Is social justice subjecting the arts to extraneous considerations?

Wesley Morris, in Should Art be a Battleground for Social Justice? [NYT] wrote

No event captures this anxious confusion of activism and criticism better than the time a group of artists descended upon the Whitney Museum during last year’s biennial and demanded, in a protest letter, for the destruction of a painting that morally offended them. Their issue wasn’t only with the painting but with the painter. Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket” depicted Emmett Till in a whirring rictus of earth tones. It’s a vague, unsure, respectfully deferential work, different from Schutz’s bigger, more dazzlingly audacious stuff. One problem, according to the protesters, was that Schutz, as a white woman, had no business painting this young black martyr. This was not, the letter agued, her story.

There have been arguments over whether Hermione, of the Harry Potter series, is black, accompanied by complaints that the most important black character is Kingsley Shacklebolt.

On the one hand, the politics of identity, in its cultural appropriation guise, says artist Dana Schutz has no right to depict someone of a minority race. This somehow takes away from the minority. 

On the other hand, J. K. Rowling is pressured to treat the Harry Potter series like an employment opportunity requiring diversity in hires. 

It can't be both. Write about one's own ethnicity and be accused of sinning against diversity. Write about other ethnicities and be charged with using, profiting, and stealing from members of a needy identity.

Classicist Mary Lefkowitz, pointing out that in the classroom a geology professor is not permitted to assert that the Earth is only 6000 years old, observed, "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."

A holder of a political position may not impose extraneous "constraints and considerations" on works of art or on those who create them.

We've experienced works of art bent to propaganda. They do not fare well.

What will the five to four conservative Court majority do?

There’s a time bomb in the Declaration of Independence that concerns a Supreme Court which exhibits insufficient deference to political democracy. The Declaration states that our “unalienable rights” derive from “the laws of nature and of nature’s God”; that is, they are prior to any government.

On this ground the Court can, in theory, invalidate any law passed by our Congress, asserting that it violates a Higher Law. We assume that this involves the personal liberty rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights.

But note the following passage from Wikipedia, where property rights seem to exist on the same level as liberty:

“Scholars have noted that when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868, 27 out of 37 state constitutions had Lockean Provisos which typically said: "All men are by nature free and independent, and have certain inalienable rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring and possessing and protecting property: and pursuing and obtaining safety and happiness."”

In the Lochner era, from the early twentieth century until a few years into FDR’s New Deal, the Court repeatedly struck down such laws as the forty hour week and restriction of child labor as interfering with an employer’s right to do as he wished with his property.

Property rights were also assumed to support the right to refuse service to customers of a given race or ethnicity.

Rising public objection to the Court’s obstructionism toward humanitarian and safety provisions of New Deal legislation persuaded the Court to moderate its position. The question is whether the new five to four conservative majority may usher in a new Lochner era in which the people are unable to effectuate laws improving work, safety, economic, health, and voting conditions.

In the end, it will come down to what we are willing to put up with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_era

On the difference between liberalism and the outlook of the left

>>Part I: 

Since “liberal” and “left” are often treated as synonymous, Historian Fritz Stern’s discussion may be useful:

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 and became an American historian.

From Fritz Stern Op-Ed New York Times September 4, 1988 (in response to 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 from Stern’s _Five Germanys I Have Known_

Stern is saying that the Founding was a liberal event. Liberalism is the _raison d’etre_ of the United States. It’s in our DNA. Enlightenment liberalism proclaimed the Rights of Man — immunities which no government can abrogate. Liberalism declared that all are created equal, which over time finally rendered slavery unthinkable, something no society prior to liberal modernity had done.

Part II:

How my own life history taught me that “liberal” and “left” are not alike:

I went to high school during the second Eisenhower administration, and to college during the first Kennedy administration. I thought of myself as liberal/left, and at that time the public understanding of these terms was not as divided as it is now.

By the time I reached middle age, I realized that the left was telling me that white was bad, male was bad, European was bad; and I began searching for a political philosophy that did not require me to hate myself.

I learned that liberalism, unlike the outlook of the left, does not care about identity. If, as the Declaration proclaimed, all are created equal, immutable characteristics that we are born with and can’t change don’t matter.

Can there be anything more unjust than considering a newborn baby guilty because of its race and gender?

