Category: Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan on violent protests and the election

August 29, 2020 • 11:00 am

I’m not sure whether access to Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish is still free, but you can try by clicking on the screenshot below (I have a paid subscription, which I think is money well spent). It’s only $50 per year, and if it’s not free I can use only very short quotes, which I will start doing. Today, however, I’ll quote Sullivan at some length, though not excessively.

Sulilivan’s thesis is one that I’ve broached before: violent protests racking many cities, and the apparent reluctance of leading Democrats (including Biden) to criticize them publicly, is a “trap” that could play into the hands of Trump.  Now perhaps you’ll contest the claim that the Democrats are reluctant to criticize violent protests, but my impression is that these “crickets” are a real thing. Sure, Biden has lamely criticized them once, but not often, and the denunciation of violence was not even a feature of the Democratic convention.  Well, you can say, that denunciation would have been a downer, but then the same lack of response has been characteristic of the major Left-wing media, including the Washington Post and the New York Times. The reason, of course, is that to emphasize the violence might look as if you’re criticizing black people, even though a lot of the violence was committed by whites. Indeed, some columnists at these venues have seemed to endorse, or at least excuse, violent protests.

In contrast, Trump and the Republicans constantly mention the violence. They know exactly what effect this emphasis has, for most Americans, white, black, Hispanic, or other, don’t like disorder and destruction, don’t think that protestors have the right to destroy property, loot, and set fires, and, most of all, don’t want the threat of violence against their property.  Emphasizing the dangers of violence, and the failure of Democrats to both call it out or do anything about it, gives the Republicans a “law and order” advantage in troubled times. (To be sure, reaction by Democratic mayors has been mixed. In Portland the city administration is totally lame on the nightly threats. In contrast, in Chicago our gay black mayor, Lori Lightfoot, a staunch antiracist if ever there was one, has condemned violence in no uncertain terms and said that if you’re caught engaging in it, or looting, you’ll go to jail.)

My own view, for the gazillionth time, is that violence by protestors is never justified in demonstrations for a political cause, no matter what the cause. That’s for two reasons. First, if you’re trying to move people by moral suasion, you hurt your cause by looting, rioting, and setting fires. This isn’t just speculation: there’s evidence from both U.S. election results and international surveys showing that violence is much less effective than peaceful protest in affecting elections or overthrowing dictators.

Sullivan agrees with me on this issue (in fact, I suspect he left New York Magazine because they wouldn’t publish his weekly column when he discussed violent protests). He doesn’t mince words, and I’ll give a few quotes from his latest piece:

In the current chaos, I’ve come to appreciate Marcus Aurelius’s maxim that “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” And I have to say I’m horribly conflicted on some issues. I’m supportive of attempts to interrogate the sins of the past, in particular the gruesome legacy of slavery and segregation, and their persistent impact on the present. And in that sense, I’m a supporter of the motives of the good folks involved with the Black Lives Matter movement. But I’m equally repelled by the insistent attempt by BLM and its ideological founders to malign and dismiss the huge progress we’ve made, to re-describe the American experiment in freedom as one utterly defined by racism, and to call the most tolerant country on the planet, with unprecedented demographic diversity, a form of “white supremacy”. I’m tired of hearing Kamala Harris say, as she did yesterday: “The reality is that the life of a black person in America has never been treated as fully human.” This is what Trump has long defended as “truthful hyperbole” — which is a euphemism for a lie.

But here’s one thing I have absolutely no conflict about. Rioting and lawlessness is evil. And any civil authority that permits, condones or dismisses violence, looting and mayhem in the streets disqualifies itself from any legitimacy. This comes first. If one party supports everything I believe in but doesn’t believe in maintaining law and order all the time and everywhere, I’ll back a party that does. In that sense, I’m a one-issue voter, because without order, there is no room for any other issue. Disorder always and everywhere begets more disorder; the minute the authorities appear to permit such violence, it is destined to grow. And if liberals do not defend order, fascists will.

. . . The pattern is textbook, if you learn anything from history: an economic crisis resulting in mass unemployment; the pent-up psychological disorders a long period of lockdown can and will unleash; a failure of nerve on the part of liberals to defend the values and institutions of liberal democracy, and of conservatives to keep their own ranks free of raw demagogues and bigots. But critically: a growing sense of disorder and violence and rioting as simply the background noise; and a sense that authorities do not have the strength or the stomach to restore order. What most people want in that kind of nerve-wracking instability is a figure who will come in and stamp it out. In Trump, we have someone who would happily trample any liberal democratic norm to do it. And the left seems to be all but begging him to do it — if only to prove them right.

. . . But Biden, let’s face it, is weak and a party man to his core, and has surrendered to the far left at almost every single turn — from abortion to immigration to race. You’d be a fool I think, to believe he could resist their fanaticism in office, or that if he does, he won’t be toast in a struggle to succeed him. He remains the only choice in this election. But on the central question of civil order, he blew it last week and so did the Dems. Biden needs a gesture of real Sister Souljah clarity to put daylight between him and the violent left. He has indeed condemned the riots, with caveats. But at some point, the caveats have to go. And the sooner the better.

I am afraid that the Democratic party will be taken over by “progressives” who are unwilling to compromise, hate Israel, don’t care much about violence if it’s committed in the right cause, and so on, though progressives have some reasonable stands, too, like fighting for universal healthcare. (But that’s also the view of mainstream liberal Democrats.) It’s just too easy to surrender to the extremists, as have the major liberal media and many university administrations, rather than be called a bigot or racist.

As for Sullivan’s fears, and mine, that downplaying or ignoring violence will help Trump, well, I hope we’re wrong. The latest FiveThirtyEight polls do show that Biden’s maintaining roughly a ten-point lead, which is heartening. And this still holds after the Republican Convention. But it’s early days yet. . .

Here are the data:

 

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Andrew Sullivan’s latest lucubrations

August 8, 2020 • 10:00 am

Andrew Sullivan’s site is still free, but will shortly go to a fee scheme whereby you can pay $50 a year for full access (I’ve already subscribed). The format is still a weekly tripartite column, but with additions like his famous “The View from My Window” contest, in which readers have to guess exactly where a reader’s photo was taken. There’s also selected feedback from readers, which Andrew answers.

