To address a couple emails, yes, I did mean "almost every particular" with no other word at the end - particular here used as a noun meaning detail, point, etc.
Don't worry, there were as usual several other prominent typos in the original email.
I think about your observation that these types of people are terribly concerned about being owned and it reminds me of a point Rutger Bregman makes in his book, Humankind (and I’m very roughly paraphrasing): if you’ve never been conned, you’re probably an asshole.
SNL ran a skit that mocked the practice of putting a mask on while walking to your table at a restaurant and then taking it off while you ate, presumably being sprayed by saliva and bits of food from your dining partners.
Even ordinary people know it's bullshit. The powers that be are uninterested in self reflection at this point precisely because they are aware of that.
Agreed- it was particularly dumb when schools were remote but bars/restaurants were open. But I'm not that interested in again criticizing dumb decisions. Instead, what tangible things could we do now based on what we learned?
How about federal grants to improve ventilation/air quality in public schools? Bring back the Child Tax Credit?
The problem with Covid retrospection, at least in the area of school closures, is that the angry ones don't realize they were in the minority. Overwhelmingly, parents got what they wanted. So the whole "underprivileged kids were kept out of schools and are far behind" is missing the part where their parents for the most part actively kept them out of those schools, whether or not they were open.
BLM/DEI on the other hand seem to be more of an embarrassed admission that hey, I overreacted.
But there's no effort to go to black, Hispanic, and Asian parents and say "do you realize how much damage you did by insisting on remote education?"
Man, my experience of majority/minority is different than yours. Though I haven't looked at the issue globally, just my own school district and state. And everyone was held out of school to do remote learning. OK, some really rich kids did that pod stuff, but this just in, really rich kids play by different rules, COVID or not.
My school district is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, but solidly middle class. They went remote right away and most parents I spoke with were cool with it n the simple grounds of we didn't know a thing about COVID and it seemed like the best of lots of bad options. Now, remote learning was a disaster for my kids. Forget learning loss, my kids went from happy and engaged students to hating school, actively comin up with ways to avoid class. It was a nightmare. Do I blame the school? Of course not. They did the best the could with limited information.
And yes, there was learning loss but.... EVERYONE experienced it. It's not like anyone got a leg up. Schools were closed across the state. We were all in the same boat, and now, a few years later, the kids have regained that lost time and more importantly, re-engaged with their social circles. The real loss is the kids who never found their way back into schools.
Given a second chance, I'm sure my school district would do something differently. The thing is, they didn't have this experience to draw upon. they made a justifiable call in good faith. It turned out to not be the optimal one, but I think asking for some sort of recriminations now is a fool's errand. Sometimes, there's no blame to be had.
"My school district is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic..."
That's why you didn't have a choice. As you say, most parents you spoke with were cool with it.
Had you spoken to mostly white parents, they would not have been cool with it from a pretty early point in the pandemic.
Schools continued to make calls throughout the pandemic by checking in with parents. And if your district was majority black and Hispanic, they overwhelmingly wanted remote. And no, I doubt your school district would do different.
What *will* change next time is the legislative response. In 2020, the legislatures said any parent could have remote education if they wanted it for the entire 2020-21 school year.
Living in a very white state with kids in a majority white school... the parents were on board with remote classes for all of the reasons that Poseur noted.
I subscribed to "The Free Press" for a year. I signed up for it because, frankly, I was outraged by the whole Tom Cotton/NYT snafu being a fervent believer in free speech, but quickly grew disillusioned with it, particularly by the yahoos on its comments page who, as it turns out—Duh!—are NOT free speech advocates. 😀
Nellie Bowles' irreverent end-of-the-week wrap-up was the only good thing about that Substack. If I could have figured out a way to subscribe to THAT without the rest of it, I would have. She is deeply hilarious.
And so are YOU, Freddie. "The Pravda of white women who force their Black colleagues into their Instagram photos" is SUCH a fabulous description.
But the rest of this piece... I truly do not GAF. I don't know what "The Reckoning" is, I think "The New Yorker" is "Reader's Digest" for aging boomers, I couldn't care less about power struggles in the increasingly irrelevant publishing industry.
But I remain in absolute AWE of your ability, Freddie, to turn out so much (mostly) articulate prose on such a wide variety of topics.
I think you can be more or less oriented towards free speech. (And that I'm pretty far out on that axis.) There probably are a few people who approach 100% free speech, but for most people, it's a balance of competing values.
I wouldn't call it a silent majority necessarily, but I feel like there is relatively broad and bipartisan support for a social ethic of letting people speak their mind. It just doesn't translate into the form of a take very well, it's almost the negative space among the discourse in a way.
Allowing people to speak freely requires that everyone accept the consequences of that. Unfortunately, due to safetyism, an increasing amount of people regard speech as harmful, and can't stand someone on the Wrong Side saying badthinkful things.
There's a real generational split in terms of who finds safetyism acceptable. And even among the younger generation the most interesting development of recent years has been a huge spike in the number of high school boys who identify as conservative.
It's interesting to see where Gen Z is trending. The expectation from surveys is that each generation, on average, is politically to the left of its predecessors, but surveys have shown that peak Left seems to have been among Millenials, and there's a small but significant rightward shift among Gen Z. Of course, this is defining "right" and "left" in the most broad way imaginable, and really, those represent coalitions that ever shifting and emphasize different priorities than their generational predecessors.
I subscribe to the cyclic theory of history. If the pendulum swings in one direction it's destined to eventually swing back.
The interesting thing about the next generation is that young males skew heavily conservative and young females skew heavily liberal. What's even more curious is that it's not just the United States, the same pattern shows up throughout the developed world (Europe and some parts of Asia).
Me too. I'm old (60) and was formally educated in public schools on the principles of free speech including the whys and the hows. That obviously stopped happening and lately has been turned around 180 degrees. Silence is violence? Fuck me.
This is too cynical even for me. There are many free speech advocates; we simply never elect them. Probably because these are people who have at least some principles, and in a highly competitive and completely amoral field (which describes US national politics pretty well), principles are a vulnerability because they force you to sometimes agree with / support / offer succor to your political enemies.
Good for Rufo on this one, but much of the legislation inspired by Rufo is pretty far from free speech-friendly, simply replacing compelled speech about antiracism and intersectionality with enforced censorship of discussing those concepts. I'm a bit cynical about his motives for opposing ASDA - does it really come from a defense of free speech, or the fact that such legislation can be used against someone with views like Marjorie Taylor Greene's just as easily as it could be used against woke anti-Zionism?
"much of the legislation inspired by Rufo is pretty far from free speech-friendly"
There's a difference between what he believes and what people influenced by him believe.
"I'm a bit cynical about his motives for opposing ASDA "
You could always go read his editorial.
"does it really come from a defense of free speech, or the fact that such legislation can be used against someone with views like Marjorie Taylor Greene's just as easily as it could be used against woke anti-Zionism?"
The whole point of defending free speech is that if it's not extended to Nazis and Antifa it could be used to ban Nazis and Antifa. The "slippery slope" is a central argument for defending free speech.
Well, the "slippery slope" part is why I'm more or less a free speech absolutist. But given the legislative history coming from Rufo and company, it doesn't seem like he takes that position, and I'm wondering aloud wither his opposition to ADSA is really a turn back to a more principled stance on free speech or a realization that it's legislation that could backfire on some of his constituency.
I would question what legislative history Rufo has since he's not a legislator.
Second, what's the difference between a "principled stance on free speech" versus a concern that it could be used against you (or anybody else)? The principle is that we have to protect the speech of the KKK or the Black Panthers or whatever because failing to do so means that it could be used to censor the Girl Scouts. That _is_ the principled position.
I think FIRE as an organization comes pretty close to that ideal, actually, as did the ACLU in its heyday. "There are no true free speech advocates" is a pretty cynical position to take, and sounds like a dismissal of that as a tenable position. What's true is that there's a whole lot of hypocrisy around free speech - people invoking it for themselves, only to want to shut it down when someone they really don't like gets up to speak. But that's pretty far from everyone, and I think many folks, even those who aren't idealists, see the need for it as a general rule - if you nullify that principal when you have power, you won't have it to fall back on if you lose that power.
Not just the commentariat, but TFP itself is pretty inconsistant. Any article they've ever published on porn treats at as pure evil and advocates legislation against it. That seems to be a pretty big exception if you're trying to position yourself as some sort of free speech absolutist.