There’s much more to be said about this, but if it is understood that any analysis which conflates “liberal” and “left” is necessarily intellectually incoherent, thats a good start.<<

How many divisions does the “Chief Justice” have?

The Roberts Court has delivered its opinion. Now let it enforce it. … How many divisions does the “Chief Justice” have?

“The broad consensus over the court’s authority to interpret the Constitution will crumble. If that all comes to pass, Kavanaugh’s appointment may come to be seen as a Pyrrhic victory not just for Trump but for the entire conservative movement. … The power and legitimacy of the whole institution depend upon the idea that regardless of the political maelstrom surrounding it, the court is doing just fine and always will be.”

Mark Joseph Stern:

By all indications, Brett Kavanaugh is about to be confirmed to the Supreme Court, where he will become part of a five-justice conservative bloc that will swiftly roll back decades of progressive jurisprudence. His confirmation will be a major victory for the Republican Party and its leader, Donald Trump, who will soon succeed in entrenching GOP control over the court for at least a generation.

But as soon as Kavanaugh takes the oath, he will plunge the Supreme Court into a legitimacy crisis that could weaken its power over the long term. This crisis will become particularly acute if Democrats retake Congress and the presidency but find their reforms stymied by a reactionary judiciary.

The broad consensus over the court’s authority to interpret the Constitution will crumble. If that all comes to pass, Kavanaugh’s appointment may come to be seen as a Pyrrhic victory not just for Trump but for the entire conservative movement.

The Supreme Court has always needed buy-in from the political branches to enforce its rulings. As my colleague Dahlia Lithwick wrote in 2016, the court “relies on us to believe that it’s magic. The power and legitimacy of the whole institution depend upon the idea that regardless of the political maelstrom surrounding it, the court is doing just fine and always will be.”

Remarkably, throughout most of American history, this magic trick has worked. It came closest to collapse after 2000’s Bush v. Gore, when five Republican appointees justices indefensibly elevated their preferred candidate to the presidency. At that point, liberals could have declared war on the court, challenging the central role it had assumed in American politics. …

Democratic approval of the court plummeted after the GOP blockaded Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s final SCOTUS nominee, and instead allowed Trump to appoint the far-right Neil Gorsuch. But while plenty of progressive advocates and politicians insisted that Gorsuch was an “illegitimate” justice in a “stolen” seat, few seriously contested the validity of his votes. That’s probably because Gorsuch didn’t alter the balance of the court and wasn’t a flagrant partisan (despite some ethical lapses). During his confirmation hearing and on the bench, Gorsuch behaved more or less like a judge, not a GOP operative out to do his party’s bidding.

Kavanaugh is different in all respects. He will drag the court far to the right, eroding Roe, marriage equality, campaign finance restrictions, voting rights, affirmative action, and the separation of church and state. Democrats’ respect for the court, already diminished, will plunge to new lows each time Kavanaugh casts the fifth vote in a controversial 5–4 ruling.

But most important is Kavanaugh’s image as both a partisan pugilist and an alleged sexual abuser.

[In the waning days of WW II during a discussion of the future of Eastern Europe British Prime Minister Winston Churchill cautioned Joseph Stalin to consider the views of the Vatican. To this the Soviet leader responded “How many divisions does the Pope have?”

In treating the Court as if it is about power, America’s radical right is making a calamitous category error. The law is the attempt to resolve contention among human beings by reason rather than force.

A court’s only strength is its cognitive virtue. Its respect for evidence and reason. When a Roberts Goresuch Kavanaugh Court holds itself forth as being about political power rather than what Quinta Jurecic calls “civic virtue,” it has sealed its doom.

How many divisions does the “Chief Justice” have?]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/brett-kavanaugh-confirmation-constitutional-crisis.html

The Supreme Court undermined and sabotaged the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, enabling Jim Crow

The Supreme Court undermined and sabotaged the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, enabling Jim Crow; and it is now undoing the Civil Rights Act and the Affordable Care Act: "The nation’s founding document is no match for a dedicated majority of justices committed to circumventing its guarantees," writes Adam Serwer.

Why wasn’t the Fourteenth Amendment enough to prevent Jim Crow? Why was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 needed, and the additional measure of protected class? The Supreme Court undid the equal protection clause, preparing the way for Jim Crow, by ruling in 1873 (_United States v. Cruikshank_) that “the Fourteenth Amendment’s powers did not cover discrimination by individuals, only by the state.”

