Palestinian Painted Plates & the Nothing Party
There’s a story from last year about Israel and Palestine, sort of, that you probably haven’t heard of. And that’s strange; it’s exactly the kind of culture war red meat that people loved to click on. The problem is that the people who would do the culture warring, the “heterodox,” the “dissidents,” the “Intellectual Dark Web,” they sat this one out. Because the one orthodoxy they’ll never break is the one that says you don’t side with the enemy. Which is, of course, the only orthodoxy that’s really worth breaking.
Last February, before the current conflict, The Guardian reported that a London hospital had taken down a controversial art display, made up of the painted plates you see above. You may think that there doesn’t appear to be anything remotely confrontational about those plates, but you can’t tell why they’re so wicked by looking at them; they become offensive only when you know that they were painted by Palestinian children, children from Gaza. And some patients at the hospital read the little plaque and learned that they were made by children from Gaza and felt marginalized and othered enough to throw their weight around and get the artwork taken down. Look again. Do you see the Palestinian flag? I guess you can sort of see a little piece of one in the upper lefthand side, but then again the central image of that plate is a literal olive branch, a plea for peace. Do you see “Free Palestine” anywhere? Do you see anything remotely inflammatory? No. You do see women in hijab and dupattas, Muslim-ass people doing Muslim-ass things. But that’s it. The plates were just decorative objects painted by children half a world away.
And yet the mere existence of these utterly anodyne plates decorated by children compelled a pro-Israel organization to force the hospital to take them down, because they supposedly made Jewish patients feel “vulnerable, harassed and victimized.” Have you ever heard anything that better fits with the anti-woke worldview than that scenario, other than the fact that the action broke against Palestinians? That’s a Ben Shapiro wet dream, “vulnerable, harassed and victimized” by plates, only too bad it’s the wogs who painted them. It’s like a parody of liberal snowflake culture, this scenario. If this exact thing happened but with the ethnic valence reversed, so that Palestinians got Israeli children’s artwork taken down by a hospital (which they could never achieve), Joe Rogan would have Jamie pulling that thing up to mock it every day for a month. r/stupidpol would crowdfund to send a correspondent to investigate. Helen Lewis would write a snide story for The Atlantic about it. Jon Chait would sweat into his keyboard for hours as he fulminated about it. Six million TERF Substacks would find a way to turn this into a complaint about how some people with penises wear dresses. John McWhorter would be inspired to write a column wondering aloud what Thomas Sowell would make of today’s world. (Thomas Sowell is still alive.) Brett Weinstein would say that the controversy was proof that fluoride makes you gay. The Free Press would start a four-part podcast series about it, hosted by a horse girl. The entire apparatus of anti-wokedom would kick into high gear.
Where was Bill Maher after this happened??? It’s right in his wheelhouse.
Maher: “Uh, new rule! Adults need to stop being afraid of dishware, mmmkay?”
[audience pretends to laugh]
Maher: “I haven’t seen this much fake emotional pain in a hospital since I forced my girlfriend to get an abortion!”
[Maher laughs and slaps knee]
Rickie Gervais on the panel: It’s mental!
[Gervais laughs so hard about his own non-joke that he ejaculates in his pants, then dies of a stroke]
“A plate made me feel vulnerable, harassed and victimized” is everything these people say they’re against. For the smarter and more principled ones, this is exactly the culture of performative vulnerability you’re always complaining about, a result of the death of resilience as a communal value that (I agree) has hurt a lot of young people. For the ones who just like to point and laugh at anyone who says they’re in pain, even better. This has everything you’d look for - except that the identified vulnerable population was not Black people, or Muslims, or trans people, or the disabled. The identified vulnerable population was Zionist Jews, though I doubt any significant number of such people felt vulnerable at all. (This has all the hallmarks of one hyper-motivated individual with influence getting what they want.) And since that was the case, since this switched the game up, since Palestinian kids were the aggressors - you know, by painting plates - and since the left loves Palestinians, the most basic concepts that underlie these people’s self-professed values just evaporated. They had nothing to say.
