My Freedom 10, Your Freedom 0
Harper's: Where the elite meet to bleat.
It’s always necessary to avoid making these newsletters little more than tirades against the online offense of the week, and surely this week’s topic is the very definition of a tempest in a Twitter teapot. But it’s so tone-deaf, so complete a botch-job of what should otherwise be a completely uncontroversial position, and such a pure and perfect example of elites not just being out of touch but utterly failing to understand why they’re so out of touch, that it bears a little examination and placement in the context of the current moment.
This morning, the fine folks at the venerable Harper’s magazine released “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”. Little is said about justice in the brief text, or open debate, for that matter; little is said about anything, if we’re to be frank. And yet somehow, the magazine’s publisher, John R. MacDonald, found a hundred and fifty people to co-sign it as if it said anything noteworthy or meaningful. The majority of these people are what are called ‘public intellectuals’ (R.I.P. irony, 424 B.C.E.-2001 C.E.), and they would like it known that they are against…well…some kind of suppression of free speech. The letter, at a lean 532 words, informs us that “our cultural institutions” (which ones?) are “facing a moment of trial”. America: truly a land of contrasts. With a brief and entirely context-free nod to ongoing uprisings against white supremacy and police brutality, we are told that there are “wider calls” (than what?) for justice and equity “not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts”. This is a strange claim—who, exactly, Is calling for greater inclusion in philanthropy, whatever that would mean?—but the reason for it will become clear soon enough.
This “new set of moral attitudes” (a curious way to describe antiracism) has an unintended consequence, however: it “tend [sic] to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences”. There is then some hand-waving in the direction of bad man/inventor of racism D. Trump, followed by the dire warning that “the free exchange of information and ideas” is “becoming more constricted”. There is “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism”; no details are provided. There is “a tendency to dissolve complex policy issues into a blinding moral certainty”, which is the kind of obfuscatory bafflegab that always comes from people explaining why they’re about to screw you. The whole remainder of the paragraph is terrifying-sounding charges with no examples given. Who are the editors fired for running “controversial pieces”? What are the books “withdrawn” (What does that mean? Withdrawn by who, and for what reason?) for “inauthenticity”? Who are the journalists “barred from writing on certain topics”, and what are the topics? What professors have been “investigated” for quoting what “works of literature”? Who is the researcher who was fired for circulating what “peer-reviewed academic study”? What “clumsy mistake” was made by what organizational boss that led to their ouster? There is nary a detail, nary a name, nary even a link; we’re all supposed to be in on this ridiculous conspiracy, or at least know it when we see it, like pornography.
Since no concrete information or even vague reference is provided—possibly because doing so would provide details of provocations that most people would find perfectly suitable to rebuke—it is left to the reader to imagine careers being ruined, lives being shattered, and entire industries being thrown into disarray by this illiberal McCarthyism. Our journalists and artists, we are told, are becoming so risk-averse at this witch-huntery that they can no longer experiment, fight back against power, or produce their best work. (So that’s why!) It’s the same old bullshit about ‘cancel culture’, portrayed as our era’s greatest bogeyman, when one would be hard pressed to think of a single example of anyone who has lost their job, their wealth, their position, their privilege, or their power for these reputed crimes against heterodoxy, let alone gotten sent to the gulag or stood against a wall to face a hail of bullets. It’s all so vague, but it seems to come from a place where our entire intelligentsia cowers in fear of censure and exposure rather than what is likely the consequence of all this mooning about: getting made fun of on the internet.
Let us be honest here. Even the most strident defenders of free speech ought to recognize that, at the present moment, we have a lot more to worry about than some half-smart public figure getting dragged for putting their foot in their mouth for the 500th time. The economy is worse than it has been in a century; unemployment is beyond crisis levels; the environment is becoming inhospitable to human survival; we are facing a global pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands; right-wing nationalism is rising at a rate unseen since the 1930s; the police are acting like a criminal gang; and late-stage capitalism looks to be on the verge of a collapse that will take large segments of society down with it. Both American political parties have little to no interest in or capability of doing anything about these problems. Anyone who thinks, with all this going on, that the situation most worthy of becoming a signatory to an open letter about the State of Things is some well-off, famous member of the chattering classes getting yelled at for racism, transphobia, or general shit-headery is wasting everyone’s time, including their own.