This week’s column (click on screenshot below) has a section on diversity, one on the possibility of a rebuilt Republican Party, and a small “1620 project” piece, in which Sullivan extols the Pilgrims’ arrival in America and, sadly, has gone back to extolling religion as well. I’ll concentrate on the diversity bit, but here’s an excerpt from his “1620 project” piece (the name, of course, is mocking the NYT’s “1619 Project”):

The [Mayflower] Compact was a way to keep the company intact, mandating an elected leader, declaring fealty to King James I, and a set of laws applicable to everyone, Puritan or stranger, as long as everyone affirmed some kind of Christianity. It was a fusion of the religious energy and consensual government that gave the New World its spiritual and political direction. You could even call it, in some ways, the true founding of America, before the Enlightenment.

. . . if you tried hard, you could trace the uniquely religious nature of America from these humble, improvised origins, along with its strong and pioneering attachment to democratic norms. In some ways, these themes run throughout American history, defining us down to this very day. Call it the 1620 Project, if you like. Maybe at some point the New York Times Magazine could devote a whole issue to it.

This is awfully close to osculating religion, and I hope Sullivan isn’t going to revert to his liberal-Catholic, god-accepting days of yore. It’s always puzzled me how someone so intelligent and discerning can buy into a whole bundle of clearly bogus myths, even if they don’t accept all the factual statements of Christianity. (I’d like to know, for instance, if Sullivan thinks Jesus was resurrected after the crucifixion—assuming there even was a Jesus person.) In those who sell themselves as perspicacious and tied to reason, I see adherence to theistic religions as a character flaw.

But I digress, and on to diversity. There are three reasons to mandate diversity (and here I mean racial diversity, which is really what “diversity” always denotes). First, it could be to instantly make the employees of a company, or students of a school, mirror the proportion of groups in the society at large. This won’t eliminate racism immediately, but is supposed to provide role models that will encourage minorities to gain equity.

Second, it could be to promote “viewpoint” diversity, that is, by getting people from different races, you’ll also get a variety of useful viewpoints that can be debated, but can also enrich the institution. This assumes, of course, that different racial groups have, on average, different viewpoints beyond the one always touted: a knowledge of oppression.

Finally, hiring or accepting minorities could serve as a form of reparations, a way to make up for the past treatment of minorities that still holds them back in society.

I adhere mainly to the third reason, which is the reason rejected in the Bakke decision, when the Supreme Court decided (the decision was a bit confusing) that diversity was an inherent good that colleges could strive for in their admissions policy, but quotas were not permitted, nor any attempt to balance out groups by proportion. While diversity is an inherent good, I think the inherent good is instantiated in giving members of minority groups that experienced oppression a leg up when their legs used to be tied down.

Reparations (and affirmative action) were always intended to be a temporary solution, to be abandoned once equal opportunity was ensured (or, if you take a harder view, when equal representation was achieved). Further, it’s not yet clear to me that, given equal opportunity, different groups will sort themselves into positions in exact proportion to their numbers in the population. My own view is that both cultural and biological differences (the latter especially important in men vs women) will convert equal opportunity into different outcomes based on interests. We already know those professions in which women are more numerous than men (e.g., grade-school teachers, nurses), as well as those in which men are more numerous than women (car mechanics). I simply can’t believe that these “inequities” are entirely the result of sexism or the patriarchy.

Sullivan addresses the first and second reasons in his piece, which is based on the New York Times‘s recent vow that by 2025 their workforce will racially reflect, in proportion, the demographics of New York City.  Sullivan calls this the “Kendi test,” based on Ibram X. Kendi’s claim that any inequalities in representation are necessarily the result of racism. Sullivan makes the point that even with free entry there might still be differences based on interests and desires, and also that racial diversity is a grossly imperfect measure of viewpoint diversity, assuming that that’s an important goal of this process.

I’ll give a few quotes:

But notice how this new goal obviously doesn’t reflect New York City’s demographics in many other ways. It draws overwhelmingly from the college educated, who account for only 37 percent of New Yorkers, leaving more than 60 percent of the city completed unreflected in the staffing. It cannot include the nearly 19 percent of New Yorkers in poverty, because a NYT salary would end that. It would also have to restrict itself to the literate, and, according to Literacy New York, 25 percent of people in Manhattan “lack basic prose literary skills” along with 37 percent in Brooklyn and 41 percent in the Bronx. And obviously, it cannot reflect the 14 percent of New Yorkers who are of retirement age, or the 21 percent who have yet to reach 18. For that matter, I have no idea what the median age of a NYT employee is — but I bet it isn’t the same as all of New York City.

Around 10 percent of staffers would have to be Republicans (and if the paper of record nationally were to reflect the country as a whole, and not just NYC, around 40 percent would have to be). Some 6 percent of the newsroom would also have to be Haredi or Orthodox Jews — a community you rarely hear about in diversity debates, but one horribly hit by a hate crime surge. 48 percent of NYT employees would have to agree that religion is “very important” in their lives; and 33 percent would be Catholic. And the logic of these demographic quotas is that if a group begins to exceed its quota — say Jews, 13 percent — a Jewish journalist would have to retire for any new one to be hired. Taking this proposal seriously, then, really does require explicit use of race in hiring, which is illegal, which is why the News Guild tweet and memo might end up causing some trouble if the policy is enforced.

Indeed, race-based hiring is illegal, as is race-based college admissions to achieve a given quota.

One more quote, this time about equity for other groups:

And that’s true of other institutions too: are we to police Broadway to make sure that gays constitute only 4 percent of the employees? Or, say, nursing, to ensure that the sex balance is 50-50? Or a construction company for gender parity? Or a bike messenger company’s staff to be reflective of the age demographics of the city? Just take publishing — an industry not far off what the New York Times does. 74 percent of its employees are women. Should there be a hiring freeze until the men catch up?

The more you think about it, the more absurdly utopian the Kendi project turns out to be. That’s because its core assumption is that any demographic discrepancies between a profession or institution and its locale are entirely a function of oppression. That’s how Kendi explains racial inequality in America, and specifically denies any alternative explanation. So how is it that a white supremacist country has whites earning considerably less on average than Asian-Americans? How does Kendi explain the fact that the most successful minority group in America are Indian-Americans — with a median income nearly twice that of the national median? Here’s a partial list of the national origins of US citizens whose median earnings are higher than that of white people in America: Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Pakistani, Iranian, Lebanese, Sri Lankan, Armenian, Hmong, Vietnamese. One group earning less: British-American.

You can argue that these groups are immigrants and self-selecting for those with higher IQs, education, motivation, and drive. It’s true. But notice that this argument cannot be deployed under the Kendi test: any inequality is a result of racism, remember? Cultural differences between groups, class, education, IQ, family structure: all these are irrelevant. So how is it that immigrant Nigerian-Americans have a slightly higher median household income than British-Americans in the US? The crudeness of the model proposed for hiring and firing at the New York Times can make no sense of this at all.