Who in the world could be a bigger snowflake than someone who feels harassed by an inanimate object? Ah, but “no friends to my left” is the real catechism here. That’s it, that’s all it is. For the vast majority of the supposedly heterodox or dissident space, the only game in town is to mock lefties. Because that’s what gets them attention.
I have spent so much time fantasizing about what would have happened if Israeli kids made artwork that was taken down after Palestinian complaints.
[Jordan Peterson stands in the hallway of the hospital in a suit he made with fabric stolen from a production of Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat]
“You’ll take down these plates over my dead body, woke moralists! Also where is this hospital’s pharmacy, just curious…”
If a Black student group on a college campus said that plates painted by white children made them feel victimized, I would say that they were misguided and suffering under a culture that prizes being vulnerable more than it prizes being tough. I would say that they can’t go their whole lives behaving that way, because the world’s just too hard for that level of sensitivity. I would say that we need to reestablish the virtues of resilience in our cultural education. I would say please, guys, focus on the very real injustices that you labor under. And I’m saying now to whichever delicate Jewish people can’t stand to walk down a hospital hallway because there’s art by Palestinian children on the wall… you’re embarrassing yourselves. Maybe I’m full of shit, always a decent possibility. But I have a set of principles here and I stick to them. Can the anti-woke say the same? Well, we already know the answer - they didn’t say shit when it actually happened.
If you can’t acknowledge that any other identity group that felt vulnerable, harassed, and victimized by some plates on a wall would be ruthlessly mocked by the “heterodox,” then you’re a propagandist. And if you can’t understand what that says about the vast and growing anti-politics that’s speedrunning the transition from being anti-establishment to becoming the establishment, then you’re an idiot. This is how a new witless consensus grows and replaces the old witless consensus. And before you know it, these people themselves will be the exact type of unelected gatekeepers of culture they never stop crying about.
I guess this part is necessary and inevitable.
To the many who would say that I just am part of that world, instead of professing my values I think I’ll just share what I’ve published. Recently, I have written in support of abortion rights here, I have explained why Republican rule is terrible for the working class here, I have advocated for the Palestinian cause here and here and here, I have written in defense of trans people here and here and here and here, I have made a prototypical leftist case against the nation-state here, I have lamented the marginalization of Medicare for All here, I have memorialized our disastrous war in Iraq here, I have articulated why rising government investment in healthcare is humane and necessary here, I have critiqued AOC from the left here, I have made the progressive case for an American policy of open immigration for all Jews here, I have laid out the socialist and environmentalist case for a housing abundance movement here, I have attacked “learn to code” and the idea of the impractical humanities major here, I have criticized effective altruism from the left here, I have explained why capitalism is a fickle game of chance here, I have laid out the poverty of equal opportunity as a goal from a left perspective here, I have showed why people can’t just will their way out of obesity here, I have expressed my deep moral revulsion towards our ongoing use of the death penalty here, and I have defined labor organizing as core to the left’s project here. All of it from 2023 or 2024. Indeed, because of my productivity I have published more purely left-wing words in the past two years then many writers who never write anything that isn’t straightforwardly liberal.
Everything listed above is indisputably left wing, but of course I think that all manner of things I write about are left-wing in substance, just not according to current liberal norms. I left out anything that others would refer to as anti-left for argument’s sake. But it all points towards the left in the end, from my particular definition of what the left is and should be. I often disagree with the progressive media consensus, which is fine because I’m right and they’re wrong. I write about free speech and civil liberties because those are left-wing values no matter what some cossetted 27-year-old Haverford graduate thinks. I wrote for The Boston Globe that identity politics is bad for the left because I sincerely believe that to be true, and I was working in the lineage of Todd Gitlin, Michael Parenti, Adolph Reed, Richard Rorty…. My recent piece about the commodification of queer culture takes as its targets people and institutions who call themselves progressive, but in the service of demonstrating that those people are betraying actual left values themselves. My piece about how easily far-right politics fit in with therapeutic culture is a left-wing argument, it’s just not one that some liberals like. I could go on.
