I am perpetually annoyed that we continue to have culture war battles out of habit long after they have ceased to mean anything. For example, the liberal insistence that the media or the academy do not have liberal biases. Of course, the mainstream media is hostile to the interests of the Trump administration. Of course, our university system is unfriendly to conservative students and scholars. How could anyone have read the New York Times for the past five years and fail to conclude that essentially everyone that works for the paper is opposed to the Trump administration? How could anyone look at the universal adoption of cultural studies as the basic intellectual foundation of the academy and think that conservative scholars are going to be welcomed in academic institutions?
Maybe these are good things, I don’t know. But for God’s sake, let go of the pretense. If you’re a journalist or academic just own it. Just own it!
And so this open letter in Harper’s about free speech and debate. Please, think for a minute and consider: what does it say when a completely generic endorsement of free speech and open debate is in and of itself immediately diagnosed as anti-progressive, as anti-left? There is literally no specific instance discussed in that open letter, no real-world incident about which there might be specific and tangible controversy. So how can someone object to an endorsement of free speech and open debate without being opposed to those things in and of themselves? You can’t. And people are objecting to it because social justice politics are plainly opposed to free speech. That is the most obvious political fact imaginable today. Of course Yelling Woke Twitter hates free speech! Of course social justice liberals would prevent expression they disagree with if they could! How could any honest person observe our political discourse for any length of time and come to any other conclusion?
You want to argue that free speech is bad, fine. You want to adopt a dominance politics that (you imagine) will result in you being the censor, fine. But just do that. Own that. Can we stop with this charade? Can we stop pretending? Can we just proceed by acknowledging what literally everyone quietly knows, which is that the dominant majority of progressive people simply don’t believe in the value of free speech anymore? Please. Let’s grow up and speak plainly, please. Let’s just grow up.
In the "amen" corner by way of partial quotation:
https://blog.ayjay.org/freddie-is-right/
In the "amen" corner by way of partial quotation:
https://blog.ayjay.org/freddie-is-right/
But who, exactly, has diagnosed the open letter as anti-progressive and anti-left? I don't have to actually go on to Twitter to find those people, do I? I try to avoid ever being on Twitter, but it would be clarifying if the people who assessed the fairly anodyne open letter in Harper's as anti-progressive and anti-left had bylines, if possible. Ellul used to write that for communists the enemies were fascists and for fascists the enemies were communist and that this said less about the details of their enemies than about how they were getting labeled.
That people who might seem to be on formally opposite poles on issues like economics or politics might have converges doesn't seem strange these days. That Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan could basically agree that Gulf War 2 and the War on Terror were disastrous policies doesn't mean they're going to agree on other things. But it does seem we live in a peculiar era in which, for want of a better way to put things, the old left and old right can have a strange agreement that the neoliberal/neoconservative center has some problems, which might include how those terms even get defined. That protest elites have not been interested in the mundane work of electoral proceduralism is a point as old as Adolph Reed's mid-1980s dissection of the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign.
But, still, it would be interesting to learn which people have said the open letter is anti-left.
That people who might seem to be on formally opposite poles on issues like economics or politics might have converges doesn't seem strange these days. That Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan could basically agree that Gulf War 2 and the War on Terror were disastrous policies doesn't mean they're going to agree on other things. But it does seem we live in a peculiar era in which, for want of a better way to put things, the old left and old right can have a strange agreement that the neoliberal/neoconservative center has some problems, which might include how those terms even get defined. That protest elites have not been interested in the mundane work of electoral proceduralism is a point as old as Adolph Reed's mid-1980s dissection of the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign.
But, still, it would be interesting to learn which people have said the open letter is anti-left.
6 comments:
AFAICT the main voices claiming this is 'anti-left' tend to be either self professed left-leaning centrists and liberals.
If I go into left discourse most of the commentary is more nuanced and focuses on the idea that this can't be a simple call to maintain existing structures as they are and should focus on access issues.
I think you do have to go to the dregs of the internet or attend a DSA meeting to find those who consider this letter anti-left. I found about Chomsky signing it because his named was "trending" (bs algorithms) on Twitter and people were saying nasty things about him or excusing him because he's so old and doesn't understand the internet.
The DSA reference reminds me that Sawant's been angling for a "third party", as if there weren't a variety of socialist parties already existing in the United States for social democrats or socialists.
I could see left-leaning centrists and liberals doing some hand-wringing. A point I have mostly tried in vain to address with conservative friends (and I still tend to think of myself as moderately conservative despite my half decade Adorno binge and occasional reading of The Baffler) that there is no monolithic "left" so much as a variety of liberal, progressive and left groups, none of which are necessarily equivalent, much like on the "right" there's Darryl Hart's old taxonomy of trad cons a la Russell Kirk, neo-cons of a more Buckley/anti-communist variety, libertarians and reactionary Buchanan types and that none of those groups are necessarily the same, either, even if the left-leaning centrists (or post-Clintonian centrists might be a more accurate term in the U.S.) and liberals, like W fans, tend to boil the entire sweep of "left" and "right" into Cold War categories of good and evil.
I can probably go to some officially left-leaning publications this week and see something like what chris e has described. :)
The basic principle is uncontroversial enough and easily supportable, the letter is signed by a roll-call of people who have done exactly what they claim to decry in the email - in terms of being litigious, organising twitter pile-ons and trying to get people removed from their jobs. So it's hard to see this as anything more as 'rando twitter person was rude to me'.
The reality is that the people most at risk from their employers are lower on the totem pole, but then a policy of strengthening employment rights[*] and UBI is likely to run into 'Lord make me holy, but not yet'
[*] and making things more contractual and formalised in this regard is likely to get rid of the sort of 'grace and favour' appointments that some of the signees have benefited from.
yeah, when I finally got around to seeing some of the names who signed off on the project I had a few "Hey, wait a minute, ... ." moments.
sure enough ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/arts/harpers-letter.html
Somebody has to cover the people who have made fun of the open letter.
That both the letter and responses to it are essentially intra-elite debates might be too obvious a point but we seem to live in an era in which pointing out the obvious seems, sometimes, to be weirdly necessary.
The lede on whether it is necessary is buried under the fact that a number of incidences are subtweeted in the letter but each when looked at in detail doesn't actually support the underlying point.
Certainly it has been useful for a particular centrist to push his new outlet.
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