Writes Jonathan Chait, in "How Liberal America Came to Its Senses/The period of left-wing illiberalism that began about a decade ago seems to have drawn to a close. The final cause of death was the reelection of Donald Trump" (The Alantic).
I'm not agreeing with the tale Chait tells. In fact, I find some of it hilarious. I'm presenting it for critical discussion. So let's continue. How did America "come to its senses"? Chait writes:
"[B]y late 2021, with COVID in abeyance and Joe Biden occupying the presidency, things began calming down quickly. Trump’s (temporary) disappearance from the political scene deescalated the sense of crisis that had fueled the hysteria. And Elon Musk’s disastrous 2022 Twitter takeover accelerated the decline. By driving away much of Twitter’s audience and suppressing the virality of news reports and left-leaning posts, Musk inadvertently shattered the platform’s monopolistic hold on the political attention economy, negating the most important arena for identifying and punishing dissidents. The aftermath of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel further chipped away at the foundations of left-wing illiberalism by showing how easily its premises could be co-opted by the other side.... I believe that the illiberal-left movement has not merely declined. It is dead, or at least barely breathing.... While the illiberal left is in retreat, the illiberal right is about to attain the height of its powers—and, alarmingly, some of the institutions that once gave in too easily to left-wing mobs are now racing to appease the MAGA movement. A new era of open discourse in progressive America cannot begin soon enough."
The illiberal-left movement needs to be dead because the tables have turned.
पोस्ट्स
५९ टिप्पण्या:
Chait is full of it. What really happened is that these behaviors became norms and were also internalized by all generations except maybe retirees. Institutions and law enforcement and courts shifted more and more resources to not just crushing dissent but preventing dissenters in the door. People learned that something they say or do in Jr. High could destroy their academic and career choices for life. They censored and silenced themselves. This is why protest and acting out seems less necessary for the Left. They already won. The next phase of fascism is just forcing people to approve enthusiastically to more and more lies. Chait’s a smart guy. Does he know nothing about the history of fascism? Fascism is unfolding right on schedule.
I hope it's dead. It seems to have a lot of virility and resilience on campus.
I'm afraid you're right.
Gay marriage turned all marriage into just jerking off. Civil unions would have worked without that effect.
Marriage had been the domestication of grudges, suspicions, fears, needs, desires, and narcissistic postures with which the two sexes regard each other. There's no such effect with gays, and it's been lost from the word.
Go to the website called “Academia.” It lists all published academic articles. You can read one for free, read unlimited anbstracts, and pay a few cents for a month or so of access.
Randomly read ten articles on speech, free speech consequences, censoring the internet, hate speech, hate crimes, transgenderism, controlling “white supremacy,” whatever.
This isn’t fringe stuff.
You will come away deeply shaken.
Chait briefly mentions Covid, but he isn't giving it enough credit. Like 9/11, the Covid 2020 was a society-changing event. The illiberalism he worries about is nothing compared to forced vaccinations and totalitarian shutdowns that killed innumerable businesses.
Tina nails it. The Biden-Harris administration was pushing even more funding to the censorship-industrial complex. Althouse just blogged about the $300M Biden gave to Reuters at al to smear Musk. Every allegedly Western country enthusiastically joined into the international censorship efforts. That crazy Scary Poppins broad brazenly tweeted her schemes to get around the First Amendment!
Jonathan Chait is a slithering chameleon who shouldn't have a forum to publish in mainstream media after the bullshit he has shoveled out onto the American people.
Liberalism is a philosophy of divergence. It has been progressive or monotonic in a conventional fashion beyond its viable threshold. Abort.
He's probably on the right track with how it started--the left thought its forever rule was inevitable and was emboldened to let us see its real self. It got more extreme over time because that's just how people are--if you see yourself as someone who pushes the envelope (as all good activists do), then you have to keep pushing. Avant Garde can't admit that it has become Garde.
Chait is also on the right track about how it went into decline (not yet ended, but it's the beginning of the end). The mass of the public was never on board with any of it; they were shamed and bullied into going along with what they disagreed with. They liked being able to provide for their family more than they hated staying silent in the face of claims that white is evil and men can be women.
