Why Pose Thought Experiments About Fake Versions of History?

it's true: if you misrepresent people's behavior, it's easier to defend that behavior

would you believe it’s the same person?

Via Matt Yglesias’s mailbag, I see that Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns, and Money got his fanfiction on recently:

In a just universe, the sheriff who threw someone in jail for 37 days over a clearly constitutional protected Facebook post he didn’t like would be at least as famous as the Oberlin undergraduate who politely told a student reporter that it was kind of insulting to call a pulled pork sandwich a “banh mi,”

That would be very cutting, if in fact that was what had happened. It is not.

Here on Earth Prime, Oberlin student activists and those at many other colleges explicitly attacked colleges under the theory that simply to serve food from “marginalized” cultures was cultural appropriation and therefore wicked. Banh mi is of Vietnamese origin, the poorly-paid Oberlin cafeteria staff who planned and executed that meal (and all manner of other “international” dishes) were not from the home culture, QED. The only moral meals that college cafeterias can serve are, like, mac & cheese and dinosaur chicken nuggets and perhaps schnitzel, it’s all a little confused. These woke volkisch rules, where people are only allowed to consume cultural products from their own culture, can be hard to parse, which is unsurprising considering that cultural appropriation is a bullshit made-up problem that has no earthly connection to actual social justice. Indeed, you could hardly pick a better target for the fundamental incoherence of the concept than banh mi, a Vietnamese dish made with French baguette, which is a good example of the glories of the cultural mixing that become impossible under a strict “no cultural appropriation” regime. For the record, “campus food isn’t very good” - which is the heart of “this banh is just a pulled-pork sandwich!” - is a) a consumer complaint, not a political demand and b) the sort of thing you were once expected to just deal with as a college student. But times change.

And were Oberlin campus activists really polite? Reader, they were not! Scott Lemieux does not mention that in fact Oberlin’s little spasm of rich-kid activism culminated in a 14-page document that, among other demands like being paid an hourly wage for doing activism, called for the firings of specific faculty based on the political views of those faculty. That seems slightly less than polite to me! Lemieux can’t tell you the truth about that because he and his blog are ostensibly in favor of academic freedom, political diversity on campus, and tenure. And there is simply no way to square those commitments with support for student activists who said, explicitly, that they had the right to get faculty fired based on their political opinions. Just like there’s no way to hold those commitments and defend the Amherst student protesters who demanded that students who criticized them face formal punishment by the university, or the Wesleyan students who fought to defund the campus newspaper because it published an op/ed by a student who criticized BlackLivesMatter, or the UC Santa Barbara students who demanded the right for students to refuse any reading if it violated their own sense of political propriety…. Those things are unmentioned, by Lemieux, because he can’t defend them. Thus, a fantasy version of the past.

Unlike anyone at LGM, I have spent thousands of hours of my life organizing, starting when I was 17, in campus activism, anti-Afghanistan and Iraq war activism, graduate student labor issues, and tenants’ rights. And one of the many benefits that experience has blessed me with is the understanding that it’s insulting, not supportive, to defend activists when they do stupid shit. I’ve written many times before about my experience in the early Iraq years, and what I’ve tried to stress is how closely righteousness and idiocy lived together; we were entirely correct about the central issues of controversy, history validated us again and again, and also the movement was forever blowing itself up in the stupidest possible ways. What I would have liked, and would like in the future, is for activists to do good things and not dumb things, to make smart demands and not dumb demands, to do politics well instead of poorly. And, indeed, there are plenty of good campus protests out there; recent campus activism in protest of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza has in general been quite salutary, and I’ve said so many times. Whining about the cafeteria food and calling it cultural appropriation in a way certain to receive negative press was dumb and I’m confident that many of the people involved in it back then are embarrassed about it now.

The Lemieux post is right about the conservative assault on free speech, as far as it goes; jailing Larry Bushart for 37 days over a Facebook meme was a straightforward abuse of power, and the settlements won by Bushart and others targeted in the post-Kirk crackdown represent real, if modest, accountability for that abuse. As Yglesias points out, a number of prominent free speech voices absolutely have criticized that situation, rather undercutting Lemieux’s complaint. I share the disgust with the sheriff’s actions, but then, what did you expect? Myself, I hold left activists to a substantially higher standard than I hold conservative officials seeking political vengeance, and I’m troubled by anyone who doesn't. That MAGA sheriffs and university administrators behaved censoriously in the aftermath of Kirk's death is dispiriting but entirely unsurprising; censorship and bad-faith invocations of free speech from the right come as no surprise. The more demanding question is whether our side has learned anything, whether what we’re doing is smart and righteous and effective and a good use of resources. MAGA is hypocritical and evil? You don’t say.

Which brings me to the second issue: Lemieux uses the banh mi anecdote as a quick, dismissive shorthand for campus overreach, gesturing at the absurdity of that situation without reckoning with the larger damage of the era. The censorious campus politics of the 2010s, the pile-ons, the demands for termination, the institutional capitulations… these were not a minor embarrassment to be waved away with a punchline. They were, instead, a genuine strategic and moral failure that alienated potential allies, corroded norms of free inquiry that the left needs as much as anyone, and handed the right a durable and genuine grievance. People who care about the left should be naming that failure honestly, not papering it over in the service of tribal point-scoring. “At least we’re not the Perry County sheriff” is a standard too low for me to accept. Sorry.

It’s a matter of respect, you know? Me, as a twenty-year-old activist at my zero-prestige state commuter school organizing against war and imperialism with a bunch of single mothers and activists with full-time jobs, I would never, ever have expected anyone to pull punches if I did or said something dumb in my organizing. I mean, that’s the whole point, right - you do and say things designed to get the world’s attention in the effort to share your vision of justice. We wanted to be taken seriously, and the heart of being taken seriously is being held accountable. Lemieux and a lot of other liberals who want to reduce campus activism to fodder for culture war don’t extend that basic respect to the activists they condescendingly defend. And you know, those Oberlin students really biffed it. They insisted that those extravagant demands they had given to the school’s administration were not subject to any negotiation - which predictably strengthened the administration’s hand considerably, giving the school’s president the perfect pretext to say “Well if there’s no negotiation, then the answer is no.” Lemieux thinks that ignoring the immense strategic and messaging failure of that approach is a way to support those campus activists; I think it’s the opposite. I think, in fact, that true respect requires us to look back and say to them, boy, that was really fucking stupid, guys.