Nov 13, 2022·edited Nov 14, 2022Liked by Noah Smith
I won't go so far as to say that DeSantis _isn't_ a closet authoritarian in disguise, though he does seem like a normal human being (even if as cynical, nihilistic, and power-hungry as the rest of the GOP leadership), so he could be shamed from launching a coup/autogolpe (Trump has no sense of shame) and probably isn't driven by the deep insecurities Trump has (that doesn't allow Trump to ever admit losing).
I would note a few things, though:
1. We were saved from a red wave mostly due to Dobbs. For Dems, thank goodness, the dog finally caught the car as the cynical conservative moneyed elite strategy of using evangelicals as foot soldiers has bitten them in the ass with Dobbs (and before that with Trump).
2. Trump is the best thing going for Dems right now. If you're a liberal, you have to hope he doesn't die. The GOP has a major Trump problem that they simply can't solve. If Trump is the GOP nominee again, the GOP would get rolled in 2024 as normie suburbanites (who have the numbers) just hate MAGA chaos agents. But if he doesn't win the GOP nomination, he'd launch a 3rd party bid that'd wreck the GOP. Even if he stays on the sidelines, we can count on him to endorse extremists who'd do badly in the general in any purple/blue state and bash GOP candidates who are attractive to swing voters but doesn't bend the knee to Trump.
Don’t forget the indictments! This is playing out like the end of the Wizard of Oz. Not sure if Trump is the Wizard, Wicked Witch, or a combination of both. Now that the Republican elite has a new horse that the big money donors can stand behind, things are going to speed up.
I think Youngkin cracked the code last year of what we are going to see from Republicans going forward. Ignore Trump, appease MAGA with culture issues, and persuade moderates with good old Ron Reagan political charisma. Not sure if DeSantis has the charisma to pull that off in a national election but Youngkin does. If they team up, the Democrats better up their game with who they nominate.
I’m optimistic, too. After over seven years of this reality show, maybe the 2024 election cycle will be about issues and a vision. Whoever sways the moderates wins rather than racing to the extreme. Just like it is supposed to be. We’ll see.
Here's the crazy thing. If Trump loses in 2024, think he goes away then? Not a chance. Trump will be an extremely loud part of republican politics for the rest of his life.
Trump might threaten to run 3rd party, but I do not think he actually does unless someone hands him the keys to another cruise ship (after he's sunk the GOP's). He does not want to lose in public, and he would almost certainly lose if he ran outside of an established apparatus.
Richard, unfortunately for you and Noah, DeSantis shows that Marx's formula of history has it backwards, at least in the U.S. In America, history repeats itself as farce, then tragedy.
DeSantis is just a capable Trump. If Trump was the Mao of magas, DeSantis is the Deng Xiaoping, who can turn idealism into political goals.
Another thing to note with populism in the Anglo-Saxon world:
In 2016, both the US and UK were shocked by populist uprisings. If Trump has managed to win a 2nd term in 2020, even with the huge and deep polarization in the US, he may have managed to bring the GOP's popularity to the depths that UK Tories are at now by now (or at least that Dubya was at during the GFC) as you probably could count on Trump to do something very illogical and unpopular in 2 years.
Also worth noting Brian Kemp (the non-Trumpy Republican) pretty throughly crushed a very liberal Stacy Abrams, but that didn’t carry over to the Trump-backed Walker, who underperformed Kemp by about 200K votes (or 10% of Kemps total).
That’s a lot of split ballots. And shows me many voters don’t support extremism in either direction. Hopefully the parties listen and give us better candidates in 2024.
There are two different Trumpisms you’re conflating here: “Trumpism” as in gleefully incompetent and autocratic (eg Hershel Walker) and “Trumpism” as in economic populism+culture warrioring
Sort of fair, but then some of those distinctions (and I’d say there are more still) are exactly my point. Essentially, there are less “extreme” versions of what Trump was doing that will have broader appeal and would be good policy even.
UGH! You say, "DeSantis fills progressives with rage, and he very well might turn the country red again, but he’s not going to try a coup or make American foreign policy subservient to Vladimir Putin." I say he has demonstrated a wily capacity to out flank domestic legal norms and constraints to pander to the worst bigots among us. He is far more dangerous than DJT because he is wiser, more strategic, and experienced in the levers of power. No stability here. Fascism on the way.
In fairness, Noah DID say he was a centrist-liberal, I think with a harsh emphasis on centrist.
He’s not left-wing or progressive, never claimed to be. Sadly many centrists don’t seem to care that Trump’s ideas have been normalized among the Conservative ideology; including his subservience to Russia and hatred of non-Europeans. Then again, what else can you expect from people with no skin in the game?
He's more strategic, but I'm not sure he'd actually hold up well in a national election. I get strong Scott Walker vibes with that dude. Recall that Scott Walker was a darling of conservatives before crashing and burning in his Presidential bid.
I live in Florida and I'm not sold DeSantis can succeed as a National Candidate. He's short and awkward - which hasn't hurt him in a Florida Media Ecosystem that's been designed to prop him up but he'll have to overcome these disadvantages when he has no choice but to face the National Media.
It's also a win for basic decency. Just as their mocking the attack on Paul Pelosi was a reminder of exactly what Trumpism is, the prediction-defying way so many voters empathized with Fetterman's struggles is a very hopeful sign for where people are at.
May I suggest a way out of that endless Democratic fight about whether to emphasize economic or social issues, which all too often has degenerated into demonizing rich people versus demonizing white people? If we have to demonize someone, how about abusive people? Trump is both rich and white, but neither is the problem with him.
Hispanics tend to be more socially conservative and are ripe for the Republican party. If the Democratic party could learn to talk about their proposed programs in such a way to demonstrate how they align with conservative values (and many of them do!), then they would be more successful at winning Hispanics over. I talk about how to use values in talking about programs in my book, Persuade, Don't Preach, which is based on research by Robb Willer and Matt Feinberg.
"This will especially come in handy in existential crises like a possible disputed 2024 election. It will now be far more difficult for Congress to use the electoral college count to approve an alternative slate of Trump-backed “fake electors”, even if some Republicans would want to do so. At least one or two representatives would probably defect in that situation. "
The Congress that votes to certify the 2024 election will be composed of the members elected in 2024. The new Congress takes office on Jan 3, 2024, and the electoral count happens Jan 6, 2024. Congress could change the Jan 6 date (but not the Jan 3 date). But as the law currently stands, this election doesn't determine who votes on the electoral certification for 2024.
Watching on from the UK I have to say I was relieved to see Trump chopped down to size.
From a European perspective, we need the US to stay the course and maintain its position as a beacon for democracy. On the edges of Europe a dark shadow lurks waiting for NATO to show weakness.
