The Liberalism of George Orwell

In a preceding post, The Liberalism of Martin Luther King, I opened with

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

MLK's sayings map rather well to “universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism.” Orwell was somewhat different. As a member of the academic left remarked, “rationalism is usually in the list.” Orwell, simply by hewing closely to honesty in observation, integrity in thought, and moral courage in presentation, became the Twentieth Century's most representative exemplar of liberal reason: fidelity to reality in service to the public good.

In “The Prevention of Literature” Orwell wrote, “Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.” Orwell represents the aspect of enlightenment liberalism which leverages humanity's working material, objective reality*, through faithful correspondence of language to what the language purports to be about. Christopher Hitchens wrote:

One cannot help but be struck by the degree to which [Orwell] became, in Henry James’s words, one of those upon whom nothing was lost. By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage. (Emphasis added)

As he observed, “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

Orwell worked out what this sort of cognitive integrity means (illustrating, along the way, the darker side of collectivist solidarity):

It is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity. ‘Daring to stand alone’ is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous. ... Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. - “The Prevention of Literature”

Orwell liberalism, which amounts to nothing less than a new way of being, seems deceptively simple. Think about what you see (in front of your nose) until you get past the social tyranny of preconceptions. Have the moral courage to speak plainly about what you saw (because, it being unorthodox, it will be denounced as “anti-social selfishness.” This modern, new human type, is denied the comfort of euphemism. Denied the Noble Lie. Required to forge forward in the face of powerful taboo:

The imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind; he cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his creative faculties will dry up. ... Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought.
...
If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. - “The Prevention of Literature”

Historian Fritz Stern: “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.” - The Liberal Founding


-*--

(*) Note two of the Founders' emphasis on evidence and reason: “The Eighteenth Century, notwithstanding all its errors and vices, has been, of all that are past, the most honorable to human nature. Knowledge and virtues were increased and diffused, arts, sciences useful to men, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any former equal period. - John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 1815”

Liberalism in the 21st Century Ctd: The Left

Yesterday's post, Enlightenment Liberalism in the 21st Century,  argued, in effect, that liberalism is The Peaceable Kingdom. As a line which appeared in rec.arts.books (USENET) years ago asserted, “Liberalism wagers that civility, cooperation and altruism have greater survival value than aggression and the will to power.” No one should be subject to the will of another. Liberalism is about efficacy and optimum outcomes* rather than “power.”**

This is in direct contradiction to powerful  “intellectual” themes from the 19th Century Central European intellectual avant-garde—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—which still are surprisingly influential in the academic humanities today. (“A left intellectual ideology which is backwards in respect to liberal modernity is one of the paradoxes of western civilization.”)

The Founders could not have warned against the illiberal mind-set of the left, because the left was a reaction against the Enlightenment which came after them.

Perhaps the most important difference between liberalism and the ideology of the left is that liberalism rejects us-vs-them thinking. The most famous three words of liberalism are those which begin the Constitution: “We the People.” By contrast, for the left there is always an oppressor. The end of the Communist Manifesto issues an implied call to war for an unnamed entity which is responsible for “your chains.” The language is everywhere. For example, Multiculturalism on Campus: Theory, Models, and Practices, states:

The revolution to the left engages people to become part of a utopian vision that is liberating ... one group subjugates and dominates (i.e., the oppressor from the right) and the other group is collaborative and empowering (i.e., the oppressed from the left).

In What's So Bad about Hate? (NYT) blogger Andrew Sullivan notes some of the consequences of this polar thinking:

The theorists behind these "isms" want to ascribe all blame to one group in society — the "oppressors" — and render specific others — the "victims" — completely blameless. And they want to do this in order in part to side unequivocally with the underdog. But it doesn't take a genius to see how this approach, too, can generate its own form of bias. It can justify blanket condemnations of whole groups of people — white straight males for example — purely because of the color of their skin or the nature of their sexual orientation. And it can condescendingly ascribe innocence to whole groups of others. It does exactly what hate does: it hammers the uniqueness of each individual into the anvil of group identity. And it postures morally over the result.