And I’ll let you read the rest for yourselves. The point is that there is an argument here worth having, and there’s no need to accept Kendi’s claim nor to insist that “equality” means “representation is always in the same proportions as groups in the population.” That’s an expectation of equal outcomes, while I think the fairest position is to ensure equal opportunity. That, of course, is harder to achieve, since ensuring equal opportunity has to begin right at birth, and that means eliminating economic and social inequalities between groups (and funding their schools) as fast as possible. But I think it’s folly to think that equal outcomes will ensure equal opportunities. Rather, equal opportunities will eventually ensure fairer outcomes.

As for Sullivan’s musings on the reconstructed GOP (should Trump lose), there’s not much there. Who, if Trump goes, can lead a kinder and fairer Republican Party, characterized by what Sullivan calls a “right-of-center pragmatism”? Sullivan is accurate in describing the changes that the GOP should make to recover from the mess that Trumpism has made of it, but as for who can head the party, his “suggestions” rankle me:

There is also, I suspect, a suppressed but real desire for the normality and calmness that Trump has eviscerated. David Brooks sees a few candidates: Josh Hawley, Ben Sasse, Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio.

To be fair, these are Brooks’s candidates, but I suspect that Sullivan agrees with him. And then Andrew lists the GOP heroes of the past:

I know that looking around the rightwing media these days is not likely to give anyone optimism that this could happen, and I’m not pinning my hopes on anyone in particular. But history does, from time to time, throw up new figures who manage to take a political party from the wilderness to something far saner. Eisenhower, Reagan, Clinton, Blair, Cameron, and Boris come to mind.

You can argue about the merits of these people, but I wouldn’t hold out Reagan or Johnson as shining beacons of conservative enlightenment. Or perhaps the problem I have with leadership in the Republican Party is that it’s not the Democratic Party.

Andrew Sullivan on postmodern “Theory”

August 1, 2020 • 9:00 am

Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish, to which I’ve just subscribed, has his usual tripartite column, along with the “view from my window” series and a place where he reproduces and responds to readers’ beefs. (To his credit, he took a reader’s advice to heart and is giving up issuing tweets that “simply mock or provoke without context.”) The three issues he takes up are wokeness—in particular a review and discussion of Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book Cynical Theories, which I’ve discussed before; an attack on Trump for intimating that he’d delay November’s election on the grounds of mail-in ballots; and a further defense of J. K. Rowling.

If you want to subscribe to Andrew’s site, it’s only $50 a year (a measly $1 per week), and you can do so here. To be honest, I’m jealous of Sullivan. When it comes to politics—though not religion: he still adheres to Catholicism, though his discussion of religion has largely disappeared—we’re pretty sympatico, and often write about the same stuff. But he makes a good living doing that, though I don’t begrudge him that because it’s hard work and he has several assistance. But I would like to write as well as he. And to make money by writing—what a joy? Not that it’s easy, of course. . .

I’ll just highlight his piece on Wokeness and Cynical Theories, a book both he and I recommend. As I’ve said, it’s not a “trade book” in the sense of being a quick and entertaining read. Rather, it’s a hybrid between a trade and an academic text, and that’s exactly what’s needed if you want to understand the intellectual roots of Wokeness and Critical Theory in postmodernism. To do that you have to come to grips with postmodernism, which is not only risible in content, but impenetrable in exposition.

Click on the screenshot to read; I think it’s still in the “free” phase.

As I wrote yesterday, my problem with Critical Race Theory, as instantiated in the principles of the Black Lives Matter movement (I again emphasize that their main goal— equality of treatment between blacks and other groups—is laudable), is that, in adhering to Identity Politics, it forever sees society as warring groups—ethnic and gender groups, by and large—vying for power in a zero-sum game. It’s thus divisive, and instead of appealing to the better angels of our nature, it demonizes whites (just as Critical Theory as a whole demonizes men and straight people), virtually bullying them into acceding to its demands. That’s a big contrast to the methods of Dr. King, which appealed to universal moral sentiments, abjured violence—and were successful. And indeed, Sullivan agrees, though he says it better than I:

After concisely summarizing the themes of Cynical Theory, Sullivan discusses its emphasis on both the individual (often seen as a victim) and the oppressed group, and its neglect of the universal—our common humanity. Of course “identity politics” has played an important role in securing gay rights, civil rights, women’s rights, and so on, but it didn’t do so by demonizing the opponent. When I refer to “identity politics”, these days, it’s to the species that loves to “other”.

Sullivan:

The “neo” [“Critical Theory” is sometimes called “neo-Marxism] comes from switching out Marxism’s focus on materialism and class in favor of various oppressed group identities, who are constantly in conflict the way classes were always in conflict. And in this worldview, individuals only exist at all as a place where these group identities intersect. You have no independent existence outside these power dynamics. I am never just me. I’m a point where the intersecting identities of white, gay, male, Catholic, immigrant, HIV-positive, cis, and English all somehow collide. You can hear this echoed in the famous words of Ayanna Pressley: “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” An assertion of individuality is, in fact, an attack upon the group and an enabling of oppression.

Just as this theory denies the individual, it also denies the universal. There are no universal truths, no objective reality, just narratives that are expressed in discourses and language that reflect one group’s power over another. There is no distinction between objective truth and subjective experience, because the former is an illusion created by the latter. So instead of an argument, you merely have an identity showdown, in which the more oppressed always wins, because that subverts the hierarchy. These discourses of power, moreover, never end; there is no progress as such, no incremental inclusion of more and more identities into a pluralist, liberal unified project; there is the permanent reality of the oppressors and the oppressed. And all that we can do is constantly expose and eternally resist these power-structures on behalf of the oppressed.

I’d forgotten about Pressley’s statement, but it still chills me, implying that all members of oppressed groups have to speak with the same Approved Voice or they can be ignored. If that isn’t authoritarianism, what is? And of course “Theory’s” denial of objective reality in favor of subjective experience is anathema to a scientist like me. I once heard one of these postmodern clowns say, in a humanities seminar, that all forms of folk medicine were just as good as scientific medicine, as each culture had its own “experience” of curing illness. In the Q&A session, I asked him (a white Western academic) if he took antibiotics or got vaccinated, or went to a shaman instead? I remember a lot of blathering in the answer.

Sullivan ends this very good piece with a call for all of us to pushback against this nonsense rather than truckle to it. And indeed we should. Yes, you risk being called a racist, a misogynist, or a bigot, or even an alt-righter, but you can laugh that off. If we don’t fight back, these ideologues will be running society come January. (I’m not convinced that Biden doesn’t have a streak of Wokeness in him, or will develop one, though of course I’ll vote for him.)

