This is an eloquent piece of writing, and I, for one, have no quarrel with with it. In fact, I’d quote it in toto but that would be both unfair to Sullivan and also a copyright violation. However, I will quote generously, probably exceeding the “fair use” doctrine. I would urge your woke friends to read it, too, but of course they wouldn’t listen because “debate” is not a word in their dictionary.
Voilà: some quotes:
The new orthodoxy — what the writer Wesley Yang has described as the “successor ideology” to liberalism — seems to be rooted in what journalist Wesley Lowery calls “moral clarity.” He told Times media columnist Ben Smith this week that journalism needs to be rebuilt around that moral clarity, which means ending its attempt to see all sides of a story, when there is only one, and dropping even an attempt at objectivity (however unattainable that ideal might be). And what is the foundational belief of such moral clarity? That America is systemically racist, and a white-supremacist project from the start, that, as Lowery put it in The Atlantic, “the justice system — in fact, the entire American experiment — was from its inception designed to perpetuate racial inequality.”
This is an argument that deserves to be aired openly in a liberal society, especially one with such racial terror and darkness in its past and inequality in the present. But it is an argument that equally deserves to be engaged, challenged, questioned, interrogated. There is truth in it, truth that it’s incumbent on us to understand more deeply and empathize with more thoroughly. But there is also an awful amount of truth it ignores or elides or simply denies.
It sees America as in its essence not about freedom but oppression. It argues, in fact, that all the ideals about individual liberty, religious freedom, limited government, and the equality of all human beings were always a falsehood to cover for and justify and entrench the enslavement of human beings under the fiction of race. It wasn’t that these values competed with the poison of slavery, and eventually overcame it, in an epic, bloody civil war whose casualties were overwhelmingly white. It’s that the liberal system is itself a form of white supremacy — which is why racial inequality endures and why liberalism’s core values and institutions cannot be reformed and can only be dismantled.
This view of the world certainly has “moral clarity.” What it lacks is moral complexity. No country can be so reduced to one single prism and damned because of it. American society has far more complexity and history has far more contingency than can be jammed into this rubric. No racial group is homogeneous, and every individual has agency. No one is entirely a victim or entirely privileged. And we are not defined by black and white any longer; we are home to every race and ethnicity, from Asia through Africa to Europe and South America.
And a country that actively seeks immigrants who are now 82 percent nonwhite is not primarily defined by white supremacy. Nor is a country that has seen the historic growth of a black middle and upper class, increasing gains for black women in education and the workplace, a revered two-term black president, a thriving black intelligentsia, successful black mayors and governors and members of Congress, and popular and high culture strongly defined by the African-American experience. Nor is a country where nonwhite immigrants are fast catching up with whites in income and where some minority groups now outearn whites. In a white-supremacist country, hundred of thousands of people of all colors would not be jamming the streets of America’s cities in the middle of a pandemic to express horror at the murder of a black man by a white cop.
And yet this crude hyperbole remains. . .
This kind of stuff needs to be said, and Sullivan is brave for saying it. Were he black, like Glenn Loury, he could get away with this more easily, but why should the cogency of an argument depend on the pigmentation of the person who makes it? That very idea is itself a symptom of the intellectual slough in which we’re mired. And it’s time that we stand up against this drive to mental conformity and cast aside our fears of being deemed a racist or a fascist.
I could quote and quote, but I’ll just add 2.3 more paragraphs (there are a lot more in the article):
The orthodoxy goes further than suppressing contrary arguments and shaming any human being who makes them. It insists, in fact, that anything counter to this view is itself a form of violence against the oppressed. The reason some New York Times staffers defenestrated op-ed page editor James Bennet was that he was, they claimed, endangering the lives of black staffers by running a piece by Senator Tom Cotton, who called for federal troops to end looting, violence, and chaos, if the local authorities could not. This framing equated words on a page with a threat to physical life — the precise argument many students at elite colleges have been using to protect themselves from views that might upset them. But, as I noted two years ago, we all live on campus now.
In this manic, Manichean world you’re not even given the space to say nothing. “White Silence = Violence” is a slogan chanted and displayed in every one of these marches. It’s very reminiscent of totalitarian states where you have to compete to broadcast your fealty to the cause.