“You can’t be a leftist because you criticize liberals” is the wildest shit I’ve ever heard; the natural enemy of the leftist is the liberal. Not because conservatives aren’t worse - they are worse - but because dragging liberals left is inevitably more realistic and more valuable than trying to turn reactionaries into socialists. Besides, it’s difficult to think of any issues on which conservatives would benefit from me getting what I want. If Freddie was king, the wokest person you know would get 90% of what they want or more. At the end of the day, my politics stand in favor of the liberation of all mankind, and I will keep my own counsel as to what it means to be left-wing. A lot of people in media call me a reactionary because they don’t like me personally and they want everyone they don’t like personally to be a Republican. There are writers who will say I’m just anti-left and editors who will let them get away with it because I am unpopular in the industry and an easy target. But that’s not my problem, that’s their problem.
Finally, I write stuff that criticizes people on the left because it is precisely the absence of harsh, good-faith criticism within the left that has allowed this anti-left tendency to fester and grow. And now here we are.
People hate it when I go nutpicking by complaining about specific tweets, but I think this is a good little jumping off point. The tweet now stands at some 3000 likes and was retweeted by Free Black Thought, an organization I respect that’s produced some good critiques of contemporary racial discourse in the past. But this tweet makes zero sense; it’s transparently meaningless.
The only countries obsessing over their “racism” are those not currently enslaving humans.
Well… yes. Yes, it’s true: the countries that eliminated racial chattel slavery are those which are most concerned with racism, in much the same way that countries that have eliminated tuberculosis are likely to be the ones that are most fixated on epidemiology. This is dog-bites-man, water-is-wet stuff. It’s such a blind stab at being contrarian that it ends up right back at the banal truth. This only makes sense as a remotely provocative statement if you think that the point of racism discourse is to say that Western developed nations are bad and the traditional victims of the racism of those nations are good. But that’s a child’s conception of what we’re up to, here; yes, some poorly-argued “anti-racists” conceive of race that way, but I am under no obligation to join them. (I want to do smart advocacy for racial equality, not dumb advocacy for racial equality.) The core point should be that some ideological and economic and political structures that led to the normalization of chattel slavery in the past still exist and contribute to the perpetuation of racism today. The problem though is that that isn’t contrarian enough, isn’t anti-woke. And this is what I mean when I call this all an anti-politics.
And those countries which are said to be the main victims of Western "racism" are those who are currently the most enthusiastic slavers.
Some of the countries in question are not “said to be” the main victims of Western racism, they are objectively the main victims of Western raism. What is the point here? What does that observation have to do with how we confront the legacy of slavery or the racism of today? Again, fighting racism isn’t about measuring out which countries are the most or least racist, the most or least bad. It’s about understanding what structures exist in our societies that perpetuate both material and social racial inequality, and yes, some of those structures are remnants of our many, many years of forcing Africans into chattel slavery.
This whole thing feels transparently motivated by the guilt-derived-resentment this particular tweeter says he shouldn’t have to feel. Like, what’s the endgame here? Would you hop in a time machine and tell a slave being worked to death on a cotton plantation “Hey don’t complain, your country will be an enthusiastic ‘slaver’ two hundred years from now?” What is the moral reasoning? If we’re being honest, it’s “I feel personally indicted by criticism of racism, so I’m attacking a strange caricature of modern philosophy on race.” And what’s with the scare quotes around the word racism? Is Free Black Thought really aligning itself, now, with people who put the very term racism in scare quotes? The only derivable meaning of putting the word racism in scare quotes is to suggest that racism in fact is not real. But racism is real and it’s as material as it gets. Is the desire to oppose dipshit wokies so great that they’re willing to splash around in the waters of pure racism denialism? I’m going to step out on a limb and suggest that racism exists; racial differences provoke hatred, stereotypes, and inequality and have for centuries. This is empirically and historically true, not disputable. I’m sorry if that’s woke.
