By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday, May 18,
2021
You all know O’Sullivan’s Law, from my
friend John
O’Sullivan? “All organizations that are not actually
right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
E.g., the Audubon Society, which is
hopping mad at your favorite correspondent!
Goodness! You’d think someone representing
the Audubon Society would know a canard, if nothing else, when he
sees one. Part of my thesis is that the environmental movement is less about
measurable real-world environmental outcomes and more about rituals of tribal
affiliation and Kulturkampf politics.
So, Exhibit A, right there.
The Audubon Society wasn’t always a
platform for feckless and rage-addled left-wingery. It once was an organization
that welcomed environmentally interested people of different political
persuasions and social outlooks. It pretends to be that still. (It even has a
former Republican congressman on its board.) The Audubon Society’s path has
followed that of far too many other important 20th-century institutions. The
NAACP, founded a few years after the Audubon Society (now there’s a
statement of American social priorities) once counted many conservatives among
its members and leaders, Barry
Goldwater prominent among them. But that was back when the NAACP was focused on its stated mission,
advancing the interests of African Americans, rather than acting as an
all-purpose Democratic machine component, which is what it does now. Back when
Amnesty International was focused on the situation of political prisoners,
William F. Buckley Jr. was on the board of its New York chapter, something that
would be unthinkable in our time. The Southern Poverty Law Center has always
attracted a hard-left element, but it was not always the irredeemably nasty
nest of kookery and crankery that it is today. The Anti-Defamation League
(which once sent me a sniffy letter for approvingly quoting a rabbi who didn’t
share its executives’ cultural politics) has not always been the debased
thing it is now. The American Civil Liberties Union
wasn’t always full of baloney. Etc.
What causes institutions to fulfill
O’Sullivan’s Law? That happens mostly through personnel decisions.
Institutional drift isn’t usually random — it is pushed in one direction or
another by the sort of people who are drawn to an organization or the sort of
people and personalities an organization selects. Personnel trends end up being
self-reinforcing, because jobs are filled mostly by social processes rather
than by HR philosopher-kings looking at CVs and dispassionately checking off
boxes. Institutional drift is non-random for the same reason the errors in
the CBS News’s
reporting about firearms policy are non-random: Bias is not a plot among conscious malefactors but
an intellectual disability at the organizational level.
The desire to enforce social and political
homogeneity within an organization through personnel action — the desire
to intentionally institutionalize bias — is the
basis of what we call “cancel culture.” It is neither surprising nor coincidental that the most important and
high-profile cancel-culture episodes have been in-house headhunts (as at
the New York Times and Yale) rather than the result of
external pressure. Cancel culture is in no small part a result of
organizational capture, the situation in which the people who are supposed to
serve an institution use the institution to serve themselves, pursuing their
own interests (financial, cultural, political, sexual) rather than the mission
of the institution. This is a widespread and reasonably well-understood
problem, but outside of publicly traded corporations (which take considerable
pains to align management’s interests with those of shareholders and impose a
reasonable degree of transparency and accountability on corporate management),
very few institutions of any real social significance address such problems in
a robust way. In many industries, including media and technology, management
pursues precisely the opposite course of action, entrenching its own cultural
and political interests with whatever tools are in hand. Apple just got rid of
an employee who
wrote a book that some other Apple employees
didn’t like, arguing — this is by now tediously familiar — that its commitment
to diversity requires it to exclude people who . . . think different.
Corporate human-resources departments are
full of prim and donkey-souled enforcers of petty orthodoxies for the same
reason mortuaries employ a relatively large number of necrophiliacs. People end
up going where they already were inclined to go. I’ve never met a prison guard
and been surprised to find out he is a prison guard.
The people who are attracted to nonprofits
are a lot like the people who are attracted to journalism. (By “journalism” I
mean print journalism and its digital equivalent — journalism in writing.
TV people are a different breed entirely, failed actors and jumped-up sports
announcers rather than failed novelists and aspiring politicians.) They are
crusaders, even if they mostly are milquetoast crusaders, and the desire to be
a crusader precedes and supersedes the commitment to any particular crusade. A
few years ago, I was speaking with some students about working in journalism,
and I asked one what she wanted to do after graduation. She said she hoped to
work in a nonprofit. “That’s great,” I said. “A nonprofit doing what?” She
hadn’t thought about that. “So, you don’t care what the organization does, as
long as it doesn’t make a profit doing it?” She didn’t want to put it exactly
that way, but, yes, that was it. That’s one expression of a particular,
strange, but not at all uncommon cast of mind, which sees profit as evidence of
exploitation rather than as evidence of social value created. From her point of
view, “nonprofit” meant “virtuous.” And who wouldn’t prefer to do virtuous
work?