They claim that their worldview is the only way to advance social progress, especially the rights of minorities, and that liberalism fails to do so. This, it seems to me, is profoundly untrue. A moral giant like John Lewis advanced this country not by intimidation, or re-ordering the language, or seeing the advancement of black people as some kind of reversal for white people. He engaged the liberal system with non-violence and persuasion, he emphasized the unifying force of love and forgiveness, he saw black people as having agency utterly independent of white people, and changed America with that fundamentally liberal perspective.

The gay rights movement, the most successful of the 21st century, succeeded in the past through showing what straights and gays have in common, rather than seeing the two as in a zero-sum conflict, resolved by prosecuting homophobia or “queering” heterosexuality. The women’s rights movement has transformed the role of women in society in the past without demonizing all men, or seeing misogyny as somehow embedded in “white supremacy”. As we have just seen, civil rights protections for transgender people—just decided by a conservative Supreme Court—have been achieved not by seeing people as groups in constant warfare, but by seeing the dignity of the unique individual in pursuing their own happiness without the obstacle of prejudice.

In fact, I suspect it is the success of liberalism in bringing this kind of non-zero-sum pluralism into being that rattles the critical theorists the most. Because it suggests that reform is always better than revolution, that empirical truth is on the side of the genuinely oppressed and we should never fear understanding things better, that progress is both possible in a liberal democracy, and more securely rooted than in other systems, because it springs from a lively, informed debate, and isn’t foisted on society by ideologues.

The rhetorical trap of critical theory is that it has coopted the cause of inclusion and forced liberals onto the defensive. But liberals have nothing to be defensive about. What’s so encouraging about this book is that it has confidence in its own arguments, and is as dedicated to actual social justice, achieved through liberal means, as it is scornful of the postmodern ideologues who have coopted and corrupted otherwise noble causes.

This is very good news—even better to see it as the Number 1 Amazon best-seller in philosophy long before its publication date later in August. The intellectual fight back against wokeness has now begun in earnest. Let’s do this.

I’m on board.

Andrew Sullivan back at the Weekly Dish, and a disquisition on the J. K. Rowling kerfuffle

July 26, 2020 • 11:00 am

Andrew Sullivan has left the room, meaning New York Magazine (NYM), and good for him—and woe to them.  He’s back at the Weekly Dish, a reincarnation of his previous website, complete with his trademarked beagle. You can subscribe for for only $50 a year (here), though for a limited time the content is free (click on screenshot below). After looking at his first “issue,” I think I’ll probably subscribe. It’s the same price as the New York Times (if you threaten to unsubscribe and then take their counteroffer), but a lot more fun—and unpredictable. It also includes the famous “view from my window” feature, in which you have to guess where a locale is that was photographed by a reader from their window.

As with his NYM columns, this week’s offering is tripartite: a mini-essay on the connection between the pandemic and the demonstrators, a defense of J. K. Rowling, and a nostalgic look back at a past that had dial telephones and open restaurants. There’s also a postscript in which Sullivan recounts some pushback he’s gotten from readers, to which he responds. I like that feature, and may do something like it here, though I don’t want to ape my betters.

The pandemic/demonstration connection may be a variant of the essay that NYM refused to publish, which likely prompted Sullivan to leave the magazine. It’s not that incendiary, though it does blame the pandemic for some of the political unrest pervading the country. That said, Sullivan still pins most of the blame on Trump, though he worries that the violent nature of some of the demonstrations may better Trump’s chances in the fall. Two short extracts:

We are, mercifully, in a much better place [than in 1918]. But it strikes me that this medical achievement doesn’t resolve the psychological trauma, the suspension of normality, the anxiety of an invisible enemy. It merely diverts it away from the illness itself toward broader social and political grievances. I don’t think you can fully explain the sudden increase in intensity of the social justice cult, for example, and its explosion in our streets and in our media in the last couple of months, without taking account of this. I don’t just mean the pent-up plague-driven frustration of young people, who, often forced to live at home with their parents, took the opportunity to finally get out, get together and do something, after the horrifying murder of George Floyd. I mean the more general frustration and despair of a generation with a gloomy and unknowable economic future—suddenly finding shape and voice in a simple, clarion call to reshape all of society.

I suspect that if this was part of Sullivan’s “canceled” essay, the mere suggestion that people made restive by the pandemic could throw their boredom into demonstrations would be likely deemed unpublishable by a woke rag like NYM, even if it be true. After all, it’s not only demonstrations that were probably invigorated by the pandemic: there’s also an epidemic of civilian shootings, especially in Chicago. This goes beyond our normal summer violence, and I think a good hypothesis is inactivity, pent-up emotions, and the absence of regular outlets for activity.

Sullivan on Trump:

All of which is a highly combustible situation, bristling with menace. What Trump has been doing since the Mount Rushmore speech—stupidly dismissed by woke media—is to try and cast this election as a battle between anarchy and the forces of law and order, between a radical dystopia laced with violence and the America we know. He’s trying to jujitsu the plague-fueled revolt into a winning campaign issue. He can’t exactly run on his record of double digit unemployment and an epidemic raging out of control. So this is his instinct. And politically, it’s not a bad one. In an environment where people are afraid and uncertain, authoritarianism has an edge. The more some cities descend into lawlessness and violence this summer, the edgier, and more popular, that performative authoritarianism could get.

. . . I may be worrying too much about the effect of this on the election, as Trump’s abject failure to control the virus remains front and center. He’s still likely to lose, absent a major surprise. But plagues are highly divisive and highly unpredictable.

But I want to talk a bit more about Sullivan’s defense of J. K. Rowling, who has been demonized and called a “transphobe” for issuing these tweets:

Indeed, while I agree that gender is a “social construct” (though I’d prefer a better word), biological sex is real and almost completely bimodal.  If there are transsexual people, then, are they simply moving from one gender role to another, or are they moving beyond their biological sex, which is what “transsexual” literally means. And how can you move beyond your sex if sex isn’t something that’s real?

While the first tweet above was perhaps unwise (I wouldn’t have said it, though I think the use of these euphemisms for “women” is ludicrous), the second tweet is pretty much accurate. But of course it is hateful to speak some truths these days, and that’s what angers Sullivan.  People like him, me, and Rowling all agree that we will accept whatever gender role people adopt; we insist on their equality in law and morality (with a few small exceptions, see below); and we’re glad to use whatever pronouns people choose. We abhor and excoriate those who demonize transsexuals, and insist that their identities be treated with respect. The rest is commentary, but what commentary! It’s led to many outlets insisting that Rowling is transphobic (she isn’t), and that her books are now verboten.