Kmele Foster’s comment, meanwhile, is not factually wrong, but is a non sequitur. Yes, slavery is very old, and most human slavery in history has not been organized on racial lines. But so what? “Slavery is old, therefore it should not be taken seriously today” is not a very compelling line of reasoning. Slavery has not always or not even usually been organized around racial lines? Again, true but irrelevant. I don’t understand why the existence of white (by modern standards) slaves in ancient Rome would somehow change how we view either the evil of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which was uniquely pernicious, or how that slave trade echoes into the present era. Never before or since in the history of the world was slavery practiced at that scale across distances of that magnitude, nor produced an identifiable offspring population as consistently oppressed as Black Americans. That is what should matter to us. Slavery was wrong. The plight of Black people today is wrong. The rest is sophistry.
If I had to define the problem here, and in the general instincts of the “heterodox,” I would say that there is too much demand for contrarian views and not enough stuff worth being contrary about. So you get people cobbling together provocation like this. As I said the other day, the dissident media/“intellectual dark web” space has plenty of targets but no purpose.
Consider this piece by Louise Perry.
Perry is the latest to run with the “LGBTQ people who oppose the slaughter of Palestinians are a joke because Palestinians are Muslims” faff. This displays the usual broken moral reasoning, as such:
“Muslims” is an incredibly capacious category (a quarter of humanity) which, while it certainly includes a strong tendency towards homophobia, also includes all manner of people who are technical opposed to homosexuality but not particularly animated about it, or are indifferent to gay rights and gay identity, or are actively accepting of LGTQB people
Even if every last Palestinian was actively homophobic, it would not in any sense suggest that gay people cannot or should not support the Palestinian liberation effort, as one thing has nothing to do with the other. A gay person who feels that the Palestinians are in the right, based on the actual issues in that conflict, is certainly under no obligation to ignore that feeling simply because there are people in Palestine who don’t approve of his lifestyle. I don’t understand what people think is supposed to happen here. Someone says “you know my investigations into the events of 1948 suggest to me that the Palestinians have been badly mistreated and are owed restitution, to say nothing of more recent events - whoops, I’m gay, never mind!”?
Palestinians Muslims are, speaking generally and as a group, secular and moderate, especially compared to some other parts of the Muslim world, especially since late 20th-century extremist groups took power in places like Iran and Afghanistan.
I’m in solidarity with Falun Gong members over their oppression by the Chinese government even though Falun Gong really is a cult and I don’t support their ideology. Similarly, I am in solidarity with Palestinian religious conservatives on the subject of the liberation of Palestine itself, which does not at all require that I accept any of their other beliefs that conflict with my values. This stuff is not hard. I must underline the fact that historically the Palestinian liberation struggle has been a profoundly secular one. The PLO’s secularism was one of its political strengths and part of what appealed to various external powers. Indeed, Israel’s well-documented support for Hamas stemmed in part from the Israeli government’s understanding that casting Palestinians as violent Muslim extremists plays into their hands.
Yes, Gazans voted to elect Hamas - in an election with bad turnout where Hamas was intimidating voters and yet still didn’t win 50% of the votes, an election which (by the way) took place before almost half of the population of Gaza was even born. Fatah was/is, I’m afraid, deeply corrupt, and Gazans had perfectly normal political reasons for supporting the opposition party. Do people even understand that the vote was 44.5% to 41.4% in favor of Hamas over Fatah? In a terribly-designed election system, to boot? Unfortunately, Palestine does not have ideal conditions for a healthy alternative party, given that its people are stateless and dispossessed and have had land stolen out from under them for generations and are subject to periodic displays of mass violence on the part of the IDF. That is not fertile soil for liberal secularism; it’s fertile soil for extremism. And those liberal and democratic Palestinian leaders Western thinkers are always asking for have a habit of being disappeared by Israel. When people say “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?,” you can tell them that he’s probably in an Israeli prison.
