Tending the Garden

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

 

So a few minutes ago, I finished a great conversation with Jonathan Haidt about his new book, The Anxious Generation, for The Remnant. While prepping, I tend to stock up on water purification tablets because I think traveling with large amounts of bottled water is too cumbersome. But that’s not important right now. 

 

While prepping for the podcast, I learned about a book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, by developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik. 

 

I’ll summarize Haidt’s summary of her argument. Apparently, the word “parenting” really only emerged in the 1950s, and didn’t become popular until the 1970s. “For nearly all of human history,” Haidt writes, “people grew up in environments where they observed many people caring for many children. There was plenty of local wisdom and no need for parenting experts.” 

 

He continues:

 

But in the 1970s, family life changed. Families grew smaller and more mobile; people spent more time working and going to school; parenthood was delayed, often into the 30s. New parents lost access to local wisdom and began to rely more on experts. As they did so, they found it easy to approach parenthood with the mindset that had led them to success in school and work: If I can just find the right training, I can do the job well, and I’ll produce a superior product. 

 

Gopnik says that parents began to think like carpenters who have a clear idea in mind of what they are trying to achieve. They look carefully at the materials they have to work with, and it is their job to assemble those materials into a finished product that can be judged by everyone against clear standards: Are the right angles perfect? Does the door work? Gopnik notes that “messiness and variability are a carpenter’s enemies; precision and control are her allies. Measure twice, cut once.” Gopnik says that a better way to think about child rearing is as a gardener. Your job is to “create a protected and nurturing space for plants to flourish.” It takes some work, but you don’t have to be a perfectionist. Weed the garden, water it, and then step back and the plants will do their thing, unpredictably and often with delightful surprises.

 

He then quotes Gopnik directly. She writes:

 

Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it’s to give them the toys. … We can’t make children learn, but we can let them learn.

 

I’m not a big pull-quote guy; I’m more of a pulled-pork guy. But I think at least some readers—and listeners—will understand why I liked this so much. 

 

One of my favorite metaphorical illustrations of how to think about the role of the state is the difference between the English and French garden. I wrote about it in my book and here and here. For those who don’t know or remember, the basic idea is that the hyperrationalist French gardens with conic shapes, right angles, and other geometric shapes represent one Enlightenment view of how government should operate, imposing a human vision of nature on nature. The English garden, meanwhile, represents a different model. It establishes a space, free of external threats and invasive weeds, that allows the plants of the garden to grow free into the best versions of themselves. As Friedrich Hayek put it in his Nobel Prize acceptance address:

 

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.

 

In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek quotes Dietrich Schindler, “The legislator more closely resembles a gardener, who has to assess the soil and the conditions necessary for his plants’ growth, than a painter who gives free rein to his imagination.”

 

Now, I’ll give you a peek behind the cranial curtain to look at the banshees swirling between my ears. I’m trying really, really, hard not to write another book. But the compulsion won’t go away. I feel a bit like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters, incapable of resisting the urge to make replicas of Devils Tower out of mashed potatoes. Ironically, he even ends up digging up a garden, like an 18th-century Versailles horticulturalist, to scratch the itch.

 

Were I to completely surrender to my compulsions, the basic idea that I’d want to explore, defend, promote, proselytize, wear on a sandwich board in Times Square, is that conservatism in the American tradition is a defense of this classically liberal conception of the English garden. 

 

The thing is everything I read, every conversation I have, starts to feel like something I could use to make my bibliographic Devils Tower. Haidt’s book(s)—and now Gopnik’s—feels like book fodder. Each of the last few episodes of The Remnant feels that way too. 

 

Allen Guelzo and I talked at length about the fundamentally liberal nature of what Lincoln called “our ancient faith” (and what Guelzo titled his book).  Tim Carney’s Family Unfriendly is in part a kind of ode to Gopnik’s conception of parenting. Rob Henderson’s compelling memoir, Troubled, explores similar territory albeit from a very different angle. While Tim highlights the benefits—for kids and parents—of raising free-range kids in a stable, morally centered, two-parent family, Henderson explores the costs of not raising kids that way, particularly for poor people. He even cites an essay by Gopnik about how stressful childhoods can permanently harm the brains of kids. Carney cites her too:

 

“Going for a walk with a two-year-old is like going for a walk with William Blake,” as mother, philosophy scholar, and psychologist Alison Gopnik puts it. Walk to the corner store as an adult, and you almost don’t experience anything. The adult brain, Gopnik explains, rationally has stopped absorbing new data because it doesn’t have use for it. “But if you do the same walk with a two-year-old,” Gopnik observes, “you realize, wait a minute: This, three blocks, it’s just amazing. It’s so rich. There’s dogs and there’s gates and there’s pizza flyers and there’s plants and trees and there’s airplanes.”

 

Raising kids in the sort of garden that Gopnik describes tends to create well-adjusted, healthy, adults. Raising kids in a state of nature tends to cause kids to grow up too quickly and to become too rigid, narrow-minded, and worse.  

 

Please note: I said “tends.”  Kids raised in ideal families can still have unfortunate lives, and kids with absolutely horrendous childhoods—like Henderson—can go on to be incredibly impressive adults. But that’s sort of the point. Best practices aren’t called “perfect practices” because life doesn’t work like that. 

 

The point is that aiming for perfection a la Gopnik’s carpenter means abandoning the reliably good for the unattainably perfect. As Haidt and Greg Lukianoff detail in The Coddling of the American Mind, the parent who tries to take all risk out of their kid’s lives will raise kids that are very good at satisfying checklists and taking tests, but too brittle to navigate the complexities of life. Driving full-out in pursuit of the perfect child requires racing past the turnoff for a happy and healthy child because on the road of parenting, there is no exit for perfection. The sign pointing that way is a Potemkin façade. In my experience, this becomes obvious—or at least more apparent—for people with lots of kids. What sounds like an ideal career for some kids is a recipe for misery for their siblings. Some kids want to be stand-up comics, or welders, or psychologists. Perfection implies a singular endpoint, a specific destination, but happiness requires letting kids go in different directions. Moreover, perfection is a mirage. 

 

Which brings me back to Hayek. (It always comes back to Hayek.) In his Mirage of Social Justice, Hayek dismantles the idea that you can impose a perfect—and perfectly just—society from above. And any effort to do so will kill the garden. You cannot make the rosebush give you apples. You cannot make the dandelion a rose simply by calling it one. 

 

For Hayek, the whole point of the gardening metaphor is that you cannot eliminate chance, contingency, human nature, and other variables that make life complicated. Perfection is possible on paper but preposterous in reality. In politics, I despise the habit of making the perfect the enemy of the good. But in political theory, pursuit of the perfect is the enemy of the pursuit of the good. That’s because the beauty of liberal order is that it creates space for different conceptions of the good. The illiberal left and right are not content with living decent or prosperous lives themselves. They want to dictate how others should live. The acolytes of social justice want to dictate how everyone lives. They see society not as a garden full of diversity and idiosyncrasies, but as a canvas for them to paint their personal conception of perfection.

 

I should pause to make an important point. Metaphors are useful, but they can also be shackles. So, I should be clear that my conception of the English garden isn’t some rigid construct or program, nor is it simply a quaint stand-in for libertarianism. What you might call vulgar libertarianism holds that individuals are maximally free to design their own happiness, unencumbered by social constraints. This is largely (but not entirely) true and valuable for purposes of law and constitutional rights. But it’s not true in life. 

 

The great irony is that while the pursuit of happiness is an individual right, the actual realization of happiness is attained in groups. Brad Wilcox in his book Get Married, demonstrates how the happiest people are married people with kids. The vulgar libertarian—or vulgar libertine—of both the left and right has trouble believing this. Why be “tied down” with obligations and responsibilities when you can maximize hedonism on your own? The answer is simple: Real flourishing, true happiness, tends to come from being other-directed, from being needed by people you love and respect. 