Adam Serwer:

"Seventy-two men were ultimately indicted for their role in the Colfax massacre [over 100 black people slaughtered], charged under the Enforcement Acts of 1870, which were passed to help the federal government suppress the Ku Klux Klan. But their convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, which concluded that the federal government lacked the authority to charge the perpetrators. Justice Joseph Bradley, a Grant appointee, wrote that the United States had not clearly stated that the accused, in slaughtering more than 100 black men, had “committed the acts complained of with a design to deprive the injured persons of their rights on account of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” And it wouldn’t have mattered if they had, argued the Grant-appointed Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, because the Fourteenth Amendment’s powers did not cover discrimination by individuals, only by the state. “The only obligation resting upon the United States is to see that the States do not deny the right,” Waite wrote. “This the amendment guarantees, but no more. The power of the national government is limited to the enforcement of this guaranty.” … 

"This decision, in United States v. Cruikshank, the legal historian Lawrence Goldstone argues, provided a guide for the campaign of racist terrorism that would suppress the black vote and enshrine a white man’s government for generations. “The Colfax defendants would have had to announce their plan to violate their victims’ rights on account of the color of their skin in order to be culpable,” Goldstone wrote. “Justice Bradley had thus communicated to any Redeemer with violent intent that to avoid federal prosecution one need simply to keep one’s mouth shut before committing murder.”

Grant was enraged that “insuperable obstructions were thrown in the way of punishing these murderers … and the so-called conservative papers of the State not only justified the massacre, but denounced as federal tyranny and despotism the attempt of the United States officers to bring them to justice.”" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/redemption-court/566963/

the Supreme Court is not a sacred body if it is bent toward politics rather than justice.

It has been said that having a sacred document (the Constitution), Americans need a sacred body to administer it.

But the Supreme Court is not a sacred body if it is bent toward politics rather than justice.

It is now routinely said that many are holding their noses and continuing to support the person in the White House because he will appoint Republican judges at the Supreme Court and intermediate levels. Let’s think about that for a moment. The movie "A Man for All Seasons" addressed the rule of law:

"[Sir Thomas] More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man's laws, not God's– and if you cut them down—and you're just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake."

But if the law is reduced to a sordid matter of "Republican judges" or "Democratic judges," the laws are down. We no longer have a polity of "laws, not men."

Where will you hide, "the laws all being flat? … Do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?"

How Ronald Reagan Turned the Supreme Court Into a Partisan Timebomb

The Federalist Society is now choosing the Republican party’s Supreme Court nominees, making sure that the pool the president selects from consists of partisan activists who deliver, not even-handed justice, but minority rule by a radical right coterie.

Judicial review has come to be a tool of reactionary power which can prevent any democratically enacted law from taking effect, so that there is no longer separation of powers, but kritarchy: rule by judges. Unelected judges. Democracy dies.

All democracy is inherently liberal, all justice is liberal, all genuine intellectuality is liberal, and all science is liberal. In the past, even justices selected by Republican presidents — "William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, David Souter, Earl Warren, and John Paul Stevens" — "drifted" to the impartial center, because they were even-handed jurists, not ideologues.

The Federalist Society is engineering a radical transformation so that the Supreme Court no longer embodies high principles, but will become a squalid entourage of cynical, debased operatives dispensing supreme bigotry and avarice.

Documentation: The URL below (or listen to the podcast). Example:

"Despite President Donald Trump’s high disapproval rating, it’s almost a certainty that his U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, will be confirmed to the high court. And it’s no surprise—former President Ronald Reagan took steps to make the court a major issue for Republican voters, something that led to the rise of the conservative Federalist Society, which has spent years sourcing and grooming potential justices. In all practical senses, the 40th president laid the groundwork for blocking Merrick Garland, and getting Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court."

"[Kavanaugh] is moved around by the political winds. He’s not just a jurist off in some ivory tower, thinking dispassionately about the law."

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/08/brett-kavanagh-has-ronald-reagan-to-thank-for-twisting-the-supreme-court.html

[A transcription of The Political Gabfest podcast for Wednesday, August 22, 2018, “The Eight-Count Edition”]

President in name only

Stop referring to him as “the president.”