Then again, that represents Bari Weiss' more recent infatuation with classic antiporn/antitrans radical feminism, which she's pushing as a key part of the 'Heterodox' IDW 2.0 coalition she's trying to build as the centrist alternative to MAGA on one hand and the 'woke' left on the other. An American version of the UK's 'New Statesman' coalition, basically.
I'll fully admit that my own politics is 'anti-woke' in the sense of being pretty disgusted by left's turn against free speech and towards a very radical sort of identity politics (I disagree with Freddie that this can rightly be called 'liberal'), but I'm also pretty turned off by Bari Weiss's influence, her own less-than-transparent agenda, and some of the highly illiberal and reactionary tendencies in the ideas that she pushes. One need look no further than the "Fall of Minneapolis" debacle that Weiss and bloggers in her orbit got behind before being roundly debunked by Radley Balko.
Yup. I think the Fall of Minneapolis crap was what pissed me off the most. Like, guys, c'mon. Floyd was clearly murdered. We don't have to be contrarian about every little thing.
Yeah, exactly. And I remember, the "additional footage" that showed Floyd resisting arrest. I'd already seen that on YouTube and did not think that remotely justified Chauvin's actions. It was a bad check bust, ffs, not taking down an armed assailant who was an immediate danger to the public.
What it also underlined was the kind of behind the scenes influencing that's been taking place in that milieu. Within a week or two, it seemed like every 'anti-woke' podcast was treating TFoM as a major story. Now, to their credit, The Fifth Column largely rejected the TFoM narrative while Glenn Loury and John McWhorter issued a mea culpa after additonal endorsement. But still, it speaks to the anti-wokes being as incestuous and prone to groupthink as the 'progressive' mainstream they're critiquing.
Yeah, those Free Press commenters are pretty wild, aren't they? A window into the right-wing fever swamp. Often they complain about how leftist it is, and how Bari and Nellie need to shape up or they will leave. But they never do. I read it for Nellie Bowles, both because she is funny, and because I'm grateful to her for doing the only real reporting in the New York Times on the Summer of Floyd. The only one who got on the ground and talked to people, and got the story.
I had a similar experience, signed up because of TGIF and also Douglas Murray's Things Worth Remembering (I know, I know, shhh don't tell anyone) but after Hamas attacked Israel I hastily unsubscribed. I also learned quickly not to read the comments on that stack, yeesh.
That's often true of the commentariat for a publication that leans in a particular direction, though. Reason I'd consider to be more or less standard, culturally liberal free-market libertarians, and often intelligent articles from a libertarian POV, but their comments section is dominated by the worst, far-right yahoos imaginable, and who rarely have anything intelligent to say. (The opposite of this comments section, which is worth wading into.)
Similarly, the Blocked and Reported pod I'll credit for having a nuanced critique of trans politics and gender medicine, but you don't have to wade very far into its subreddit before you encounter some pretty ugly 'gender critical' transphobia and kink-shaming. There's some intelligent discussion there too, and views that align with the level of nuance coming from show's hosts, but the more radical GC contingent is still a pretty noticeable presence.
The far far right is, bluntly, really stupid. Which means it can't generate writers worth reading. Which in turn means that its members need to read writers from adjacent, less stupid, political tendencies.
Many of the people in Reason's comment section would rather be reading a publication that doesn't exist and maybe can't exist.
People have different opinions - who knew? The FP commenters have a variety of opinions, some of which I agree with and many I do not. Here’s the thing though - no one is forcing me to read every comment. When Nellie, Bari and co stop writing articles that are interesting and expand my viewpoint, I’ll cancel my subscription.
Yep. I don't read comments at every Substack I frequent; I've learned that some simply don't have enough signal in the noise to be worth the time. But that doesn't really have anything to do with the articles. But I can understand if a significant piece of one's draw to Substack is the ability to read good comments, that one may rethink the money one spends in response to a stack where the comments are mire.
I guess it depends on one's expectations. The FP appears to be pretty "liberal" in managing their comments section. I for one appreciate that. There are other outlets where even modest deviations from the party line will get one banned. I suppose if folks value echo chambers, that's up to them.
The best Substacks have a wide diversity in terms of readership. If the entire subscriber base has drunk the Kool Aid the writing is likely to be just as brain washed as the readers.
Living in the Twin Cities during the protests was surreal. It's always weird to have something that makes world news happen locally, but for me I always saw the protests as the death rattle of the nascent social democratic left which had sprung up around Sanders. In my bones, I knew right then and there that it would be over. That the "abolish the police" rhetoric which had been somewhat fringe even among that crowd would now be omnipresent and that any attempts at universalism created by shared economic circumstances and common sense reforms was going to vanish into thin air. That there were plenty of right wingers ready to swoop in with their own solutions when it all fell apart. Pretty much all that has happened. I'm no prophet. Anyone with their head on straight could have seen it coming from a mile a way.
2020 was actually when I gave up. I went back to school for accounting that fall. The last train had left the station. I had sunk a whole lot of time into activism and political organizing in the preceding years. I was already pretty checked out by that point, but that was the final break. I remember trying to convince people that Biden would be at best a continuation of the status quo and do like 90% of the same things Trump did, but no one wanted to hear that either. I tried to explain how much I despised Dubya back in college, thinking that if we could just get a Democrat in again things would be good again, and that perhaps the biggest political disappointment of my life was finding out that simply wasn't the case. No one wanted to hear that either.
It's just a long way of saying I knew I was done. After all that I never wanted to do anything political ever again. Still don't, to be honest, but I live here the same as anyone else.
I'm burnt out too, man. At this point, I'm just a moderate Democrat who votes but otherwise doesn't get political anymore. The Long Screaming 2010s (and 2020) and all the identitarian crap sapped all the energy out of me.
I'm a big fan of the theory that the 2020s are the new 1970s: an exhausted, meandering, confusing period where no one's quite sure where to go next.
No one with any sense of history could seriously live in the Summer of Hate and think that it was not destined to flame out, that it would last about as long as the smoke from the burning tires, plus a day, then PFFTT.
When the NPR totebag set say "Defund the police!" what they mean is "Take money from the undeserving (blue collar meathead cops, most of whom lack Serious Academic Credentials and who are famously unwoke to boot) and give to the deserving (white collar social workers with appropriate degrees who can be counted on to uphold the latest and most censorious standards of political correctness)".
Don't get me started on effing land acknowledgements. Add to the emptiness of the gesture, the people making the land acknowledgements typically don't have the slightest clue as to who the people they're invoking actually are, or whether they even were a local presence historically - it's just a name they found on an ethnographic map somewhere. And sure, sometimes that's actually accompanied by donations to the group in question, but that's highly succeptably to grift - in the East Bay Area where I live, that's often thousands donated to a group called the Muwekma Ohlone, which is debatable as to whether it's a real tribal group or simply a few individuals with a very small amount of Ohlone ancestry somewhere in their genealogy.
Sort of, but I think it was even shallower than that. "Abolish the police" and "defund the police" (if you wanted to sound less radical) were catchy slogans and I don't think most people thought it through much further than that. These slogans were fashionable until right around the time people started having their cars stolen on a regular basis, sometimes at gunpoint.
Sure, conservative media is basically crime porn and exaggerates the hell out of it, but crime in Minneapolis and Saint Paul had undeniably got worse. Having liberals tell people "actually, this isn't bad" while sort of accurate was absolutely tone deaf and yet another nail in the coffin. Never underestimate how much influence fashion/trends/fads have on political views. A lot of the time political stances aren't all that much deeper than the decisions people make about footwear.
Or the slogans sounded all right on until Biden got elected.
Sort of like how the election of Obama did more to neuter the antiwar movement than anything Dick Cheney could have done, even if he were made Maximum Autocrat And President For Life.
Violent crime took a huge jump after 2019 and the country is still living through that today. Telling people who living through a crime wave that they're imagining the problem is probably not going to be productive.
"Crime porn" - I like that. It's interesting that the left will scream bloody murder about any actual or perceived abuse of trans folks, while the right will highlight any time a trans person commits a violent crime. If you just consume left-wing media you will be convinced that trans folks are routinely abused by MAGA extremists. If you just consume right-wing media, you will be thinking that there are a bunch of murderous trans folks just waiting to attack normal folk. Sigh, I dislike the "both sides" trope, but sometimes it really is both sides. Our host sometimes seems to have a blind spot about that.