 

The English garden isn’t purely libertarian because it recognizes this fact. Pluralism is different from what we mean today by diversity. Diversity has come to be understood as a very narrow conception about the distribution of individuals—the “right” kind of individuals—throughout institutions and society. Pluralism is about different spheres of authority and institutions. Federalism is one kind of pluralism; what works for Kansas doesn’t necessarily work for California. Freedom of religion is another manifestation of pluralism. The rules for Catholics are different than the rules for Jews or Hindus or atheists. Different institutions from Churches to the Marines, to softball leagues, make demands on their members but only their members. Families are the bedrock of pluralism. All families are different civilizations, or microcosms as Hayek called them. The authority of parents is real and vital, but it is limited to their own children. I am not your kids’ dad.  

 

All forms of tyranny involve taking the rules of one institution and imposing them on everyone. Trying to make a president into a parent or pope is tyrannical. Pretending that all citizens are soldiers under a general is tyranny. Pluralistic liberty and human happiness are conjoined projects because the latter is impossible, at scale, without the former. Meaningful happiness comes when free individuals find their place in larger institutions or associations. To be sure, some people are happiest alone and in isolation. But they are rare. And the existence of miserable bastards is something good societies tolerate but are impossibilities in perfect ones.

 

Libertarians are usually comfortable with the idea of the English garden, but all philosophical commitments are revealed at their testing points. We’re all libertarians about the things we want to be free to do, just as we’re all democrats about the things we want to be decided democratically. But ask small-d democrats if they think freedom of speech or gun rights should be put on the ballot and you’ll see democratic unanimity sundered by liberal commitments. We all like nationalism when it’s little more than vague and cost-free social solidarity or indistinguishable from conventional patriotism. But if some new nationalist party insisted on invading Canada, we’d see the ranks of the nationalists shrink and split. 

 

Some libertarians—again, of both the left and right—do not like Jonathan Haidt’s proposals to restrict children’s access to social media and pornography on the internet. Their arguments vary in both persuasiveness and principle. It’s a wholly legitimate argument. But I side entirely with Haidt. Not all his proposed solutions require top-down federal intervention. Many actually depend on pluralism: schools, parents, and businesses making individual and collective decisions. But where necessary, I favor the government choosing sides. Making it easier, at the margins, for parents, schools, and communities to raise healthy and happy kids is not necessarily tyrannical. It can be, in theory. But I see no evidence of that in practice here. When I was a kid it was hard for me to find porn. Believe me, I looked. My difficulty was not tyranny. It was the result of legitimate and necessary laws that made it easier for parents to raise kids the way they wanted. The internet made those laws irrelevant. Writing new laws to do the same job is not tyranny; it’s liberating, for parents and schools to do their jobs. 

 

That’s what’s so conservative about the garden of liberty. It doesn’t liberate the individual, adults, or children from all constraints or sources of authority. It recognizes different spheres of authority and defers to them. Society isn’t a forest of individual trees, it’s an ecosystem of diverse, pluralistic, habitats. 

 

And that’s what ties this potpourri on parenting to political theory. All societies are made up of citizens. In America and most of the world, citizens aren’t manufactured in factories or giant industrial farms. They are made, one by one, by little artisan shops called “families.” Families are the innermost circle of a series of rings that extend out from microcosm to macrocosm like the rings of a tree. Families don’t do all the work. A couple years after birth the production line is extended to, or shared with, schools, peers, other families, churches, clubs, communities, etc. The timeline from conception to finished product takes about 18 years, but often longer. 

 

Governments aren’t parents, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of the best practices for parents at the heart of the microcosm mirror the best practices at the outermost rings of the macrocosm. Children need freedom to make mistakes in a process of discovery but within certain boundaries. As they get older, the boundaries expand until they are citizens (aka adults). There are still boundaries for citizens but, just as importantly,  there are boundaries for government, too. One of the most crucial: The government shouldn’t intrude too deeply in the production process. 

 

Most parents eventually learn from experience that they can’t live their kids’ lives for them. This is one reason why grandparents tend to be so much more libertarian about their grandkids than they were about their own kids. But governments don’t learn lessons the same way (which is one reason governments shouldn’t confuse themselves for parents in the first place). And I do worry that a generation of kids raised by helicopter parents is more likely to want helicopter government, too. But that’s a topic for another day.    

You Mean the Man Still Pays?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, March 28, 2024

 

Modern revolutions — those we know to have failed — share an impractical conceit. In the minds of their architects, the establishment of a wholly new social contract has meant renovating human nature itself.

 

France’s revolution, which begat the utopian tradition, was predicated on the assumption that humanity unshackled from superstition and guided by pure reason would enter a new epoch of Enlightenment. That utopian ideal was carried forward by the Paris Commune and, eventually, the Soviets, who sought to erase from the human experience concepts such as property, enterprise, and individuality. Throughout, the revolutionaries’ ambition was matched only by their contempt for the world as it was. Robert Owen, the founder of one similarly ill-fated experiment in utopian design, in America, professed that the social reformer’s goal is to stamp out “that greatest of all errors, the notion that individuals form their own characters.”

 

It’s no coincidence, therefore, that the modern revolutionists who convinced themselves that they could remake mankind according to design experimented with radically new forms of relations between men and women. The ideologically zealous sort in more-bohemian quarters believed that perfecting the human condition required liberation from all restrictive social constructs, romantic endeavors very much included. Freeing the body and freeing the mind from convention were two complementary aspects of the same project.

 

But the liberality of interpersonal relations in postrevolutionary periods reliably gave way to a backlash when the consequences of intemperance became tangible. From the Jacobin “sex panic” of the 1790s to the Bolsheviks’ renewed emphasis on conventional familial forms (a corrective after the widespread orphancy and delinquency that resulted from “free love” and communal child-rearing), the old ways have a habit of making a comeback.

 

Our most recent quasi-revolutionary period followed a similar trajectory. Amid the tearing down of the statues, the struggle sessions, and the ritual denunciations of the ancien régime’s illegitimacy, a transgressive set of carnal mores swept aside the preceding strictures. As that fervor subsides, however, the old-fashioned ideals are returning to vogue. And yet those who are resurrecting the old ways are desperate to avoid the recrimination of their more subversive peers. No one wants to be branded a reactionary. So a familiar dynamic has reemerged. The rediscovery of the old morality is being framed not as a counterrevolutionary act but as a mere reinterpretation of the radical project. Those who have tried to thread this needle have made amusing spectacles of themselves.

 

***

 

Radical social reformers have long nursed a preoccupation with gender roles. In an earlier age, gender-specific societal expectations were branded a suffocating anachronism and condemned as obstacles to equality. In our own time, they are perceived to be a source of great offense to those who don’t believe they fit within that binary rubric. Gender itself, we are so often told, is artificial. Therefore, it’s only right that gender-specific behavioral norms be cast aside, not just in the professional and domestic spheres but in courtship rituals as well. But as a reported item in the New York Times recently discovered, that ideal conflicts with reality.

 

“My date, a 27-year-old woman I matched with on Hinge, said gender equality didn’t mean men and women should pay the same when they went out,” New York Times reporter Santul Nerkar related. That age-old practice of men paying more cannot, however, be chivalric. It must be an outgrowth of the enlightenment to which only the members of a sophisticated vanguard are privy. “Women,” Nerkar’s date informed him, “earn less than men in the workplace, spend more time getting ready for outings and pay more for reproductive care.” Men must therefore pay a cosmic ante in penance for their undeserved good fortune. Indeed, there is “an expectation” even among the most au courant that “the person who did the asking out — usually the man — should pay for the date,” which explains why researchers have found that young men still pick up the tab roughly 90 percent of the time. Still, Nerkar remained unconverted. “When the date ended,” he confessed, “we split the bill.”

 

The Times reporter’s modest sociological study comports with broadly observable trends. Amid the wave of heterodoxy that overtook American political culture in and around the annus horribilis 2020, sex — its provision, its withholding, and its redefinition — was said to hold its own revolutionary power. American politics is tainted by “our corrosive sexual shame,” the author Dave Madden wrote for the Guardian. “So many of us believe that the work of our genitals is far less noble than the work of our minds,” he lamented. Hence the proliferation of sexual proclivities — all of which have their own names, flags, and political agendas — that seem to have little to do with gratification. Rather, sexual orientation became a form of political activity, what reporter Olivia Goldhill described in Quartz as one of many “quietly revolutionary” acts between the sheets.