The Founders were quite clear: any president must swear and affirm an Oath of Office to protect and defend the Constitution.

You’d think they believed that a habitual, inveterate, compulsive, vicious liar, a man utterly without shame in his constant prevarication, could not be president.

Back when lower courts, through several iterations of anti-immigration executive orders, blocked each diktat from the Oval Office, Quinta Jurecic of Lawfareblog mused that the nation’s administrators of justice, reflecting on the gravity of the Oath, felt that he who had sworn it lacked “civic virtue,” and was not entitled to normal presidential deference.

The squatter who currently, through a catastrophic quirk of the Electoral College, holds the highest office of the land in Babylonian captivity, had formal authority but was as lacking in moral authority as he was lacking in dignity, judgment, and common human decency.

How many kinds of disgusting does one have to be to so besmirch the noble office once held by Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, cavorting on the national stage, smirking, bullying, threatening, hurling kindergarten epithets at the press, the judiciary, at petitioners for refuge?

Each time we attach the name of a high office to a miserable creature who stiffed his contractors, defrauded citizens who sought to better themselves with a fake university, and betrayed the marriage vow with playmates and porn stars, we impute the virtue of the presidency to one who has none.

If money is speech, my taxes' supporting Trump violates my First Amendment rights

Let me say at the outset that the argument here is a full-throated objection to the oligarchic notion that money is speech, not an advocacy of designating how one's taxes may be used.(1) If money was speech, then the slave-holding landholders of Socrates' time would have had more "speech" than the nearly penniless philosopher.

If taxes to the "president" is supportive "speech," then that violates the First Amendment principle that communicative freedom includes not only the right to think and speak freely, but to refuse to utter anything abhorrent to one's thought and principles.

Another point is that we are in the position of a hypothetical young German liberal, Hildetrude Weineck, born in Jena in 1910. Hildetrude was as opposed to Nazism as any of us, and voted against Hitler (just as we voted against Trump last year) when he was elected Chancellor on January 30, 1933. She was 23.

Hildetrude was powerless to stop Hitler's barbarous policies—Kristallnacht, the Gleichschaltung, the Endlösung, and the suicidal initiation of a war against both the Soviet Union and the United States—just as we are unable, at least at present, to stop the cruel and unspeakable barbarities of the witless liar now usurping the Oval Office. But she suffered right along with the guilty.

We liberals who support the Enlightenment ideals of the Founding find ourselves in what Andrew Sullivan calls the "Caligula phase of the collapse of the American republic." Sullivan recounts a conversation with a retiree on a recent flight.

At one point, I gingerly indicated that I didn’t exactly share the views of his neighbors. “Oh I understand,” he said. “My wife is always telling me never to talk about religion or politics with strangers, but I can’t help myself.” No problem, I told him. I do it all the time too. Then he leaned in, pushed his wire eyeglasses up his nose, and looked straight into my eyes. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “This president will be the greatest president we have ever had in our entire history.”

We are involuntarily complicit. Our "speech" supports a bigot who slanders fellow North Americans by saying, "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." We're subject to the indignity of having our representative before the world degrade and demean an international religious leader who criticized him: “For a religious leader to question a person's faith is disgraceful.” We are all too aware that the rest of the world is witnessing the cruelty of an alt-right government doing its very best to condemn millions of its citizens to lives of illness, disability, incapacity, and agonizing premature death by stealing their health care funds in order to aggrandize the obscenely rich.

As Sullivan added, "I have a hard time figuring out how this ends, even though it must end."

But please do not forget, This is not all we are. When the immigration executive order placed "the leader of the free world" in the third world position of refusing to honor its own visas, and the "president" mocked the leader who wept at the utterly pointless suffering of families and children, at airports all over the country hundreds of lawyers came and volunteered their assistance.

This is a crisis of the Republic. The more the laws and the norms and the guardrails fail, the more it is up to us. We are the people.


*-**

(1)  While it would be nice if each taxpayer could slice and dice their taxes so as to pay only for public enterprises they approve, it's unworkable. The objection of pacifists to funding the army, and of people who are not into sports to public funding of stadiums, does not make sequestering taxes for actions one does not support practicable.