I am happy with the election results but never was concerned that democracy was in danger. If people think an election result was invalid, what are they supposed to do? Deny what they think? Al Gore did the right thing. He accepted the result. I do not know how he feels but if he feels that he really won, I have no problem with that. I think it is despicable to claim that a person is unqualified to be elected because they think they lost an election unfairly. If that is the rule, everyone in sports needs to be disqualified. Is there a single person in sports who does not believe they were harmed due to a bad call by the officials? January 6 was a disgrace. Wanting to improve election integrity is a good thing.
Mr. Silber, I think you're conflating several very different elements of election denial. It may be that former president Trump and some close to him sincerely believed the election was stolen from him. It's hard to tell, but possible--certainly Trump was told by many people he had previsously trusted that this was not the case, but if you see him as incapable of buffering his feelings with reasoning then his self-deception may be honest.
But the problem with Trumpist election denialism isn't Trump, it's two audiences that he appealed to. One was a popular following that chose to accept his claim that the election result was invalid in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary: court rulings, GOP officials' acknowledgments, reports debunking claim after claim made by Trump and his team. Politics can't funtion if it's treated as religion--with acceptance of election results guided by faith over reason and evidence; that is precisely what is most dangerous to procedural democracy. These voters aren't asked to "deny what they think"; they're being asked to question what they think in light of copious amounts of evidence offered.
The other audience are GOP politicans and media figures who understood perfectly well that the election was not stolen, but judged it in their personal or professional interest not only to accept Trump's claims but to broadcast them and undermine the evidence offered against them. They aren't being asked to "deny what they think"; they're being asked to reveal what they think.
As for being unqualified for election to office, in the case of Trump the argument is not that he is unqualified because he believes he won in 2020, it's that he is unqualified due to the fact that he either holds that belief because he is unable to acknowledge overwhelming evidence that he lost or because he is lying about what he believes and risking the intergrity of the national electoral process for personal gain. The denialists who ran in this cycle are unqualified because they are either unable to recognize the baselessness of Trump's claims, despite overwhelming evidence, or they are lying about what they believe and risking the intergrity of the electoral process for personal gain.
If a sports figure disputes a call that causes her to lose, and maintains her view despite being shown a clear instant reply, and further attempts to disrupt subsequent games by claiming they are tainted by the "mistake" she has been shown was not in error, then there are indeed grounds for disqualifying her from future competitions. I don't believe there is a single sports figure who has ever done anything analogous to what former president Trump has done.
I partially agree with you. But it is not true that there is no evidence of fraud. There is. I personally think that Biden won. But I know many who do not and it is not just because Trump said that. They have looked into the data. I know for example that in New Mexico, we have a huge number of registered voters who do not reside at the location that is on their registration. This was determined by many people taking the time to visit those locations. In some cases the locations do not exist i.e. a parking lot. In other cases there are a very large number of people (over a hundred) registered at the same location). It appears than none or just a few of these voters voted. So it does not look like there was a problem in New Mexico. There certainly was a potential problem.
Many watched the film 2,000 mules. There has been some critique of this film. But I think it does show that ballot harvesting did occur but perhaps in only a few places. Our systems allow fraud to occur. In New Mexico you are not even allowed to produce ID at a polling location. You state your name and address and if there is a registered voter with that name at that address who has not yet voted you get to vote. Does that make sense?
I agree with you that the main problem is Donald Trump. But it does not seem to be right to me for a large number of people to be disenfranchised because Donald Trump is unscrupulous or mentally ill. He was not on the ballot.
I doubt that we will every know exactly how many candidates who said that Trump won in 2,000 believe it versus how many say this because a large percentage of their participants believe this.
If you reread my post you will see that what I said was that democracy was not in danger. I did not say the so called Election Deniers were correct. Candidates often lie and voters are often wrong about things. Are you assuming that everyone who voted Democrat was correct in their assumptions about what Biden plans to do and what the implications are of his policies.
That is never the case. If voters were correct we probably would not have such a wide spread in the stated views of candidates. There is no requirement in the U.S. Constitution for a voter to be correct. And if there was, who would decide?
I do not believe that President Biden was correct that candidates who claimed that the Trump won in 2000 were a threat to democracy. And I am not sure that he believes that they were. He might or he might believe it was effective politics to claim that. I think he is a lot smarter than Donald Trump.
I do not like this form of politics. I do not think it is healthy. I am not happy about a lot of the views of many Republicans and I am not happy about many of the views of Democrats. But I do not think that the views of either Party are a threat to democracy. But demonizing people for their views is. People should be allowed to express their views.
I think this is a complex issue and not unusual. Finding ways to discredit candidates is part of the process. It is not new. But I do not have to admire those who engage in it.
But I agree with you that no President has ever done anything as bad as Donald Trump did on January 6. But he has done good things also. In particular he bought my parent's property which allowed them to retire. And the intermediary treated my parents very well. But if I had been in a position to do so I would have exercised Amendment XXV and removed Trump from office.
I wish we did not even have to have this discussion. But unfortunately we do and it not your fault or my fault that it is a topic of discussion. It is nice however, that we are allowed to have this discussion so we both should be thankful for that.
Thank you for the detailed reply, Mr. Silber. You have clearly thought about this in detail.
There is a fundamental difference between there being exploitable flaws in an election system that individuals may take advantage of and massive fraud committed by one party sufficient to alter outcomes of races decided by many thousands of votes over multiple states. No election system could possibly avoid having potential for abuse: isolated cases have always occurred and always will. It is an unfortunate byproduct of the complexity of the democratic electoral process in countries with many millions of voters. To selectively exploit this inevitable fact in order to overturn outcomes you do not like is the threat to the legitimacy of electoral democracy we are discussing.
In my state a few years ago we had a well publicized case of vote fraud by an individual. It had no effect on the outcome of the race, but garnered attention because the person was the Republican Secretary of State. No Democrat in my Red state suggested that this was a sign of a GOP conspiracy or that the outcome (a GOP win) was illegitimate.
Ballot harvesting, where legal, can be abused, but election officials understand this and there are multiple checks to detect it. The only known case sufficient to affect results in recent history was in a Congressional race in the North Carolina 9th District in 2018: a new election was ordered by the GOP-majority state Board of Elections. The harvesting was done by a GOP political operative and had resulted in a narrow GOP voctory. (The same operative had almost certainly affected earlier outcomes in two GOP primaries.) So far as I know, since the days of big city political machines that largely ended in the 1970s, when systematic vote fraud of various kinds was often alleged, the NC case is the largest case of systematic vote fraud uncovered. Individual cases of fraud--impersonation, submission of ballots for dead relatives, non-citizen voting, etc.--occur in very small numbers in every election cycle, and to the degree I've tracked them, they split between the two parties. The most publicized case of this recently has been in The Villages, a retirement community in Florida, where those convicted of vote fraud who had party registrations, just three people, were Republicans. I have, however, seen reports of small numbers of individual cases in Texas that divided between parties.