 

Despite appearances, this superficially permissive outlook toward sex is not in conflict with the strict codification, in either law or institutional covenant, of what it means to consent to intercourse. Around this time, a panic about the unseen prevalence of criminal sexual misconduct led the stewards of America’s institutions to seek to standardize the concept of “affirmative consent” — verifiable, sometimes written, and even “ongoing” proof of explicit pre-authorization ahead of an amorous encounter — to deter prosecutable violations of personal autonomy. Yet, despite all the social engineers’ efforts, attraction and courtship remained a nebulous phenomenon that could not be forced to fit within the confines of contractual negotiations.

 

To hear young women tell it, the social strictures that liberal columnist Ezra Klein hailed for making men “feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter” had the effect of rendering men timid and, therefore, unattractive. The new consequences of pursuing a partner boldly and assertively had their intended effect, but no one much liked the new status quo. And so, without admitting as much, the younger generation quietly abandoned the revolutionary ideals that they had briefly adopted.

 

“Some students do practice affirmative consent, but many others use a range of social cues to make sense of whether or not a sexual encounter was consensual or nonconsensual,” the trend-setting venue Teen Vogue observed. The outlet recognized the “cognitive dissonance” in good progressives who nevertheless “operate within an implicit framework in which men are the ones who move the sexual ball down to the field,” but the curiosities of attraction just would not comport with the new affirmative-consent paradigm.

 

By loosening the constraints associated with pair-bonding amid a society-wide effort to crack down on sexual and emotional abuse within relationships, the engineers of the new ideal created a permission structure for even more abuse. Polyamory — a modern twist on the 19th century’s “free love” movement — is a cause célèbre in the press. Accordingly, it has been festooned with the trappings of revolutionary political activity, complete with “a poly flag, poly symbols and poly pride celebrations,” as the Christian ministry Focus on the Family remarked. “Ethical non-monogamy” has been the subject of apple-polishing write-ups in mainstream venues from Vanity Fair to Newsweek, and it has found its way into conventional media fare such as HGTV’s House Hunters. But the practice of polyamory has not lived up to its promise.

 

“At a time when non-monogamy has become a drop-down option on dating apps,” the Times recently reported, upstart institutions that “push the boundaries of sexual norms — or flout them altogether — in the safe company of like-minded people” have flourished. But at one venue for polyamorous encounters, profiled by reporter Sarah Maslin Nir, the members began to feel more like “victims of sexual or physical assault.”

 

Readers of deviationist tracts such as Nir’s are treated to a lot of pseudoscientific jargon designed to recast the rank hedonism they criticize as a species of sophistication. They are aware that their modest critiques risk offending their more committed comrades, but their criticisms ring true nonetheless.

 

Of course, sexual assault and misconduct are attributable to their alleged perpetrators alone. But tales of abuse like those Nir chronicled also allow progressives to make note of the narcissism, emotional manipulation, and dehumanization that the industry devoted to promoting open relationships can encourage. Such observations can now be spoken aloud even by progressives in good standing, so long as they are couched in the language of therapy.

 

“After many months and lots of experiences both great and difficult, my partner and I had a long discussion about the future and decided to become monogamous together,” one essayist confessed in the Vox Media outlet PopSugar. Ultimately, she wrote, “the transition from a polyamorous relationship into monogamy . . . has made me feel more secure, and overall increases my capacity to love my partner more selflessly.” After all, “compersion,” or the vicarious joy one derives from seeing one’s partner achieve sexual satisfaction in the arms of another, involves a “level of selflessness that only comes from loving someone unconditionally.” Yet it is for that reason that polyamory and unconditional love tend to be mutually unsustainable. A love so selfless that it might tolerate polyamory takes up enough emotional bandwidth to preclude multiple similar sentimental (and physical) obligations. Eventually, either love or polyamory gives way.

 

It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the author is fishing for congratulations over her self-professed “selflessness,” but she does, in fact, deserve some credit. In progressive circles, admitting to finding fulfillment in something as bourgeois as monogamy takes real courage.

 

The rediscovery of the old ways is not limited to expressions of sexuality alone. In mid February, an essay published by the Cut, a New York magazine offshoot covering “women’s lives and interests,” captured the attention of the national intelligentsia. In the essay, inaptly titled “The Lure of Divorce,” the author Emily Gould spun a winding tale involving her own deep, often manic, dissatisfaction with her husband and their respective professional successes, the fruits of which she thought were inequitably distributed.

 

The essay exploded onto the literary scene at a time when the upsides to divorce had become a fixation of the pop-cultural press. It may be no coincidence that the media’s obsessive effort to make divorce into a fashionable trend had an inverse relationship with American divorce rates. According to census data compiled in 2021, the rate of divorce in America declined from 9.7 per 1,000 women aged 15 and older in 2011 to just 6.9. But media accounts of the declining divorce rate present it as an undesirable development.

 

“Families are sticking together!” Time editor Belinda Luscombe remarked. “But in practice, this does not mean more people are living happily ever after.” As Lyz Lenz, author of a book on divorce and her experience with it, wrote in an excerpt published by the Washington Post, marriage is an especially raw deal for women — whose happiness never seems to rate with either their partners or society more broadly. “You do not have to waste years of your life hoping that maybe, one day, you’ll finally get there,” she concluded in an essay that evolved into a pep talk. “You can be happy now.”

 

Lenz’s contentment in divorce notwithstanding, the available data don’t suggest that her experience is representative. As American Enterprise Institute scholar Brad Wilcox documented, the 2022 General Social Survey found that “a combination of marriage and parenthood is linked to the biggest happiness dividends for women.” Just 22 percent of unmarried, childless women between the ages of 18 and 55 describe themselves as “very happy” compared with 40 percent of married women with children. The same can be said for men, who experience more happiness and prosperity within matrimonial bonds than outside them. “Specifically, the odds that men and women say they are ‘very happy’ with their lives are a staggering 545 percent higher for those who are very happily married, compared to their peers who are not married or who are less than very happy in their marriages,” Wilcox wrote in his new book, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.

 

Wilcox’s conclusions are a source of resentment among those who promote divorce as a fashion. Given this fad and its accompanying social pressures, it’s reasonable to expect that Gould’s celebrated essay on divorce would culminate in a, you know, divorce. But it did not. “We still see the therapist twice a month,” she wrote. “We talk about how to make things more equal in our marriage, how not to revert to old patterns.” Staying together may be “work,” but it’s the satisfying sort and vastly preferable to its alternatives. “The difference is that we now understand what can happen when we don’t do it.”

 

It’s a touching conclusion — one that reflects shifting values on the progressive left. That shift is as apparent in Gould’s essay as it is in the decline of Times op-eds that fête divorce as “an act of radical self-love” or ask whether a “good-enough marriage” can “make for a great divorce.” It’s evident in the fact that the Times replaced those items with essays extolling “the case for staying married to a spouse you cannot stand” and tales about how “I married the wrong person, and I’m so glad I did.” When outlets such as Vox can produce compositions about how the alleged “‘decline’ of marriage isn’t a problem” in one decade only to lament in the next the degree to which “America has made it harder for Black people to marry,” we can deduce that a metamorphosis on the cultural left is under way, despite the efforts to disguise it.

 

***

 

All of this is to say that the Left is insecure in its own intellectual and moral evolution. We see that insecurity especially in tentative efforts by progressives to question what has become the foremost value proposition in modern left-wing orthodoxy: the attribution of social and cultural currency to victimization.

 

The author Kathryn Jezer-Morton, in her column for the Cut, expressed her deep fear that her sons, ages ten and 13, may grow up to become — gasp — right-wingers. In an admission against interest, she confided in her readers that the only cure for the ills of her children’s miseducation is more miseducation. By immersing them in the academy’s ideological finishing schools, Jezer-Morton hopes to forestall late-onset conservatism in her offspring. In a moment of clarity, however, the author acknowledged a conundrum: The forces busily transforming academia into progressive reeducation camps are the same forces turning young men toward what she regards as the toxic masculinity–industrial complex.