People who take a different view of profit
don’t often end up in journalism or nonprofits and, when they do, they
frequently end up in explicitly conservative publications and institutions —
O’Sullivan’s Law, again. The Philadelphia Inquirer does not
bill itself as a left-wing or Democratic outlet, but its editors investigated
my politics aggressively when I interviewed for a job there a million years ago
— not as a columnist but as a copy editor.
The Audubon Society does not advertise
itself as a Democratic front group — in fact, it advertises
itself as the opposite. But, of
course, it is run by Democratic hacks who are veterans of Senator Ben Cardin’s
office, apparatchiks from non-environmental
left-wing groups, former Democrat-leaning media people, former Gates Foundation people, and the like. The political contributions of the people associated
with it (a useful but by no means perfect indicator) most recently ran 99.72
percent Democrat, according to OpenSecrets.Org. It’s woke, but, of course, never woke
enough. (No one ever is — that’s the point of
woke hysteria and the source of woke power.) Its magazine
has taken on a more overtly political character, and its environmental activism has mutated into an all-fronts
left-wing posture.
Becoming another left-wing cell among
thousands of others more or less like it makes the Audubon Society less
effective at its notional mission rather than more effective. But, of course,
its stated mission is not its operative mission — its operative mission is to
provide incomes and influence to its executives and staff, who typically lean
more energetically left than do its board members as a whole or its supporters.
That’s a typical pattern, too, notably in universities — even the university
boards that are left-leaning to the point of actual goofiness seldom are as
left-wing as the English department or the women’s-studies department. Such
institutions end up being hotbeds of mediocrity because intellectual
homogeneity and enforced conformism practically guarantee it. The unchallenged
mind grows flabby from disuse at the institutional level as readily as the
individual level.
An illustrative example of this mediocrity
can be found in the case of David K. Johnson, “mixologist, professor” (his
words) in the nation’s 127th-most-prestigious history program. (Don’t
blame me, University of South Florida — you brought this on
yourselves.) A few weeks ago, I gave a talk for the Benson Center at the
University of Colorado, which has been hosting a series of discussions on
cancel culture. I argued, as I have before, that this phenomenon is not
particularly new, but that while many of my friends on the right denounce
cancel culture as “neo-McCarthyism,” the scare it most closely resembles is not
the red one but the lavender one — the anti-gay hysteria that convulsed the
U.S. government, Hollywood, much of corporate America, and the service industry
at the same time as the Red Scare and for related reasons. The effects of the
Lavender Scare were much greater than the actual number of job losses and
criminal prosecutions by themselves would have accounted for on their own, and
this was by design. The point of the Lavender Scare was not to lock millions of
people up on sodomy charges — punishment was only the easiest means to the end
of terrorization. Terror was the point, not incarceration. It was a means of
enforcing social homogeneity. Likewise, the point of bullying the New
York Times into firing writers with nonconforming views isn’t to
“silence” Bari Weiss — it is to terrorize other people with nonconforming views
into never voicing them in the first place. It is a matter of making an
example.
Professor Johnson publicly charged me with
making a “misuse of history” in that argument. Because he is the author of a
well-regarded book about the subject, I took his criticism seriously and wrote
to him asking him to expand. Taking his criticism seriously turned out to be a
mistake, which I suppose I should have foreseen. You will not be surprised to
learn that he hadn’t seen the talk or read a transcript of it, that he is
unfamiliar with my views and work, or that he based his judgment on — and this
I could not make up — a blog post on a site run by “the co-author of UrbanMushrooms.com, which is an online guide to mushroom hunting in cities.”
University of South Florida meets
urban-mushrooms guy: That’s about as low-rent an echo-chamber as you could come
up with. But the Audubon Society is much the same thing with some legacy
prestige.
(Personally, I have met more interesting
mushrooms.)
We need institutions to do what the
Audubon Society is supposed to be doing. We need institutions to do what the
NAACP and the ACLU and Amnesty International are supposed to be doing. We even
need institutions to do what the University of South Florida, in its stately
C-minus fashion, is supposed to be doing. But we do not have them.
Whose interests are served by that?
Meditate on the question and much will become clear and clearer.
Seemingly independent phenomena such as
cancel culture, media bias, and campus madness would be better understood as
manifestations of the same phenomenon: institutional failure following
institutional capture.
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