I live in Oakland, CA and used to ride BART regularly, and, yep, "actually isn't that bad" really felt like gaslighting. I'm not someone who habitually likes cops, but I'm really glad BART stepped up police presence in the stations and on the trains. I'm not even calling for heavy-handed policing, but just having them around seems to discourage a bad element that's all-too-real.
This is true at the high levels - the top leaders of BLM were anti-Bernie, especially in 2016. But at least in my city, there was huge overlap between people who supported Bernie and people who were in the streets in summer 2020.
I have to disagree, but I have nothing but anecdotal evidence. In my memory the lines between liberal and Sanders left at that time were so blurry that the basically matched on lockstep. Most people I knew through the DSA were all in on those slogans. Perhaps your experience was different, but I came to see CHAZ as the logical extension of this milieu. It's like if you took the worst aspects of both communities (obnoxious more-radical-than-thou posturing on the left and the most vulgar, empty, and performative identity politics if the NPR set) and combined them. For a brief moment everyone was pushing in the same direction.
DSA hated Bernie? I know you want to believe this nonsense was a bunch of DtripC liberal Hilldogs but the "real" left was just as in on it. Not a lot of Biden bros at Stop Cop City or CHAZ.
This reminds me of the weird shift from a lot of conservative writers and voters on who once crusaded against gay marriage but then never addressed the issue again after Obergefell in 2015. Their arguments in the 2000s were weak but popular, and then there was a vibe shift in the 2010s and they lost all traction. And if you try and bring this up with any number of Republican voters they seem very reluctant to talk about it. It's either some variant of "I'm socially moderate but otherwise conservative" (when they were explicitly party-line "traditional marriage" at the time), or they act like they never cared about the issue much either way, and YOU'RE the one who's being weirdly confrontational about it.
I think this is the right analogy with conservative actions. With gay marriage, they had a coherent message (not one I agree with), but they lost, the culture moved on, and many realized that gay marriage didn't end civilization after all or it's just not worth pushing anymore. Why would they want to talk about it?
The waters have been significantly muddied in terms of election interference by the criminal charges against Trump. To a lot of people that looks like political persecution. Fareed Zhakaria just discussed this a short time ago.
I think I could steelman a few different conservative reactions to gay marriage post-Obergefell.
(1) I still think gay marriage is likely to be net harmful, but we lost that one and need to spend our powder where it will do the most good.
(2) I was mistaken in believing that gay marriage would be net harmful. Here's what I learned from that mistake: (there are several possibilities here).
(3) I am a hack who expresses whatever opinion gets me the most money/clicks/votes and never really had a well formed opinion on this. (More charitably - I follow the opinions of people I trust in areas where I'm not an expert, and the fact that they have shut up on this issue means that I don't have much of an opinion on it either without spending time I don't have to become personally expert.)
It would be interesting to see a debate on National Review or somewhere about these points, but it's probably not in conservatives' short-term interest to have that debate publicly. Maybe something similar is going on about the Reckoning.
"(More charitably - I follow the opinions of people I trust in areas where I'm not an expert, and the fact that they have shut up on this issue means that I don't have much of an opinion on it either without spending time I don't have to become personally expert.)"
I favor this explanation for most. The ideas are still there, but since they now lack all credible leadership politically and culturally, people just let them go. But if the leadership returns, you'll find there's still quite a bit of this sentiment out there.
Roughly 75% of Americans supported the Iraq War in early 2003, including 55-60% of Democrats and 85-90% of Republicans. Good luck finding any of those people who will cop to doing so today.
I did. I supported the war. I was suspicious of the claims of WMD, but I thought that both the world and Iraq would be better off without Saddam. I also supported a much, much larger force and a long-term plan for keeping peace and creating democracy (we're talking 20-30 years or more).
But I was wrong. The internal divisions with Iraq plus the massive pressure externally in the Middle East makes that a pipe dream. I was wrong.
Hey, I thing Saddam Hussein ending up on the business end of a noose was the one good outcome of the Iraq War, but then I have a pretty deep hatred of dictators and strongmen. But the Iraq War was an object lesson in how shutting down a particular bad guy is not a sufficient justification for war. (The Gulf War I feel differently about - allowing the Hussein-controlled Iraq to absorb Kuwait would have had some very bad long-term consequences.)
I did. I thought Saddam was going to get out from under sanctions sooner or later and develop WMD, and I thought he was bad enough that any likely alternative would be an improvement.
Now I think he was an important counterweight to Iran, and that we are probably net worse off after getting rid of him (and Qaddafi for that matter.) I'm still morally uncomfortable with that conclusion, though.
These instances illustrate the one thing that unites Americans across every political spectrum...we hate admitting we lost. Even when it's a glaring loss, we figure ways to block the trauma from our conscience by any means necessary whether that's full on denial or re-writing history to allow us to move on.
I fundamentally disagree with your assertion that BLM failed because we did not legislate racism away. I disagree with the left that BLM failed because we have yet to see adequate representation in every crevice of society (where are all the black transgender neurosurgeons!). I disagree with the right that BLM failed because we didn’t need it in the first place.
I think it was a success. It changed the way I think, which is EXACTLY what it needed to do. The major failure of BLM is that, in the process of making crucial steps towards a more just society, it also advanced the great brain-poison of progressive politics, victim fetishization; which has the power to crush us all.
You are my neighbor. I love you. You carry dignity and grace, innately. These are lessons I learned from a great man who lived a long time ago. I will wash your feet, but I won’t kiss them.
In my city of Toronto, "Defund the Police" didn't actually reduce police budgets. But it did result in a new Community Health Crisis Service -- essentially mental health first responders that can be deployed by 911 in lieu of cops. So that's something.
And I'd say there's still a fairly widespread dubiousness towards the cops in the center/left here, due to some high-profile examples of incompetence. We didn't defund them at all, yet they keep accidentally killing children, have basically thrown their hands up at preventing car theft, and seem to refuse to do basic traffic enforcement.
Indeed. These days when I hear the word 'racism' my first though is whether the speaker/writer means actual racism or the wokie/DEI version of 'racism'.
Or I just roll my eyes and think "here we go again ..."
No. You are correct. But what they ‘wanted’ to do and what The Movement ‘needed’ to do were very different, I think. Just my opinion. Abolish the police?? Seriously? And no more laws, please! Use momentum when you have it but tap the breaks frequently and thoughtfully. Otherwise, everyone but the zealots jump off the bus, and what you have left is a complete and utter shit show. MLKJr is someone to look up to here. The best thing the organizers did was name themselves Black Lives Matter, which is the most beautiful and heartbreaking name for a protest group ever, at least that I can think of.
Yes? Haven't we all agreed that these movements were overly concerned with our internal thoughts and even unconscious biases, to the exclusion of actual action or policy? That's what all the "Do the Work" messaging was about - to re-examine all of our impure thoughts and self-flagellate until we had clean minds.
I just googled BLM signs and this was the first thing that popped up:
I'm still BLM-skeptical. I still see the George Floyd murder as a crime of excessive police power, and by extension, state power. And, certainly, exacerbated by systemic racism and, maybe, the personal racism of Derek Chauvin and his accomplices. But the narrative that was spun by the media, very quickly, was that it was all about race and collectively about how the racism in white people's hearts affects black people. While 'Defund the Police' was the mantra, more effort was put into bullshit like workplace antiracism trainings and cancelling people for wrongthink than eliminating things like qualified immunity.
There were also a lot of excuses made for things like CHAZ and the Portland and Kenosha riots that were often quite violent and led to the deaths of something like 20 people. (Far more than were killed in the January 6th riots, BTW.) These were not BLM actions, by and large, but anyone who criticized this kind of mob action was treated as if they were attacking BLM and antiracism full stop. All of which led to the backlash we're now seeing.
After the last 10-15 years, and especially after the fun events of 2020, I'm still left with the feeling that Identity Politics are antithetical to political coalition building, which is kinda important to win elections. I would bet, though I can't prove it, that Identity Politics have alienated more voters than have won them over.
2) IMHO, the main unusual characteristic of the reckoning was the experiment with the idea that if you punished dissent hard enough, you could make progress in the movement. (E.g., firing people for suggesting that some scholarship indicates that non violent protest can be more effective that "mostly non-violent" or dragging people for saying, apparently innocently, that all lives matter, etc.) I'm personally in favor of open debate, but an experiment every so often is a reasonable way to challenge our preconceptions -- my impression is that the effort to squash disagreement in the reconning was more effective at shutting people up in the moment, but probably not that helpful to finding accurate information and ultimately to addressing racism in America.