Now to build on these inevitable flaws, which have no clear partison pattern, and to allege that election results are being massively distorted by a Democratic conspiracy involving international conspiracies of voting machine manipulation, ballot harvesting, truckloads of premarked ballots, and so forth, is to set out on a path that can only delegitimize *any* voting system. Look at your own statement. You cite evidence friends have told you they found that indicates potential problems, hypothetical abuse of New Mexico's procedures, and the evidence of a film that has been systematically debunked in such excruciating detail that nothing about it is reliable other than the fact that the filmmaker's willingness to build a case on false evidence has been conclusively demonstrated. (If you know who Dinesh D'Souza is this is completely unsurprising.)
Donald Trump has built a political career on sowing doubt. He fabricates facts, claims that he's heard them from others, and spreads them with inflammatory rhetoric. He dismisses everything that does not fit his own narrative as "fake" and uses his invented TV persona as a brilliant businessman to persuade millions of followers that his version of reality is true and what evidence shows is false, that their doubts can be accepted as certainties, and that those who dispute them are "so evil."
"Election denialism" is built on this framework of massive distortion. Ask an election denier what would change their mind. They will inevitably say something like "clear evidence that there was no fraud"--doesn't matter if they are true believers or pretenders. The only thing you can, in fact, do is to show them that every instance they assert was fraud was, in fact, either fictitious or misinterpreted (there is no way to actually prove an absence). That will not change their commitment to election denial--they will either fall back on yet more bogus reported cases or on an assertion that their "gut feeling" remains the same and is a perfectly legitimate basis for their belief. They are making faith-based claims, and their faith is in Donald Trump or the election-denial wing of the GOP.
Of course, voters are "entitled to their opinions," but if this is the way opinions are formed then we are moving towards a competition of Democratic and Republican religions, where the latter includes the dogma that every Democratic electoral victory in a contested race is the result of fraud. If that's the politics American voters want, they have every right to it. If you go down that road far enough, it's likely we will no longer be allowed to have this discussion, and we'll have very little to be thankful for.
Why is it a problem for election integrity if the registration system has the wrong address for people? In any case, I’m not sure you’re describing any problems with the system - where do you think homeless people put their address as for registration if not a parking lot? And wouldn’t the hundreds of residents of a dorm or apartment building all put the same place as their registration address?
The New Mexico system seems like it would be *possible* to abuse, if you try to steal someone else’s vote by declaring their name and address. But then when that person shows up to vote and is told they already voted, do you think they’re not going to leave an official complaint? If this were actually happening more than a few dozen times, this would be all over public records and the news.
If your solution to a problem that gets a few dozen votes wrong is something that prevents a few hundred people from voting, then it is against the spirit of democracy, which is about getting the most accurate representation of the will of the people.
2020 had massive voter turnout by American standards - about 62% of voting age Americans went to the polls. A typical mid-term election, like this one, is about 50%.
The big challenge to American democracy is not that the wrong people are voting but not enough eligible voters are voting. Most of the developed world is typically high 60s to 80% of voting age population and higher percentages of registered voters. Much of the voter fraud is people applying for absentee ballots of people who are not voting. That becomes much less possible if there is a high probability that those people are voting.
As a naturalized US citizen, I will point out that the only voter ID that proves somebody is eligible to vote is a current US passport proving they are an American citizen and have not renounced their citizenship (a possibility if they show up with a US birth certificate or naturalization certificate). Only about one-third of Americans have a current passport, so it would definitely limit the number of people voting, mainly people in the top 50% income bracket. I haven't heard any politicians proposing limiting voter ID to current US passports, even though that would be about the only way to get real proof they are eligible to vote. It would eliminate too many of their voters. Even Real ID drivers licenses don't work as voter ID because they just say your identity has been verified, not that you are a US citizen - a permanent resident can get a Real ID driver license.
The voter ID requirements currently being pushed can be easily met by non-US citizens (I had several of them when a Resident Alien). However, non-US citizens who vote illegally can be deported if discovered and convicted of voter fraud which is a felony. There was no way I was going to try to vote when I was not a US citizen, even though it would have been easy to do. Very few people are going to take that life-changing risk so the voter ID issue is largely a red herring to suppress lower class voters who often don't have the ID documents being demanded.
For me, the fight shouldn’t be about “democracy,” that’s a given --it’s about expanding democracy. In 1929 US population was 121M. From 1927-1929 there were 5 women in Congress. From 1929-1931 there were 9 women in Congress. From 1929-1931 there was one Black member of Congress. The average member of Congress in 1929 represented 278k people. The population of US now is 331.9M people. The average member of Congress represents 763k people. Is there any wonder so many people are angry because the feel unheard, unrepresented? Is it any wonder that money talks, bullshit screams at people on Fox? 1n 1929 Congress capped the number of representatives at 435. Article 1, Section 2 of the US Constitution states there shall no more than 1 member of Congress for every 30,000 people. So by the express terms of the Constitution we could have 11,063 members in Congress. I’m not saying 11,000 is the right number (or the wrong number) but the Constitution contemplates much more representation than we have today. Simply by expanding the numbers on membership, you dilute the voices of the MTGs. You limit the impact of gerrymandering as more districts would have to be drawn, thereby exposing further the perniciousness of the practice. If you gave a small budget to each Comp Sci and Geography Dept at each State University, you’d easliy get maps drawn if there was no regard for party affiliation. It would cost much much more to control Congress by money. Party organization would have to be wider and deeper, requiring more reach and participation. I’d argue that 11,001 is the right number. But it should start at 1191, which is about 2.75 times the number now, simply adjusted for population growth. And I’m not so sure the 435 number, so so good even then -- these are the people who set the stage for the Great Depression. More voices, participation needed.
One thing I would add is that what the U.S. ought to be doing is redrawing state boundaries rather than congressional boundaries.
Borders are arbitrary things. There's a national border, of course, but the word nation is both a map (government and institutions) and a territory (people with a shared sense of self). At subsidiary levels, like states, there isn't anything sacred about boundary lines. You can move from one state to another and not have to worry about learning a new language or converting currency. You also don't have to worry about a governor declaring war on another governor and intrastate warfare.
There's a more cohesive geographic unit that would actually be a better basis for governance: the metropolitan statistical area or the consolidated statistical area (the latter is when two MSAs touch and have commuting relationships at their edges).