The election of Donald Trump made it clear that most people don't like woke and now we no longer have to hide our feelings about it.
I don't think it does. On campus, just as in the rest of life, there is a silent majority who don't support it but aren't willing to make fighting it their lives as the activists make pushing it theirs.
Most students just want to go to class and learn something. They hate the activists as much as we do.
Biden et al saved people billions in trillion dollar redistributive change schemes/sinks. That was after the temporary boosts that he enjoyed with reopening the economy, immigration reform, ethnic Springs, etc. reset the GDP and other statistical perceptions.
Lukianoff: One of the most ridiculous examples of college censorship occurred in 2007 at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. A student who was working his way through college as a janitor—a student in his fifties—was reading the book Notre Dame versus the Klan by Todd Tucker. It’s about the defeat of the Ku Klux Klan when they tried to march on the University of Notre Dame in the 1920s. The cover had a picture of the Klan rally that attempted that march, a famous historical photo. And he was found guilty of racial harassment because the book cover made another employee uncomfortable.
Well this event happened in 2007 and it seems to be a good example of what people would call a woke response. This was also an institutional response. I found this this quote because I was looking for the quote, I think is from Greg Lukianoff of FIRE, that says something to the effect that the kids on college campuses never favored restrictions on free speech but the administration did however that changed sometime around late 2000's early 2010's. While I wouldn't say that marks the start of Wokeism, it certainly seems like an important inflection point. In fact it seems to me that Wokeism must have predated the existence of FIRE as it seems to be a response to it.
"By driving away much of Twitter’s audience and suppressing the virality of news reports and left-leaning posts, Musk inadvertently shattered the platform’s monopolistic hold on the political attention economy, negating the most important arena for identifying and punishing dissidents."
There are so many untruths packed in one paragraph. Musk didn't "Drive away" anyone! The liberal/left boycotted his platform because he wasn't approved by the liberal/left power elite. They wanted a leftwing echo chamber and Musk wanted free speech.
And twitter never had a "Monopolistic Hold" on anything. The liberal/left tried to destroy twitter (and still is) but Musk has deep pockets and is forcing them through lawsuits to stop the advertising boycott.
Anyway, the real driving force behind the Left not pushing censorship harder, is that they already have a huge censorship machine in place and they've normalized de-banking, lawfare, kicking people out of college and firing them for saying "the wrong thing". Its a time for a breather. And the Zionists have realized that too much leftwing wokeness leads to support for Gaza, so they're pulling back, but the rest of the liberal/left isnt. They just voted out of power. Temporarily.
Sorry, I wish I'd read Tina's post before I wrote mine. She says what I did, only better.
It's been a month and Chair waddles out to say it's not only merely dead, it's really most sincerely dead.
It is not just campuses. All of corporate America, bar a few blue collar industries, force this on their workers. I personally know two longtime (Conservatism Inc.) workers, really productive but really conservative guys, who have been fired and replaced by Kochbot open borders leftitarians. My husband stopped looking for academic work when a male interviewer hit on him. He knew he couldn’t report him: heterosexuals may not report homosexuals for sexual harassment at law schools, or any other school. I lost the last academic gig I was offered when the grant officer merely found out I was the VP of the local GOP. In a military town, in a military school, with a Rangers Camp. I had to tell her because she was ranting about how hard it must be for people like me to be surrounded by right-wing scum. She used the word scum. I was gently trying to spare her more embarrassment. I had already started the work. She started shaking, slammed down her books so hard our coffees spilled, and stormed out. I never got paid.
So it goes and goes and goes. In the 1980s, at IBM, my dad would complain about a black co-worker who didn’t shows up, didn’t do his job, and who treated his peers with contempt. My dad, a very mild-mannered guy who grew up in a biracial orphanage with a black roommate, later black neighborhood friends, and not a racist bone in his body, showed up for work one day, and despite decades of loyalty, seniority, far superior intelligence, and likability, this guy was suddenly his boss.