If you read her open letter about her views, it’s hard to construe her as a transphobe; but read it for yourself. She’s concerned with the distinction between biological women and trans women, and that is a matter worth discussing on some fronts, like sports, rape counseling, who goes to prison, and so on. But she also issued the tweet below, explaining it in her open letter;

For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t. Ergo this:

And yes, biological sex is real. And no, transwomen aren’t biological women, but they assume that gender role; and it would be wrong to denigrate them or deny them rights for doing so.

At any rate, Sullivan, who is of course gay, has an eloquent defense of Rowling, and here’s some of it:

[Rowling] became interested in the question after a consultant, Maya Forsteter, lost a contract in the UK for believing and saying that sex is a biological reality. When Forsteter took her case to an employment tribunal, the judge ruled against her, arguing that such a view was a form of bigotry, in so far as it seemed to deny the gender of trans people (which, of course, it doesn’t). Rowling was perturbed by this. And I can see why: in order either to defend or oppose transgender rights, you need to be able to discuss what being transgender means. That will necessarily require an understanding of the human mind and body, the architectonic role of biology in the creation of two sexes, and the nature of the small minority whose genital and biological sex differs from the sex of their brain.

This is not an easy question. It requires some thinking through. And in a liberal democracy, we should be able to debate the subject freely and openly. I’ve done my best to do that in this column, and have come to many of the conclusions Rowling has. She does not question the existence of trans people, or the imperative to respect their dignity and equality as fully-formed human beings. She believes they should be protected from discrimination in every field, and given the same opportunities as anyone else. She would address any trans person as the gender they present, as would I. Of course. That those of us who hold these views are now deemed bigots is, quite simply, preposterous.

Where Rowling and I draw the line is saying that a trans woman is in every single respect indistinguishable from a natal woman. We believe that a natal man who is a transwoman, for example, cannot have a vagina exactly as a natal woman does. That’s all. And that is objectively true. Note also that this has no impact whatever on how someone should be treated by society or under the law. A transwoman can and should be treated exactly as a woman, even if she isn’t in every single respect a woman.

There are a few areas where this becomes a problem for some: a) restrooms, b) sports, and c) shelters for abused women. On a), I have zero issues with trans women with penises using the women’s room. I know some worry that creeps simply posing as transwomen could exploit this in order to gain access to children. But I have yet to see such a case in reality. It should be simple: just use a stall and mind your own business. On b), sports is different, because the physiology of male and female bodies is, by virtue of our species’ reproductive strategy, bimodal, and in sports reliant on strength and size and speed, no co-ed contest can be fair. And the last issue c) is about whether women who are in shelters for those who have been abused by men should be allowed spaces where no actual penises, even if attached to women, are around. On this difficult third area, I defer to abused women on the question of shelters. And here’s the thing: Rowling is one such woman. She told her own story of marital abuse in her letter, with a disarming honesty that surely should evoke engagement, rather than vilification.

JAC: I agree with the Sullivan’s take on the three “exceptions” above.  He ends with some common sense: demonization is not a response to an argument, it is avoidance of an argument. Sullivan:

It pains me to see where this debate has gone. There’s so much common ground. And I do not doubt that taking into account the lived experiences of trans people is important. But if we cannot state an objective fact without being deemed a bigot, and if we cannot debate a subject because debating itself is a form of hate, we have all but abandoned any pretense of liberal democracy. And if a woman as sophisticated and eloquent and humane as J K Rowling is now deemed a foul bigot for having a different opinion, then the word bigotry has ceased to have any meaning at all.

I’ve quoted more extensively than I wanted, for Sullivan’s website will become a subscription-only site, soon, and my quotes after that will fall within “fair usage.” But I urge you to subscribe, as it looks like a good place to visit.

Andrew Sullivan says goodbye to New York Magazine

July 18, 2020 • 9:30 am

Journalism lost two valuable voices last week: Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan. Both will, I’m sure, find new homes, and Andrew has already rebuilt his home—a new version of his old blog The Daily Dish.  Weiss wasn’t fired from the New York Times; she quit. According to her letter of resignation, it was because of the disapprobation and harassment by her colleagues, as well as the paper’s well-known climate of ideological intolerance. While some have accused Weiss of whining about her situation, her description of her “hostile work environment.” occupies but one scant paragraph among eighteen. The rest is devoted to the paper’s intolerance of even a centrist political attitude among op-ed writers. I’m curious to know where Bari will wind up (it won’t be the Washington Post, that’s for sure!)—but perhaps she could find a home in a place like The Atlantic.

What happened to Sullivan is not so clear; read his farewell column in New York Magazine by clicking on the screenshot below.

Sullivan doesn’t say whether he left, was pushed out, or was fired outright (this omission is probably deliberate), but his departure clearly had something to do with the magazine not running one of his columns a few weeks ago. And a few words in his column suggest that maybe he was shown the door:

What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.

Two years ago, I wrote that we all live on campus now. That is an understatement. In academia, a tiny fraction of professors and administrators have not yet bent the knee to the woke program [JAC: I’m one!] — and those few left are being purged. The latest study of Harvard University faculty, for example, finds that only 1.46 percent call themselves conservative. But that’s probably higher than the proportion of journalists who call themselves conservative at the New York Times or CNN or New York Magazine. And maybe it’s worth pointing out that “conservative” in my case means that I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination. I was one of the first journalists in established media to come out. I was a major and early supporter of Barack Obama. I intend to vote for Biden in November.

It seems to me that if this conservatism is so foul that many of my peers are embarrassed to be working at the same magazine, then I have no idea what version of conservatism could ever be tolerated.

I’ve long called out all three major publications with “New York” in the title”—the New York Times, the New Yorker, and New York Magazine—for their fulminating and irritating wokeness. Clearly Sullivan is a victim of this, as was Bari Weiss. Their brand of politics, refusing to truckle to “progressive” Leftism or to toe the Line of Wokeness, is not welcomed. And all these publications will be the poorer for losing these writers. Truth be told, how many of us want to read the same, predictable take on issues over and over again? Yes, many American do, but many Americans don’t want to exercise their neurons.