If you decide the New York City CSA (which stretches to Connecticut, New Jersey and northeast Pennsylvania) should be a state and partitioned off from the rest of New York state, you have about 25 million people. And if 25 million people give or take were the basis of state populations, the U.S. would return to the original 13 states (actually 14).
If you want to keep 50 states, you'd divide populations into about 6 million residents apiece. This would mean partitioning places like New York City, L.A., and Chicago but having about 50 economically functional governments. (As it stands today, we have very wide GDP disparities by state and a very hamfisted way of redistributing wealth.)
We've seen in China recently how much worse it is to have a dictator than an autocracy.
I don't have any hope that DeSantis will be "less authoritarian" than Trump - especially after Trump has shown what is possible and was cheered on by the party for it.
But I do think it could be a healthy sign for American democracy if the GOP can manage to elevate anyone other than Trump in the presidential primary. It'd be healthier if it were not someone seen as a successor to the MAGA movement, and it'd be healthier if they didn't win the ability to enact their authoritarian plans - but a key thing is the decentralization of power within both parties.
GOP strategists and donors are excited about DeSantis but it remains to be seen whether GOP primary voters will follow.
Pre-midterms primary polls show Trump ~45% to DeSantis ~25%, I'd be highly surprise if those numbers flip among ideologically committed but not politically savvy primary voters.
If Trump maintains an unassailable lead in early primary voters, I predict GOP strategist will chicken out again and bow down to dictator Trump because they "see which way the wind is blowing".
I want to emphasize here that presidential primary polls this early are not always a meaningful predictor of what will actually happen in the primary (remember Jeb?) - but that won't stop it from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Left appears to have given up Enlightenment liberalism and embraced post-liberal wokeness. That means intersectional group victim status trumps individual rights -- Kendi is explicit about this. If Patrick Deneen is correct, liberalism is already dead. Perhaps the Democrats were wise to move on instead of playing Weekend at Bernie's with its corpse the way the GOP is.
The mainstream Right is still trying to find its head with both hands after the postmodernists detonated a truck bomb in the middle of the Declaration of Independence. Turns out Locke's "self-evident rights" aren't so self-evident to the postmodernists, and the Right can't figure out how to prove they exist without God, who no one really wants to invite back to the party. He was a real killjoy, and the guests were all secretly thrilled when Nietzsche killed Him off.
Only the very far-Right is willing meet the Left on its own post-liberal terms. Ibram Kendi says we should all see race first; the white-nationalists say the same thing. They only disagree about which race ought to be on top. Fortunately, the Nazis have little mainstream following, but they grow stronger as the Left keeps pushing race essentialism. If you thought the Christian Right was scary, just wait until you meet his brother: the non-Christian Right.
For those of us who actually liked Enlightenment liberalism and would prefer to live in a broadly liberal, tolerant society built on Judeo-Christian philosophy... we're hosed. Deneen's right; Humpty Dumpty isn't going back together.
Sorry. Noah, but I don't share your optimism. In David Reapoi's terminology, most people don't seem to know what time it is, and the hour is far later than many realize.
Adam, the words mean things whether you know their meanings or not.
"post liberal wokeness” - the belief that group outcomes are more important than individual rights, a direct repudiation of John Locke's theory of individual moral worth via natural law.
"race essentialism” - a belief that the most important attribute of any person is their race and should dictate their social and economic outcomes.
"Leftist race essentialism” - a belief that black people are uniquely oppressed by white people in American society and thus deserve to be treated differently because of that oppression. (see my comment on Kendi above.)
“Intersectional group victim status” - a hierarchy of oppression in which those who have greater levels of oppression, by being members of multiple oppressed groups, like race, sex, disabled, poor, fat, etc...
"postmodernism" - a belief that objective reality is unknowable and what we believe to be "the real world" is actually just a shared delusion constructed by the language we use to describe the world.
All of these ideas are in common use in the academy, govt and NGOs today. The vocabulary may be foreign to you, but its not to those in positions of power. Your society is permeated with these ideas. I hope that helps.
"Post-liberal wokeness is the belief that group outcomes are more important than individual rights, a direct repudiation of John Locke's theory of individual moral worth via natural law."
Therein lies the problem. None of the people you group into the "post-liberal wokeness" category actually believe that individual rights are at odds with group outcomes. What they argue is that individual rights have historically not been respected for social and racial minorities, and it is this complex history of socioeconomic conditions, rather than genetic differences (yuck) that accounts for massive disparities in outcomes. You cannot just make up a phrase like "post-liberal wokeness," assign it a definition you came up with on the spot and then straw-man the position of others in order to group them under this label.
"Race-essentialism is a belief that black people are uniquely oppressed by white people in American society and thus deserve to be treated differently because of that oppression."
1. Brian, that is not the definition of race-essentialism. Race essentialism is the belief that racial groups form discrete genetic categories; that individuals of the same racial category are biogenetically similar; and that different races are fundamentally different. It has nothing to do with believing minority groups are or have been oppressed.
2. Putting that aside, black people have in fact been uniquely oppressed by white landowners in American society, and the consequences of this oppression did not magically go away with the abolition of slavery or the 1960s civil rights movement. This is what self-identified 'antiracists' such as Kendi et al believe. There are real consequences of racist policy making that has had a direct impact on the lives of millions of people.
Now, you are free to disagree with the solutions proposed by the likes of certain antiracists such as Kendi et al and propose alternatives. For example, I tend to agree with Noah that race-based affirmative action is no longer the best way to address education and employment disparities, and that affirmative action should be class-based instead. That said, there is no doubt that inequalities these "woke scholars" describe are indeed real, and are primarily consequences of historical and contemporary policy making.
"Post-modernism is a belief that objective reality is unknowable and what we believe to be "the real world" is actually just a shared delusion constructed by the language we use to describe the world."
Post-modernism is not a single "belief." Postmodernism is an intellectual movement characterised by an attitude of skepticism toward the "grand narratives" associated with modernism, scepticism to notions of absolute epistemic certainty, and emphasis on the role of ideology in maintaining systems of socio-political power.
In any case, what you have presented here is simply not what most post-modernist scholars believe. Post-modernists don’t reject truth, such as the statement 2+2=4. Or claim that reality is completely unknowable. Rather they argue that how we understand, describe and interpret reality is a reflection of our identities, values, and socioeconomic conditions rather than having intrinsic properties that can be understood in isolation.
For example, one’s definition of a chair maybe a seat for one person with four legs. Travel to a different part of the world and their image or definition of a chair may look completely different because of their culture and history.
Another example would be the word *woke.* Initially, being woke was an African American vernacular adjective that referred to being aware of systemic inequality and injustice (particularly the legacy of racial discrimination which has been a big problem for decades there). Now, the word is used almost exclusively by conservative western politicians and their supporters to signal their disdain for any person or organisation that has socially progressive ideas.