At its extreme, us-vs-them thinking has an anti-intellectual effect. Ideas are subject to blanket rejection on ad hominem grounds if articulated by the “other.” The tendency is suggested by Stephen Carter: “There is a partisanship that involves rooting for my side, and there is a partisanship that involves insisting that my side can do no wrong, that all the bad guys are on the other side.”

Eventually it becomes an attempt to limit the range of thought:

Almost any argument about race, gender, Israel, or the war is now apt to be infected by a spirit of self-righteous grievance and demonization. Passionate disagreement isn’t sufficient; bad faith must be imputed to one’s opponents: skepticism of affirmative action equals racism, antiwar sentiment equals anti-Americanism (or terrorist sympathy), criticism of Israel is by definition anti-Semitic, and so on. More and more people think they’re entitled to the right not just to ignore or disapprove, but to veto and banish. - Kurt Andersen

Once again, for liberalism, language is critically important.



(*) It's important to emphasize that the word "idealism" is a technical word in philosophy, and that this usage has little to do with the common usage of that term, which refers to dedication to achieving ideal outcomes without making compromises. - Steven Den Beste, denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/05/Inelegance.shtml (Emphasis added)

(**) “Live dangerously!” Nietzsche taught: “Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners.” Nothing could be further from the liberal spirit.

Enlightenment Liberalism in the 21st Century

The previous post argued the centrality of liberalism in American politics and culture. It cited the work of German-American historian Fritz Stern, one of the few intellectual thinkers who discusses liberalism as liberalism. Such great examinations of liberal political democracy as The Open Society and Its Enemies, I. F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates, John Murray Cuddihy's The Ordeal of Civility, and the works of George Orwell, are more typical, in that they are essentially about liberal modernity, but seldom, if ever, reference liberalism directly.

The Founders, despite the fact that “the Founding was an expression of the new liberal values of the Enlightenment,” likewise did not commonly speak of liberalism as the underlying spirit of their work. But examination of their work reveals abstract truths, applicable to all men and all times*, which they implied but did not articulate.

For example, the Founders relegated rulership to the dustbin of history. The title they conferred on the leader of the new nation they created, “president,” was no stronger at the time than “facilitator” is in ours. To this day no one is legitimately called “ruler” in our political hierarchy.

To be specific, what this implies is that liberalism holds that rulership is illegitimate. Rulership is incompatible with liberty. In “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant wrote, “Enlightenment is man's release from his self incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.” In liberal societies, each member of the people is a citizen, not a subject. The difference is that the citizen is not under “direction from another.”

A corollary is that liberalism holds that no one should be subject to the will of another. If we achieve a truly liberal outlook, we do not even want to take advantage of anyone else, to “rule” or dominate or “get over on” or coerce. We should be past such behavior by the time we get out of high school.

This is a high standard. It means that we should not speak of election results as reflecting “the will of the people.” (Orwell wrote, “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”) Rather, elections reflect the people's choice, arrived at by deliberation in which personal desire is mediated by reflection on the public good.

But isn't democracy that situation where the people rule? No. They govern. The Declaration does not say, “consent of the ruled,” it says “consent of the governed.”

Have you ever heard someone argue, “that's just semantics”? For liberalism, language is critically important. (Orwell, again, “the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”) For instance, one can argue that the French Revolution segued into the Terror because of a flawed vision of liberalism. The agents of the revolution misunderstood progress as a movement from the will of the King to Rousseau's “general will,” a version of “the will of the people.” (It is also significant that of the formula “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” only the first two terms made it into the Declaration. Fraternity, or brotherhood, involves obligations “antecedent to choice,” as a passage cited by Randall Kennedy notes. The abrogation of moral choice facilitated the emergence of the Terror's murderous violence. We are constituted by the terms we use, and liberalism asks us to choose carefully. Or, as a previous post implied, Fraternity points to group identity and its vested interests.)
 (*) Lincoln, of course.

The Liberal Founding - Repost

This is a repost of “The Liberal Founding,” originally posted here July 24, 2012. 

JohnMH127@gmail.com

“The spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights” - (Vide infra)

Professor Charles K. Rowley:

In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. - What Is Living and What Is Dead in Classical Liberalism

To start, preliminary remarks on liberalism. The underlying propositions:

1. The liberal Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was an outgrowth of the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century
2. In this blog the term ‘liberalism’ means Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism is substantially different from the outlook of the left, and from Marxism, progressivism, libertarianism, and conservatism (as Historian Fritz Stern writes, “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.”)
3. The Declaration and Constitution, recognized by scholars as representative Enlightenment documents, embody liberal principles. As Stern’s and Ferris’s notes below suggest, the Founding was an expression of the new liberal values of the Enlightenment
4. The underlying assumptions and working principles of the United States are liberal. The present tendency to use ‘liberal’ as a derogatory epithet suggests a fundamental problem for the working of our society

Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty:

This book argues that the new ingredient was science. It maintains that the democratic revolution was sparked—caused is perhaps not too strong a word—by the scientific revolution. … Science arose to prominence immediately prior to the Enlightenment—as would be expected if, indeed, science was the one indisputably new ingredient in the social and intellectual ferment that produced the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions that followed. (p. 2, p. 6)

Fritz Stern was born in Breslau, Germany in 1926, and moved with his family to the United States in 1938 in response to the rising anti-semitism of the Third Reich. As he wrote in The Failure of Illiberalism:

It may be that the accident of German birth gave me an added incentive to work in this extraordinary field. It certainly left me with strong memories. I was seven when Hitler came to power; for the next five years I lived under the two faces of Fascism. ... In school I saw the smiling face of Nazism, as fellow students reveled in their uniforms, sang their songs, and prattled their litany of love and hate. I sensed their exultation and felt their cruelty.

From Fritz Stern Op-Ed New York Times September 4, 1988 (in response to George H.W. Bush’s Ronald Reagan's derogatory use of ‘liberal’):

Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . [I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best . . . a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” [...] In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.” - This, and the following, from Five Germanys I Have Known

 
New York Times ad purchased  October 26, 1988 by Fritz Stern and C. Vann Woodward:

A Reaffirmation of Principle

We speak as American citizens who wish to reaffirm America's liberal tradition. At our country's founding, the spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These principles, thus embodied, have inspired the respect of much of the world.

We regret that the President of the United States has taken the lead in vilifying one of our oldest and noblest traditions. He made sport of “the dreaded L-word” and continues to make “liberal” and “liberalism” terms of opprobrium. We are deeply concerned about the erosion and debasement of American values and American traditions that our country has long cherished.

In the past and at its best, liberalism has sought the institutional defense of decency. Everywhere it has fought for the freedom of individuals to attain their fullest development. It has opposed tyranny in all forms, past and present. Liberal policies require constant scrutiny and sometimes revision. Liberal principles—freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen—are timeless.

Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out. We hope that others will do so as well.

A Committed Writer

"The citizen is lost in the labyrinth constructed by his country, ... It was not enough. It will not be enough. Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house." (As Doris Lessing wrote [NYT], "There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. ... Powerful ideas affecting our behavior can be visible only in brief sentences, even a phrase — a catch phrase.") 

Concerning a national magazine's resort to such revolutionary rhetoric, conservative Rod Dreher wrote:

Then TNC goes on to draw some sort of black nationalist lesson from his summer at French camp, culminating in this line: “Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house.” OK. Whatever. Reparations scholarships to Middlebury for all!

I snark, but honestly, the idea that the enormous privilege of spending a summer studying a foreign language at a verdant Vermont college should conclude with a resolution to become even more of a militant race man is depressing. Exactly whose house will TNC be burning down as a result of the tools he acquired this summer at Middlebury? François Hollande’s? I don’t get it.

Earlier, a fellow contributor to The Atlantic, struggling to decode TNC's rhetoric, thought his crusade was an appeal to to the good will of his fellow American citizens:

The real importance of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Reparations article, which is still attracting deserved attention, is that it is not mainly about repayment in a literal, financial sense. Instead, as I understand it, it’s about a larger historical reckoning or awareness. “Truth and reconciliation,” you might call it. (Emphasis added.)

Yet TNC had already delivered a sweeping indictment of the very people to whom he was appealing: 

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people . . . (Emphasis added)

These articles in The Atlantic are being given a lot of slack because they play the race card. Part of our bargain with ourselves as citizens of a society which supports equality and tolerance is to subject criticism of certain subjects to heightened scrutiny. But doing so can impede reasonable debate, as in the related case:

American Jewish liberals have been intimidated or censored themselves into silence, which has only made matters worse. The reason is the need to somehow credentialize yourself as “pro-Israel”, and any criticism is immediately interpreted as being “anti-Israel”. That’s essentially a loyalty test that impedes reasonable debate – and is designed to.

I don't know if an article series which includes phrases like “Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house” and “A crime that implicates the entire American people” is Communist jargon, but it crosses a line which responsible journalism should not cross (Ref. The Opinions in this Article are those of the Author and Do Not Necessarily Reflect the Opinion of The Atlantic or Its Staff).

As we saw above, a veteran journalist seemed to find it necessary to put words in TNC's mouth in order to put a positive slant on his rhetoric. Previous articles on this weblog have critiqued The Atlantic's series' "mishmash logic and language of innuendo and false equivalence." Lincoln, speaking of the advocates of slavery themselves, noted a similar rhetoric which lowers the level of public discourse:

Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind. They invented an ingenious sophism which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, to the complete destruction of the Union.

The sophism of The Atlantic's articles, correspondingly, is their implied proposition that everyone in America now—right now—is culpably burdened by antebellum slavery: “A crime that implicates the entire American people.” Blamed not only for their ancestors, but their descendants: “An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.”

“To think clearly,” said Orwell, “is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”

“The first point: language.” Lessing explained:

It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. ... the pedantries and verbosity of Communism had their roots in German academia. And now that has become a kind of mildew blighting the whole world. ... Powerful ideas affecting our behavior can be visible only in brief sentences, even a phrase — a catch phrase. All writers are asked this question by interviewers: “Do you think a writer should...?” “Ought writers to...?” The question always has to do with a political stance, and note that the assumption behind the words is that all writers should do the same thing, whatever it is. The phrases “Should a writer...?” “Ought writers to...?” have a long history that seems unknown to the people who so casually use them. Another is “commitment,” so much in vogue not long ago. Is so and so a committed writer? 

A successor to “commitment” is “raising consciousness.” This is double-edged. The people whose consciousness is being raised may be given information they most desperately lack and need, may be given moral support they need. But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of. “Raising consciousness,” like “commitment,” like “political correctness,” is a continuation of that old bully, the party line. (Emphasis added)

“But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of.” Previous blog posts have noted that Lincoln in numerous speeches and writings decisively refuted many of the derogatory assertions in The Atlantic's Reparations series (here, here and here, among others.) The Atlantic mentions none of them.

The method is dishonesty and the purpose is deception.

Lincoln: Why the Founders Didn't Abolish Slavery at the Outset

From the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

It may be argued that there are certain conditions that make necessities and impose them upon us, and to the extent that a necessity is imposed upon a man, he must submit to it. I think that was the condition in which we found ourselves when we established this Government. We had slavery among us, we could not get our Constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more; and having by necessity submitted to that much, it does not destroy the principle that is the charter of our liberties. Let that charter stand as our standard. (Emphasis added)

Thus when The Atlantic titles an article Slavery Made America, it is at best a misleading half-truth. When the series of articles of which this is a part give no voice whatever to Lincoln's dissenting opinion, that influential publication breaks journalistic faith with the American public. When The Atlantic insinuates that the Founders were morally compromised hypocrites (see the opening portion of The Opinions in this Article are those of the Author and Do Not Necessarily Reflect the Opinion of The Atlantic or Its Staff), it slanders courageous, principled leaders to whom it, and we, owe much.

The Opinions in this Article are those of the Author and Do Not Necessarily Reflect the Opinion of The Atlantic or Its Staff

Earlier this year The Atlantic published the following assertion:

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. ...

What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

The article does not contain the kind of caveat expressed by the title of this post. The Atlantic editors do not caution that the above opinions are not necessarily their own, or those of the magazine. Yet Wikipedia currently asserts:

The Atlantic is an American magazine, founded in 1857 as The Atlantic Monthly in Boston, Massachusetts, now based in Washington, D.C. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine and quickly achieved a national reputation as a high-quality review with a moderate worldview—a reputation it has maintained for over 150 years. (Emphasis added)

For American citizens there could be no greater attack on the principles of liberty, justice, and equality than the above passage. What is celebrated while "scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July" are the noble principles which this country proclaimed to the world on that date. What is celebrated is the greatest document in the history of liberal democratic government, the Declaration of Independence.

The author proceeds by innuendo and insinuation. He does not openly state that the principles of equality, liberty, and freedom from tyranny are negated by his litany of American sins. Instead, he casts cowardly aspersion on public-spiritedness, "integrationists," and democratic dispositions, if not on the very idea of principled action itself. How could the editors of The Atlantic be comfortable with this?

The very first post on this weblog, The Liberal Founding, contained a response to a similar critique of American principles by none other than the President.* The response began:

We speak as American citizens who wish to reaffirm America's liberal tradition. At our country's founding, the spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These principles, thus embodied, have inspired the respect of much of the world. - Historian Fritz Stern, refugee from Hitler Germany

Dr. Stern and a number of other signatories continued:

We regret that the President of the United States has taken the lead in vilifying one of our oldest and noblest traditions. He made sport of “the dreaded L-word” and continues to make “liberal” and “liberalism” terms of opprobrium. We are deeply concerned about the erosion and debasement of American values and American traditions that our country has long cherished.

In the past and at its best, liberalism has sought the institutional defense of decency. Everywhere it has fought for the freedom of individuals to attain their fullest development. It has opposed tyranny in all forms, past and present. Liberal policies require constant scrutiny and sometimes revision. Liberal principles—freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen—are timeless.

Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists.

The author given platform by The Atlantic's hapless editors found it necessary to trash the Declaration (and by implication the Constitution) in order to construct an argument for "reparations." Be not afraid. This American Scripture** continues to have "the respect of much of the world ... [because] Liberal principles—freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen—are timeless."

A closing note concerning language and propositional assent. The author of this article in The Atlantic is apparently summering in France (or not: "Je vais retourner en aout."). Question: Does "white guilt" apply to the French? Certainly, if there is something uniquely evil about white folks that causes them, alone, to commit slavery, then it applies equally to the French, the Afghans, the Iranians, and so on around the world.

The problem is that attributing unique evil to a given race is classic racism. If this is what The Atlantic's editors meant when they published an unexplained reference to "white guilt," they have, according to standards articulated by Atlantic contributor James Fallows(***), violated the principles of responsible journalism. Fallows recently observed, concerning another article:

I’m sure that fakery has occurred. But the claim that it has is as serious as they come in journalism. It goes at our ultimate source of self-respect. As when saying that a doctor is deliberately misdiagnosing patients, that a pilot is drunk in the cockpit, that a lifeguard is purposely letting people drown, you might be right, but you had better be very, very sure before making the claim.

As when tossing out an unqualified reference to "white guilt."

In How to Think Straight: An Introduction to Critical Reasoning, Anthony Flew cited the Marquis de Vauvenargues:

“Obscurity is the kingdom of error” and “For the philosopher clarity is a matter of good faith.”

The Atlantic article claims that "white supremacy" is "fundamental" to America, and insinuates that principled Americans such as Fritz Stern are wrong in their faith that it is "freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen" which established the nation and continue to shape it. The article's mishmash logic and language of innuendo and false equivalence further this unprincipled objective. Thus do the media, today, "undermine American democracy."


(*) The post erroneously refers to then presidential candidate George H. W. Bush rather than Reagan. 

(**) Pauline Meyer's book, American Scripture, about the Declaration. "The spreading ideas of natural rights and individual liberty distinctively altered politics, economy and society."

(***) Fallows is the author of Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy.

Did You Feel Guilty When You Celebrated the Fourth This Year?

No. You didn't. And the guy who conducted the "Reparations" faux civil rights campaign, in the pages of The Atlantic, is summering in Paris.

In The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates announces: 

What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

Coates' "White Supremacy" / "Reparations" series of articles appeared to be in the great call-for-renewal tradition of the suffragists and of Martin Luther King's campaign to end Jim Crow. Au contraire. It was civil rights theater. Civil rights spectacle. Designed to increase the circulation of The Atlantic, and to solidify Ta-Nehisi Coates' standing as a premiere print-media commentator.

Americans got it. They humored him. They watched his puff-ball televised "interview" with Jeffrey Goldberg. They responded in the hundreds to the comment site set up by The Atlantic. And they had the grand hot dogs, baked beans, cherry-bomb-detonating Fourth they usually do.

And that's a good thing. There's much to be said for the wised-up, ironic response to egregious dastardy. Very little that is good, constructive, and bettering about "this good free country of ours," escaped the wide swath of destruction, wreaked by Mr. Coates' campaign to seek justice for the "crime that implicates the entire American people."

This is how Coates, by implication, invalidates his nation's inspiring founding:

One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

By contrast, Lincoln, in his letter to Henry L. Pierce, noted the universal character of the Founders' principles:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. (Emphasis added)

One of the great glories of being human is that the good men do lives after them, while the evil is oft interred with their bones.* Lincoln was stirred by the poetry of the Founding; Coates is deaf to it. All he sees is the Founders' personal flaws. Our wisdom literature is profound when it says, "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest; ... if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."

That is how you get a better world. That is why I am glad we Americans went right ahead and celebrated the Fourth, even though Ta-Nehisi Coates said we shouldn't.

And to what purpose Coates' reckless act of destruction? By his logic we would be hypocrites to celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday.**

"Ben," one of the commenters, noted:

The article's prognosis doesn't follow from its diagnosis. Given that ... African-Americans were systematically denied economic participation and security, and that that oppression continues to happen in ever-changing forms in the present day, the solution is: . . . a national dialogue? About coming to grips with America's past? So we don't have "a la carte patriotism" anymore?

No. What is needed to combat what the article documents is for African-Americans to meaningfully participate in the day-to-day political economic life of the US. But that would require an analysis of political dynamics and economic institutions which the article is completely silent on. What forms of economic organization for African-American workers that would allow capital accumulation without having to go through multi-national institutions that are racist and, in any case, constructed to steal as much as possible from the non-elite? What kinds of political behavior, both inside and outside the electoral system, would be most likely to get that system to change in favor of more equitable treatment?

Calling for a national dialogue and an honest accounting with America's past, with George Washington the slave owner, is not about answering the above questions. It is treating cancer with prayer.

I suspect Coates knows this. And I don't want my hunch on why he didn't publish that article to be true.

From a previous post:

J. D. Vance: "Coates cherry-picks data to score emotional points instead of carefully building an argument for reparations."

Coates' intent is apparently to fix the blame rather than fix the problem. Vance again: "There’s no talk, however, of what to do now, how reparations would help, or why we ought to focus on settling an old score instead of charting a new course. ... But it must be said: breaking hearts is far easier than healing them." (Emphasis added)

Ta-Nehisi Coates' Reparations series bore little resemblance to our nation's civil rights campaigns. It was more like trolling.

America, your ironic response to someone who threw "white guilt" in your face was wise and good. May you still be able to recognize, and honor, a real civil rights campaign when one appears.

Where there is no vision, the people perish. - Proverbs 29:18


(*) Apologies for egregious misquote of Shakespeare. - Act 3, Scene ii, "Julius Caesar"

(**) Wikipedia mentions: "A tape recording of several of [Martin Luther] King's extramarital liaisons, excerpted from FBI wiretaps . . ."