Also, not for nothing, but large portion of Palestinians in both sections of the territories remain opposed to Hamas’s rule of Gaza.
Sure - I wish more of the people involved in the liberation of Palestine, in Palestine, had progressive views on individual social rights and other issues. But that’s not what’s relevant when bombs are incinerating children every day. The problem is not that there’s some fundamental and insurmountable conflict between LGBTQ rights and the Palestinian cause. The problem is that the Louise Perrys of the world don’t know anything, have studied nothing, weigh in from a place of total ignorance. Like so many people working in this lane, she’s leveraging burgeoning majority antagonism to social justice liberalism without feeling any particular need to learn, read, or develop her own internally-consistent worldview beyond the usual senseless mélange of empty provocation and opposite-world posturing.
She’s perfectly typical of the whole Joe Rogan spectrum of politics. I don’t particularly hate Rogan, and I don’t think it’s true (or helpful) when liberals simply call him a right winger. But what is true, even more so than when I wrote about him a couple of years ago, is that Rogan will take any argument seriously but is exposed only to right-wing arguments like 80% of the time and so becomes a right-wing figure in effect if not in intent. Joe Rogan the podcast host is welcoming to left guests but Joe Rogan the booker is not, and the upshot is that his show is functionally a right-wing program. And a lot of his fans are fine with that because they are in fact wingers.
Which gets to a question that I want to ask more and more often to these anti-progressives lately: are you sure you aren’t just a Republican?
You get that the accusation of hypocrisy works exactly as well in the opposite direction, right? You get that, right? Tell me you get that. Please.
Hey, let’s check out the front page of dissident, heterodox journal Quillette, which eschews the partisan binary and stands for free-thinking and independence!
Here’s a piece about how pro-Palestinian activists are evil. Here’s an argument against post-colonial views on museums. Here’s a complaint about any modern approaches to gender identity. Here’s a piece about Chinese spirituality that is in fact just another tired anti-communist screed. Here’s a piece about Chinese sci-fi classic The Three-Body Problem that is in fact yet another tired anti-communist screed. Here’s a piece about why UK’s Labour party must avoid any impulse to tack to the left. Here’s a piece about why puberty blockers are bad. Here’s a piece that’s fundamentally about the fact that men are better at chess than women. Here’s - I swear I’m not joking - an anti-woke appreciation of William Shatner.
They host some pieces that don’t have particular right-wing animus. But every argument on Quillette that has obvious binary political valence is a right-wing argument. That’s not being a dissident. That’s not being independent. That’s not heterodox. It’s orthodox conservatism! It’s boring, bullshit, Rush Limbaugh conservatism. Yes, yes, you had a gay friend once, good for you. You’re just a bunch of boring wingers who never publish any pieces that could be considered remotely left-wing by anyone’s definition. It’s simply a far-right publication that tries to brand itself into the lucrative “sensible center” space, which has been obvious for as long as the publication has existed. Its founder, Claire Lehmann, strikes me as a woman who holds uncomplicatedly conservative views but who feels uncomfortable about that for social and self-definition problems. The result is this endless quest to rebrand conservatism as some sort of truth-telling third way. If you criticize the left, you will sometimes be right and sometimes be wrong. (And you’ll be right more often still if you criticize establishment liberals particularly.) If you do nothing but criticize the left without making even half-assed stabs at progressive arguments once in awhile, you’re just conservatives.
If you read the pro-Palestine activist piece I linked to, you’ll see a really common dynamic: Israel has an absolutely dominant hold on support from American institutions, which is what actually matters, but the writer speaks from a bunker mentality, like Palestinian activists are someday going to be able to lead him off to the gulag. Which is of course at the heart of right wing politics - irrational fear.