This video, retweeted by Ricky Gervais, is a prime example of broadcasting one’s fealty to the cause. And it makes me cringe. (I suspect it made Gervais cringe as well.) Here are the famous and privileged acting as penitentes. If anything is performative and accomplishes nothing, this is:
Finally, Sullivan’s paean to liberalism:
Liberalism is not just a set of rules. There’s a spirit to it. A spirit that believes that there are whole spheres of human life that lie beyond ideology — friendship, art, love, sex, scholarship, family. A spirit that seeks not to impose orthodoxy but to open up the possibilities of the human mind and soul. A spirit that seeks moral clarity but understands that this is very hard, that life and history are complex, and it is this complexity that a truly liberal society seeks to understand if it wants to advance. It is a spirit that deals with an argument — and not a person — and that counters that argument with logic, not abuse. It’s a spirit that allows for various ideas to clash and evolve, and treats citizens as equal, regardless of their race, rather than insisting on equity for designated racial groups. It’s a spirit that delights sometimes in being wrong because it offers an opportunity to figure out what’s right. And it’s generous, humorous, and graceful in its love of argument and debate. It gives you space to think and reflect and deliberate. Twitter, of course, is the antithesis of all this — and its mercy-free, moblike qualities when combined with a moral panic are, quite frankly, terrifying.
It’s a superb piece of writing. And yes, not everything must be dissected with an ideological scalpel. One such thing is STEM. Another thing that’s been dissected away (by HBO) is “Gone With the Wind” —soon to return with an ideological “corrective”, even though anybody with two neurons to rub together can see its palpable racist moments. What’s next—the Pyramids? Oh wait, people are calling for their destruction; after all, they were built by slaves.
Andrew is a courageous writer, and, in his contrarianism. individuality, and literary bravery, is the closest thing we have to Hitchens.
h/t: Simon
I struggle here, first of all. If these values are wrong, which ones are right? I would like very much to hear what the Wokiees propose as their replacements. They may say “racial equality”, but we’ve seen over and over what the results of revolutionary equality are without individual rights. If the American experiment has been all about perpetuating racial inequality, it has failed badly. The fact is that every step towards racial equality in the US has only been possible because of white votes. How do they think slavery ended, anyhow?
Not “racial equality” — equity. And equity will involve Maoist struggle sessions for everyone.
I think that definition of liberalism is spot on. I wish more people practiced that ideal.
Sullivan is indeed an eloquent writer. Comparing him to Hitch is reasonable. I wish I could read the censored article now more than ever.
Twitter, of course, is the antithesis of all this — and its mercy-free, moblike qualities when combined with a moral panic are, quite frankly, terrifying.
I know there is no way to know now that Twitter’s Pandora’s box is wide open, but I truly wonder how much better off America (the world?) would be without the invention of Twitter. I guess it would help if Twitter and especially Facebook were more responsible managing their content and users. Trump’s Twitter feed should have had hundreds of disclaimers by now…I think Twitter did it once? And Trump had a fit. Money talks and bullshit walks; that’s a dangerous policy in regards to social media.
I also frankly wish that mainstream media would just not take Twitter seriously. I always say, a**holes make a lot of noise, but they’re mostly full of sh*t, and Twitter often acts like just a big public lavatory. Why do people even pay attention to Twitter mobs? Tell them all go go tweet themselves.
Tweet themselves! That’s about right.
I would like to see the reaction to a new slogan:
Not Voting = Violence
I suspect that the Millennials would find it uncomfortable given their poor rate of participation.
I saw a post about how generations before had a hard time of it. Basically it took someone born in, I believe 1917, and how that person would have gone through the Spanish Flu, various other outbreaks, two world wars, etc. Several millennials complained that the piece, which had nothing to do with them and never mentioned them, was just comparing their pain with COVID-19 to other generations and suggesting their pain was less. One millennial in particular actually said, out loud, that it was far worse to be born in 1980. I remember laughing out loud & repeating server times “1980! In the west!”
“I suspect that the Millennials would find it uncomfortable given their poor rate of participation.”
Maybe they should be offered some kind of material consumerist reward as a carrot to vote. I perceive, however subjectively, that most will much more significantly inconvenience themselves in pursuit of the latest “cool” demigod digital device than in voting.
Don’t know that the beau idéal for a liberal democracy could be better described.
As a starting point in discussing current race relations in the United States, one must first answer this question: has the country since its inception (you can choose the date – 1619 or 1776 or something else) been one (with rare exceptions) where the white majority has systematically oppressed and discriminated against its black minority? If you answer yes then you cannot have a reasonable discussion with a person who answers no and vice-versa. This is because there is such a fundamental difference in outlook then changing minds is nearly impossible. It is like trying to change the mind of a Trump cultist.
