution and sow distrust and suspicion.
Read the whole thing.
Andrew Sullivan: Emerging Cracks In The Woke Elite
Just back from vacation, Andrew Sullivan finds some reasons for optimism in the ongoing struggle against illiberalism, ranging from HBO Max’s miniseries “The White Lotus” to recent pieces published in left-of-center publications that question some aspects of progressive orthodoxy. There is a long way to go, Sullivan notes, but some progress is better than none.
“The White Lotus” is not an anti-woke jeremiad. It’s much subtler than that. Even the sophomores seem more naïve and callow than actively sexist and racist. The miniseries doesn’t look away from the staggering social inequality we now live in; and gives us a classic white, straight, male, rich narcissist in the finance jock. But it’s humane. It sees the unique drama of the individual and how that can never be reduced to categories or classes or identities.
And this step toward humaneness is what interests me. Because if we can’t intellectually engage people on how critical theory is palpably wrong in its view of the world, we can sure show how brutal and callous it is — and must definitionally be — toward individual human beings in the pursuit of utopia. “The White Lotus” is thereby a liberal work of complexity and art.
Another sign of elite adjustment: both The Atlantic and The New Yorker have just published long essays that push back against woke authoritarianism and cruelty. Since both magazines have long capitulated to rank illiberalism, this is encouraging. And since critical theory is an entirely elite-imposed orthodoxy, it matters when the ranks of the elite crack a little.
Read it all.
Around Twitter
A thread by Christopher Rufo explaining his political/ideological evolution:
Wesley Yang with some thoughts on the corner Big Tech appears to have painted itself into:
Finally, the beginning of a thread on a Wall Street Journal investigation of Facebook’s content moderation and exemptions for certain users. Click through for the whole thing:
