“How thoroughly campus cultural Marxism has come to be tolerated in mainstream society”

[From a July 2019 Facebook post] - I was once a fan of Ta-Nehisi Coates. He is a writer with phenomenal natural talents. Then he took a part-time teaching position at MIT, and he began saying things like, “Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house.” (As Doris Lessing wrote, “There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence.”)

Ta-Nehisi adopted a social-justice warrior stance which made him the idol of a surprisingly large number of progressive journalists, despite positions which were often rather strange, as you will see in the following instances.

Carlos Lozada, at the end of this post (“Radical Chic”), describes an adulation which made me realize how thoroughly campus cultural Marxism has come to be tolerated in mainstream society:

For instance, Ta-Nehisi said that the deaths of those who tried to save people on 911 left him “cold”:

“He writes of the police and firefighters who died running into the burning buildings [the twin towers on 911] in a forlorn effort to save all the people whose bodies were about to be obliterated into dust, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.””

Ta-Nehisi would apparently let _all_ criminals out of prison:

“[Jeffrey] Goldberg asked what [Ta-Nehisi Coates] would do if he were in [Mitch] Landrieu’s position — surely there was something, “I don’t know what I’d do if I were mayor, but I could tell you what I’d do if I was king.” [Ta-Nehisi Coates would] let criminals out of prison, he said. “And, by the way, I include violent criminals in that.” Goldberg asked what he meant by “violent.” “Gun crime, too,” Coates said.”

He is unconcerned with the civil rights of any group but his own:

“Everywhere he goes, Coates hears versions of the same plea: What about my group? What about Native Americans? What about Latino immigrants? What about me?

“You get here and people say, ‘Why can’t you do that for our community?’ ” Coates says one morning at a Capitol Hill coffee shop. He calls the reaction “disrespectful” ... Disrespectful because he believes the experience of blacks in America deserves its own, focused examination.”

Ta-Nehisi said that reparations would end “white guilt.”

-*—

In The Radical Chic of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Carlos Lozada writes:

“In an America consumed by debates over racism, police violence and domestic terror, it is Coates to whom so many of us turn to affirm, challenge or, more often, to mold our views from the clay. Among public intellectuals in the U.S., writes media critic Jay Rosen, he’s the man now. When the Confederate battle flag on the statehouse grounds in Columbia, S.C., seemed the only thing the news media could discuss, my Washington Post colleague Ishaan Tharoor put it simply: Just shut up and read @tanehisicoates. These days, you hear many variations on that advice.

Coates is more than the writer whose thinking and focus best match the moment. With his 2014 Atlantic cover essay on The Case for Reparations, which explores the brutal U.S. history of redlining and housing discrimination, and now with the critical rapture surrounding his new book, Between the World and Me, he has become liberal America’s conscience on race. Did you read the latest Ta-Nehisi Coates piece? is shorthand for Have you absorbed and shared the latest and best and correct thinking on racism, white privilege, institutional violence and structural inequality? If you don’t have the time or inclination or experience to figure it out yourself, you outsource it to Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2015/07/16/the-radical-chic-of-ta-nehisi-coates/]

Prophet or fool; “All democracy, science, justice, and genuine intellectuality are liberal”

Are you left/progressive? Or are you liberal?

I've already written that all democracy, science, justice, and genuine intellectuality are liberal.
That liberalism is the central theme of first-world modernity.
And that liberalism is the methodology of the good life. [These assertions haven’t been challenged yet. Feel free.]

Left/progressivism conflicts with or violates many of the values, methodologies, ethical principles, and standards of liberalism, as will be discussed below. Yet on our campuses, and in the news, left/progressivism seems to predominate over liberalism. [Former President Obama criticizes two aspects of progressivism, the desire for a revolution; and “cancel culture.” (When Virginia Governor Northam continued to serve after a youthful picture of him in blackface emerged, the media kept asking why he didn’t resign.) These two topics don’t appear in this post. Perhaps in a later post.]

First example. In a widely hailed article in The Atlantic a few years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates said that the policy he was advocating would end "white guilt." Liberalism holds that statements such as race [derogatory characteristic] or gender [derogatory characteristic] are prejudicial, and as such, not allowable. Andrew Sullivan, in "We all live on campus now," suggested that important decisions should not be "based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation."

There is a tendency, with left/progressivism, to treat certain identities as "oppressor groups." It is acceptable to attribute derogatory characteristics to these groups, or to their members. This violates an important principle of liberalism: All people are created equal. Egalitarianism is the principle which made first-world modernity the first era in history to condemn slavery unequivocally.