Essentially, 'post-modernist' scholars argued that our understanding of the terms we use change depending on the social and cultural context, and thus cannot be used to refer to universal, timeless and unchanging truths. Leading us back to our previous example, no 'post-modernist' intellectual would reject the idea that two sticks and two sticks make four sticks. But our decision to label these figures "two" and "four" and our use of a base 10 system is something that is subject to our unique historical circumstances.
I think it is more beneficial to actually engage with people's ideas rather than throwing around poorly defined buzzwords. I hope in your Civics class you encourage your students to do the former.
You're entitled to your views of postmodernism, and it's clear yours are less negative than mine. You were the one who said these were buzzwords without meaning though.
Mr. Villanueva, I have little use for the approach Kendi is known for--although I think his book on anti-racism is actually far better and more nuanced--basically liberal rather than illiberal--than his subsequent public writings and proposals like the Dept. of Antiracism (!). But I think it's a gross error to say that his ideas represent "the Left." Very few Democrats in office have adopted Kendi's illiberal positions, and those that have tend to have little influence on party policy, except in the area of economic policy, where their influence comes from their social democratic orientation (with Bernie and Warren as faction leaders), not from anti-racism. Of course, the Democrats continue to address issues of racial discrimination and fairness, but this has been the party's tradition since at least the mid-1960s. Is there a single Democratic figure who has endorsed the creating a Department of Antiracism? Do you really foresee one doing so?
There is certainly a small caucus of progressives in the House who foreground Kendi-like positions on racism and associated gender issues, and woke progressives--like white nationalists--are overrepresented in digital publications, on social media, and on elite college campuses, where their influence is particularly strong.
Your original formulation illustrates what I mean: "The Left appears to have given up Enlightenment liberalism and embraced post-liberal wokeness." Then you go on to equate "the Left" with "the far-Right." What I think you should be writing is "The woke Left appears to have given up Enlightenment liberalism and embraced post-liberal wokeness." I think any analysis of political outcomes on the Left over the past couple of years will demonstrate that the largest segments of the Left are very strongly resisting post-liberal wokeness in its policies and choices of political candidates.
I want to second Kenny Easwaran's point that your equation of white nationalist and the woke Left positions on race is an error. Woke ideology does indeed foreground racial identity (far too much, in my view), but it does so primarily in support of an imagined path to a non-discriminatory society, in the belief that because there are no intrinsic disparities of essential ability between races, a society without the traces of past racism or current racist orientation will have roughly equal levels of accomplishment among people of all races. "Approximately" isn't a weasel word; it's a statistical factor. White nationalists no longer call themselves supremacists, but if you read what they write (both the blogger-level stuff and the "intellectual dark web" magazines) they are straightforward about their race essentialism and their belief that "white Christians of European descent" are intellectually, temperamentally, and morally superior.
If the illiberalism that Kendi and those who celebrate him have fallen into is dangerous, the last think we should be doing is raising it to a caricature of the Left and the political party that represents it. (For years I maintained the same position with regard to the Alt-Right and the GOP, and then Rand Paul called Biden's inauguration appeal against white nationalism an attack on Republicans, Fox News mainstreamed replacement theory, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Green joined Nick Fuentes' annual Alt-Right conventions, Tommy Tuberville equated Blacks and criminals, our former president smeared his own former cabinet minister with a racist slur becuase she is of Chinese descent . . . )
Everyone talks about Jan 6, but it was actually the Jericho March a month earlier that showed me that the crazies on the Right were more numerous than I imagined. Eric Metaxis and MyPillow Dude openly comparing Trump to Jesus! What the heck?
However, every major cultural power center in America is currently held by the Left: academy, media, major tech, occupational licensing boards, professional associations, unions, and K-12 ed. There are loons on the Right and they need to be countered. But in terms of societal influence, the loons on the Left (who are obsessed with Critical Theory / group identity politics) are capable of inflicting far more damage.
"it does so primarily in support of an imagined path to a non-discriminatory society, in the belief that because there are no intrinsic disparities of essential ability between races, a society without the traces of past racism or current racist orientation will have roughly equal levels of accomplishment among people of all races."
I agree with you 100% on this. This is what MLK believed too. However, Kendi's approach effectively uses these percentages to intentionally handicap one group so that another can rise. I know you don't want to see him that way, but there's no other way to interpret the idea that white people need to stop talking and just listen, or stand aside -- because they're white. Since writing Antiracist, he's also embraced intersectionality, which takes us near Harrison Bergeron territory. (That's a great short story if you don't know it -- Vonnegut figured out the endpoint of intersectionality and equity 50 years ago.) This sort of pitting of groups against each other is not only anti-liberal but runs the very real risk of creating a white identity backlash the likes of which we haven't seen in most of a century.
Let me give you an example from my own life. I have never felt affinity for white people as a racial group. Are there advantages that I derive from being white, absolutely. They are the same advantages that the racial majority derives in every society on Earth. However, race consciousness is simply not part of my being; I grew up on MLK and believed him. I still do.
(On a side note, I also derive advantages from being male, and being tall, but I am disadvantaged by not being particularly attractive, being overweight, and having a slight lisp. Perhaps those of you who embrace postmodernism can tell me how I rank in the intersectional victimization Olympics that increasingly characterize Western society.)
Back to my my anecdote... After the summer of Floyd, there were a number of charities that sprang up to help rebuild the city blocks that had been destroyed by the "peaceful protests". Nearly all of these were to "help rebuild BIPOC businesses". That was the first time in my life that I ever felt affinity for "white people" as a racial group: who was going to help white (non-BIPOC) business owners rebuild? Joe Biden's attempt to prioritize farm aid by race did the same thing to me. The AMA's attempt to favor minorities in monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID did too. In the last 2 years, I have been made increasingly aware of my identity as a "white" person, in a way that I have never felt before. And it was the Left that pushed me that way, not the Right. I realize this is a single anecdote, but if it's happening to me, it's happening to other people who also are also too afraid to talk about it. Whites (re-)developing racial affinity is bad; it takes us further from MLK's vision not closer.
You may be correct that I am underestimating the danger from the Right. But I believe many of you here underestimate the danger from the Left. I want to believe they are well intentioned, but they are driving this society into a race war. Most of the average, working-stiff, 30 year old, white guys will only embrace ethno-nationalism if the Left pushes them toward it and the mainstream Right simultaneously refuses to defend them. But so far, that is the pattern playing out.
All of you are certainly welcome to your opinions. I didn't respond to the other commenters here not because I didn't think they made good points, but because I think back and forth arguing in blog comments isn't that productive. Overall though, I think y'all are seeing Kendi / CRT / intersectionality through rose-colored glasses.