 

“Overcoming obstacles is the most hallowed narrative in our culture,” Jezer-Morton asserted. “It’s a place where capitalism’s growth imperative dovetails with the progressive appetite for stories about emancipation.” In simpler terms, the culture and its progressive arbiters privilege persecution narratives above all others. “So, for young men, and straight white men in particular, to feel like valid participants in the storytelling of selfhood, they feel the need to start from a place of grievance, because otherwise there’s no way to bounce back and beat the odds.”

 

What a stroke of insight — one Jezer-Morton was brave enough to publish but not stalwart enough to attribute to her fellow progressives. Although she astutely condemned the “appeal of a grievance-based identity” as the source of so much modern psychological maladjustment, she blamed the incentives for victimization on anything and everything but the Left. It must be “logic from the free-market economy,” the modern feminist supposition that “women started from a position of inferiority,” or the “paranoid hands of masculinist discourses of male disempowerment.”

 

These are the tributes vice pays to virtue — an offering in exchange for a worthwhile indulgence. And Jezer-Morton made the most of the dispensation she had purchased. “The appeal of a grievance-based identity makes it hard to convince straight white boys that they in fact have plenty going for them, and that they have no reason to feel aggrieved,” the author concluded. Conservatives know her to be correct and have been saying precisely that for decades.

 

If the revolutionaries are slowly letting go of the radicalism that was so fashionable just a few years ago, they have not abandoned the language of rebellion. They frame as their own innovations their rediscovery of and satisfaction with ancient insights into the human condition. They tell anyone willing to listen that their breakthroughs are available only to those with levels of enlightenment rivaling their own. Well, whatever gets them through the night.

 

If these authors need to convince themselves that finding happiness in monogamous fidelity is insurrectionary, that gender-specific courtship rituals are an outgrowth of an education in gender inequities, and that a culture of victimization is psychologically debilitating only because of the evils of capitalism, so be it. As go the revolution’s myths, so goes the revolution itself.

 

Conservatives who never needed to rediscover these eternal truths in the first place will have to be satisfied in victory without a triumph. And that shouldn’t be too difficult. After all, conservatives know too well that lasting achievements are of the incremental sort. Here’s hoping that progressives never convince themselves of the shrewdness in that bit of wisdom, too.

NBC’s Ronna McDaniel Uproar Was Never about Journalistic Integrity

By Becket Adams

Sunday, March 31, 2024

 

Once you understand that the legacy press is essentially a high-school cafeteria with strict clique enforcement, the things that upset corporate journalists make a lot more sense.

 

The “outrages” rarely, if ever, concern journalistic integrity and are usually mere violations of tribal purity.

 

Case in point: the dust-up at NBC News this month over the hiring and abrupt firing of former Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.

 

NBC News announced on March 22 that it had hired McDaniel as an on-air contributor two weeks after she stepped down at the RNC. In response, NBC staff, including Chuck Todd, Rachel Maddow, and Nicolle Wallace, revolted, claiming that McDaniel’s hiring severely threatened the network’s journalistic credibility.

 

On Meet the Press, Todd, formerly the show’s anchor, appeared on a panel hosted by his successor, Kristen Welker, following her on-air interview with McDaniel. “I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation,” he said solemnly to Welker.

 

He added, “There’s a reason why there’s a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”

 

On her show on MSNBC, Maddow caustically reproached her network: “The fact that Ms. McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News, to me, that is inexplicable. You wouldn’t — you wouldn’t — you wouldn’t hire, like, a wise guy. You wouldn’t hire a made man, like a mobster, to work at a DA’s office, right? You wouldn’t hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener.”

 

In Wallace’s view, what NBC’s hiring of McDaniel said to “election deniers is not just that they can do that on our airwaves, but that they can do that as one of us, as badge-carrying employees of NBC News, as paid contributors to our sacred airwaves.”

 

“Sacred airwaves”? Do these people even hear themselves?

 

By March 26, the staff revolt had achieved its goal. NBC News severed ties with McDaniel.

 

“After listening to the legitimate concerns of many of you, I have decided that Ronna McDaniel will not be an NBC News contributor,” NBC News Group chairman Cesar Conde said in a memo to staff. “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned. Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”

 

The absurdity of a completely “aligned” newsroom aside, the real laugh line here is the risible idea that NBC staffers were concerned solely about the network’s journalistic credibility.

 

The revolt was never about integrity. It was only ever about personal animus. Or, put more simply, they plain don’t like McDaniel (or anyone in Trump’s orbit, for that matter). The revolt was no deeper than a clique saying to an outsider, You can’t sit at our table!

 

Now, McDaniel is a political creature, a gutless mercenary who will do as she’s told, including dropping the “Romney” from her name after Trump apparently suggested it. Her hiring by NBC was an embarrassment. A good journalist should be ashamed to share airtime with her. The politics-to-media revolving door shouldn’t exist, and NBC shouldn’t have hired McDaniel in the first place.

 

The issue here is that McDaniel would hardly have been the worst of NBC’s problems. Credibility? What credibility? For the employees of NBC, of all news organizations, to raise a stink over the impropriety of the McDaniel hire is laughable. It’s a bit like Tom Green tsk-tsking that those Jackass boys are too undignified. Are NBC staffers completely unaware of what goes on at their own network?

 

Where was their righteous indignation when NBC announced it had hired former CIA director John Brennan as a contributor?

 

Brennan is not just any former CIA director. He’s the one who was caught turning his agents loose on the U.S. Senate after lawmakers started looking into the CIA’s torture methods. Brennan was caught not just spying on the Senate; he was also caught lying about said spying on the Senate. Oh, also, Brennan is one of the chief architects of the drone-warfare program. Brennan is a professional liar. Yet there have been no internal revolts at 30 Rock because he draws a paycheck from NBC.

 

NBC also gave a show to former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki. The network even negotiated her contract while she was still an employee of the White House. Psaki has no serious journalism or news background apart from finding creative ways to undercut and lie to reporters. But she has a show!

 

Most damning of all, NBC at one point paid Chelsea Clinton $600,000 annually for a made-up gig, evidently because the network’s executives thought her mother would one day be president.

 

There were no on-air meltdowns for Brennan’s hiring, Chelsea Clinton’s six-figure “salary,” or the White House press secretary’s negotiating an NBC contract while still briefing reporters — including those employed by NBC — from the podium of the White House press room.

 

This is to say nothing of the fact that NBC gave a show to Nicolle Wallace, known best for trading McCain campaign secrets. NBC gave a show to former congressman Joe Scarborough, who is definitionally partisan. Former RNC chairman Michael Steele, a partisan, is a weekend host. Obama election guru David Axelrod was a senior political analyst at NBC until 2015 (he jumped ship for CNN). NBC even gave Al Sharpton, who once incited antisemitic riots in Crown Heights, a weekend show on MSNBC.

 

Yet this past weekend, we were treated to multiple sermons about NBC’s sacred airwaves. McDaniel, you see, is different. She isn’t just a simple beneficiary of the politics-to-media revolving door, the sermonizers said. No, the difference here is that McDaniel, like many GOP lieutenants, played along with former president Donald Trump’s 2020 election trutherism.

 

Fair enough. But again, this complaint would be more compelling if it came from basically any other network. NBC is the home for not just 2016 election conspiracy theories (the Russians robbed Hillary!) but also 2000 election trutherism. It’s true: There are still 2000 holdouts who think Al Gore was robbed, some of whom anchor MSNBC programs (see: Joy Reid).

 

The McDaniel affair last week is reminiscent of when CNN hired former Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur in 2019 as a politics editor. Journalists everywhere complained all at once, screaming that she was too political and inexperienced for such a job. CNN scrambled, moving Isgur into a political-analyst role.

 

Never mind that George Stephanopoulos’s only media experience before ABC News was when he did some light sports broadcasting in college. In between college and ABC, Stephanopoulos worked for two Democratic congressmen and then served on the Dukakis ’88 presidential campaign before eventually landing a lead role in the Clinton White House. And never mind that before the late Tim Russert anchored Meet the Press, his résumé consisted of serving in Democratic senator Daniel Moynihan’s office and later as an aide to Democratic New York governor Mario Cuomo. No outcry was heard over their political ties or collective lack of journalism experience.