Sullivan adds,

This is compounded by the idea that only a member of a minority group can speak about racism or homophobia, or that only women can discuss sexual harassment. The only reason this should be the case is if we think someone’s identity is more important than the argument they might want to make. And that campus orthodoxy is now the culture’s as a whole.

Second example. The left/progressive belief that identity is important, as seen in the two preceding paragraphs. This, too, conflicts with the values of liberalism. If all are created equal, then the only identity that matters is "human being," and all possess it.

Someone recently tossed off a remark about "the patriarchy." Apart from the problem that its vagueness makes it difficult to construct a refutation, it treats a particular identity, possessing the immutable characteristic, male, as having a derogatory nature, "oppressor." For left/progressivism, "patriarchy" is a term thought to resist evil. It is a logical consequence of progressivism's implicit decision to abandon egalitarianism, to divide humankind into a good group, the oppressed, and a bad group, the oppressor, and to support prejudicial language against those who are born into the bad group.

Liberalism opposes progressivism here because to abandon human equality invites the us-against-them conflict which has always beset us; because it initiates a slippery slope whose terminus is the reintroduction of slavery;(1) and because liberalism considers such remarks to be bigotry.

/*****/

Where to find out about liberalism? The inspiring passages of the Declaration and Constitution are liberal. President Kennedy’s presentation to the Houston Ministerial Association is a stirring liberal argument for separation of church and state. Naipaul’s presentation, “Our Universal Civilization” is liberal. The concept of the Rights of Man is liberal, plus the meta-right to the pursuit of happiness.(2)

(1) Slavery is justified because the slave has a “slave nature,” said one Greek thinker.

(2) Andrew Sullivan: “ … The most radical statement of the Enlightenment, which is why it is indeed of such world-historical importance. As I write I have no idea as to the conclusion of this new drama in world history, except that it will have ramifications as large and as lasting as the end of the Cold War. 

What power four little words—the pursuit of happiness—still have.”

NYC Bar Association implies that “The norms and standards that govern the fair administration of justice” unmask “Social Justice”

On many campuses “Social Justice” is doctrine. Andrew Sullivan: “When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well.” This is a problem for law faculty as well as any other higher education staff who have bar accreditation.

In a current article in Business Insider, the NYC Bar Association charges that US Attorney General William Barr violates “the norms and standards that govern the fair administration of justice.”

Mr. Barr's recent actions and statements position the Attorney General and, by extension, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) as political partisans willing to use the levers of government to empower certain groups over others," the letter said. "These statements are the latest examples of a broader pattern of conduct that is inconsistent with the role of the Attorney General in our legal and constitutional system and with the norms and standards that govern the fair administration of justice.

Social Justice does not meet these standards because it is indifferent to them. Its identity-based values result in the same deviation from universal justice that the New York City Bar Association accuses Barr of, seeking to “empower certain groups over others.”

The reason is that under the politics of identity there is no equality. There is, Sullivan argues, “the idea that only a member of a minority group can speak about racism or homophobia, or that only women can discuss sexual harassment. The only reason this should be the case is if we think someone’s identity is more important than the argument they might want to make. And that campus orthodoxy is now the culture’s as a whole.”

If Social Justice had “the norms and standards that govern the fair administration of justice,” it would be just. These are some of the elements of actual justice which Social Justice lacks:

Due process, including

The presumption of innocence
The presumption of equality
Rules of evidence
The right to legal counsel
The right to confront witnesses or accusers
The right of appeal
The right right to trial by impartial jury, rather than the “community” which accused them in the first place, and is hardly likely to be impartial
Constraint by the laws

Lacking the norms and standards of justice, Social Justice is a contradiction in terms. On campuses where Social Justice is de rigueur, staff having legal accreditation have the difficult choice between upholding the standards of their profession and risking dismissal, or countenancing the travesty of Social Justice and risking disbarment.

/*****/

In the Business Insider article Sonam Sheth wrote:

The New York City Bar Association asked Congress to investigate AG William Barr for political bias and weaponizing the DOJ 

In October, Barr "launched a partisan attack against 'so called progressives' for supposedly waging a 'campaign to destroy the traditional order,'" the letter [from the NYC Bar Association] said. Barr accused these individuals of "marshal[ing] all the force of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values" in order to achieve the "organized destruction" of religion. 

In November, Barr "vilified" progressives and "the Left" during a speech to the conservative Federalist Society's National Lawyers Convention. The letter accused Barr of characterizing "the other side" as people who "oppose this President" and doing so in "highly partisan terms." 