I'm going to start by echoing some of what Richard has already written, Mr. Villanueva. I agree with him that you're overestimating the influence of the identitarian Left (which is a good term--especially since those folks use it, and "identitarianism" is very much a creature of European white nationalism).
What I see as your overstatement seems to me to derive from two issues: you're using an all-or-nothing lens to measure progressive influence in cultural institutions, and you're attributing all activity that aligns with aspects of the "identitarian Left" with the agenda and activism of that group.
For example, looking at your claim that "every cultural power center in America is currently held by the Left," let me speak to a few of your examples. My perception has been that in academia, identitarian/intersectionality values are represented very strongly in the humanities and some social sciences, moderately in STEM disciplines and some professional schools (e.g., journalism, social work), and not at all in other professional schools (e.g., engineering, business, medicine--the big dogs). In K-12 education, the politics of the school district is the primary determinant of how "woke" the public schools are--the county I live in is rather starkly divided blue/red geographically, and the two school districts and teachers union locals are moderately-woke/not-a-bit-woke. Those are local observations that I think align with a national situation. As for media, thinking of TV I guess you've got some pretty wokish stuff on Lefty cable channels like CNN and MSNBC, and some pretty out white nationalism on Fox and OAN. And when it comes to corporate organizations of all types, I think wokism is almost comical: company after company contracts to have their workforce exposed to DEI training, and the Robin DiAngelos who lead the thought reform struggle sessions can't get over how little impact it actually has. It seems like political theater. (I don't mean to say that DEI/implicit bias training can't be useful, but the woke incarnation of it is so over-the-top that it has no impact. No one of any color is going to respond well to being treated as a stereotype.) A lot of the cultural impact I think you're thinking of is simply corporate America responding to the fact that while progressives are not a particularly large group of consumers, they are on average a particularly wealthy group of consumers.
So where you're picturing domination I think what you actually have is a mixed bag.
And when it comes to activity on the part of schools, corporations, and so forth, I think you're conflating liberal action and progressive action--they share many features. For example, affirmative action in hiring is a liberal program with a long history. Whether you approve or disapprove, the fact that affirmative action hiring programs continue to be practiced by universities, businesses, etc., is simply not an indication of CRT influence. So far as I can tell locally, there has been not much change over the three-plus decades I've lived where I do, and this is in a city with not a single elected GOP officeholder: a problem in itself--the real influence of progressivism here concerns road/traffic policy (woke bicyclists rule).
On two points I agree with you completely, both related to backlash. (1) Woke rhetoric and the way race-conscious policy is being applied in a time of income inequality and social dislocation is marginalizing white men, particularly low-income young white boys and men, and that's unacceptable. (2) These trends do indeed create the danger of a race war because the groups that feels most excluded is easily moved towards racism and is well armed. And ironically, the chief targets in any race war will be low-income Black people, who are *not* overall a woke group--the real "race" conflict is between subgroups of relatively low-income rural white people and relatively high-income urban white people. Militia-backed white nationalists are the ones who are intrinsically dangerous; the identitarian Left is, to my mind, dangerously foolish. (I'm sympathetic: I was a dangerously stupid antiwar activist in the '60s, and have had to observe the negative consequences since Nixon's election. I'd rather not see that movie again--or a worse one, since guns were so much rarer back then.)
As for Kendi, when people talk about his book, all I ever hear is that it tells us that if you're not an antiracist you're a racist. Well, Kendi did say that, and it resonates with the old union motto that if you're not with the union you're against it--you can make sense of the idea, even if you don't agree. But for me the unexpected thing about the book, which I had to force myself to read, was that the overwhelming headline was, "Don't stereotype people because of superficial chatacteristics, like race, sex, or gender affinity" . . . or height, or lisps, or looks. It's a terrific message, delivered with great nuance via a powerful personal narrative, and I'd really like to know where that Kendi went, and where this illiberal identitarian intersectionalist using his name came from.
You know, this is really a very rich topic, and we could go on like this for days. I just saw your response to Richard--you're way overstating the university situation, at least based on my experience, although I understand what it must look like given specific cases that make the news. We're not likely to agree on specifics, but I think we actually share a basic point of view. [A late edit: I hadn't read down to your comments on trans issues when I wrote: I'm not going to follow your--or anyone's--unnuanced take on that.] If you want the last word I'll leave the field to you.
Actually, I think people are saying you’re overestimating the power and influence of the identitarian Left in all those areas you cited. Count up the number of folks who agree with Kendi and those who agree with Thiel in tech, for instance. Care to take a stab at who you think has more adherents?
It’s easiest to count up reps in Congress, where the mainstream moderates far out number the identitarian Left on the Dem side but it’s the authoritarian Right who outnumber mainstream moderates in the GOP.
Richard, stop counting and look around. Your world has completely embraced postmodernism.
Kendi charges thousands of dollars to speak at executive retreats. HR departments throughout the Western world are running unconscious bias training where people confess their white guilt. Universities are holding racially segregated graduations. DEI statements (effectively Leftist loyalty oaths) are now required for all essentially all university faculty hires. Speakers with broadly liberal (both Enlightenment and JS Mill) views are routinely shouted down at campuses and the administrations do nothing. BLM flags are encouraged in classrooms but whoa to the teacher who wears a cross. Writers are disavowed by their publishers for writing characters that don't share the author's race. US embassies throughout the world flew gay pride flags for the entire month of June. A 6 foot "woman" with a dick just demolished half the records in women's swimming and a 250 lb dude just won a county-level, Miss America beauty pageant in new Hampshire, thus taking $10K in scholarship money from an actual girl. The President of the United States declares it a civil right that boys can use HS girls locker rooms (any girls who protest are bigots) and a Supreme Court candidate says "men can get pregnant" in her confirmation hearing.
You say the identiarian Left isn't really that powerful? How exactly would the world be different if they were powerful?
Kendi is pretty explicit - the point of seeing race in an official capacity is to understand which policies are leading to more equal racial outcomes so you can choose those. He declares anything other than that to be racist, including things that *appear* racially neutral but have the effect of leaving one racial group wealthier than another.
Kendi: "Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing. An example of racial equity would be if there were relatively equitable percentages of all three racial groups living in owner-occupied homes."
This blurs "stand on equal footing" with "get the same results regardless of effort", but let's let that go and assume the goal to be worthy. The problem is credit worthiness (Kendi would say banks are racist, but there is simply no truth to that and hasn't been for decades). The only ways to improve black mortgage issuance rates would be: to have different mortgage qualification ratios for different races (whites need an LTV or 31, but blacks can have LTVs up to 50); mandate that credit bureaus consider race in their scores (blacks get scores 100 points higher than whites); or simply raise the income of black people (racial welfare payments). Kendi would likely support all 3 of these.