On Fresh Air: A founding principle of Enlightenment liberalism

Monday's transcript of Terry Gross' Fresh Air, interviewing Tom Hicks on his new book Churchill And Orwell: The Fight For Freedom, quoted his conclusion: "The fundamental driver of Western civilization is the agreement that objective reality exists, that people of goodwill can perceive it and that other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter." (Emphasis added)

Remember the central problem of our current politics—that conservatism in its current form, in Congress, is driven by a rigid ideology and won't listen to the American majority? Instead of a Republican party which constitutes the loyal opposition characteristic of democracy, we have a totalitarian mindset which is "alien to any dialogue":

The tragedy of Marxist teaching is that it is alien to any dialogue. Marxism only conducted a monologue and never listened. It was always right...always claiming to know everything and to be able to do everything, thus proving its totalitarian essence. - Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia, p. 8.

"I alone can fix it," Trump declared in his nomination acceptance speech, "claiming to know everything and to be able to do everything."

"People of goodwill can perceive [reality] ... other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter." The foundation of democracy is our common experience of the world. The foundation of democratic prudence is that all citizens, no matter what their "beliefs," will honor evidence by changing their views when those views are shown not to comport with reality.

This is one of Enlightenment liberalism's most fundamental principles. It is echoed when the Declaration (a representative Enlightenment document) proclaims, "let facts be submitted to a candid world." But it is one of the ways the illiberal left disagrees with democratic principle. A tendency toward radical skepticism is shown in a recent post which noted rejection of the rule of law; privileging narratives on ad hominem rather than factual grounds; and claiming there are no neutral, objective claims about the world. On campus, postmodernism denied the relation between reality and language in Derrida's "There is nothing outside the text." (A scholar joked that a postmodernist is someone who spends the day telling students that language cannot refer to reality, then leaves a message on his wife's answering machine asking if he should pick up a pizza on the way home.)

This is not a separate problem of left politics and right politics, but prior. It stems from the ideological cast both have assumed. Ideology privileges belief over reality and, lacking any true principles, will opportunistically assert either omniscient knowledge—Trump claiming to be able to fix everything above—or deny the possibility of knowledge—Trump recently suggested that “nobody really knows” if climate change exists.

Foundation on cognitive prudence—objective reality exists and tends to make it possible for people of good will to agree and work together—is not just a principle of Enlightenment liberalism. The Enlightenment was the birth of "our universal civilization." Mr. Ricks concludes by arguing that holding that objective reality tops the dogmas of ideology. Right ideology and left ideology have no legitimate claim whatsoever, because ideology is inherently unprincipled:

If there's anything I have to say I learned from this experience of reading and re-reading thousands upon thousands of words by Churchill and Orwell over the last three and half years, it's that. That's my conclusion - that this is the essence of Western society and, at its best, how Western society operates.

And it's - you can really reduce it to a formula. First of all, you need to have principles. You need to stand by those principles and remember them. Second, you need to look at reality to observe facts and not just have opinions and to say, what are the facts of the matter? Third, you need to act upon those facts according to your principles.

The Filipino Bunkhouse

In  “My Family’s Slave,” which appeared in The Atlantic a few days ago, Alex Tizon described how "Lola" immigrated to America with his family as a de facto slave and remained in that status for the rest of her life. "It took Tizon a while to realize his family had a slave," Jesse Singal reports in New York Magazine, "and he then spent the rest of his life grappling with what that meant about him and his parents." Singal continues, "One category of response, though, seems to have picked up a bunch of steam online — that the story is simply bad because it “normalizes” or “apologizes for” slavery."

Singal argues below that "all of us" could have found ourselves in a circumstance resembling Tizon's situation. I did.

I spent a portion of my K-12 years wintering in a fishing village in the Alaskan bush, and attending a one-room school with a dozen pupils. There was a salmon cannery, closed except for a caretaker during the winter, a long walk from one end of the village. One spring a classmate told me, laughing, how a Filipino from the cannery had drawn his attention to a "McPie," that is, a magpie as pronounced in a Tagalog accent.

Decades later I had a Filipino supervisor, who told me he had campaigned against the segregation of Filipinos in Alaskan salmon canneries. I knew about them — the "Filipino bunkhouse" in most Kodiak Island canneries — and never realized the ethical problem. Nor did my classmate, himself an Alaska native. "We do what the people around us are doing, what our culture is doing."