 

No, the hiring of Isgur, who departed CNN in 2020 for greener pastures, was an outrage. She served at the Justice Department under Trump! To offer her a job straight out of the DOJ was an insult to all that is good and holy about journalism!

 

The revolving door between media and journalism is real. It shouldn’t be, but it is. NBC is one of the worst offenders. Its staffers have rarely, if ever, said boo about it. Yet we’re supposed to believe now that their objections to McDaniel were genuine and rooted in a deep sense of professionalism? Come on.

 

Like the New York Times’ Tom Cotton op-ed debacle, this entire McDaniel affair has been highly instructive in terms of understanding what animates corporate journalists.

 

Hint: It’s not their credibility.

The ISIS Attack on Moscow Should Be a Wake-Up Call to the U.S.

By Kevin Carroll

Friday, March 29, 2024

 

Last week’s Islamic State attack that killed at least 143 Russian concertgoers confirms what the group’s January bombing of an Iranian memorial service suggested: It is capable of and committed to launching mass-casualty terrorism from its Afghan sanctuary. Some may be tempted to coldly dismiss these murderous attacks only because they befell America’s adversaries, even though the victims were innocent civilians. That is wrong on the merits, but also ignores that the United States is vulnerable to similar attacks. We can’t afford to forget the hard lessons learned from campaigns against both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State’s Iraq-and-Syria wing.

 

Between 1998 and 2001, the U.S. paid insufficient attention to a growing drumbeat of al-Qaeda activity emanating from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan—bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, a plot against Los Angeles International Airport, a failed attack on USS The Sullivans and a successful attack on USS Cole in Yemen. President Bill Clinton struck Afghanistan with cruise missiles, and he and President George W. Bush began an armed Predator drone program while CIA contacts resumed with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, all in unsuccessful efforts to kill al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

 

But understandably distracted by an Asian financial crisis, an impeachment, the Y2K scare and a contested presidential election, policymakers missed the al-Qaeda plot that began in Afghanistan in the late 1990s; developed in Germany, Malaysia and the Gulf States; entered the U.S. and came to awful fruition on a bright September morning.  We risk making such mistakes of omission now.

 

Thanks to policy decisions by Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden that may now be objectively described as bad, we once again lack Afghan bases from which to hunt our enemies in Islamic State’s “Khorasan” branch.  We face divisive domestic political problems to which those of the Millennium era pale in comparison. The danger of attack may be more acute than circa 2000 due to our insecure southwest border, and the skyrocketing number of “special interest aliens” and even “known or suspected terrorists” caught crossing over.

 

In the ‘90s most U.S. officials saw the threat al-Qaeda presented only through a glass, darkly, and they failed to imagine them attacking the homeland—until they did. But the Islamic State made its intentions and capabilities very clear from 2015 to 2017: In San Bernardino, Orlando, Columbus, and Manhattan, ISIS-inspired terrorists killed 72 Americans.

 

ISIS has twice now murdered hundreds at a stroke in Europe, right under the noses first of the famously good French internal security service—the DGSI—and now Russia’s infamously brutal one, the FSB. The Islamic State’s external attacks are often simple and involve firearms (which are far too available to bad actors in this country) or even just knives or trucks. This gives these conspiracies a smaller signature, making them more difficult for Western law enforcement and intelligence services to foil than al-Qaeda’s complex plots from about 1998 to 2009. Those often sought to turn boats, planes, and trains into weapons to strike multiple symbolic targets at the same time, in what the enemy sickeningly dubbed “spectacular” attacks.

 

France’s government is now reportedly on its highest counterterror alert as the Paris Olympic Games approach this summer. This is wise. What can American leaders usefully do to prevent ISIS attacks on the U.S., for which long-term planning may already be underway?  Counterterrorism is a multifaceted problem involving subjects as disparate and politically sensitive as immigration, surveillance, social media, gun control, the military and law enforcement. Several initiatives, seemingly unrelated, can work in concert to offer some level of protection.

 

First, is the bipartisan border bill sponsored by Sen. James Lankford that stalled in the Senate. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and waiting until 2025 to begin to secure the border is unacceptable for any reason, much less for the sake of preserving a Republican talking point for the upcoming election. The fact that 736 individuals whose identities are in terrorist screening databases were encountered by Customs and Border Protection at or between U.S. ports of entry in 2023 alone should give Congress reason enough to pass this legislation. (Indeed, a self-proclaimed Hezbollah bombmaker was detained in Texas just this month.) By the same token, it is incumbent upon Democratic-led states and cities that have bragged about being sanctuaries to cooperate with Homeland Security—to remove individuals who are here illegally and who also present violent criminal or national security risks.

 

Next is the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, currently before Congress. This provision is set to expire, and was abused during the Obama administration, yet FISA provides the lion’s share of our counterterror intelligence. Similarly, Congress should decline to pursue bills such as “the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act,” which would prevent law enforcement from buying commercially available data to track mobile phones, a crucial tool in the previous fight against ISIS inside this country.

 

Then there is the bipartisan bill seeking to sever TikTok from the influence of hostile foreign powers. TikTok’s promotion last year of Osama bin Laden’s infamous 2002 “letter to the American people” is a prime example of how social media can radicalize the impressionable and vulnerable.  So is the avalanche of ghastly pro-Hamas and antisemitic propaganda trending on this platform since October 7—precisely because of and not despite that attack—even as TikTok weakly attempts to disclaim responsibility for the popularity of this content. Even given the First Amendment considerations and TikTok’s popularity with young voters—which recently led Biden’s reelection campaign to post a video on it—ought to be subordinate to counterterror concerns.

 

The defense budget generally has been shrinking as a share of GDP since 2010—including during the Trump administration—which is a problem on several fronts but particularly here. But it’s not just that we need to be spending more. This threat calls for more of the longer-range, higher-payload types of drones needed to persistently surveil and then strike ISIS targets in Afghanistan now that we lack Bagram and Kandahar airbases from which to stage our airpower. Also, proposed cuts to special operations forces need to be shelved, as these kinds of units are needed for raids into Afghanistan to capture terror leaders for interrogation, and to seize and exploit their electronic and paper records, to uncover the identities of their operatives and the targets of their evil plots.

 

Both federal and state governments should consider my former boss Rep. Peter King’s “no fly, no buy” bill, which he annually co-sponsored across party lines with the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein. No plausible reading of the Second Amendment demands that we allow the purchase of powerful firearms by those on terror watch lists, especially when the worst of ISIS’s past attacks in the U.S. made use of such weapons.

 

There is also a role for states and cities to play, by restoring robust funding and authorities for police counterterror units. After 2001 the New York and Los Angeles police departments, for example, established significant counterterror capabilities. Brave local cops were the first responders to ISIS’ domestic attacks; indeed, uniformed patrolmen were the targets of some attacks. With deep cuts to law enforcement budgets since 2020, police counterterror programs—some of which became controversial, including the NYPD’s—often got curtailed.  Unfortunately, they may soon again be needed.

 

Islamic State attacks from Afghanistan into Iran and now Russia should be wake-up calls to us.  Remember how you felt the morning of September 12? And when missed opportunities by our government to thwart the hijackings were revealed in the days, weeks, and months that followed? The political ephemera of summer 2001 seemed so shamefully trivial in retrospect. We ought to respond to ISIS now, in a bipartisan manner, and in the constructive way Americans later wished our country had responded to al-Qaeda’s attacks before 9/11.

It’s Complicated

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, March 29, 2024

 

If you go into a car dealership and say, “I’m going to buy a car today, but I have one drop-dead, non-negotiable, requirement: I need a blue car. Everything else is open to negotiation,” two things are definitely going to happen: 1) you’re going to buy a blue car and 2) you’re going to spend too much on a blue car. 

 

I often use hypotheticals like this to rant against what I call one-thingism. Sometimes, when I want to sound fancy, I use words like “monocausality” or “monism,” but that sometimes invites philosophy and theology buffs to start talking about neo-Platonism, monotheism, or even henotheism. And, sometimes, pervy dudes think I’m saying “moan-ism” which is a common form of auralism. I don’t want to talk about any of that. 