Once you've done that though, you also need to consider sex, transness, and immigration status as overlapping intersectional oppressions too. Pretty soon the first question on your mortgage application (and job application and grant application) is: "What is your intersectional oppression level?" and that's the only question that really matters. I don't want to live in that society; I doubt you really do either.
Elsewhere, Kendi talks about establishing a federal Dept of Antiracism (unelected, of course) that can overturn any federal, state, or local law that it finds to be racist. This is the same basic govt structure that Iran has: elected leadership with a council of religious elders who get the final say over all laws. You can believe races should "stand on the same equal footing" but still have problems with creating a Critical Race Theory theocracy.
I'm teaching Ibram Kendi to my civics class tomorrow. Those were their readings for him from last week.
The idea that differences in economic outcomes across groups are, ipso-facto evidence of racism/ sexism/ ableism/ beautyism/ etc-ism is a Pandora's Box which my managed to mostly close in the 1960's. I would prefer to keep it shut.
Differences in outcome mean racism, and racism can only be defeated with antiracism. So the NHL needs to be forced to stop hiring white guys until they achieve 15% black representation for each team. The NBA can keep hiring blacks though, because they're oppressed.
Yes, there are all sorts of criticisms of Kendi. But not one of them is that he thinks black people should be above others. He is not in any way saying the same thing as the alt right just with a different group on top.
What was so alarming about Dobbs wasn't the abortion issue as much as the way the autocratic GOP triumphantly activated their forced-birth, no exceptions, trigger laws without the slightest consideration of the negative consequences. 10 - year - old rape victims, snooping into Doctors medical records, rheumatoid arthritis patients who need a medication that could be used for abortion and enforcing that by snooping into Pharmacy records. And it should be obvious that that would be exactly the way they will continue to govern as long as they are in charge.
If the GOP winds up with the house and they spend two years investigating Biden with Trump whining on the sidelines and being indicted which will make him crazier than ever and alienate more people than ever by 2024 an actually conservative party might Rise From the Ashes and Lindsey would be proven right. " every nominate Trump it will destroy our party and we will deserve it."
Agreed. Long-term trend is away from traditional, white elitism and toward a multi-racial democracy. But the right wing won’t go easily, and I predict political terrorism will increase out of desperation.
I think optimism at this point is foolish. There are Q Anon elected officials in office! As a Democrat I celebrate that it seems half the country doesn’t like Marjorie Taylor Green and those like her. But the cancer is there and it is hungry and will not just go away. Spend time in a Fox News living room and you will feel the power of angertainment. DeSantis is a nightmare for education, lgbt issues, reproductive rights, etc. I’m happy the category 5 hurricane likely moving our way has slowed, but the conditions conducive to development remain.
What feels unstable to me is not the proliferation of traditional conservative politics per se but that Republicans are still pushing and getting votes for perpetuating the “stolen election” lie, undermining confidence in election processes, denying Jan 6th was anything serious, calling for Dr Fauci to be jailed and/or hanged for some imaginary crime. The conspiracy theorists are now in office and controlling their own news sources. I just don’t think the push to turn the USA into Hungary (like Tucker Carlson and Bannon advocate) is going away. Things haven’t been stable since Trump was elected.
Some of the key differences between U.S. and Hungary:
1. U.S. is still economically mighty and demographically still growing. Hungary is an economic laggard in Europe and it is depopulating. Population peaked in 1980 and since then, it's been in decline with birth rates low, death rates high and out-migration by young adults.
2. U.S. has had a continuous government since the Civil War. Hungary had several government regimes in the 20th century alone: Austro-Hungarian empire, transitional regime, a Nazi satellite government, post-Nazism, Soviet communism 1.0, the failed 1956 uprising, Soviet communism 2.0, and European-style democracy. Orban was premier twice; it's his second and current reign that has perfected authoritarianism. (The sad fact is that there's something festering in the Danube. Hungary still has elections with pretty high turnout -- the most recent one was about 67%. Of that 67%, three far-right parties could claim about 60% of the vote -- Fidesz, Jobbik and Mi Hazank. Hungarians are far right AF.)
What the far-right parties have thus far not been able to do is capture Budapest. The capital remains politically and socially more liberal than the remainder of Hungary. Also, its governance structure is distributed, and this frustrates the far right. Within Hungary, Budapest has a status of a city-state. It doesn't belong to any county, and Pest County surrounds it.
Furthermore, Budapest is divided into 23 districts. Each district has a mayor and a partisan district council. The 24th is what used to be called the Lord Mayor of Budapest -- the mayor of mayors who heads the municipal general assembly. All residents can elect the lord mayor directly.
Scalise can probably outmaneuver McCarthy if he wants to. The clown show caucus (Boebert, MTG, and any other trolls who survived NOT YOU CAWTHORN the election) may at least respect that he took a literal bullet from a loon with left-wing politics.
I won't go so far as to say that DeSantis _isn't_ a closet authoritarian in disguise, though he does seem like a normal human being (even if as cynical, nihilistic, and power-hungry as the rest of the GOP leadership), so he could be shamed from launching a coup/autogolpe (Trump has no sense of shame) and probably isn't driven by the deep insecurities Trump has (that doesn't allow Trump to ever admit losing).
I would note a few things, though:
1. We were saved from a red wave mostly due to Dobbs. For Dems, thank goodness, the dog finally caught the car as the cynical conservative moneyed elite strategy of using evangelicals as foot soldiers has bitten them in the ass with Dobbs (and before that with Trump).
2. Trump is the best thing going for Dems right now. If you're a liberal, you have to hope he doesn't die. The GOP has a major Trump problem that they simply can't solve. If Trump is the GOP nominee again, the GOP would get rolled in 2024 as normie suburbanites (who have the numbers) just hate MAGA chaos agents. But if he doesn't win the GOP nomination, he'd launch a 3rd party bid that'd wreck the GOP. Even if he stays on the sidelines, we can count on him to endorse extremists who'd do badly in the general in any purple/blue state and bash GOP candidates who are attractive to swing voters but doesn't bend the knee to Trump.
Agree.
My prediction: Trump runs as a third party candidate, hands the election to the Democrats and becomes the butt of jokes forever.
He’s too egotistical to admit defeat.
Don’t forget the indictments! This is playing out like the end of the Wizard of Oz. Not sure if Trump is the Wizard, Wicked Witch, or a combination of both. Now that the Republican elite has a new horse that the big money donors can stand behind, things are going to speed up.
I think Youngkin cracked the code last year of what we are going to see from Republicans going forward. Ignore Trump, appease MAGA with culture issues, and persuade moderates with good old Ron Reagan political charisma. Not sure if DeSantis has the charisma to pull that off in a national election but Youngkin does. If they team up, the Democrats better up their game with who they nominate.