 

When one realizes that what Arendt called "the banality of evil"(1) can touch any of us, Singal's humane objection to the knee-jerk ideological condemnation of Tizon's courageous last work, below, stands as corrective to the present climate. Singal:

All of us — I really mean this; I really mean you and your family and everyone you love — could, in a different historical context, have been a slaver or a Holocaust-perpetrator or at the very least decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to contest these grotesque crimes. Because that’s the human condition: We don’t have easy access to a zoomed-out view of morality and empathy. We do what the people around us are doing, what our culture is doing.

I don't know about you, but the idealistic teenager I was lived comfortably with the Filipino bunkhouse, because everybody around me did.

 

(Excerpts (2) and (3) from Singal below.)

-*--

(1) In Eichmann in Jerusalem: "One doctor remarked that his overall attitude towards other people, especially his family and friends, was "highly desirable", while another remarked that the only unusual trait Eichmann displayed was being more "normal" in his habits and speech than the average person."

(2) "One of the key themes of Tizons’ article is that his family was, in many senses, almost a caricature of the striving, American-dream-seeking immigrant experience. They were normal. They were normal and yet they had a slave. To which one could respond, “Well, no, they’re not normal — they are deranged psychopaths to have managed to simply live for decades and decades with a slave under their roof. That is not something normal people do, and it’s wrong to portray it as such.”"

(3) "But the entire brutal weight of human history contradicts this view. Normal people — people who otherwise have no signs of derangement or a lack of a grip on basic human moral principles — do evil stuff all the time. One could write millions of pages detailing all the times when evil acts were perpetrated, abetted, or not resisted by people who were, in every other respect, perfectly normal. It’s safe to say, to a certain approximation, that all of us — I really mean this; I really mean you and your family and everyone you love — could, in a different historical context, have been a slaver or a Holocaust-perpetrator or at the very least decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to contest these grotesque crimes. Because that’s the human condition: We don’t have easy access to a zoomed-out view of morality and empathy. We do what the people around us are doing, what our culture is doing."

Was "Newsroom"s portrayal of the social system its real offense?

In two previous articles on Sorkin's "The Newsroom," Why did "The Newsroom" offend progressives? and "Nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate", we noted that this parody of television news aroused considerable opposition, partly for criticizing news-as-entertainment rather than news-as-information. Although the overt theme was the undemocratic nature of movement conservatism and particularly the Tea Party ("The American Taliban"), most of the criticism found in Google searches seemed to be by an outraged left. The subtext of TNR's criticism of the present's domineering right was an implicit something which hit "the illiberal left" (Jonathan Chait) right where it lives. 

That something may have been a tectonic shift in the American social system. Social systems are no better than the public and civil culture under which they operate. Under the norms of civility, "actions in public" operate in a warm, tolerant, convivial climate. They honor the third right mentioned in the Declaration: the pursuit of happiness. Under the progressive norm of "struggle" against polymorphic wickedness, you have a fear society.

Tocqueville spoke of the "habits of the heart" (that shape our daily unconscious choices and actions) which made Democracy in America work in his time. In The Ordeal of Civility John Murray Cuddihy said that a society's true values are revealed in those manners we call civility. In a liberal society social customs are humane; have a sense of justice; are benignly tolerant. College students can have bull sessions—free-ranging discussions in which just about anything goes—without fear of being accused of microaggressions.

That tectonic shift may be shown in the change in popular music. The lyrics of our more civil past may look "sentimental" to the tough-minded mind-set of our bleak and ever more fearful present. The "warm, tolerant, convivial climate" strikes both the progressive and the alt-right as inauthentic, even nauseating.

"Moonlight Bay" resonated with the people we once were:

We were sailing along
On Moonlight Bay.
We could hear the voices ringing;
They seemed to say,
"You have stolen her heart"
"Now don't go 'way!"
As we sang Love's Old Sweet Song
On Moonlight Bay.

Imagine a song today which implies our human responsibility for those we attract. But just think of it—it implies a connection. Maybe it would lessen our desperate need for safe spaces.