Sullivan, I’m sure, had already formulated his exist strategy at least a few weeks ago when his column was censored, and he makes it clear in this last piece: he’s reviving his blog The Dish, which will be subscription-only but will be free for a few weeks. I never read The Dish before (now to be called The Weekly Dish), but I’ve signed up for the free sample, and, if I like what I read, I’ll pay to subscribe. Here’s what excited Sullivan about returning to his own site:

I miss a readership that truly was eclectic — left, liberal, centrist, right, reactionary — and that loved to be challenged by me and by each other. I miss just the sheer fun that used to be a part of being a hack before all these dreadfully earnest, humor-free puritans took over the press: jokes, window views, silly videos, contests, puns, rickrolls, and so on. The most popular feature we ever ran was completely apolitical — The View From Your Window contest. It was as simple and humanizing as the current web is so fraught and dehumanizing. And in this era of COVID-19 isolation and despair, the need for a humane, tolerant, yet provocative and interesting, community is more urgent than ever.

And here’s what he envisions:

The initial basic formula — which, as with all things Dish, will no doubt evolve — is the following: this three-part column, with perhaps a couple of added short posts or features (I probably won’t be able to resist); a serious dissent section, where I can air real disagreement with my column, and engage with it constructively and civilly; a podcast, which I’ve long wanted to do, but never found a way to fit in; and yes, reader window views again, and the return of The View From Your Window contest. I’m able to do all this because Chris Bodenner, the guru of the Dish in-box and master of the Window View contest, is coming back to join me. He’ll select the dissents, as he long did, in ways that will put me on the spot.

Before leaving, and telling us how to subscribe, Sullivan gets in a final swipe at the illiberal liberal media:

If the mainstream media will not host a diversity of opinion, or puts the “moral clarity” of some self-appointed saints before the goal of objectivity in reporting, if it treats writers as mere avatars for their race and gender or gender identity, rather than as unique individuals whose identity is largely irrelevant, then the nonmainstream needs to pick up the slack. What I hope to do at the Weekly Dish is to champion those younger writers who are increasingly shut out of the Establishment, to promote their blogs, articles, and podcasts, to link to them, and encourage them. I want to show them that they have a future in the American discourse. Instead of merely diagnosing the problem of illiberalism, I want to try to be part of the solution.

You can get on the mailing list, and see the first couple of issues for free, by going to the site below (click on screenshot first, and then click on “none” if you just want a sample, or on the other alternatives if you’re ready to pay):

I didn’t realize that this site was so lucrative in its earlier incarnation, pulling in about a million bucks a year before expenses (there were several salaries to pay), with 30,000 subscribers. Crikey, that’s a lot of dosh! But if readers are willing to pay for what you write, then I can’t begrudge him the money.

Good luck, Andrew! New York Magazine‘s loss is your gain—and ours.

 

h/t: Simon

Andrew Sullivan on Newspeak

July 4, 2020 • 10:45 am

I’d urge everyone who hasn’t read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or hasn’t read it for a long time, to reread it now.  A major part of the book—Winston Smith’s job—is to erase real history and replace it with the latest, ideologically-approved version of history. Sound familiar?

And the ruling party of Big Brother also created a language, “Newspeak“, which Wikipedia describes as follows:

Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate that is the setting of George Orwell’s dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. To meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism (Ingsoc) in Oceania, the ruling Party created Newspeak, a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought—personal identity, self-expression, free will—that threatens the ideology of the régime of Big Brother and the Party, who have criminalised such concepts into thoughtcrime as contradictions of Ingsoc orthodoxy.

A lot of the recent alterations in language and phrasing that I’ve described (as has Andrew Sullivan) are of just that character: designed to prevent questioning of concepts and ideas. The flat declaration “Trans women are women,” which I wrote about the other day, is such a phrase, and Merriam-Webster’s redefinitions of “trans woman” and “trans man” can also be thought of as attempts to stifle dissent on an issue that isn’t black and white. In fact, “Black” and “white”, with differential capitalization, are also forms of Newspeak, according to the second part of Andrew Sullivan’s newest tripartite column in New York Magazine (click on screenshot below to read).  I wrote about this briefly, but Sullivan goes into more detail.

The other two parts of his piece are about the dangers that, he says, China poses to the world (the “genocide” refers China’s Uighur Muslims), as well as Trump’s reprehensible pardoning of soldiers who committed war crimes. But I’ll concentrate briefly on the second part: “The New Newspeak”.

Here are Andrew’s examples of Newspeak, and I’ve indented his words.

“Black” vs. “white.”  I wasn’t much aware of “critical theory“, though I was of “critical race theory,” but it turns out that “critical theory” is just a wider version, casting all relations in terms of power struggles: not just race, but between any groups in which one can discern an oppressor and the oppressed. Both theories, especially in their postmodern form, prize narrative over truth, which apparently doesn’t exist.

One of the core premises of critical theory — the academic project that undergirds much of today’s progressive politics — is that controlling language is essential. Since critical theorists suggest that there is not any objective reality, and that there are only narratives imposed by oppressors, changing the meaning of words is essential to gaining and maintaining power. After all, they sure don’t believe in open debate. Some of this is subtle. The New York Times, an institution now meaningfully captured by the doctrines of critical theory, will now capitalize “Black,” for example, but will not capitalize “white” or “brown.”

I’ve read their explanation a few times and it seems to boil down to the idea that all people of African descent all around the world are somehow one single identifiable entity, while white and brown people are too diverse and variegated to be treated the same way. (The Times explains: “We’ve decided to adopt the change and start using uppercase ‘Black’ to describe people and cultures of African origin, both in the United States and elsewhere.”)

Given the extraordinary diversity of the African continent, and the vast range of cultural, ethnic, religious, and tribal differences among Americans of African descent — new immigrants and descendants of slaves, East and West Africans, people from the Caribbean and South America, and the Middle East — this seems more than a little reductionist. . . . The point, of course, is to ignore all these real-life differences in order to promote the narrative that critical race theory demands: All that matters is oppression.

Critical gender theory.  Not long ago I wrote about reddit’s new policy of banning hate speech, but only against minority groups. It was apparently okay to emit hate against those in “majority groups.” At the time they announced “While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”  Now it appears they’ve ditched the part about not protecting groups in the majority, but the implication of the new wording is still that hate speech is speech directed primarily at minority or marginalized groups.

Sullivan has far more analysis of this than I have, and verified that there’s a bit of hypocrisy on what groups have been banned, and what questions can be discussed freely:

Similarly, Reddit this week announced its new policy against “hate” and banned a whole slew of discussion groups, including some pro-Trump ones. Again, the reasoning was straight out of critical theory: The ruling against hate only protects minority groups and “does not protect people who are in the majority.” (After complaints, Reddit removed the specific claim that any and all attacks on “a majority” are fine, but kept the notion that it does not apply to all groups or identities.) But the implication remains that it is perfectly kosher for discussion groups to demonize and spread hatred for all white people, or, say, women. Louis Farrakhan would thereby be protected to speak of “the white devil.” Ditto any Islamists defending the burka. But J.K. Rowling’s defense of biological sex as a key element supporting the rights of women is impermissible — because it could be deemed a form of hate by some trans groups.