Free speech, indeed, is under threat; our president treats the press like some shit he found smeared on his shoe, but his predecessor waged a war on whistleblowers unprecedented in the modern era, and the government has made state surveillance of its citizens a major priority for the last two decades. In most American states, you can be barred from many forms of employment for participating in a non-violent boycott of the oppressive government of Israel. The majority of our news media—increasingly in the hands of a small number of oligarchs—conceives ideological diversity as occupying a spectrum between far right and center right. You can be fired from your job for just about anything because of at-will employment, but it is practically a guarantee that you will be terminated if you take part in organizing or advocating for a union. And the police have spent the last month brutalizing and murdering people who engage in the right to protest. But does any of this obvious infringement on the concept of free expression get mentioned by our signatories? It does not.
Which is not to say that everyone who signed this document is a poltroon or a phony! Many are quite admirable people—including leftists, civil rights activists, advocates for diversity, and authors of important works on race, history and economics. (Each of whom should know better.) But others are clowns, frauds, and fools looking to cover their own asses. The biggest sore thumb on the list is Bari Weiss, whose entire career stemmed from her early attempts to, yes, censor academic voices who were critical of Israel. Signatory Noam Chomsky has been used as a cudgel against those who find the document cowardly instead of radical, but Chomsky is no stranger to showing his ass in defense of free speech, having famously written the foreword to a book by a notorious Holocaust denier, as if the whole project of protected expression would have fallen apart if he didn’t leap to the defense of an anti-Semitic creep. J.K. Rowling appears on the list (as does her agent; a lot of the signatories are awfully cozy) as part of her ongoing project of shitting all over her legacy because people clown on her for being a thin-skinned billionaire transphobe—curious, as a handful of others who signed on to the letter are themselves trans.
It’s a real rogue’s gallery: Semites and anti-Semites, Muslims and Islamophobes, conservative columnists for the New York Times and slightly more conservative columnists for the New York Times. Indeed, figuring out the common thread among the signatories took me a moment. They tend to be on the older side, but some are young; they are mostly white, but some are not; there are a good number of libertarians, but also a handful of self-identified leftists. But after a few hours of research, the commonality lit up to my eyes like a strip of fluorescent lights buzzing and clicking to life. Of the 150 people who signed the letter, almost all of them have significant academic achievements. They may not all be rich (though many of them are very rich indeed); they may not all be famous (though only 9% of them don’t have a Wikipedia entry, a telling statistic all its own); but almost every single one is among the elite of this country in the fields of—well, I’m sure you can remember all the way back to the second paragraph—higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. An astonishing 46% of them hold degrees from Harvard or Yale; 67% are degreed from Berkeley, Cambridge, Columbia, Chicago, Cornell, NYU, Oxford, Princeton, Rutgers, Stanford, UPenn, and the London School of Economics. Many are from extremely well-connected families, including Boston brahmins, a Rothschild, and a DuPont. The publisher of the article is the grandson of the man who funded the so-called “genius grant”. There is nothing wrong with any of this attainment; it’s just that it makes them a very specific class cohort, and that’s what makes it laughable to hear them complain about the wholesale destruction of America at the hands of woke-scolds and PC thugs. It is safe to say that very few of these people have ever suffered what ordinary working-class people would consider a career consequence, and so their complaints come across as whiny rather than noble. They are people used to telling others what to think and to do, and having now experienced the reverse, they don’t care for it.
It is true, as they say, that intolerance “invariably hurts those who lack power”, but what would they know about it? Most of these people have been on the upside of power their entire lives. It is also true that “the way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion”, but that’s exactly what’s happening to the people they evasively allude to as victims—certainly no one is “trying to silence or wish them away”—and they seem none too happy about it. It is definitely not true that having justice and freedom is a “false choice”, or that one “cannot exist without each other”; there are millions in this country who are free, and there are millions who receive no justice for the abuse that they experience at the hands of those free people—that’s what all these protests are about, which should be obvious to anyone who doesn’t live behind ivy walls and glass-paneled balconies. Most working people receive more or-else orders—from bosses, creditors, teachers, cops, landlords, and administrators—in a week than any of these people will encounter in a lifetime. They live in a world without tenure, without financial cushions, without connections, without family money, without any process of appeal. They are the ones who need the voices, the advocacy, and the protection of our public intellectual class; but instead, that class has decided to throw its weight behind its own in defense of their right to speak not truth to power, but nonsense to the powerless. They’re the ones who get culture, and we’re the ones who get canceled.