3) Freddie writes, regarding Nellie Bowles or the Freep: "I keep wondering how many pieces lambasting the college students protesting against the war in Gaza have to be published in mainstream papers and magazines for people to grasp that you can’t be an outsider by engaging in such rhetoric." I don't read Bowles or the FP - do they claim to be outsiders?
Thinking about it a little more, I don't know if Bowles is an outsider or not, but I think an outsider can have really any opinion about the Gaza protests and remain outside. The FP is definitely outside mainstream media, but they have the opinions they have. To go farther, Julian Assange is an outsider, and so is the crazy guy down the road posting inside jokes on Twitter about politics, but they still have voices and opinions, and some of those opinions are going to line up with the interests of the powerful just by random chance.
"my impression is that the effort to squash disagreement in the reconning was more effective at shutting people up in the moment, but probably not that helpful to finding accurate information and ultimately to addressing racism in America."
My impression of it was that it was effective in silencing people who were largely on your side, but who didn't entirely agree with you; oddly, you'd think they could maybe *get something done* with all that apparent message discipline on their side.
It was also very effective in absolutely riling up their opponents to be equally radical in response.
There's a lot to be said on the broader drift of educated liberal politics in the 2010's, and certainly the George Floyd moment was a product of those trends, but I always feel like the discussion tends to miss the mechanics of the Bernie and Warren campaigns, which had dominated the discourse in that world for a year of Peak Twitter, abruptly ending and vanishing, at the exact moment when that entire class of people got locked inside for three months out of nowhere by this bizarre and unfathomable external force.
I don't know if that's sympathetic or not, but there was a sense of grasping for normalcy about the whole thing, nonsensical as that may seem in retrospect.
Yeah but as I said above, the trouble with this analysis is that it presumes the Bernie left and the BLM left were the same group. Trust me, there was a lot of mutual antipathy there.
Yeah, exactly, which was the Bernie and Warren fighting on Twitter throughout late 2019, early 2020. In some ways that was the clearest that particular cleavage has ever been shown. And it was this huge vibrant day-to-day discourse for the class of people who spent their days at email jobs slacking off on Twitter.
Then those campaigns vanished overnight and their enthusiasts all got locked inside their apartments and barely got to see anyone for three months as the world went crazy. It all happened in literally like a week.
Many people of the left, yourself included, were inoculated with the right first principles to look with suspicion at what emerged from that isolation with the Floyd protests, but in that moment we were all coming at it from a weird and unprecedented head space.
It's worth a "to be sure" paragraph for you, Fischer and Bowles alike, I guess is my point.
Elizabeth Warren leaned hard into idpol in no small part to distinguish herself from being just 'Bernie lite'. And, as a result, was the darling of the so-called 'social justice' left. In any event, it was the centrist Dems that came out on top, no surprise there, with some olive branches thrown toward left identitarians, notably the appointment of Kamala Harris as VP. (Though her 'progressivism' was a very recent conversion from her prior record as a law-and-order hardliner.)
But this tension dated back to 2016, where the otherwise conservative Democrat Hillary Clinton played the feminist and identity card pretty hard against Bernie, which a highly visible part of the highly online 'social justice' left was all too willing to take up.
I suspect a large part of that is because Biden's in office and the fear among the establishment is that anything that looks like chaos will reflect poorly on his administration.
"All the media attention and the genuflecting corporations and the billions of dollars in donations couldn’t distract from a glaring reality: none of it was going anywhere. The highly sympathetic but strategically directionless protest movement rallied around no coherent ideology, held immediate goals that were too extravagant and long-term goals that were too vague, and relied on the amplification of an elite liberal class whose support was about as deep as the grooves in a record. "
Humans are herd animals to rival any sheep or lemming. The Establishment can easily co-opt or buy off such movements, while making no fundamental changes, nothing that materially affects power relations or how the pie is sliced. A diversity committee or two, making preferred pronouns mandatory on a corporate email signature, that sort of thing.
Easy, meaningless concessions are handed out because they are easy and meaningless. They're then disproportionately celebrated, because meaningful concessions are so scarce.
This all reminds me of when people post dumb takes on Twitter, then when they get clowned on, respond with "omg look at all these rubes not realizing it was all a joke kekekeke."
Once-proponents of the Reckoning have it easy, I suppose, in that in 2024, their 2020 antics are such low-hanging fruits that it's no longer even that satisfying to make fun of them for that. The crumbling has also been rather swift that there's not even that much to fight against. What is left to attack? Some Reckoning-ish attempt to revive Lovecraft Country?
You say, "The anti-woke are finding it difficult (as everyone does) to realize that they aren’t truth-telling outsiders but rather represent a point of view that’s very useful to the powerful..."
I've spent a lot of time thinking on how every political or justice position is exploitable, eventually, by some group of interested powerful people. So, I'm not sure what to make of the argument that in some ways, your belief system aligns with the interests of the powerful. No matter the position, the powerful will figure it out eventually. It's a treadmill.
But I'm not spending every day on podcasts telling people what a rebel I am. The whole anti-woke thing is defined by anti-establishment branding. But (for example) support for Israel IS the establishment.
Yes, they are very annoying. I guess they still have a responsibility to acknowledge when an interest aligns with the establishment. But do we really expect that rebellious movements will be rebellious on every single issue? That also sounds more like an aesthetic rather than a set of sincerely held beliefs.
I'm pretty cynical about "useful to the powerful", who have a track record of co-opting progressivism or actual conservatism when it suits their purposes. But that said, I think 'anti-woke' is these days certainly coalescing into a distinct online faction with a party line of its own, often a very socially conservative one, rather than just being the heterodox and ideological diverse band of dissedents brought together by a common opposition to woke orthodoxy that they often present themselves as. And, certainly, Bari Weiss and TFP is playing a large part in setting the agenda for that faction.
Now I certainly am enjoying seeing the unraveling of the overwhelming hegemony of the 'woke' progressive left as much as any other free thinker, but I'm not buying into the party line of whatever faction is claiming to be the opposition to that.
Good piece. I think this criticism could be taken to an even higher level than just the form of faux politics that waxed in 2020. One of the larger problems I've noticed in the last two decades of American politics is the way that seemingly major policy decisions are just memory holed without real professional reckonings either in politics or the press. You can look at other, arguably more consequential failures, like the Iraq invasion, the lack of accounting for the losers in globalized trade, the 2008 financial crisis, etc. One thing that sticks out to me is that while 'vibes' shift you never hear anyone talk about lessons learned. That has deep ramifications for our politics. Trying to run away from it has completely destroyed the political right but the left I think is in danger of losing its own ability to be a constructive force. The thing that always struck me most about the type of politics that are the topic of this piece was how intricately they rationalize away the possibility of doing anything that matters.
To address a couple emails, yes, I did mean "almost every particular" with no other word at the end - particular here used as a noun meaning detail, point, etc.
Don't worry, there were as usual several other prominent typos in the original email.
I think about your observation that these types of people are terribly concerned about being owned and it reminds me of a point Rutger Bregman makes in his book, Humankind (and I’m very roughly paraphrasing): if you’ve never been conned, you’re probably an asshole.
The two biggest stories of the last 5 years - BLM/DEI and COVID - and there is an active effort to avoid any type of retrospection.
A combination of exhaustion, embarrassment, and self-righteousness means we'll learn nothing, thank you very much.
Correct. And I would change it to "decade" and add "Me Too."
I'm a little more optimistic. Give it time. Everything is still very fresh.
SNL ran a skit that mocked the practice of putting a mask on while walking to your table at a restaurant and then taking it off while you ate, presumably being sprayed by saliva and bits of food from your dining partners.
Even ordinary people know it's bullshit. The powers that be are uninterested in self reflection at this point precisely because they are aware of that.
Agreed- it was particularly dumb when schools were remote but bars/restaurants were open. But I'm not that interested in again criticizing dumb decisions. Instead, what tangible things could we do now based on what we learned?
How about federal grants to improve ventilation/air quality in public schools? Bring back the Child Tax Credit?
How about firing the people responsible for those decisions and hiring replacements? They've shown themselves to be incompetent.
The problem with Covid retrospection, at least in the area of school closures, is that the angry ones don't realize they were in the minority. Overwhelmingly, parents got what they wanted. So the whole "underprivileged kids were kept out of schools and are far behind" is missing the part where their parents for the most part actively kept them out of those schools, whether or not they were open.
BLM/DEI on the other hand seem to be more of an embarrassed admission that hey, I overreacted.