My answer to the question is yes, so I will address my remarks to those who also answer yes, but are disturbed by these calls to essentially terminate the philosophy of liberal democracy, which in theory if not the practice of which American society is supposedly built upon. I share these concerns, but view Sullivan’s remarks as unwarranted apocalyptic. His fear that Floyd’s death has unleashed a tidal wave of “wokeism” on American society, which was previously just a minor flood, but growing more serious, reflects a lack of understanding of American history, particularly how social change takes place. Americans are a conservative people; they like change to take place incrementally. Indeed, I would argue (and many would disagree with me) that the two great upheavals in American history were conservative. The American Revolution was fought to preserve the power of the colonial elite; the South seceded to preserve slavery and the North resisted to preserve the Union. Most reform in this country (such as the New Deal and the civil rights movement of 1960s) took place with relatively little social upheaval or threat to the social order. My emphasis is on the word relatively, meaning that violence, although present, was not widespread.
Playing the role of pundit (meaning if I turn out to be wrong, I’ll just keep on opining), I don’t think wokeism represents a threat to liberal democracy. The basic reason is that too many people oppose it. This includes just about all Republicans and probably most Democrats. The vast majority of the latter realize that the real and imminent threat to liberal democratic values are represented by Trump and his minions. Some of the reasonable demands of the Woke, such as police reform, should and probably will be implemented (although not to the radical extent that the Woke demand). The demand that whites should self-shame themselves is nothing but bombast and will quickly fade away. When the dust settles and the protesters go home, at least some white Americans may understand better that the last few weeks were characterized by the expression of frustration by African-Americans over the centuries of slavery then discrimination. And if the country is really lucky, perhaps in a year from now we’ll be on the way to a more just society, a vaccine will be generally available, the economy will be recovering and Trump will be gone. It’s a nice thought, but maybe it’s just a fantasy.
The thing that bothers me quite a bit and is probably the basis of much ideological squabbling is the great gap between the haves and the have nots, i.e. the concentration of wealth at the top of society. The ruling class seems to have no enthusiasm see this changed.
This will be their ruination.
To quote Warren Buffett:
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
I agree that Americans are conservative. They still have the $1 bill and the penny. As a Canadian, this doesn’t surprise me because that’s just how Americans are (bless their hearts) 🙂
You just wait ’till generation Z gets it sh** together.😏
“The new orthodoxy — what the writer Wesley Yang has described as the “successor ideology” to liberalism — seems to be rooted in what journalist Wesley Lowery calls “moral clarity.”
In other words, secular religious fundamentalism. And religious fundamentalism is a language which I know to well having been at its receiving end.
Yet again, however, we see issues of class being totally displaced by issues of race. In fact, class subsumes race.
Corporations,and Mitt Romney, have been quick to seize this moment knowing that identity is no hindrance to the neoliberal/globalist business model. In fact, it creates new markets and their segmentation.
Among the most “woke”, probably the most, is tech. Yet that industry, at the top, is largely white or Asian. Given its political leanings, Why do readers think that is so? And saying not enough minority graduates, begs the question of why….
I have the feeling that industry is going to have to perform, not just sloganeer.
What? some idiots want to destroy the pyramids because “they were built by slaves”?? Where is all this crap going to end? There is NO evidence that slaves built the pyramids. In fact nearly all Egyptologists agree that they were not built by slaves. Zahi Hawass, in only the last couple of days, has confirmed it. There really are some ignoramuses out there.
Exactly:
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-html
Still we can’t expect these pinheads to keep up with actual research.
I should like simply to say that there is huge difference between pulling down a statue of a slave-trader in Bristol about which there has been controversy for years (and in a country where racism remains strong – read Amelia Gentleman’s ‘The Windrush Betrayal’) and pulling down the pyramids, and it is, in all honesty, ridiculously, indeed frivolously, wrong to pretend that these two things are in any way comparable. I don’t suppose that Susan Davies & Chris Moffat would have any problem with the pulling down of the statue of George III in Manhattan after the announcement of the Declaration of Independence – I certainly don’t, and I am not American, but British. Or do they think it should have been left up?
I should like to add that I much admired Historian’s temperate and sensible comment above at 7.