And indeed, groups that dissent from critical gender theory — which seeks to efface the basic fact of biological sex — have been banned. Arguments rooted in good-faith differences over the nature of sex and the meaning of gender are thereby suppressed because of alleged transphobia. But countless porn groups with extraordinarily misogynist content — r/RapeKink, r/degraded females, r/putinherplace — are still up. You can celebrate the rape and abuse of women on Reddit, but you cannot debate the contentious question of what sex and gender actually mean.

Sullivan gives a host of Newspeak terms that are sex- or gender-related, including the neologism “non-straight cisgender people” as a better replacement for “gay”, as “critical queer studies” apparently finds “gay” offensive—and for reasons I can’t fathom.  Sullivan lists a few more terms and fires a final salvo at Critical Theory:

Leading progressive maternity and doula organizations now deploy and encourage a whole array of “gender-neutral language” with respect to sex, birth, labor, and parenting. And so we now have the terms “chest-feeding,” “persons who menstruate,” “persons who produce sperm,” and “birthing person” for breastfeeding, women, men, and mothers, respectively. And instead of a butthole, we have a “back-hole”; instead of a vagina, we have a “front hole.” “Ovaries” and “uterus” are now rendered as “internal organs,” which may strike you as somewhat vague. These may sound completely absurd now, but given the choke hold critical gender theory has on almost all elite organizations, you can be sure you’ll hear them soon enough. They’ll likely be mandatory if you want to prove you’re not a transphobe. It was an objection to one of these terms — “people who menstruate” — that got J.K. Rowling tarred again as a bigot.

Those of us who oppose this abuse of the English language, who try to abide by Orwell’s dictum to use the simplest, clearest Anglo-Saxon words to describe reality, are now instantly suspect. Given the fear of losing your job for resisting this madness, most people will submit to this linguistic distortion. As you can see everywhere, the stigma of being called a bigot sweeps away all objects before it. But the further this goes — and there is no limiting principle in critical theory at all — the less able we are to describe reality. Which is, of course, the point. Narratives, only narratives, exist. And power, only power, matters.

Sometimes I feel glad that I won’t live to see these people take over all power in the West (actually, that’s not true: I want to live forever). But take over they will: there’s nothing stopping them so long as everyone’s terrified of being called a racist or a misogynist, so long as your ethnicity determines whether you can even debate an issue, and so long as all of us are afraid to push back against the madness. For madness it surely is.

Andrew Sullivan on the new cultural revolution and its “illiberal malignancy”

June 28, 2020 • 10:45 am

Andrew Sullivan hasn’t been fired from New York Magazine, despite the venue apparently having censored or deep-sixed one of his Friday columns, probably about violent protests. And this week he has an unusually good effort in his tripartite essay.  I’m referring to the first part—on the authoritarianism of the progressive Left. (The other two parts, also good, are on Trump’s decline in the polls due to mishandling the pandemic, a decline that Andrew applauds, and the efforts of Keir Starmer, the new leader of Britain’s Labour Party, to purge anti-Semitism from its ranks.) All in all, it’s a good read, which you can access by clicking on the screenshot.

If you’ve used up your access to the New York Magazine site, and are paywalled, judicious inquiry might yield you a copy of Sullivan’s essay.

I’d quote the entire first section of the article as a whole, but that would violate fair usage policy. I’ll give just a few quotes and a summary of the argument. In short, Sullivan contends that the erasure of history by revolutionary movements has often proceeded, especially in our era, by the “elites” (intellectuals or the regime in power) egging on young people, who then go nuts and try to efface every remnant of the past. (At this point I’d highly recommend you reread Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which, though mis-prognosticated as to date, is just 36 years late.)

Sullivan’s examples are the Taliban’s destruction of Afghan art like the Buddhas of Bamian; the Cultural Revolution in China, which Mao had to eventually curb; the urging of revolution in late 19th-century Russia, approved and promoted by the “intellectual elite”; and now the turmoil in the U.S., which is largely fomented by the young and promoted by the organs of the intellectual Left, like the New York Times and Washington Post. (Neither Andrew nor I decry the entire program of Leftist progressivism, of course; what he and I deplore are the excesses, including the rampant attempt to rewrite history, an activity not foreign to Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four.)

Here are a couple of paragraphs from Andrew:

 . . . in late-19th-century Russia, much of the intellectual elite also found themselves incapable of drawing a line when it came to revolutionary behavior — and so they tolerated violence that eventually swept everything away in terror. Even though they were the elite, the intelligentsia regarded the wealthy as the real rulers and salivated at the prospect of dethroning them. As the Russian-history professor Gary Saul Morson told The Wall Street Journal: “The idea was that since they knew the theory, they were morally superior and they should be in charge, and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world when ‘practical’ people were.” Welcome to the New York Times newsroom in 2020.

That last sentence above is a zinger, but not far from the truth. He goes on:

Revolutionary moments also require public confessions of iniquity by those complicit in oppression. These now seem to come almost daily. I’m still marveling this week at the apology the actress Jenny Slate gave for voicing a biracial cartoon character. It’s a classic confession of counterrevolutionary error: “I acknowledge how my original reasoning was flawed and that it existed as an example of white privilege and unjust allowances made within a system of societal white supremacy … Ending my portrayal of ‘Missy’ is one step in a life-long process of uncovering the racism in my actions.” For Slate to survive in her career, she had to go full Cersei in her walk of shame. If you find this creepy, but don’t want to say that out loud, just know that you are not alone.