But there's no effort to go to black, Hispanic, and Asian parents and say "do you realize how much damage you did by insisting on remote education?"
Man, my experience of majority/minority is different than yours. Though I haven't looked at the issue globally, just my own school district and state. And everyone was held out of school to do remote learning. OK, some really rich kids did that pod stuff, but this just in, really rich kids play by different rules, COVID or not.
My school district is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, but solidly middle class. They went remote right away and most parents I spoke with were cool with it n the simple grounds of we didn't know a thing about COVID and it seemed like the best of lots of bad options. Now, remote learning was a disaster for my kids. Forget learning loss, my kids went from happy and engaged students to hating school, actively comin up with ways to avoid class. It was a nightmare. Do I blame the school? Of course not. They did the best the could with limited information.
And yes, there was learning loss but.... EVERYONE experienced it. It's not like anyone got a leg up. Schools were closed across the state. We were all in the same boat, and now, a few years later, the kids have regained that lost time and more importantly, re-engaged with their social circles. The real loss is the kids who never found their way back into schools.
Given a second chance, I'm sure my school district would do something differently. The thing is, they didn't have this experience to draw upon. they made a justifiable call in good faith. It turned out to not be the optimal one, but I think asking for some sort of recriminations now is a fool's errand. Sometimes, there's no blame to be had.
"My school district is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic..."
That's why you didn't have a choice. As you say, most parents you spoke with were cool with it.
Had you spoken to mostly white parents, they would not have been cool with it from a pretty early point in the pandemic.
Schools continued to make calls throughout the pandemic by checking in with parents. And if your district was majority black and Hispanic, they overwhelmingly wanted remote. And no, I doubt your school district would do different.
What *will* change next time is the legislative response. In 2020, the legislatures said any parent could have remote education if they wanted it for the entire 2020-21 school year.
They won't make that mistake again.
Living in a very white state with kids in a majority white school... the parents were on board with remote classes for all of the reasons that Poseur noted.
I subscribed to "The Free Press" for a year. I signed up for it because, frankly, I was outraged by the whole Tom Cotton/NYT snafu being a fervent believer in free speech, but quickly grew disillusioned with it, particularly by the yahoos on its comments page who, as it turns out—Duh!—are NOT free speech advocates. 😀
Nellie Bowles' irreverent end-of-the-week wrap-up was the only good thing about that Substack. If I could have figured out a way to subscribe to THAT without the rest of it, I would have. She is deeply hilarious.
And so are YOU, Freddie. "The Pravda of white women who force their Black colleagues into their Instagram photos" is SUCH a fabulous description.
But the rest of this piece... I truly do not GAF. I don't know what "The Reckoning" is, I think "The New Yorker" is "Reader's Digest" for aging boomers, I couldn't care less about power struggles in the increasingly irrelevant publishing industry.
But I remain in absolute AWE of your ability, Freddie, to turn out so much (mostly) articulate prose on such a wide variety of topics.
There are no true free speech advocates; everyone's tolerance turns out to extend about 5 inches past their political beliefs.
I think you can be more or less oriented towards free speech. (And that I'm pretty far out on that axis.) There probably are a few people who approach 100% free speech, but for most people, it's a balance of competing values.
I wouldn't call it a silent majority necessarily, but I feel like there is relatively broad and bipartisan support for a social ethic of letting people speak their mind. It just doesn't translate into the form of a take very well, it's almost the negative space among the discourse in a way.
Allowing people to speak freely requires that everyone accept the consequences of that. Unfortunately, due to safetyism, an increasing amount of people regard speech as harmful, and can't stand someone on the Wrong Side saying badthinkful things.
There's a real generational split in terms of who finds safetyism acceptable. And even among the younger generation the most interesting development of recent years has been a huge spike in the number of high school boys who identify as conservative.
It's interesting to see where Gen Z is trending. The expectation from surveys is that each generation, on average, is politically to the left of its predecessors, but surveys have shown that peak Left seems to have been among Millenials, and there's a small but significant rightward shift among Gen Z. Of course, this is defining "right" and "left" in the most broad way imaginable, and really, those represent coalitions that ever shifting and emphasize different priorities than their generational predecessors.
I subscribe to the cyclic theory of history. If the pendulum swings in one direction it's destined to eventually swing back.
The interesting thing about the next generation is that young males skew heavily conservative and young females skew heavily liberal. What's even more curious is that it's not just the United States, the same pattern shows up throughout the developed world (Europe and some parts of Asia).
The fact that kids are both growing up in a panopticon and encouraged to take part in victimhood culture both make me despair about the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFYSTWRaTrc
As a tutor, I spend a lot of time with kids. Don't despair: they're mostly fine.
Not true. I’m a firm free speech advocate and apply to views I consider ridiculous.
Me too. I'm old (60) and was formally educated in public schools on the principles of free speech including the whys and the hows. That obviously stopped happening and lately has been turned around 180 degrees. Silence is violence? Fuck me.
This is too cynical even for me. There are many free speech advocates; we simply never elect them. Probably because these are people who have at least some principles, and in a highly competitive and completely amoral field (which describes US national politics pretty well), principles are a vulnerability because they force you to sometimes agree with / support / offer succor to your political enemies.
In an atmosphere of binaries, nuance is considered wrong.
Christopher Rufo just came out in opposition to the Anti-Semitic Defense Act, or whatever it's called.
And I'm a true free speech advocate.
Good for Rufo on this one, but much of the legislation inspired by Rufo is pretty far from free speech-friendly, simply replacing compelled speech about antiracism and intersectionality with enforced censorship of discussing those concepts. I'm a bit cynical about his motives for opposing ASDA - does it really come from a defense of free speech, or the fact that such legislation can be used against someone with views like Marjorie Taylor Greene's just as easily as it could be used against woke anti-Zionism?
"much of the legislation inspired by Rufo is pretty far from free speech-friendly"
There's a difference between what he believes and what people influenced by him believe.
"I'm a bit cynical about his motives for opposing ASDA "
You could always go read his editorial.
"does it really come from a defense of free speech, or the fact that such legislation can be used against someone with views like Marjorie Taylor Greene's just as easily as it could be used against woke anti-Zionism?"
The whole point of defending free speech is that if it's not extended to Nazis and Antifa it could be used to ban Nazis and Antifa. The "slippery slope" is a central argument for defending free speech.
Well, the "slippery slope" part is why I'm more or less a free speech absolutist. But given the legislative history coming from Rufo and company, it doesn't seem like he takes that position, and I'm wondering aloud wither his opposition to ADSA is really a turn back to a more principled stance on free speech or a realization that it's legislation that could backfire on some of his constituency.
I would question what legislative history Rufo has since he's not a legislator.
Second, what's the difference between a "principled stance on free speech" versus a concern that it could be used against you (or anybody else)? The principle is that we have to protect the speech of the KKK or the Black Panthers or whatever because failing to do so means that it could be used to censor the Girl Scouts. That _is_ the principled position.
I think FIRE as an organization comes pretty close to that ideal, actually, as did the ACLU in its heyday. "There are no true free speech advocates" is a pretty cynical position to take, and sounds like a dismissal of that as a tenable position. What's true is that there's a whole lot of hypocrisy around free speech - people invoking it for themselves, only to want to shut it down when someone they really don't like gets up to speak. But that's pretty far from everyone, and I think many folks, even those who aren't idealists, see the need for it as a general rule - if you nullify that principal when you have power, you won't have it to fall back on if you lose that power.
Yup. Many of The Free Press' commenters are lunatics. Its turned me off of the newsletter.
Not just the commentariat, but TFP itself is pretty inconsistant. Any article they've ever published on porn treats at as pure evil and advocates legislation against it. That seems to be a pretty big exception if you're trying to position yourself as some sort of free speech absolutist.
Then again, that represents Bari Weiss' more recent infatuation with classic antiporn/antitrans radical feminism, which she's pushing as a key part of the 'Heterodox' IDW 2.0 coalition she's trying to build as the centrist alternative to MAGA on one hand and the 'woke' left on the other. An American version of the UK's 'New Statesman' coalition, basically.
I'll fully admit that my own politics is 'anti-woke' in the sense of being pretty disgusted by left's turn against free speech and towards a very radical sort of identity politics (I disagree with Freddie that this can rightly be called 'liberal'), but I'm also pretty turned off by Bari Weiss's influence, her own less-than-transparent agenda, and some of the highly illiberal and reactionary tendencies in the ideas that she pushes. One need look no further than the "Fall of Minneapolis" debacle that Weiss and bloggers in her orbit got behind before being roundly debunked by Radley Balko.
Yup. I think the Fall of Minneapolis crap was what pissed me off the most. Like, guys, c'mon. Floyd was clearly murdered. We don't have to be contrarian about every little thing.
Yeah, exactly. And I remember, the "additional footage" that showed Floyd resisting arrest. I'd already seen that on YouTube and did not think that remotely justified Chauvin's actions. It was a bad check bust, ffs, not taking down an armed assailant who was an immediate danger to the public.
What it also underlined was the kind of behind the scenes influencing that's been taking place in that milieu. Within a week or two, it seemed like every 'anti-woke' podcast was treating TFoM as a major story. Now, to their credit, The Fifth Column largely rejected the TFoM narrative while Glenn Loury and John McWhorter issued a mea culpa after additonal endorsement. But still, it speaks to the anti-wokes being as incestuous and prone to groupthink as the 'progressive' mainstream they're critiquing.
Yeah, those Free Press commenters are pretty wild, aren't they? A window into the right-wing fever swamp. Often they complain about how leftist it is, and how Bari and Nellie need to shape up or they will leave. But they never do. I read it for Nellie Bowles, both because she is funny, and because I'm grateful to her for doing the only real reporting in the New York Times on the Summer of Floyd. The only one who got on the ground and talked to people, and got the story.
Nellie Bowles is a total treasure.
I miss reading her TGIF.
But not enough to subject myself to the right-wing fever swamp (as you so aptly describe it. 😀) Man, those people are _creepy_.
I had a similar experience, signed up because of TGIF and also Douglas Murray's Things Worth Remembering (I know, I know, shhh don't tell anyone) but after Hamas attacked Israel I hastily unsubscribed. I also learned quickly not to read the comments on that stack, yeesh.
I just don’t read the comments (except for amusement)
That's often true of the commentariat for a publication that leans in a particular direction, though. Reason I'd consider to be more or less standard, culturally liberal free-market libertarians, and often intelligent articles from a libertarian POV, but their comments section is dominated by the worst, far-right yahoos imaginable, and who rarely have anything intelligent to say. (The opposite of this comments section, which is worth wading into.)
Similarly, the Blocked and Reported pod I'll credit for having a nuanced critique of trans politics and gender medicine, but you don't have to wade very far into its subreddit before you encounter some pretty ugly 'gender critical' transphobia and kink-shaming. There's some intelligent discussion there too, and views that align with the level of nuance coming from show's hosts, but the more radical GC contingent is still a pretty noticeable presence.
I wonder sometimes if it’s an organized effort spread around as many places as possible.
The far far right is, bluntly, really stupid. Which means it can't generate writers worth reading. Which in turn means that its members need to read writers from adjacent, less stupid, political tendencies.
Many of the people in Reason's comment section would rather be reading a publication that doesn't exist and maybe can't exist.
People have different opinions - who knew? The FP commenters have a variety of opinions, some of which I agree with and many I do not. Here’s the thing though - no one is forcing me to read every comment. When Nellie, Bari and co stop writing articles that are interesting and expand my viewpoint, I’ll cancel my subscription.
Yep. I don't read comments at every Substack I frequent; I've learned that some simply don't have enough signal in the noise to be worth the time. But that doesn't really have anything to do with the articles. But I can understand if a significant piece of one's draw to Substack is the ability to read good comments, that one may rethink the money one spends in response to a stack where the comments are mire.
I guess it depends on one's expectations. The FP appears to be pretty "liberal" in managing their comments section. I for one appreciate that. There are other outlets where even modest deviations from the party line will get one banned. I suppose if folks value echo chambers, that's up to them.
The best Substacks have a wide diversity in terms of readership. If the entire subscriber base has drunk the Kool Aid the writing is likely to be just as brain washed as the readers.
The sure sign of a truly satisfying Substack is that the comments are often more interesting than the articles themselves.
That's often true.
Living in the Twin Cities during the protests was surreal. It's always weird to have something that makes world news happen locally, but for me I always saw the protests as the death rattle of the nascent social democratic left which had sprung up around Sanders. In my bones, I knew right then and there that it would be over. That the "abolish the police" rhetoric which had been somewhat fringe even among that crowd would now be omnipresent and that any attempts at universalism created by shared economic circumstances and common sense reforms was going to vanish into thin air. That there were plenty of right wingers ready to swoop in with their own solutions when it all fell apart. Pretty much all that has happened. I'm no prophet. Anyone with their head on straight could have seen it coming from a mile a way.
2020 was actually when I gave up. I went back to school for accounting that fall. The last train had left the station. I had sunk a whole lot of time into activism and political organizing in the preceding years. I was already pretty checked out by that point, but that was the final break. I remember trying to convince people that Biden would be at best a continuation of the status quo and do like 90% of the same things Trump did, but no one wanted to hear that either. I tried to explain how much I despised Dubya back in college, thinking that if we could just get a Democrat in again things would be good again, and that perhaps the biggest political disappointment of my life was finding out that simply wasn't the case. No one wanted to hear that either.
It's just a long way of saying I knew I was done. After all that I never wanted to do anything political ever again. Still don't, to be honest, but I live here the same as anyone else.
I'm burnt out too, man. At this point, I'm just a moderate Democrat who votes but otherwise doesn't get political anymore. The Long Screaming 2010s (and 2020) and all the identitarian crap sapped all the energy out of me.
I'm a big fan of the theory that the 2020s are the new 1970s: an exhausted, meandering, confusing period where no one's quite sure where to go next.
No one with any sense of history could seriously live in the Summer of Hate and think that it was not destined to flame out, that it would last about as long as the smoke from the burning tires, plus a day, then PFFTT.
When the NPR totebag set say "Defund the police!" what they mean is "Take money from the undeserving (blue collar meathead cops, most of whom lack Serious Academic Credentials and who are famously unwoke to boot) and give to the deserving (white collar social workers with appropriate degrees who can be counted on to uphold the latest and most censorious standards of political correctness)".
Don't get me started on effing land acknowledgements. Add to the emptiness of the gesture, the people making the land acknowledgements typically don't have the slightest clue as to who the people they're invoking actually are, or whether they even were a local presence historically - it's just a name they found on an ethnographic map somewhere. And sure, sometimes that's actually accompanied by donations to the group in question, but that's highly succeptably to grift - in the East Bay Area where I live, that's often thousands donated to a group called the Muwekma Ohlone, which is debatable as to whether it's a real tribal group or simply a few individuals with a very small amount of Ohlone ancestry somewhere in their genealogy.
I like to acknowledge that I am on occupied land stolen from the Habsburg Empire at every opportunity.
Sort of, but I think it was even shallower than that. "Abolish the police" and "defund the police" (if you wanted to sound less radical) were catchy slogans and I don't think most people thought it through much further than that. These slogans were fashionable until right around the time people started having their cars stolen on a regular basis, sometimes at gunpoint.
Sure, conservative media is basically crime porn and exaggerates the hell out of it, but crime in Minneapolis and Saint Paul had undeniably got worse. Having liberals tell people "actually, this isn't bad" while sort of accurate was absolutely tone deaf and yet another nail in the coffin. Never underestimate how much influence fashion/trends/fads have on political views. A lot of the time political stances aren't all that much deeper than the decisions people make about footwear.
Or the slogans sounded all right on until Biden got elected.
Sort of like how the election of Obama did more to neuter the antiwar movement than anything Dick Cheney could have done, even if he were made Maximum Autocrat And President For Life.
Violent crime took a huge jump after 2019 and the country is still living through that today. Telling people who living through a crime wave that they're imagining the problem is probably not going to be productive.
"Crime porn" - I like that. It's interesting that the left will scream bloody murder about any actual or perceived abuse of trans folks, while the right will highlight any time a trans person commits a violent crime. If you just consume left-wing media you will be convinced that trans folks are routinely abused by MAGA extremists. If you just consume right-wing media, you will be thinking that there are a bunch of murderous trans folks just waiting to attack normal folk. Sigh, I dislike the "both sides" trope, but sometimes it really is both sides. Our host sometimes seems to have a blind spot about that.
I live in Oakland, CA and used to ride BART regularly, and, yep, "actually isn't that bad" really felt like gaslighting. I'm not someone who habitually likes cops, but I'm really glad BART stepped up police presence in the stations and on the trains. I'm not even calling for heavy-handed policing, but just having them around seems to discourage a bad element that's all-too-real.