He came home and had a heart attack.
It’s been over for decades.
Elon Musk’s disastrous 2022 Twitter takeover accelerated the decline [of "the sense of crisis that had fueled the hysteria"].
He accelerated the decline of the sense of crisis that had fueled the hysteria. What a disaster!
Musk inadvertently...negat[ed] the most important arena for identifying and punishing dissidents.
He bought Twitter upon seeing the Babylon Bee kicked off the platform. The purchase was in order to negate the most important arena for identifying and punishing dissidents.
It’s far too late.
Transgender marriages representated a milestone in Diversity, equivocation, and implosion (DEI) exercised with liberal license. Well, that, and Obama's celebration of albinophobia in parades. Also, Democratic legalization of queer sexual orientations (e.g. pedophilia, incest, polygamy, sadomasochism, homosexuality) under the euphemistically titled "Respect for Marriage" act. Human rites, feminism, racism, etc. were of course imperative needs ro sustain social progress.
Eat modestly and keep on exercising, Mr. Hardin. I for one would miss your bracing contributions.
No. I'd say your 8:03 post is an expanded and excellent take on the situation. Chait has a bad habit of mixing up cause and effect or assuming agency where none exists. Your second paragraph and the oft-neglected fact that the Left took Musk to court and FORCED him to buy Twitter after he almost backed out bear constant repeating to keep lies like Chait's from gaining a hold on the public.
Have you ever heard any of them express regret for that mob action?
Jonathan Chait has always been a slimy little weasel nursing his high-school and college grudges about not being one of the "cool kids" (he's still not).
What happened in 2013-14 was that internet behavior started bleeding through into real life because younger and younger audiences came into contact with it through their iPhones, especially on the most poisonous platforms like Tumblr and various fan "boards" for entertainers and TV shows.* "Journalists" then amplified that behavior by calling up clueless Boomer bosses who didn't understand the internet and panicked. This led directly to a stampede to punish people over idiotic things like halloween costumes, old jokes, and singing along with revolting rap songs (if repeating the lyrics are so vile, why are they allowed on the airwaves?) and indirectly to Millennials being utterly moronic about believing anything that they see a bunch of people repeating it on Tumblr or Twitter or now, I guess, Bluesky.
(The same way that older generations were moronic about believing whatever they heard over the radio, Boomers are moronic about believing anything they see on TV, GenX is moronic about believing whatever we see on a personal site like a blog, and GenZ is moronic about believing whatever is on a video)
*The little "Kony the Warlord" panic in 2012 was the beta-test for the bigger engineered panic/frauds like Saint Trayvon of the Blessed Skittles (chosen entirely because everyone assumed "Zimmerman" was a white person), culminating in the great George Floyd panic/fraud of 2020.
Ha. Thank you. I have two and a half advanced degrees and my last job was stocking shelves overnight at a Kroger, where the co-workers were not all knee-knockingly insane, except one, who had a relationship with her dog and also her landlord.
ALWAYS wash the soup cans.
And Elon Musk’s disastrous 2022 Twitter takeover accelerated the decline.
The only disastrous thing about the Twitter takeover was the loss to the Democrats of the ability to censor opposing views. Chait is a moron.
I'm in corporate training now, and it's all woke, our case studies featuring stock photos of mixed race couples, Indian doctors, Hispanic hairdressers, same sex couples, black female IT nerds, white male homemakers lol.
So far no trans though. With any luck Woke Corp will stop short of that.
Couplets "=" couples. Men making deposits in sperm banks, women herded on womb farms, and human rites to relieve "burdens" of State, really. Liberalism has been a progressive condition beyond its viability date.
No pop-up pictures in the training manuals, I guess.
I'm curious who Chait thinks is the "other side" in the disputes over Israel and Gaza. There would be some accuracy is saying that the modern academic establishment--thanks to the professors of the recent past--is not morally or intellectually equipped to deal with political disagreement within its ranks.