If we’re mentioning stuff that we find creepy yet few dare criticize, well, I found the action below a bit creepy as well. Although sentiments behind it were laudabe—sympathy for the murder of George Floyd—but the optics. . . . well, too close to penitentes. And, in fact, the performative act was criticized by some blacks as “virtue signaling”, “pandering,” and “cultural appropriation.” A better response from the legislators would have been a strong statement, and, better yet, legislation (which, with a Republican Senate, would be futile, but still symbolic in a better way):

Democrats from the House and Senate kneel in silence for eight minutes and 46 seconds to honor George Floyd in the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center on June 8.Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

One critical tweet:

As Andrew proceeds through the column, his prose gets more and more heated but also more and more eloquent as he says what needs to be said—and what all of us should be echoing loudly, regardless of the fear of being called a racist, a bigot, a transphobe, and all the other slurs that keep appalled Leftists from speaking out:

Revolutionaries also create new forms of language to dismantle the existing order. Under Mao, “linguistic engineering” was integral to identifying counterrevolutionaries, and so it is today. The use of the term “white supremacy” to mean not the KKK or the antebellum South but American society as a whole in the 21st century has become routine on the left, as if it were now beyond dispute. The word “women,” J.K. Rowling had the temerity to point out, is now being replaced by “people who menstruate.” The word “oppression” now includes not only being herded into Uighur reeducation camps but also feeling awkward as a sophomore in an Ivy League school. The word “racist,” which was widely understood quite recently to be prejudicial treatment of an individual based on the color of their skin, now requires no intent to be racist in the former sense, just acquiescence in something called “structural racism,” which can mean any difference in outcomes among racial groupings. Being color-blind is therefore now being racist.

. . . So, yes, this is an Orwellian moment. It’s not a moment of reform but of a revolutionary break, sustained in part by much of the liberal Establishment. Even good and important causes, like exposing and stopping police brutality, can morph very easily from an exercise in overdue reform into a revolutionary spasm. There has been much good done by the demonstrations forcing us all to understand better how our fellow citizens are mistreated by the agents of the state or worn down by the residue of past and present inequality. But the zeal and certainty of its more revolutionary features threaten to undo a great deal of that goodwill.

The movement’s destruction of even abolitionist statues, its vandalism of monuments to even George Washington, its crude demonization of figures like Jefferson, its coerced public confessions, its pitiless wreckage of people’s lives and livelihoods, its crude ideological Manichaeanism, its struggle sessions and mandated anti-racism courses, its purging of cultural institutions of dissidents, its abandonment of objective tests in higher education (replacing them with quotas and a commitment to ideology), and its desire to upend a country’s sustained meaning and practices are deeply reminiscent of some very ugly predecessors.

And at the end is a call to stop the excesses, encapsulated in the final sentence:

But the erasure of the past means a tyranny of the present. In the words of Orwell, a truly successful ideological revolution means that “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” We are not there yet. But unless we recognize the illiberal malignancy of some of what we face, and stand up to it with courage and candor, we soon will be.

I was chatting to a writer friend the other day, and I asked why he, who shares the views of Sullivan and I, didn’t write something about it. He responded that he had nothing novel to add—that people like Andrew had said it all. I responded that I look at anti-wokeness in the same way as I look at atheism: there really isn’t much new to say here, but we still need to oppose both religious nonsense and wokeness constantly, and in the public square. If for no other reason, we need to do this because standing up against the madness, like coming out against religion, empowers the timorous and silent to come out publicly and join us.

Here are a few examples of the “revolutionary spasm” that Sullivan mentioned, examples that I see as bordering on the ludicrous.

a.) The musical group The Dixie Chicks changed their name to “The Chicks.”  They presumably did this because they thought “Dixie” had some association with slavery, but there are at least three explanations for the word “Dixie” (which simply refers to “the South”)—two of which have nothing to do with slavery and the third one, about a kind slaveowner, is probably a myth. The most credible explanations refer to the Mason-Dixon line, a surveyed boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that had nothing to do with slavery, and the antebellum issuance by banks in Louisiana of ten-dollar notes (ten is “dix” in French), notes that became known as “Dixies”.

b.)  The defacement of road signs for Penny Lane in Liverpool. That road was, of course, made famous by the eponymous Beatles song. But lately, signs for the street have been defaced on the supposed grounds that it honors a slave merchant named James Penny. To wit:

It now turns out that, according to the Liverpool Slavery Museum, and reported by The Independent, there appears to be no connection between the street name and the slave merchant. As the site notes, “The road is instead believed to take its name from a toll on the road that was paid in pennies.”

But that didn’t matter. All it took was a rumor with no facts behind it, and the mob had a spasm. This is truly a kneejerk reaction in the literal sense: the foot kicks out when the knee is tapped, and it’s automatic and uncontrollable.

c.) The mass toppling of statues, often again prompted by urgings of the elite. There’s justification for statue removal, as well as some renaming of institutions, but things have gotten out of hand, and the reaction is automatic. Nobody, it seems, was sufficiently virtuous in the past to allow their statue to stand undamaged, and so those who have fallen or had their monuments defaced include Thomas Jefferson, George Washington (in Portland, of course), Theodore Roosevelt (Greg will have more to say about this later today), Ulysses S. Grant, Mohandas Gandhi (for crying out loud!), Ulysses S. Grant and (in France) Voltaire.  I can only guess that Charles Darwin is next, for although he was an abolitionist, he made some pretty dire statements about indigenous peoples and blacks.

Now some statues, especially monuments to oppression, could justifiably be removed from the public square, but my own view is that they should be put in museums with appropriate labels, not destroyed. Or, as they do in some places, left to decay and degenerate as nature’s elements take their toll. For doesn’t their presence also tell us something about history?

All this does is erase U.S.and world history with no palpable benefit save displays of virtue by the destroyers. Now you might say, “Well, the history is still there in the books,” and I’d respond, “It’s also in the statues that make people ponder their history.” After all, when I’m in India I see monuments to Gandhi all the time in public, but I’m not constantly reading about him. In the end, the “erasure” movement is identical to Winston Smith’s job in Orwell’s novel (from Wikipedia):

Winston Smith works as a clerk in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line. This involves revising newspaper articles and doctoring photographs—mostly to remove “unpersons“, people who have fallen afoul of the party. Because of his proximity to the mechanics of rewriting history, Winston Smith nurses doubts about the Party and its monopoly on truth.

Sound familiar? And, as we know, the party line changes over time. Who of today’s heroes will be tomorrow’s villians?

I’ll finish with a quote from Henry Olsen writing in The Washington Post:

It is here that sober minds must pause and reflect. There is no pure past to which one can turn for intellectual sustenance if one desires a political regime dedicated to freedom and equality. Just about every pre-modern political regime was predicated upon the idea that its purported superiority justified treating outsiders over whom it ruled as if those people were not human beings. Aztecs murdered their war captives as human sacrifices to their gods. Many black Africans did not see other black Africans as fellow human beings to be protected against white slave traders; instead, they simply captured them and sold them to profit themselves. Mongol conquest of Russia and China was brutal and tyrannical as the warrior clan ruled on its own and for its own benefit. Almost all civilization has been based on inequality and tyranny regardless of the color of the masters’ skin.

And this we need to remember.

Decry the madness!