The problem with this analysis is many or most of the people behind the protests hated Bernie
This is true at the high levels - the top leaders of BLM were anti-Bernie, especially in 2016. But at least in my city, there was huge overlap between people who supported Bernie and people who were in the streets in summer 2020.
I have to disagree, but I have nothing but anecdotal evidence. In my memory the lines between liberal and Sanders left at that time were so blurry that the basically matched on lockstep. Most people I knew through the DSA were all in on those slogans. Perhaps your experience was different, but I came to see CHAZ as the logical extension of this milieu. It's like if you took the worst aspects of both communities (obnoxious more-radical-than-thou posturing on the left and the most vulgar, empty, and performative identity politics if the NPR set) and combined them. For a brief moment everyone was pushing in the same direction.
DSA hated Bernie? I know you want to believe this nonsense was a bunch of DtripC liberal Hilldogs but the "real" left was just as in on it. Not a lot of Biden bros at Stop Cop City or CHAZ.
"...Biden would be at best a continuation of the status quo and do like 90% of the same things Trump did..."
My read on this is that Sanders' overlap with Trump is greater than his overlap with Biden because they're both populists.
Bravo.
This reminds me of the weird shift from a lot of conservative writers and voters on who once crusaded against gay marriage but then never addressed the issue again after Obergefell in 2015. Their arguments in the 2000s were weak but popular, and then there was a vibe shift in the 2010s and they lost all traction. And if you try and bring this up with any number of Republican voters they seem very reluctant to talk about it. It's either some variant of "I'm socially moderate but otherwise conservative" (when they were explicitly party-line "traditional marriage" at the time), or they act like they never cared about the issue much either way, and YOU'RE the one who's being weirdly confrontational about it.
I think this is the right analogy with conservative actions. With gay marriage, they had a coherent message (not one I agree with), but they lost, the culture moved on, and many realized that gay marriage didn't end civilization after all or it's just not worth pushing anymore. Why would they want to talk about it?
The waters have been significantly muddied in terms of election interference by the criminal charges against Trump. To a lot of people that looks like political persecution. Fareed Zhakaria just discussed this a short time ago.
People set their sails with the wind.
Like Barack Obama. A lot of people felt that way, got sick of their own political body odor, and realized they were wrong.
I think I could steelman a few different conservative reactions to gay marriage post-Obergefell.
(1) I still think gay marriage is likely to be net harmful, but we lost that one and need to spend our powder where it will do the most good.
(2) I was mistaken in believing that gay marriage would be net harmful. Here's what I learned from that mistake: (there are several possibilities here).
(3) I am a hack who expresses whatever opinion gets me the most money/clicks/votes and never really had a well formed opinion on this. (More charitably - I follow the opinions of people I trust in areas where I'm not an expert, and the fact that they have shut up on this issue means that I don't have much of an opinion on it either without spending time I don't have to become personally expert.)
It would be interesting to see a debate on National Review or somewhere about these points, but it's probably not in conservatives' short-term interest to have that debate publicly. Maybe something similar is going on about the Reckoning.
"(More charitably - I follow the opinions of people I trust in areas where I'm not an expert, and the fact that they have shut up on this issue means that I don't have much of an opinion on it either without spending time I don't have to become personally expert.)"
I favor this explanation for most. The ideas are still there, but since they now lack all credible leadership politically and culturally, people just let them go. But if the leadership returns, you'll find there's still quite a bit of this sentiment out there.
You're forgetting:
4) I was actively in favor of gay marriage but lied about it because that was my job.
LOL! (I was a college conservative but outspoken in favor of the Jonathan Rauch conservative case for gay marriage, so I'm good.)
Roughly 75% of Americans supported the Iraq War in early 2003, including 55-60% of Democrats and 85-90% of Republicans. Good luck finding any of those people who will cop to doing so today.
I did. I supported the war. I was suspicious of the claims of WMD, but I thought that both the world and Iraq would be better off without Saddam. I also supported a much, much larger force and a long-term plan for keeping peace and creating democracy (we're talking 20-30 years or more).
But I was wrong. The internal divisions with Iraq plus the massive pressure externally in the Middle East makes that a pipe dream. I was wrong.
Now you have 1.
Hey, I thing Saddam Hussein ending up on the business end of a noose was the one good outcome of the Iraq War, but then I have a pretty deep hatred of dictators and strongmen. But the Iraq War was an object lesson in how shutting down a particular bad guy is not a sufficient justification for war. (The Gulf War I feel differently about - allowing the Hussein-controlled Iraq to absorb Kuwait would have had some very bad long-term consequences.)
I still support the war. The _occupation_ was screwed up and that was mostly Rumsfeld's fault.
I did. I thought Saddam was going to get out from under sanctions sooner or later and develop WMD, and I thought he was bad enough that any likely alternative would be an improvement.
Now I think he was an important counterweight to Iran, and that we are probably net worse off after getting rid of him (and Qaddafi for that matter.) I'm still morally uncomfortable with that conclusion, though.
These instances illustrate the one thing that unites Americans across every political spectrum...we hate admitting we lost. Even when it's a glaring loss, we figure ways to block the trauma from our conscience by any means necessary whether that's full on denial or re-writing history to allow us to move on.
I fundamentally disagree with your assertion that BLM failed because we did not legislate racism away. I disagree with the left that BLM failed because we have yet to see adequate representation in every crevice of society (where are all the black transgender neurosurgeons!). I disagree with the right that BLM failed because we didn’t need it in the first place.
I think it was a success. It changed the way I think, which is EXACTLY what it needed to do. The major failure of BLM is that, in the process of making crucial steps towards a more just society, it also advanced the great brain-poison of progressive politics, victim fetishization; which has the power to crush us all.
You are my neighbor. I love you. You carry dignity and grace, innately. These are lessons I learned from a great man who lived a long time ago. I will wash your feet, but I won’t kiss them.
The best antidote for efforts to "reform" policing are high crime rates, and the country has that in spades right now.
In my city of Toronto, "Defund the Police" didn't actually reduce police budgets. But it did result in a new Community Health Crisis Service -- essentially mental health first responders that can be deployed by 911 in lieu of cops. So that's something.
And I'd say there's still a fairly widespread dubiousness towards the cops in the center/left here, due to some high-profile examples of incompetence. We didn't defund them at all, yet they keep accidentally killing children, have basically thrown their hands up at preventing car theft, and seem to refuse to do basic traffic enforcement.
It changed the way I think, too, but not in any way the typical BLM protestor would like.
Indeed. These days when I hear the word 'racism' my first though is whether the speaker/writer means actual racism or the wokie/DEI version of 'racism'.
Or I just roll my eyes and think "here we go again ..."
The funny part is that some people--often known these days as Republicans--were thinking that 30 years ago.
Is that what the protesters demanded? Wrote on their signs? "Change the Way You Think"?
This movement had explicit aims, goals, demands. And what they demanded was a total reorientation of how society engaged with race.
No. You are correct. But what they ‘wanted’ to do and what The Movement ‘needed’ to do were very different, I think. Just my opinion. Abolish the police?? Seriously? And no more laws, please! Use momentum when you have it but tap the breaks frequently and thoughtfully. Otherwise, everyone but the zealots jump off the bus, and what you have left is a complete and utter shit show. MLKJr is someone to look up to here. The best thing the organizers did was name themselves Black Lives Matter, which is the most beautiful and heartbreaking name for a protest group ever, at least that I can think of.
Yes? Haven't we all agreed that these movements were overly concerned with our internal thoughts and even unconscious biases, to the exclusion of actual action or policy? That's what all the "Do the Work" messaging was about - to re-examine all of our impure thoughts and self-flagellate until we had clean minds.
I just googled BLM signs and this was the first thing that popped up:
https://www.businessinsider.com/black-lives-matter-photos-protest-signs-2020-6
One could translate the meaning of this sign as: How does your mind frame me? And Maybe you should reconsider that and change your thinking?
There was tons of this stuff.
By a large margin, I think the most popular slogan during the summer of 2020 was "defund the police".
If the police have not been defunded, I think it's fair to say the movement failed in its primary stated goal.
I think the movement failed in its primary, secondary, etc., goals. So no argument here, really.