Gay marriage didn't progress as a cause. It was forced upon the people by a cabal of lawyers dressed in robes. A very anti-democracy sort of process. You know, like discovering that the Reconstruction Congress made up of Puritan Republicans passed the 14th Amendment to protect guys and transsexuals. The Supreme Court has caused all of America's internal crises.
The forces of "illiberal liberalism" are just taking a breather and re-strategizing. DEI didn't just occur to the average person as a reasonable set of ideas that deserved a try. The woke movement was manufactured.
Some of those "Disinformation Studies" departments on university campuses will have to be renamed. Some of those Pentagon agencies will go dark for a while, or hide in the EU.
The Deep State will have to find another way to crush Musk and X. They will (they are working hard on it).
The Nazgul were unleashed and have been called back. They are still there, however.
The good news is that people like Musk and Mike Benz have the ear of the President*, and the President isn't shy about getting his points across. So far so good. A very long way to go.
*President-to-be. As opposed to the absent Resident.
Given some of the things Chait has said in the past I don't think he is saying this to try and cover up the existence of Woke ideology (It definitely still exists, though it is diminished from what it was 2 years ago.) I think he is trying a talking past the sale strategy, to try and get folks on the left to start believing that wokeism is dead so they start acting that way. A lot of the persistence of Wokeism isn't because of widespread support but because of momentum. People have grown to expect certain responses to situations. And so even if a person wouldn't have agreed with the outcome that person will go along with another getting fired for saying something verboten because that is what is expected to happen. I think Chait is trying to change that emotional response so folks on the left no longer expect a woke response.
I always start reading Chait expecting him to be reasonable and get just a couple of sentences in and go, "Oh. No. The reasonable guy's name is Haidt."
And after all the hand-wringing about Twitter post-Musk, it remains almost exactly 50/50 in terms of users' political ideology. I suppose unless it's at least 80/20 left, it is a "disaster."
You know what, I was thinking of Haidt when I opined that Chait might be trying a talk past the sale strategy.
"cultural norms in elite American institutions took a sharply illiberal turn"
"How did America "come to its senses?"
Simple Answer:
the MAJORITY of students going to college are now female.
When the majority of a group becomes female, that group loses power.
That is now happening. College degrees are worth less.
The same has happened to the Democrat party. The Democrat Party is now the party of single professional women. Single professional women that abort their children (and castrate any surviving ones).
Meanwhile.. More and More (and More (and More)) foreign students are going to our "elite" universities. Most of these foreign students do not support ANY thing like an American Ideal.
Shouldn't surprise anyone that Democrats lost. What SHOULD surprise (and disgust) people, is how high the vote "count" is for these losers. There are NOT that many cat ladies here.
And Elon Musk’s disastrous 2022 Twitter takeover accelerated the decline.
"Disastrous"? For whom?
By driving away much of Twitter’s audience and suppressing the virality of news reports and left-leaning posts
By allowing those not of the far left back on Twitter, Musk broke up the left wing echo chamber.
FIFY
Musk inadvertently shattered the platform’s monopolistic hold on the political attention economy
Musk destroyed the Left's ability to dominate public discourse (see Hunter Biden's laptop)
negating the most important arena for identifying and punishing dissidents
The only words in there that do NOT show Chait's stupidity and cluelessness
Chait's analysis is not better or different than AI hallucination. Humorous though. The real issue is that the left told themselves they were morally superior to opponents starting in the 1960s (racial and sex equity/affirmative action; Vietnam; Watergate; guns; abortion, etc.) and refused all discussion and debate. They purged the conservative left, such as Joseph Lieberman, and put Joe Manchin in the corner. They got high on their own supply.
Liberalism was promoting divergent thinking in an era dominated by conventional religious, patriotic, ethnocentric people. When that background is gone, when society is no longer dominated by such people, what role is there for liberalism? When liberalism or progressivism dominates, what do they do about their opponents, the unenlightened ones? What else but ridicule, dismiss and try to suppress them?
Right now, liberals are going to be fighting against Trump and there will be plenty of opportunities (real and imagined) for sinking back into the old role of the defender of dissent and heterodoxy. But what happens when liberals and progressives are in charge again? Probably a return to the hunting down of their opponents. I don't see universities or foundations actually encouraging opposing viewpoints.