Or a song having the range of "Silver threads among the gold":

Darling, I am growing old,
Silver threads among the gold,
Shine upon my brow today,
Life is fading fast away.
But, my darling, you will be,
Always young and fair to me,
Yes, my darling, you will be
Always young and fair to me.

The lyrics benignly encompass both youth and age, which they seem to calmly accept, as they seem to accept the prospect that the narrator will soon "go the way of all the earth."(1)

The Lawrence Welk show's Larry Hooper, a lanky, homely, likable feller, once gave a rueful rendition of "Somebody Stole My Gal":

Gee, but I'm lonesome, lonesome and blue.
I've found out something I never knew.
I know now what it means to be sad,
For I've lost the best gal I ever had;
She only left yesterday, Somebody stole her away.

Somebody stole my gal,
Somebody made off with my pal, ...
And gee, I know that she,
Would come to me
If she could see,
Her broken hearted lonesome pal,
Somebody stole my gal! ...

My old love
Sure is an angel, take it from me
And she's all the angel I want to see
Maybe she'll come back some day
All I can do now is pray.

That's what the prevailing voice once was, before the "me" generation. He doesn't blame her, or her new guy. His soul is large enough to encompass her, her "somebody," and the very human situation in which they find themselves. The whole situation, under the aspect of magnanimity of soul, is graced with meaning. He is not damaged, but yearning, and yearning is an affirmation of hope.

Reviewing "American Graffiti," the late film critic Roger Ebert noted the change in our music, as we discussed awhile back:

What characterizes a liberal society is yearning, because yearning is the entryway to ideals and aspirations; and because the dream is for all (see meliorism, above) it is pure and untainted. “The music was as innocent as the time,” Ebert wrote:

Songs like “Sixteen Candles” and “Gonna Find Her” and “The Book of Love” sound touchingly naive today; nothing prepared us for the decadence and the aggression of rock only a handful of years later.

The founding liberals thought in terms of a transformation of the whole world (see universalism, above). Thomas Paine proclaimed, “I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness.” The music of yearning had been replaced by a music of decadence and aggression, folly and baseness. For example, by the Rolling Stones:

You can't come back and think you are still mine / You're out of touch, my baby / My poor discarded baby / I said, baby, baby, baby, you're out of time.

“My solemn belief of your cause,” Paine added, “is, that it is hellish and damnable, and, under that conviction, every thinking man's heart must fail him.”

In January 2015, Jonathan Chait described aspects of our changed social culture. Elements include the belief of some progressives that speech may be censored if it creates a “hostile environment,” or constitutes a thought-crime. It is hard to imagine the above music able to survive alongside "the culture of taking offense" reported:

Around 2 a.m. on December 12, four students approached the apartment of Omar Mahmood, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan, who had recently published a column in a school newspaper about his perspective as a minority on campus. The students, who were recorded on a building surveillance camera wearing baggy hooded sweatshirts to hide their identity, littered Mahmood’s doorway with copies of his column, scrawled with messages like “You scum embarrass us,” “Shut the fuck up,” and “DO YOU EVEN GO HERE?! LEAVE!!” They posted a picture of a demon and splattered eggs.

This might appear to be the sort of episode that would stoke the moral conscience of students on a progressive campus like Ann Arbor, and it was quickly agreed that an act of biased intimidation had taken place. But Mahmood was widely seen as the perpetrator rather than the victim. His column, published in the school’s conservative newspaper, had spoofed the culture of taking offense that pervades the campus. Mahmood satirically pretended to denounce “a white cis-gendered hetero upper-class man” who offered to help him up when he slipped, leading him to denounce “our barbaric attitude toward people of left-handydnyss.” The gentle tone of his mockery was closer to Charlie Brown than to Charlie Hebdo.

The Michigan Daily, where Mahmood also worked as a columnist and film critic, objected to the placement of his column in the conservative paper but hardly wanted his satirical column in its own pages. Mahmood later said that he was told by the editor that his column had created a “hostile environment,” in which at least one Daily staffer felt threatened, and that he must write a letter of apology to the staff. When he refused, the Daily fired him, and the subsequent vandalism of his apartment served to confirm his status as thought-criminal.

Chait's recent The ‘Shut It Down!’ Left and the War on the Liberal Mind is also recommended for further reading.


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(1) 1 Kings 2:2 KJV: I go the way of all the earth: be thou strong therefore ...