At no time did I say the statues and pyramids are in any way the same, I said that wanting the destroy the pyramids through ignorance was stupid. I have no opinion on the statue of George III. I am not American and don’t live there and you should not make ignorant statements about people you don’t know.
Well, I apologise for my misunderstanding, but you did say ‘Where is all this crap going to end?’, which led to that misunderstanding. The trouble is that Conservative MPs in the UK, and, almost certainly, right-wing politicians in the US, have been rehearsing the same sort of tropes with regard to attempts to remove the statues of historical figures, men in the main, who remain, shall we say, controversial.
In my opinion, it IS all crap when compared to the scourges of domestic violence, homelessness, violence against women and a myriad of other stuff. Tearing down statues is juvenile. If these people used their time and money to help other people how much better off we would all be. It’s all just virtue signalling to me.
In some cases it may no doubt be ‘virtue-signalling’ (another term that – forgive me for saying this – tends, it seems to me, to be, like ‘woke’, a rather too ready resort). In other cases it is not. Regarding that statue in Bristol, there had been controversy about it for years. A group suggested a plaque that mentioned that Edward Colston was more than the simple generous-minded philanthropist that the plaque already there made him out to be, but this was turned down.
The scourge of racism is also a great and terrible one.
“wanting the destroy the pyramids through ignorance was stupid”
Sounds like if an egyptologist would convince you that the pyramids were in fact built by slaves you would be in favor of their destruction.
Wrong. I am not in favour of the destruction of anything. What I said does not “sound” like what you said.
“There is NO evidence that slaves built the pyramids. ”
If if they were built by slaves? what then?
I couldn’t care less who built them. I don’t believe in the wanton destruction of anything. Such efforts should be redirected to helping people who need help, not wasted on stuff that doesn’t matter.
What concerns Sullivan about the great awokening is a feature that the ideological Left repeats one generation after another: its tropism for one-dimensional discourse. In the heyday of Marxism-Leninism, this was The Class Struggle—and its corollary in the Socialist bloc, the struggle to Build Socialism. Everything—literature, music, painting, and eventually even Biology—had to be focused along this axis.
Today, the new axis of Leftthink is Race, or to be more specific, White Oppression of the non-White. Every discourse that is not about this paramount subject (e.g., all STEM subjects) must be either filled with it or shut down. In fact, every ordinary, mundane social activity must be subordinated to this focus (e.g., No Justice No Peace). [The intense one-dimensionality of woke language, incidentally, is why it sounds so much like the Daily Workerese of two generations ago.]
The specific, narrow definition of the Race axis explains some odd features of wokese. All cases of oppression carried out by actors defined as non-White—e.g., the east African slave trade, the persecution of the Copts in Egypt, the occupation of Tibet by China, the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsis—are almost completely ignored. Because Jews are defined as White (despite the pigmentation of many Mizrahi and all Ethiopian Jews), antisemitism is generally ignored and sometimes indulged. Finally, the emphasis on race rather than class may explain why wokese has a certain appeal to the affluent of the high-tech world.
I think you are exaggerating rather, as is Sullivan, who is intelligent and eloquent but not someone I find it easy to trust as a result of his disgraceful and dishonest support for the Iraq war. Whether or not there is such a thing as ‘Leftthink’, racism is engrained in our societies and that surely should be both recognised and addressed so that a fairer and juster society can be created. It often seems to me that the noise about ‘woke-ness’ is used as a distraction from getting to grips with the fact of racism in our societies. Again, as I said above in another comment, read ‘The Windrush Betrayal’ by Amelia Gentleman (who is the wife, incidentally, of Boris Johnson’s younger brother). It is not a ‘wokist’ tract, but a serious analysis of a great injustice – and one that continues today, since the Conservative government is still dragging its feet about addressing this injustice. The British government is of course led by a man who saw, and sees, nothing wrong about speaking of ‘piccaninnies with watermelon smiles’. And apart from Amelia Gentleman’s book, there are plenty of other serious essays and books that address racism in a responsible way. Why not pay attention to them, instead of getting exercised about ‘wokeness’ in a way that suggests that, for you, at least, it is a more important and dangerous issue than racism?
Liberalism has its problems: economic imperialism, exaggerated individualism, etc. But it also contains seeds to improve itself and transcend itself in some respects. In that respect I am a liberal. (Certainly I am one if liberal is the only opposition to conservative.) In that respect also, one should ensure that successor families of principles include these important features and not throw them away. So much baby-bathwater stuff going on though.