By Noah Rothman
Friday, November 10, 2023
How did this happen? It’s an urgent question consuming the minds of college administrators, Democratic political leaders, American Jews, and just about everyone else possessed of the requisite decency. What were the conditions that contributed to the eruption of not just antisemitism but the rank illiberalism that so often accompanies the oldest hate? It’s a complex phenomenon in some ways. In others, it’s deplorably unsophisticated. But while a general sense of confusion may be understandable, the surprise so many have expressed at this public outpouring of malice is not. Such rage has been encouraged and inculcated by the fashionable movements that overtook the culture in recent years. Many of those movements formed, nobly enough, around opposition to genuine injustice. But too often, their preferred remedy was the selective application of even more injustice.
MeToo was one such movement. It took on the abusive men ensconced in positions of power and the institutions that shielded them from the consequences of their actions, and it was a success: It left a more just social compact in its wake. But its members often tolerated — indeed, prescribed — illiberalism to rectify the injustices it targeted.
It was the MeToo movement that gave us the notion of a “right to be believed,” advocates of which articulated a bigoted ideal that privileges demographic signifiers and accidents of birth over the conduct of impartial justice. It was a movement that took aim at the particulars of English jurisprudential culture — “a white man’s culture,” as President Biden derisively called it. MeToo’s most zealous activists took a sledgehammer to the foundations of English common law because it was all too psychologically distressing. The right to confront an accuser in a neutral setting, the high evidentiary standards required for a criminal conviction, being judged by one’s peers; it was all to be dispensed with. Otherwise, society would be guilty of retraumatizing victims.
This ethos produced a culture that disregarded constitutional liberties. It formed the intellectual basis for the establishment of Star Chambers, in which accused and accuser alike were deprived of their freedoms. It encouraged Soviet-style forced confessions and equally coerced denunciations. It criminalized harmless and consensual conduct. It pathologized women who objected to this anti-liberal crusade as “battered women,” and it anathematized men whose mistaken attachment to their legal rights was a function of their “privilege.” It regarded due process with disdain and held blind justice in contempt. This logic soon became the nearest weapon at hand, and it was wielded recklessly. Soon enough, the movement’s skeptics were bludgeoned with it. Their experiences were abstracted, their individuality flattened, and their objections to their persecution rationalized away.
MeToo evolved from a political phenomenon into a fad. That evolution created a popular cultural mandate for the maximalism of its most committed activists. Moderation, tolerance, and the observance of conventions designed to preserve the fragile liberality of the existing social compact became signs of a suspicious level of dissent against the new program. This template was applied with equal verve to another movement that became a social fashion: the Black Lives Matter movement.
Like MeToo, BLM emerged in response to real and perceived injustice. The movement asked important questions about the root of disparities in rates of incarceration and wrongful convictions between black and white Americans, police violence, and social equality and economic mobility for racial minorities. But when the movement’s members received answers that failed to satisfy the underlying assumption that the system was rigged against them, the answers were summarily rejected. BLM’s most committed advocates erred in the same way MeToo did, insofar as they denied the idea that American institutions could mete out real justice. And from that denial emerged a consensus around a set of illiberal policy preferences grouped together under the Orwellian euphemism “equity.”
Susan Rice, the director of Biden’s Domestic Policy Council, was “charged with ensuring that the new administration embeds issues of racial equity into everything it does,” according to the New York Times. That mandate took many forms. It involved an aborted effort to prioritize Covid-vaccination distribution for racial minorities, with America’s demographic majority sent to the back of the line. It led the administration to attempt to disburse pandemic-relief funds to businesses owned by Americans possessed of the proper accidents of birth. It applied a racial litmus test to agricultural-loan applicants. None of this survived scrutiny in the courts, but that only affirmed the logic of equity as a governing ethos: The courts and the Constitution that informed their jurisprudence were complicit in a campaign of systematic oppression.
Outside Washington, the theory of social organization that prescribed “antiracist discrimination” as “the only remedy to racist discrimination,” as Ibram X. Kendi put it, was no less vigorous in its assault on the American idea. It informed a blessedly failed effort to enshrine legal racial discrimination in California’s state constitution. It gave rise to the “de-policing” fad, the attack on meritocracy, and pedagogical trends that swapped out standard ways of gauging student performance for entirely subjective criteria because arithmetic and English grammar had been deemed racist.
Like MeToo, BLM’s critique of American society was transformed into an instrument that, in the hands of the unscrupulous, was used to prosecute personal grievances and satisfy professional jealousies. Accusations of insufficient fealty to the premises adopted by the BLM movement were sufficient to close popular restaurants, scuttle the careers of artists and writers, and render whole institutions suspect of being “complicit with” America’s campaign of “systematized violence against black individuals.” And through it all, BLM maintained its air of hipness in popular culture. It was commodified, celebrated, and promoted as the apotheosis of social and cultural awareness. It was cool.
The Palestinian liberationist vogue that has overtaken American campuses and spilled into the streets has adopted the aesthetic trappings and rhetorical excesses of movements responsible for anti-Israeli terrorism. Its vanguard is composed of thugs and vandals, but the movement itself is informed by a virtuous, albeit misplaced, understanding that a grave injustice is afoot. The people of the Gaza Strip most certainly are oppressed, but their oppressors are their own leaders. The Strip is an “open-air prison” only insofar as Hamas are the jailers. The people withering under the terrorist group’s rule are of value to their leaders only as corpses and human shields. The hardships Gazans are enduring now are a consequence of their government’s actions. But like its forebearers, this particular pop-cultural liberationist movement cannot see their torment because it does not recognize liberalism as the proper remedy.
The keffiyeh-clad hoodlums have elevated subversion to a source of identity. Conventionality is poison. They are outsiders, by their own definition. That which is inside the bounds of orthodoxy does not satisfy their revolutionary self-conception. Enlightened liberalism, conventional wisdom, universal moral precepts are all so jejune. So they tear down posters, shatter windows, physically attack dissenters, and lend their support to a hideously Heideggerian intimidation campaign. At long last, these displays have finally shocked the senses of their authors’ permissive elders, few of whom can understand where this reactionary intolerance came from.
The rest of us don’t have much trouble understanding at all.
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