I'm still BLM-skeptical. I still see the George Floyd murder as a crime of excessive police power, and by extension, state power. And, certainly, exacerbated by systemic racism and, maybe, the personal racism of Derek Chauvin and his accomplices. But the narrative that was spun by the media, very quickly, was that it was all about race and collectively about how the racism in white people's hearts affects black people. While 'Defund the Police' was the mantra, more effort was put into bullshit like workplace antiracism trainings and cancelling people for wrongthink than eliminating things like qualified immunity.
There were also a lot of excuses made for things like CHAZ and the Portland and Kenosha riots that were often quite violent and led to the deaths of something like 20 people. (Far more than were killed in the January 6th riots, BTW.) These were not BLM actions, by and large, but anyone who criticized this kind of mob action was treated as if they were attacking BLM and antiracism full stop. All of which led to the backlash we're now seeing.
After the last 10-15 years, and especially after the fun events of 2020, I'm still left with the feeling that Identity Politics are antithetical to political coalition building, which is kinda important to win elections. I would bet, though I can't prove it, that Identity Politics have alienated more voters than have won them over.
1) Great piece, Freddie.
2) IMHO, the main unusual characteristic of the reckoning was the experiment with the idea that if you punished dissent hard enough, you could make progress in the movement. (E.g., firing people for suggesting that some scholarship indicates that non violent protest can be more effective that "mostly non-violent" or dragging people for saying, apparently innocently, that all lives matter, etc.) I'm personally in favor of open debate, but an experiment every so often is a reasonable way to challenge our preconceptions -- my impression is that the effort to squash disagreement in the reconning was more effective at shutting people up in the moment, but probably not that helpful to finding accurate information and ultimately to addressing racism in America.
3) Freddie writes, regarding Nellie Bowles or the Freep: "I keep wondering how many pieces lambasting the college students protesting against the war in Gaza have to be published in mainstream papers and magazines for people to grasp that you can’t be an outsider by engaging in such rhetoric." I don't read Bowles or the FP - do they claim to be outsiders?
Thinking about it a little more, I don't know if Bowles is an outsider or not, but I think an outsider can have really any opinion about the Gaza protests and remain outside. The FP is definitely outside mainstream media, but they have the opinions they have. To go farther, Julian Assange is an outsider, and so is the crazy guy down the road posting inside jokes on Twitter about politics, but they still have voices and opinions, and some of those opinions are going to line up with the interests of the powerful just by random chance.
"my impression is that the effort to squash disagreement in the reconning was more effective at shutting people up in the moment, but probably not that helpful to finding accurate information and ultimately to addressing racism in America."
My impression of it was that it was effective in silencing people who were largely on your side, but who didn't entirely agree with you; oddly, you'd think they could maybe *get something done* with all that apparent message discipline on their side.
It was also very effective in absolutely riling up their opponents to be equally radical in response.
There's a lot to be said on the broader drift of educated liberal politics in the 2010's, and certainly the George Floyd moment was a product of those trends, but I always feel like the discussion tends to miss the mechanics of the Bernie and Warren campaigns, which had dominated the discourse in that world for a year of Peak Twitter, abruptly ending and vanishing, at the exact moment when that entire class of people got locked inside for three months out of nowhere by this bizarre and unfathomable external force.
I don't know if that's sympathetic or not, but there was a sense of grasping for normalcy about the whole thing, nonsensical as that may seem in retrospect.
Yeah but as I said above, the trouble with this analysis is that it presumes the Bernie left and the BLM left were the same group. Trust me, there was a lot of mutual antipathy there.
Yeah, exactly, which was the Bernie and Warren fighting on Twitter throughout late 2019, early 2020. In some ways that was the clearest that particular cleavage has ever been shown. And it was this huge vibrant day-to-day discourse for the class of people who spent their days at email jobs slacking off on Twitter.
Then those campaigns vanished overnight and their enthusiasts all got locked inside their apartments and barely got to see anyone for three months as the world went crazy. It all happened in literally like a week.
Many people of the left, yourself included, were inoculated with the right first principles to look with suspicion at what emerged from that isolation with the Floyd protests, but in that moment we were all coming at it from a weird and unprecedented head space.
It's worth a "to be sure" paragraph for you, Fischer and Bowles alike, I guess is my point.
Elizabeth Warren leaned hard into idpol in no small part to distinguish herself from being just 'Bernie lite'. And, as a result, was the darling of the so-called 'social justice' left. In any event, it was the centrist Dems that came out on top, no surprise there, with some olive branches thrown toward left identitarians, notably the appointment of Kamala Harris as VP. (Though her 'progressivism' was a very recent conversion from her prior record as a law-and-order hardliner.)
But this tension dated back to 2016, where the otherwise conservative Democrat Hillary Clinton played the feminist and identity card pretty hard against Bernie, which a highly visible part of the highly online 'social justice' left was all too willing to take up.
Contrast with the bipartisan freakout over the Gaza protests.
I suspect a large part of that is because Biden's in office and the fear among the establishment is that anything that looks like chaos will reflect poorly on his administration.
"All the media attention and the genuflecting corporations and the billions of dollars in donations couldn’t distract from a glaring reality: none of it was going anywhere. The highly sympathetic but strategically directionless protest movement rallied around no coherent ideology, held immediate goals that were too extravagant and long-term goals that were too vague, and relied on the amplification of an elite liberal class whose support was about as deep as the grooves in a record. "
Humans are herd animals to rival any sheep or lemming. The Establishment can easily co-opt or buy off such movements, while making no fundamental changes, nothing that materially affects power relations or how the pie is sliced. A diversity committee or two, making preferred pronouns mandatory on a corporate email signature, that sort of thing.
Easy, meaningless concessions are handed out because they are easy and meaningless. They're then disproportionately celebrated, because meaningful concessions are so scarce.
Of course. Not to mention, many of these cheap concessions are in fact a jobs program for activists with student loans to pay off.
This all reminds me of when people post dumb takes on Twitter, then when they get clowned on, respond with "omg look at all these rubes not realizing it was all a joke kekekeke."
Once-proponents of the Reckoning have it easy, I suppose, in that in 2024, their 2020 antics are such low-hanging fruits that it's no longer even that satisfying to make fun of them for that. The crumbling has also been rather swift that there's not even that much to fight against. What is left to attack? Some Reckoning-ish attempt to revive Lovecraft Country?
You say, "The anti-woke are finding it difficult (as everyone does) to realize that they aren’t truth-telling outsiders but rather represent a point of view that’s very useful to the powerful..."
I've spent a lot of time thinking on how every political or justice position is exploitable, eventually, by some group of interested powerful people. So, I'm not sure what to make of the argument that in some ways, your belief system aligns with the interests of the powerful. No matter the position, the powerful will figure it out eventually. It's a treadmill.
Progressive points of view are also very useful to the powerful.
But I'm not spending every day on podcasts telling people what a rebel I am. The whole anti-woke thing is defined by anti-establishment branding. But (for example) support for Israel IS the establishment.
Yes, they are very annoying. I guess they still have a responsibility to acknowledge when an interest aligns with the establishment. But do we really expect that rebellious movements will be rebellious on every single issue? That also sounds more like an aesthetic rather than a set of sincerely held beliefs.
I'm pretty cynical about "useful to the powerful", who have a track record of co-opting progressivism or actual conservatism when it suits their purposes. But that said, I think 'anti-woke' is these days certainly coalescing into a distinct online faction with a party line of its own, often a very socially conservative one, rather than just being the heterodox and ideological diverse band of dissedents brought together by a common opposition to woke orthodoxy that they often present themselves as. And, certainly, Bari Weiss and TFP is playing a large part in setting the agenda for that faction.
Now I certainly am enjoying seeing the unraveling of the overwhelming hegemony of the 'woke' progressive left as much as any other free thinker, but I'm not buying into the party line of whatever faction is claiming to be the opposition to that.
Good piece. I think this criticism could be taken to an even higher level than just the form of faux politics that waxed in 2020. One of the larger problems I've noticed in the last two decades of American politics is the way that seemingly major policy decisions are just memory holed without real professional reckonings either in politics or the press. You can look at other, arguably more consequential failures, like the Iraq invasion, the lack of accounting for the losers in globalized trade, the 2008 financial crisis, etc. One thing that sticks out to me is that while 'vibes' shift you never hear anyone talk about lessons learned. That has deep ramifications for our politics. Trying to run away from it has completely destroyed the political right but the left I think is in danger of losing its own ability to be a constructive force. The thing that always struck me most about the type of politics that are the topic of this piece was how intricately they rationalize away the possibility of doing anything that matters.