Love Haidt, hate Chait?
"You know what, I was thinking of Haidt when I opined that Chait might be trying a talk past the sale strategy."
I'm not the only one, I guess.
You are right. I will erase my comments above.
Early liberalism benefited from being the middle way between right (landowners and industrialists) and left (socialist workers), so it could advocate tolerance of opinions on both sides and in the middle. We don't have that tripartite division that 19th and 20th century Europe had. We have a very polarized two-way division. Chait sees himself as standing in the middle between the right and the campus left. One can wonder, though, if he really wants more freedom of opinion, or if he wants the radical campus left to get out of the way so that liberals can more effectively slug it out with conservatives.
"A new era of open discourse in progressive America cannot begin soon enough."
Is Chait saying he's going to shut his lying mouth?
"The era lasted almost exactly 10 years."
They fired the rodeo clown in 2013.
And no, Jonathan, it's not dead. You and others are just trying to take a negative issue for the left off the table. Its not going to work.
You can count on Chait for codswallop. But if there is a new ascendancy of the right, let's be mindful of what Dennis Prager frequently said. The Right believes that the Left is either wrong or mistaken; the Left believes the Right is evil. There will be a sorting out of positions over the next four years.
He wants the "illiberal left" to be dead, but it isn't and can't be until it is rooted out of academia and media. All we've seen so far is the public stand up and announce their opposition. But remember this has happened before and all the left did was retreat to campus for 15 years to recruit more and then try again.
It remains to be seen how academia can be reformed, but my suggestion is to use the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which makes racial and gender discrimination in education a criminal offense.
Skeptical Voter: "The Right believes that the Left is either wrong or mistaken; the Left believes the Right is evil."
Time to update the cliche. Any leftist who watched all the consequences of their policies in the last four years must be presumed to intend those consequences and therefore be evil.
JSM
"Elon Musk’s disastrous 2022 Twitter takeover"
Disastrous for whom? Not Twitter, that's for sure.
That is what I call a Steaming Pile of Chait.
It's Christmas Break. Expect a great deal of sanctimonious outrage, acts of civil disobedience, and loud howls from US campuses from January onward. Don't expect much learning to go on..
Another way in which Chait is full of shit is in his invocation of "chaos". No way is that something that Trump did, rather it was the refusal by far too many of Chait's side to acknowledge that Trump was, legitimately the president of the United States.
And that stupid p**** hat protest -- It may not have occurred until the day after the inauguration, but was planned well in advance. IE common before Trump had done anything official in any way that a person could object to.
No, what they were really protesting was that we deplorables were reprehensible enough to have voted for this guy and that was an outrage. I lost friends over this, and not in single digits.
It's straight-up Ch8-speech.
I mix up Chait and Haidt too.
Tina—thank you for your astute comments. Crossing my fingers that your conclusions are wrong.
Haidt’s actually a sincere, nice guy. Almost pulled off his blinders now. I predict he’ll be a John Bircher within five years.
Besides, they have a better record on racial integration than the DNC or the RNC.
I deleted my prior version of this comment lest I italico'ed the thread.
I think he is trying a talking past the sale strategy, to try and get folks on the left to start believing that wokeism is dead so they start acting that way.
Was this the post where we were discussing permission structures, or was that a different one? I guess I could see a scenario in which Chait was trying to create a permission structure for members of the moderate left to reject Wokeism, in the name of returning to electoral relevance. I'm not convinced that's what he's doing, but it's at least plausible.
... And then, after I posted my original badly formatted comment, I saw the follow up comments in which the original author, among others, said he might have confused Haidt and Chait - and yes, it's a lot MORE plausible that Haidt, rather than Chait, would talk past the sale for the benefit of Democrats!
Furthermore: Chait's statement that the illiberal left is in retreat but the illiberal right is ascending, with influential people rushing to bend the knee to them, seems to me to be an anchoring strategy: all the illiberalism you will see going forward, dear readers, will have emanated from the right, see??
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