 

If you listen to The Remnant, you’ve heard me rant against monocausal explanations, the idea that a complex event happened for a single, usually simple, reason. 

 

Fun fact: I am so ill-disposed to monocausal explanations that I just wrote like 600 words expanding on the point, but decided to cut them so I could get to my actual point faster. 

 

So to summarize what I just threw on the cutting-room floor, there are instances for which monocausal explanations are valid. But they tend to be very tightly constrained to narrow facts and time periods. Why did Lincoln die? For that I can give a simple singular answer: John Wilkes Booth fatally shot him. What did Lincoln die for? 

 

How much time do you have?

 

Good historians hate monocausal explanations. If you ever meet one who says there was one reason for stuff like the fall of Rome, or the rise of the Bolsheviks or the Nazis, you can be pretty sure you’re talking to a bad historian. 

 

My objection to one-thingism extends into normal life, too. If you’re looking for a potential spouse and your criteria is a single-item checklist, things probably won’t go well. The one arguable exception is, of course, “love.” But I cut several hundred words explaining how love is really a multivariate thing that magically becomes a unitary thing. So, let’s leave that there. 

 

What I mean is that if, like the guy looking to buy a blue car, you tell me “the one thing I’m looking for in a woman is height. She’s gotta be really tall,” I’m gonna try to talk you out of it. If I can’t, don’t be surprised when you find yourself saying something like, “Sure, Sandra is a heroin addict kleptomaniac with horrible halitosis, but man she’s tall. I definitely found the one!” 

 

One implies two.

 

I think it’d be fun to say that monocausality is the cause of all of our problems. But for obvious reasons I can’t go that far. Still, I think one-thingism is at the heart of a lot of our dysfunction. 

 

The desire to reduce everything down to a single cause, it seems to me, stems from a desire for certainty. A classic example of this is theological. Everything that happens is God’s will. Now, I have no problem with this at a very high level of abstraction. But the closer you get to life on the ground, the more you have to make allowances for free will. Sin is impossible if everything you choose to do was God’s will. It’s been a while since I read the Bible, but I’m pretty sure there are lots of examples in both testaments of God getting mad at people for doing things He didn’t want them to do. If there’s no free will, then God getting mad at the golden calf-worshippers or the temple moneychangers is like me getting mad at a remote control car for crashing into a tree. 

 

Marxism, a shadow religion of Christianity and Judaism, was a cathedral to one-thingism. Every development could be reduced to a single secular demiurge. The unfolding “scientific” process of class antagonism explained everything. And if you had a different understanding of the facts, it wasn’t because other theories had equal claims to the truth, it was because you couldn’t see reality the way only Marx and Marxists can. “The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being,” Marx wrote, “but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

 

A lot of people like to say that various forms of identity politics are Marxist. The most forceful opponents of this view aren’t the practitioners of identity politics—many of them like the association with Marxist radicalism. No, the people who really hate this claim are doctrinaire Marxists themselves. If you say that race is more important than class, you’ve dethroned the scientific certainty of the Marxist project. The place where the Venn diagrams overlap is the shared hubris and theoretical imperialism—or one-thingism—of both camps. Our theory explains everything—or at least everything important—and if you disagree you are an enemy of truth. Ibrim Kendi explicitly believes that there’s no safe harbor outside of his racist/anti-racist paradigm. You’re either with us or against us. If every explanation for the problems—real or perceived—of black people or women is “racism” or “sexism,” you’re reducing the complexity of life and individual agency to a single variable. 

 

I’m not saying, by the way, that racism and sexism lack explanatory power, I’m saying they lack all-explanatory power. As a matter of logic, saying racism explains every bad thing is no different than saying “Satan” explains every bad thing. 

 

I’ve talked about all this before. But what’s new—at least in my head—is the realization that one-thingism is in reality dualism. Because if X is everything good and right to you, then not-X is your enemy. But here’s the thing. Not-X could be A, B, C, D, E … and everything but X on your way to Z. And, once you run out of letters, you can start using combinations of letters or symbols to expand the list. 

 

And that brings me to politics. For a bunch of reasons, our politics these days reduces everything to X versus Not-X. The reasons include, but are not limited to: the two-party system, polarization, tribalism, self-sorting, changing media, stupid binary ideologies that reduce everything to oppressors and victims, popular-frontism, the failures of countless educational and cultural institutions, and the evolved mechanics of our brains. Many tributaries and rivers have converged to form the wave of one-thingism. 

 

Oh, I left out an important variable: Donald Trump. Both parties are tribal these days and have been for a while. But the Republican Party’s tribalism has been grafted to Donald Trump. Tribal partisanship used to have the sometimes salutary (sometimes not!) effect of enforcing ideological consensus around issues. Right now, issues simply do not matter very much in the GOP. We saw this in the Republican debates. The non-Trump candidates argued about relatively minor policy disagreements as if they mattered a lot. I wish they did. But the reason they didn’t is that the party as a practical matter internally cares only about one issue: loyalty to Donald Trump. Externally, the party claims the real issue is opposition to Joe Biden and the Not-X party. Indeed, that’s their chief argument to whip people into supporting Trump. And it’s working. 

 

Let’s talk about the internal dynamic for a second. The Republican National Committee (RNC) is reportedly asking job applicants to affirm that they think the 2020 election was stolen. Apologists justify this on elaborate claims that the election was stolen so of course the RNC should consider loyalty to the lie a prerequisite. The problem isn’t merely that it’s a lie or that the people who will affirm the lie are either liars or ignorant about how elections work. Though that in itself is a problem. Experts in how elections work—experts the RNC needs—know that Dominion, Hugo Chavez, North Koreans, or Italian satellite operators not only didn’t steal the 2020 election but that they couldn’t steal it. If you don’t know this, you’re not going to be a quality hire. Think of this way: If you think Bill Gates did—or could have—put mind controlling microchips in the COVID vaccine, you’re probably a crappy epidemiologist. 

 

But the real problem is that the stolen election lie is a pretext emanating from the more salient fact that Trump is an insecure narcissist who cannot handle the idea that he lost or that anyone thinks he’s a loser. That’s the one-thingism Trump is imposing on the GOP. The party is institutionally locked into Critical Trump Theory. And like other forms of critical theory, it’s a form of one-thingism. 

 

The ego-maintenance stuff is just the most obvious example of it. But it poisons policy debates everywhere you look. Because Trump says he won’t touch entitlements, it’s now a kind of tribal heresy to make the same math-based arguments conservatives have made for decades. Because Trump is pro-Putin, apologies for Putinism or condemnations of Ukraine are party priorities, heedless of the arguments or facts. Not-X is defined as anything Trump opposes or that is problematic for Trump. 

 

The iron-cage binary thinking.

 

It’s a really simple insight. But I find it hugely helpful in understanding a whole bunch of things, starting with my exhaustion with the stupidity of so much of our politics. 

 

Every day—every hour if I’m on Twitter—I’m informed, heckled, harassed, and harangued that the entire world of politics is reducible to a simple brainless binary. If you’re not for Trump, you’re for Biden. If you’re not for Biden, you’re for Trump. Whenever I complain about something terrible going on, I’m told by Trumpers who think I voted for Biden (I didn’t) that “you voted for this.” If I say the Alvin Bragg case is unsound, I’m told I’m pro-Trump. All complexity and nuance is sluiced into one of two steaming vats of idiocy. (Read the comments to Ramesh Ponnuru’s Washington Post column this week in defense of being a “double hater” for some truly pristine examples of this brain rot). 

 

Partisan politics isn’t the only manifestation of this craptacularly insipid Manichaeism. The purest manifestations of one-thingism and the false certainty it provides are conspiracy theories. That’s because conspiracy theorists consider evidence that the conspiracy doesn’t exist to be proof of how successful it is. They reduce complicated events, accidents, mistakes, surprises, tragedies, and unwelcome successes to a single monocausal explanation: Sinister forces did it. Morons insisting that the CIA or the Deep State or the Egg Council were behind the tanker hitting the Francis Scott Key Bridge find their proof in the thing itself and in the official and expert denials that it was an accident.