You could try to point to some third way, some space scratched out in that publication that occupies a genuine alternative to the old left-right binary. But… what does that look like, exactly? What are the parameters of that third way? What are its goals, its values? This is the Nothing Party problem. Yes, it’s true: in the past two decades liberals achieved hegemonic control over certain aspects of our cultural and educational industries, leading to an at-times suffocating sense that they were in charge of everything and there was no alternative to soggy Hillary for Prez 2016 politics. And annoyance at liberal dominance over the communal narrative is very popular, because most people are not liberals and because the average American liberal really is a self-righteous elitist who thinks they’re better than everyone. But “I’m annoyed at liberals” is not a politics. It’s not a platform. It’s not a manifesto. It’s empty; it’s nothing.
Sad fact: social justice progressives think that if you disagree with them on any one thing, you’re their enemy, while new right types think that if you agree with them on any one thing, you’re their friend. And in the long run that’s some really brutal math for social justice.
What’s an alternative to being anti-woke, other than scratching together tuition money to study at Emerson and become a dutiful wokie? (Only $54,400 a year! Don’t you dare try to forgive a penny in student loans!) Well, you know, you could just be a conservative.
Donald Trump has obviously complicated things. I get into debates with people I know about what the post-Trump future of the GOP might look like. I think the outcome of the battle ahead for who gains control of the American right is not at all clear. We know what it has been, for some time now: conservative Christianity, an incumbent-protecting vision of free market capitalism, militaristic nationalism, and a general antipathy to reducing hierarchy in the social order. Fundamentally, it’s an ideological giftbag devoted to the already-comfortable that has caused a tremendous amount of injustice but which benefits from the fact that the already-comfortable have the power. Whatever else is true, though, it is ultimately coherent; this approach to conservatism has proved durable and popular because its various parts interface together effectively and present something like a moral-political interface, albeit an ugly one.
What does Joe Rogan Thought amount to? An admirable defense of free speech, an attachment to intellectual curiosity, a kind of groovy acceptance of difference that collapses as soon as someone makes some spurious claims to personal safety, bullshit bro mysticism, moving to Texas because you mistakenly believe it’s a low-tax state, a belief in ancient aliens, utter lies about adverse health reactions to Covid vaccines, a relentless fixation on the absolutely miniscule portion of the child population receiving medical intervention for gender transition, an attachment to the idea that the real problem in society is the power of groups that are largely powerless, a strange reconstruction of traditional gender norms by people who think we should all take ayahuasca to get past our hangups, love for guns, the belief that we should not only be free to smoke weed but that getting high should be compulsory (it’ll mellow people the fuck out and there’ll be no more violence man trust me), unjustifiable faith in the efficacy of nootropics, total credulity to flimflam artists who claim to be oppressed by The System, a surprising gentleness that curdles into a taste for violence at the slightest push, long lectures about how standup comics are the philosophers of our age….
As an ideology it ain’t much, and it’s internal contradictions threaten to blow the whole thing up at any moment. But precisely because liberals have bent media and the creative arts in their own image, forever dunking on the “meaningless symbols” net while the other side lays it in on the “actual progress” net, this heterodox thing has flourished. I’ve always been amused when Democrats say that socialists have it easy, because we don’t have to figure out how to actually govern; socialism is the most over-theorized governing style in history. (I can recommend some good books to you about what socialists would do in the event that society faced problems that no society ever has or ever will.) But this anti-woke thing, there is no center, and they really have had it easy. All they’ve had to do is to point out the hypocrisies and corruption of liberals, which is shooting fish in the barrel. If we continue going the way we’re going, though, they might actually have to figure out what they believe. And I think they’ll find that, for example, you can’t trust some of the people who write essays about the inherent health risks of “the gay lifestyle” that are prefaced by the writer assuring you that they love gay people. A lot of people who have said things like “of course adults are free to be trans….” will be revealed in time to think no such thing, once in a position of influence. And then you'll have to choose.