The attorney general accused progressives and the left of launching a "holy war" and using "any means necessary" to engage in "the systematic shredding of norms" and undermine the rule of law.

Caitlin Flanagan’s acerbic remarks about ‘justice critics’

‘Truth stands independently of social opinion,’ Robert Pirsig wrote: and that’s one reason ‘social justice’ is an oxymoron.

Caitlin Flanagan: 

The justice critics, the ones who want to count up every movie’s sins against approved sensibilities, say that the film is nostalgic, a term intended to damage it. Only another artist would understand the way that Tarantino has deployed that potent force. Guillermo del Toro tweeted that the movie was “[chock-full] of yearning,” that it was “a tale of another time that probably never was but feels like a memory.”

The justice critics aren’t interested in fictions that feel like memories. They want movies that adhere to their vision of the way the world should be. To them, the movie is too white, too violent toward women, and too uninterested in Margot Robbie, whose Sharon Tate has few lines. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody reviled the picture, calling it “ridiculously white.” But Charles Manson was a white supremacist, a fact that does tend to put a lot of white people in a movie.

The justice critics want to subject art to ‘constraints and considerations extraneous’ to it. [The phrase comes from Classicist Mary Lefkowitz, who once declared, “Academic freedom is the freedom to profess a discipline according to its recognized content and procedures, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to that discipline.”]

Unaesthetic philistines telling art what to do is nothing new, from the boy-meets-tractor diktat of Soviet Commissars to Plato’s condemnation of Graeco-Roman mythology for showing the gods chasing each other’s wives.

Kudos to Flanagan for daring to critique puritanical dictatorship-of-virtue justice critics and the boring bowdlerized didactic art they would foist on us. Ars grātiā artis

The academic left and the political left, i.e., Democratic Party. Compare and contrast.

There’s no overlap. The academic left today is a form of Marxism. The politics of identity is a recognizable variant of class warfare. The AL’s mantra — “oppositional, adversarial, subversive” — echoes the call to war which ends the Communist Manifesto. It’s an attack outlook incompatible with liberalism.

The political “left” today — Democrats as contrasted with Republicans — is descended from two Enlightenment documents, the Declaration and Constitution. The stirring principles in them, human equality, the rights of man, immunities from unnecessary government intrusion, “the human soul is inviolate,” these are Enlightenment liberalism’s principles. They are positive, constructive principles based on cooperation, as is political democracy.

The tenor of the academic left, “oppositional, adversarial, subversive,” consists of negative, destructive principles based on enmity. It has turned higher education, the university, from a place for the free discussion of competing ideas, an arena, into a place where only the “right” ideas are allowed, a “platform,” where viewpoint censorship of what it considers wrong ideas is routinely justified under a new, anti-intellectual “no platforming” rule.

The Democratic party, an Enlightenment liberal party, needs to be able to speak about its positive, cooperative, constructive principles clearly when some of its members, an AOC, a Tlaib, an Omar, appear more left than liberal.

It can’t, because nowhere in our public discourse today, in the “news,” is liberalism discussed on its own terms, as the underlying conceptual system of our country, and as such an inspiration to the world which unmasks the negativity, hostility, and destructiveness of an undermining “left” which is so alien to it.

The Democratic party’s success in the 2018 election, which gave it a decisive majority in the House, also brought its inability to speak clearly to the fore. It can’t articulate its spiritual opposition to the politics of identity, even though the politics of identity cannot be reconciled with the Democratic party’s most fundamental value, human equality, because valorizing certain identities over others (and thus encouraging discriminatory treatment of other identities) is presented in media discourse as a way of fighting racism. It is torn between another of its intrinsic values, freedom of speech, and the pressure to treat campus viewpoint censorship with benign neglect, out of fear of being accused of countenancing hate speech.

To exercise the forceful leadership needed to topple a malignant presidency, the Democratic party needs the courage to say, as Justice Harlan did in dissent to Plessy versus Ferguson, “our Constitution … neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens” and in no way supports any politics of identity. The Democratic party needs to say that freedom of speech is more important than fear, fear that students may be misled or have their feelings hurt.

The Democratic party’s inability to proclaim what it stands for forcefully may be the greatest undiscussed problem of the calamitous political situation we’ve gotten ourselves into.

-*—

Afterword: In the mid-nineties, shortly after beginning to use the internet, I received an email from Mike Morris concerning something I said in a discussion group. Mike used a term new to me, “Enlightenment liberal.” He meant a liberalism having no taint of Marxism, a perceptive understanding (Mike once teamed with Kip Thorne, in the Morris-Thorne Wormhole Metric and other contributions to astrophysics) I have studied ever since.