 

Antisemitism is both one of the oldest forms of one-thingism and conspiracy theory and it’s everywhere these days. 

 

We can argue about whether hatred of Israel is necessarily antisemitic if you want. I don’t think it always is. But what’s indisputable is that antisemitism suffuses much of the hardcore anti-Israel crowd. For them, all inconvenient facts are waved away, denied, or bent into moral perversion. 

 

But black-and-white thinking of Israel hatred isn’t just a story of antisemitism. The left’s—largely correct and valuable—elevation of rape and sexual assault as grave societal concerns has been defenestrated in order to protect the dignity and moral necessity of Hamas’ “resistance.” Homophobia and sexism, still great sins for white Americans, becomes invisible or a tolerable requirement of “diversity” when it comes to Islamic radicals. 

 

I don’t think we see anything like the mirror of that on the pro-Israel side, though surely some such extremists exist. But for the people who celebrate mass rape and murder as “resistance,” even Holocaust memorials and Holocaust survivors, are simply mockable ornaments of the forces of Not-X. I think that this stuff is objectively antisemitic, but even if it’s not, it’s objectively grotesque. 

 

Meanwhile, in certain corners of the right, Christian nationalists are constructing (or reconstructing) cathedrals to theocratic one-thingism. Proponents of post-liberalism and the new nationalism openly talk about the need to impose a singular worldview on the country.

 

Our political life is punctuated constantly with little Spanish civil wars that demand onlookers pick a side in a movable feast of Rashomonism. Are you pro-Ronna McDaniel or pro-NBC? Are you on the side of the police or the criminals? Taylor Swift or Ted Nugent, Kyle Rittenhouse or the mob? 

 

I am not saying there’s never a clear distinction between right and wrong, or even between good guys and bad guys. Moral clarity is important. What I am saying is that these moments are rare and don’t require lying or ignoring the truth. And when such moments present themselves, what to do in response is usually still complicated or difficult. If the complication and difficulty aren’t apparent to you, you should look harder. You shouldn’t invent narratives or solutions that erase the complexity and difficulty, the way demagogues and populists across the ideological spectrum tend to do. For instance, I think the rapist, theocratic goons and criminals of Hamas constitute bad guys by every moral and political definition readily available to me. That doesn’t mean dealing with them isn’t difficult or complicated. 

 

I am a soft convert to the Lewis brothers’ book The Myth of Left and Right. What I mean is that I subscribe to many of their arguments while not buying the “hard” version of their claim that the categories of left and right are meaningless. But I agree with them that the left-right binary fuels muddy thinking and cheap one-thingism. 

 

So let’s get back to X and Not-X. Ibram Kendi, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Rachel Maddow, and Bernie Sanders are on the left. But you know who else is on the left? Steven Pinker, John Fetterman, Lawrence Summers, and—until this week—the late Joe Lieberman. Reducing them all to “the left” is like reducing Tom Sowell, Cornell West, Condoleezza Rice, and O.J. Simpson to “blacks.” It’s true, but the truth of the monism is, if you’ll forgive the problematic word choice, a whitewash of the complexity. 

 

Belle Fourche, South Dakota, is the geographic center of the United States. But you wouldn’t say Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is on the East Coast or Moab, Utah, is on the West Coast. But the ideological binary combined with the two-party binary causes millions of people, and hundreds of leading “influencers,” to talk about the political equivalent of Baton Rougeans and Moabites as if they were residents of San Francisco or Burlington. 

 

Okay, I’ve gone on for a while now. And I realize that all I’ve basically done is expand on the old saw, “There are two kinds of people in this world. People who think there are only two kinds of people and people who know better.” 

 

But I felt like I needed to get this off my chest—or out of my head. Because every day for nearly a decade now people have asked me how I can’t see the binary that is so obvious to them. I can see it. I agree it’s obvious. I just think it’s wrong—most of the time. 

What You Can’t Say in a TED Talk

By Brian Stewart

Thursday, March 28, 2024

 

TED — the popular “ideas organization” devoted to the pursuit of knowledge “without an agenda” — has never been known for its modesty. It is hosting its annual conference in Vancouver in April under the banner “The Brave and the Brilliant.” This is a large claim, but there can be little doubt about the brilliance showcased on the TED stage. The bravery at TED, however, is another question.

 

This year’s TED conference comes at a time of crisis in the realm of ideas. Institutions and organizations that were supposed to be bastions of free thought have become strongholds of ideological conformity and monoculture. Nowhere has this been truer than in academia. The condition of free thought and free speech on America’s college campuses has gone from bad to worse with unnerving velocity. Illiberalism and identity politics were incubated in American higher education for decades before culminating — especially in the most elite and expensive schools — in a mushy culture of “safetyism.” This has nothing to do with the physical safety of students and everything to do with suppressing dissenting opinions.

 

Worse still, the surly and stultifying culture on campus has migrated beyond the university walls to the wider world of business, entertainment, media, and politics. “We all live on campus now,” to borrow Andrew Sullivan’s wry description of our predicament. Behind this new discipline is a reactionary body of thought in which the whole idea of Western civilization and American history is assumed to be racist and oppressive. Over time, these pseudo-intellectual tropes congealed into a species of open and pervasive antisemitism that has been on perpetual display since Hamas’s savage attack on Israel on October 7. In every major American city, protests outside Jewish-owned businesses and calls for the elimination of the Jewish state have proliferated — not in response to any Israeli policy, but rather in support of a jihadist death cult that launched a vicious pogrom against Israeli Jews.

 

In the world before this latest explosion of Jew-hatred, ivory-tower administrators spared no effort in prosecuting every offense, real or perceived, against other minorities. Bans of the Confederate flag, to cite one example, have been the coin of the realm. In pointed contrast, expressions of antisemitism have now been met with insipid disavowals of “violence” and “hatred in all its forms.” Three elite university presidents, testifying before a congressional committee, couldn’t explain why their institutions suddenly jettisoned their refined sensitivities and permitted virulent antisemitism on free-speech grounds. Apologists for antisemitic mobs wish to benefit from free speech but not to the point where it allows the expression of views contrary to their own.

 

This double standard — one for a protected class of the politically and culturally ascendant, another for those at the mercy of the protected class’s favored opinions — produced a backlash.

 

And this is where we return to the pusillanimity of TED. In January, TED caused an uproar by announcing that it would host Bill Ackman as one of the main speakers at its April conference. Ackman is the controversial hedge-fund manager who was instrumental in pushing out Harvard’s president, who was forced to resign from her office (though she still teaches at Harvard) over her record of plagiarism and also allegations that she was insufficiently concerned about antisemitism. Another person invited to be a keynote speaker at the conference was the journalist Bari Weiss, editor of the Free Press and a prominent defender of the Jewish state. A handful of TED fellows promptly resigned, accusing the organization of taking an anti-Palestinian position and aligning itself “with enablers and supporters of genocide” in Gaza.

 

It is not clear how TED will navigate the situation if it becomes more dire, but there is little reason for confidence that it will stand for principle. Anyone familiar with the breakdown in the culture of free speech, and the way that “anti-racism” has merged into latent or blatant antisemitism, will not be surprised by the controversy over the demonization of Israel. And anyone familiar with TED’s travails of late will not be surprised that hostility to free speech has arisen from within its ranks. A precedent had recently been set by high-ranking TED officials proving that certain ideas, no matter how respectable, could be justifiably curtailed in the face of a mob.

 

At the TED conference in April 2023, Coleman Hughes, an independent podcaster and author, was invited to lay out the case for color-blindness — the quaint notion that people should be treated equally regardless of race, both in their personal lives and in public policy. Hughes had a forthcoming book on the subject, so TED had summoned him to British Columbia. But a curious thing happened once Hughes left the TED stage. His talk was suppressed after a small but vociferous band of the most intolerant TED employees objected to the idea that human beings ought to be judged not by the color of their skin but only by the content of their character.