You know Blaire White, the conservative trans celebrity? I feel bad for Blaire White. Go look around on “X” for tweets about Blaire White. You have people who call her based but won’t call her “she”; you have conservatives who will call her “she” who are immediately reprimanded because that’s “trans ideology.” I think someday she’s going to realize that she’s aligned herself with a movement full of people who, if they saw her walking down a dark road, would kill her and throw her body in a ditch and would hoot and holler and pound a Coors Light to celebrate. You can call that dark. You’re right. It’s definitely dark.
The problem with liberals (among other things) is that they can’t let go of the flawed logic that suggests that because conservatives are stupid, anything conservatives criticize must be good. This Gizmodo article on the Google Gemini controversy is as insistent in the overuse of “anti-woke” as conservatives have been about the overuse of “woke,” pointing to a deepening addiction to left anti-politics. Gizmodo is doing that because that’s what farms clicks right now. This is a big problem. But fundamentally, as misguided as they often are, contemporary liberals are defining an affirmative vision of politics. They want things - respect and safety for people from marginalized groups, a generous welfare state, a restrained foreign policy, personal social freedoms regarding sex and gender. Mind you, they aren’t willing to sully themselves by trying to win votes from people who can’t identify all the characters on Girls, but they want things, coherent things, mostly good things.
Meanwhile, we have a right-wing struggling to define post-Reaganite conservatism, hamstrung by the serial incoherence of Donald Trump; few people believe that Trumpism will survive Trump’s death, given its paucity of underlying principle. But what will emerge from the vacuum? I’m constantly told that my sense that God & Reagan have largely been left behind by the modern right is wrong, that they still are the lodestars of the contemporary conservative movement. But where is the energy of the not-left right now, really? National Review? The Wall Street Journal? Come on. The foot soldiers of the American right, in the 2020s, are those who are motivated primarily by culture war issues, not religion, not economics, not even nationalism in any terms other than as a partisan football. They care about whatever Dave Rubin tells them to care about The people sketching out whatever liberalism’s alternative will be are motivated by exactly that status - by the status of being other than a liberal. They’ll often even tell you that they aren’t conservatives; they just hate liberals. This is not fertile territory for generative ideological work.
The squabbles happening now are a battle for whatever gets built in the ashes of Trump’s presidency (or presidencies), with the genuinely neo-fascist elements achieving considerable energy but still unable to coalesce as a potential ruling coalition. This is thanks to their extremity but also thanks to the fact that, like a lot of their lefty counterparts, they’ve drenched their political expression in so many layers of irony that even they don’t know how seriously they take what they’re saying. And then you have this large and growing layer of not-right-anti-left types, who run the gamut from usually right on specific points to generally harmless to actively malevolent. What animates them is the increasing vulnerability of institutional liberalism, vulnerability that grows from the peculiar extremist drift of those politics. I know this claim enflames liberals more than almost any other, but the 2010s push of radlib politics into a more and more extreme parody of itself, driven by the fundamentally competitive nature of social media, opened the door for the weirdo curio of the “alt-right” of 2016 to become in time the heaving mass of conservative vitality in 2024. Are you, as a liberal, to blame? It’s not a meaningful question. But one does not happen without the other.
Well, look folks, for that group of people who I know exists who are genuinely motivated to build a better world for everyone but who find the galactic self-regard of modern liberalism suffocating…. It is not sufficient to not replicate the exact shades of idiocy that you’ve been complaining about in lefty elites. You have to do better than Louise Perry, putting together a gumbo of anti-woke cliches that coalesce into nothing but a set of soft targets, fish in barrels that the Elon Musks of the world will reward you for shooting. So many of these anti-wokies have painted themselves into the corner of denying that there’s any such thing as structural oppression of minority groups, which is bad enough. But beyond that, so often their various forms of engagement are just so witless, so relentlessly devoid of meaning or insight. That’s because the bar right now is incredibly low. A decade of professionally and socially-enforced limp social justice politics, a decade of White Fragility and mandatory corporate diversity trainings, has created vast demand for content that comes from the opposite direction. That means that, as it always does, demand has mostly provoked very uninspiring supply. The weakness of so much social justice argument has provoked a seething backlash of even-worse anti-social justice argument, and surely this is one of the greatest tricks the devil has ever pulled.