 

This episode was further proof that many elite institutions have been captured by an illiberal successor ideology known to its critics as “wokeism.” It’s no exaggeration to say that the commanding heights of American life — prestige media, social media, entertainment, academia, and the current majority party in Washington — have enforced a stifling conformity that borders on political religion. Formerly venerated repositories of liberal thought have been converted en masse to a theological vision that permits little if any dissent. The creed of individual freedom and equality of opportunity that defined American liberalism in its heyday has been swept away, not only on campus but across the cultural and political landscape. Erstwhile liberal institutions and foundations have been transformed into hotbeds of reactionary progressivism where racial progress is held to be a myth and the ideal of racial equality is given rude, short shrift.

 

The Hughes controversy warrants more attention than it has received. The day after the writer’s lecture, the head of TED, Chris Anderson, informed him that an “employee resource” group called “Black@TED” had taken issue with his remarks. After the conference, Anderson told Hughes that the internal “blowback” had developed into a firestorm. The faction at TED that took umbrage with Hughes’s talk was aghast that there would be any contemporary support for a color-blind society — the animating philosophy of the American civil-rights movement. The objective success of that movement in smashing white supremacy and achieving official racial equality is largely forgotten. In its place has grown up an ideology that casts the United States as fundamentally evil. Rigid racial categories are invoked and said to reflect an irreducible conflict between oppressor and oppressed groups. From this perspective, color-blindness is an insidious principle inhibiting racial progress. As Hughes has summarized his critics’ view, color-blindness is little more than “a Trojan horse for white supremacy.”

 

The upheaval at TED would have been an excellent opportunity for Anderson to stand up for Hughes and insist on letting him air his views. But instead Anderson yielded to the mob. At first he wavered. Then he proposed publishing Hughes’s speech, but only after insisting on a moderated conversation between Hughes and a prominent critic of color-blindness that would be distributed around the same time. Even after this highly unusual condition was met, TED chose not to promote Hughes’s talk.

 

This capitulation received a rebuke from Hughes, who meticulously exposed TED’s betrayal of its professed mission to be a neutral arbiter in the battle of ideas. (Full disclosure: I have a slight social acquaintance with Hughes and favor airing his argument, as a matter of both principle and public interest.) In response, Anderson twice took to X, formerly Twitter, in a vain attempt to defend TED’s craven conduct. In these mawkish posts, Anderson acknowledges that Hughes’s talk set off an “intense debate” at TED. By the looks of it, however, the debate was not nearly intense enough. The TED employees angered by a remarkably mild argument sought to prevent its circulation on the grounds that, as Anderson put it, the principle of color-blindness is “not just wrong, but truly dangerous.”

 

If any TED employees found it preposterous to call the philosophy of color-blindness “dangerous,” Anderson made no attempt to speak on their behalf. Nor did he show his team or the wider world that Hughes is not, in point of fact, propagating dangerous ideas. He might have noted that anyone who claims otherwise is likely to be in the grip of an odd and extreme ideology and free to resign, but he didn’t do that, either. A major purpose of the Enlightenment was to substitute the criticism of ideas for assaults on people. In this instance, TED employees, with the help of Anderson, obliterated that essential distinction. In the process, a brilliant young writer has been vilified as an intellectual maniac who brings harm on society.

 

This is nonsense on stilts. For starters, no one is made unsafe by the thoughts in your head. Moreover, Hughes appealed to the color-blindness principle that originated in the struggle against slavery and was refined during the struggle against segregation. Providing a lucid explanation of the philosophy undergirding the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow, Hughes urged people to think and act without regard to the color line and to do everything in their power to transcend it. He castigated race-based affirmative action, which he seeks to replace with government support for those who, regardless of skin pigment, used to be called the “deserving poor.” 

 

Those in the business of promoting ideas should be expected, at a minimum, not to go berserk in the presence of such an argument, even if they disagree with it. But Anderson chose to discard the essence of TED’s mission and placate those who elevate emotion above reason.

 

Instead of pushing back against the mob and upholding the cause of free thought and free speech, Anderson bowed to those who don’t tolerate views contrary to their own. Instead of jealously guarding the moral space for true argument, he endorsed the notion that liberal ideas pose a danger to individuals. Instead of firing those who conspired to squelch a TED talk and defame its author (whom Anderson had personally invited), Anderson caved to the heckler’s veto.

 

It would have been less astonishing if Anderson had come clean and confessed that TED is no longer a values-neutral platform for ideas. He might have argued that TED was set to become a different sort of organization, explicitly aligned with the needs of the “social justice” movement. But instead he pretended that those who hounded Hughes “believe in the importance of ideas and in TED.”

 

To justify this risible claim, Anderson cited the “rich debate” that has erupted in recent years on the subject of race. This is sheer fantasy. If the conversation about race had indeed been so rich, Hughes’s TED talk would have struck his audience as moderate and even banal rather than shocking and dangerous. The strident and condescending response it generated is proof that the debate is impoverished. It has been pitifully deficient of imagination, nuance, and intelligence — the very hallmarks of Hughes’s style and argument.

 

Anderson appears to understand that the cultural Left has veered into extremism. He noted that Hughes’s views on color-blindness, once typical among leftists, are today “generally regarded as right of center.” Exactly so. But this is where Anderson, who concedes that his ostensibly nonpartisan organization has fallen into the Left’s orbit, loses the plot. TED’s mission, he insists, is “to offer powerful ideas to everyone in the world, not just those from within one political group,” and he regrets the “storm that has blown up” over Hughes’s talk. Nonetheless, he assures us, “we want a growing diversity of ideas at TED.”

 

Alas, this does not withstand scrutiny. Hughes was prepared to risk calumny to dispel what he regards as pernicious myths about race in America. For his trouble, he was used and abused by an organization billing itself as a platform for thinkers to disseminate their ideas. Hughes’s defenestration will have a chilling effect on all those who venture to share heterodox views.

 

Anderson’s statements on l’affaire Hughes demonstrate a failure to understand his role and responsibilities as the custodian of an institution devoted to intellectual freedom and excellence. At the end of his meandering missive posted on X, he confesses, “I really long for a shift in our culture.” But he doesn’t spell out what is wrong with the culture, what he’d like it to become, or how he — as the head of a supremely influential cultural organization — might help effect such a transformation.

 

Fortunately for the rest of us, the way to build a culture of tolerance and liberty is no mystery. An example from Victorian England reminds us that the madness of crowds, especially when combined with backing from the wider society, is inimical to freedom. When John Stuart Mill campaigned for the right to protest and speak in London’s public parks — the famous Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park is a tribute to his triumph — his primary concern was not government censorship but the enfeebled culture of free expression. It was not “the tyranny of the magistrate” that chiefly suffocated the conscience but rather the fear of social obloquy and ostracism for heterodox thinking. “There needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling,” he warned.

 

The failure to defend and maintain culture against such powerful forces, especially in the upper reaches of our society, has been evident for some time. As a result, old verities no longer claim many supporters, and vast swaths of society can no longer think straight about rightful authority. In 1975, Robert Nisbet argued in Twilight of Authority that there was a critical diminution in “the traditional institutional authorities that for nearly a millennium have been Western man’s principal sources of order and liberty.” Nisbet spoke darkly of “twilight ages” and “processes of decline and erosion.”

 

A vacuum obtains in the moral order. . . . Retreat from the major to the minor, from the noble to the trivial, the communal to the personal, and from the objective to the subjective is commonplace. There is a widely expressed sense of degradation of values and of corruption of culture. The sense of estrangement from community is strong. 

 

This degradation has been painfully demonstrated, in microcosm, in the TED fiasco over Hughes’s views on race. It may surface again in the dispute over antisemitism. On each of these questions, the progressive cognoscenti now extol preposterous and sinister ideas. TED used to extol what every genuinely free society requires: the art of conversation and disputation, of giving both sides their say and listening to each with an open mind. Until it commits once again to that mission, it will be an organization that tacitly encourages the worst trends of modernity that put the entire architecture of liberal culture at risk: the use of taboos and stigmas to enforce conformity; the unwillingness to examine contrary threads of evidence and entertain opposing points of view; the facile conflation of accusation with guilt; the interpretation of thoughts and words as weapons; the failure of nerve by leaders entrusted with preserving free institutions.

 

Until it returns to that mission, TED will be a useless organization and ought to be treated as such.