Please tell Christopher Rufo I said he can eat shit.
Perhaps on your way to once again mocking those silly lefties you might take a moment to wonder how many of the children who made those plates are still alive.
I hadn't heard of the "Gaza plates" controversy until now. But when I clicked onto the Guardian article, I saw that you weren't representing the objection fairly. The objection definitely was not the mere fact that the plates were made by children from Gaza, as you misleadingly imply. According to the Guardian, the objection was that some of the plates, and the accompanying commentary (which was presumably not by the children themselves) apparently made contentious political statements. I quote:
"One plate showed the Dome of the Rock, a site in Jerusalem of religious significance to Muslims and Jews, with a Palestinian flag. Another, featuring the Palestinian fishing industry, was accompanied by a text referring to the shoreline of Palestine running from Gaza’s border with Egypt to Israel’s border with Lebanon. Since 1948, most of the shoreline has been in the state of Israel."
And the pro-Zionist organization which campaigned for its removal said explicitly (according to the Guardian): "We asked for the artwork to be removed because of the propaganda, not because it was by children from Gaza".
You can still say - and I would agree with you! - that even so the exhibition should not have been taken down; you can also say - and I would agree with you here too - that some (not all) of the "anti-woke" are very unpleasantly selective in their anti-wokeness, and if they were consistent they would have mocked the taking down of this exhibition in the way that they mock conceding to sensitivities in other directions. Even if some of the exhibition was one-sidedly political, people really should be able to cope with seeing political art which they don't happen to agree with, and in other contexts the "anti-woke" would see that clearly.
But telling the real story makes it clearer that the hypocrisy goes in both directions: because it is fairly clear (I think) that if (to use your analogy) a Black student group objected to a set of plates made by white children, NOT because the makers were white, but because some of the plates and the accompanying commentary included (e.g.) support for a contentious political program like Blue Lives Matter, then most "social justice" liberals would support the Black objectors, and be very happy to see the exhibition removed. The problem is that "social justice" liberals typically do not see Jews as a minority whose sensitivities deserve to same consideration as is given to Blacks or Hispanics or Asians. If they did, then probably the "Gaza plates" exhibition would not have taken the form it did in the first place, just like we can't realistically imagine a hospital putting up a set of plates with commentary supporting Blue Lives Matter.
The only consistent people are those (like you, I think!!) who would argue that the exhibition should be maintained in both cases. Sadly, they are rarer than they should be.
Many “heterodox” writers would fit with the Democratic party of 20 years ago. They support gay marriage, legal abortion, legal weed, free speech, racial harmony. They view 2024 anti-racism and gender-affirming care as regressive, but they would be on the side of Black and queer people in 2004 discourse (with the possible exception of affirmative action). They like Obama. They hate Bush and Trump. They still think Iraq was a bad idea.
There has been a genuine change in what it means to be a liberal Democrat, and the 2004 Democrats are probably not coming back. But I understand the reluctance to identify as a Republican when you’re unhappy about abortion and hate Trump. (And because people still hate the Republicans from 2004 who invaded Iraq and opposed gay marriage.) One day, it might make more sense for several of these writers to identify as heterodox Republicans rather than heterodox Democrats.
Louise Perry, for what it's worth, would call herself a conservative, and she has a coherent view on her main topics (sexuality and motherhood). I take your point that you can be queer AND for Palestine, but I do think it’s silly to emphasize queerness when protesting in favor of Palestine. I've also seen takes that Palestine is somehow better than Israel for queer people, which is insane.
But Perry’s main point is not about Palestine at all. She uses clashes at pro-Palestine protests to illustrate that progressives “have radically overestimated the willingness of immigrants to adopt WEIRD progressive ideology.” She’s concerned about UK immigration policy and how socially conservative immigrants will affect the country. (The conclusion to her piece is after the paywall.)