I’m optimistic, too. After over seven years of this reality show, maybe the 2024 election cycle will be about issues and a vision. Whoever sways the moderates wins rather than racing to the extreme. Just like it is supposed to be. We’ll see.
Here's the crazy thing. If Trump loses in 2024, think he goes away then? Not a chance. Trump will be an extremely loud part of republican politics for the rest of his life.
Trump might threaten to run 3rd party, but I do not think he actually does unless someone hands him the keys to another cruise ship (after he's sunk the GOP's). He does not want to lose in public, and he would almost certainly lose if he ran outside of an established apparatus.
Richard, unfortunately for you and Noah, DeSantis shows that Marx's formula of history has it backwards, at least in the U.S. In America, history repeats itself as farce, then tragedy.
DeSantis is just a capable Trump. If Trump was the Mao of magas, DeSantis is the Deng Xiaoping, who can turn idealism into political goals.
Another thing to note with populism in the Anglo-Saxon world:
In 2016, both the US and UK were shocked by populist uprisings. If Trump has managed to win a 2nd term in 2020, even with the huge and deep polarization in the US, he may have managed to bring the GOP's popularity to the depths that UK Tories are at now by now (or at least that Dubya was at during the GFC) as you probably could count on Trump to do something very illogical and unpopular in 2 years.
I voted to hand Trump a loss. Had nothing to do with Dobbs. Maybe anecdotal. Probably a mix of both.
Also worth noting Brian Kemp (the non-Trumpy Republican) pretty throughly crushed a very liberal Stacy Abrams, but that didn’t carry over to the Trump-backed Walker, who underperformed Kemp by about 200K votes (or 10% of Kemps total).
That’s a lot of split ballots. And shows me many voters don’t support extremism in either direction. Hopefully the parties listen and give us better candidates in 2024.
Perhaps they were rewarding Kemp for not kissing up to Trump and will punish Walker because he did.
There are two different Trumpisms you’re conflating here: “Trumpism” as in gleefully incompetent and autocratic (eg Hershel Walker) and “Trumpism” as in economic populism+culture warrioring
Sort of fair, but then some of those distinctions (and I’d say there are more still) are exactly my point. Essentially, there are less “extreme” versions of what Trump was doing that will have broader appeal and would be good policy even.
Biden v Trump:
The Rematch
(Not what I am advocating for, mind you, just what I am predicting).
At this point, Trump is so toxic that Hillary would beat him handily.
Let’s hope we don’t find out.
UGH! You say, "DeSantis fills progressives with rage, and he very well might turn the country red again, but he’s not going to try a coup or make American foreign policy subservient to Vladimir Putin." I say he has demonstrated a wily capacity to out flank domestic legal norms and constraints to pander to the worst bigots among us. He is far more dangerous than DJT because he is wiser, more strategic, and experienced in the levers of power. No stability here. Fascism on the way.
In fairness, Noah DID say he was a centrist-liberal, I think with a harsh emphasis on centrist.
He’s not left-wing or progressive, never claimed to be. Sadly many centrists don’t seem to care that Trump’s ideas have been normalized among the Conservative ideology; including his subservience to Russia and hatred of non-Europeans. Then again, what else can you expect from people with no skin in the game?
Domestic legal norms? Like what?
Pander to bigots? How?
He's more strategic, but I'm not sure he'd actually hold up well in a national election. I get strong Scott Walker vibes with that dude. Recall that Scott Walker was a darling of conservatives before crashing and burning in his Presidential bid.
Hope so!
I live in Florida and I'm not sold DeSantis can succeed as a National Candidate. He's short and awkward - which hasn't hurt him in a Florida Media Ecosystem that's been designed to prop him up but he'll have to overcome these disadvantages when he has no choice but to face the National Media.
I pray you are right. Yet short folks are motivated to macho behavior -see Napoleon!
It's also a win for basic decency. Just as their mocking the attack on Paul Pelosi was a reminder of exactly what Trumpism is, the prediction-defying way so many voters empathized with Fetterman's struggles is a very hopeful sign for where people are at.
May I suggest a way out of that endless Democratic fight about whether to emphasize economic or social issues, which all too often has degenerated into demonizing rich people versus demonizing white people? If we have to demonize someone, how about abusive people? Trump is both rich and white, but neither is the problem with him.
Hispanics tend to be more socially conservative and are ripe for the Republican party. If the Democratic party could learn to talk about their proposed programs in such a way to demonstrate how they align with conservative values (and many of them do!), then they would be more successful at winning Hispanics over. I talk about how to use values in talking about programs in my book, Persuade, Don't Preach, which is based on research by Robb Willer and Matt Feinberg.
One technical correction on this point:
"This will especially come in handy in existential crises like a possible disputed 2024 election. It will now be far more difficult for Congress to use the electoral college count to approve an alternative slate of Trump-backed “fake electors”, even if some Republicans would want to do so. At least one or two representatives would probably defect in that situation. "
The Congress that votes to certify the 2024 election will be composed of the members elected in 2024. The new Congress takes office on Jan 3, 2024, and the electoral count happens Jan 6, 2024. Congress could change the Jan 6 date (but not the Jan 3 date). But as the law currently stands, this election doesn't determine who votes on the electoral certification for 2024.
This is a great piece. Thank you.
Watching on from the UK I have to say I was relieved to see Trump chopped down to size.
From a European perspective, we need the US to stay the course and maintain its position as a beacon for democracy. On the edges of Europe a dark shadow lurks waiting for NATO to show weakness.
I am happy with the election results but never was concerned that democracy was in danger. If people think an election result was invalid, what are they supposed to do? Deny what they think? Al Gore did the right thing. He accepted the result. I do not know how he feels but if he feels that he really won, I have no problem with that. I think it is despicable to claim that a person is unqualified to be elected because they think they lost an election unfairly. If that is the rule, everyone in sports needs to be disqualified. Is there a single person in sports who does not believe they were harmed due to a bad call by the officials? January 6 was a disgrace. Wanting to improve election integrity is a good thing.
Mr. Silber, I think you're conflating several very different elements of election denial. It may be that former president Trump and some close to him sincerely believed the election was stolen from him. It's hard to tell, but possible--certainly Trump was told by many people he had previsously trusted that this was not the case, but if you see him as incapable of buffering his feelings with reasoning then his self-deception may be honest.
But the problem with Trumpist election denialism isn't Trump, it's two audiences that he appealed to. One was a popular following that chose to accept his claim that the election result was invalid in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary: court rulings, GOP officials' acknowledgments, reports debunking claim after claim made by Trump and his team. Politics can't funtion if it's treated as religion--with acceptance of election results guided by faith over reason and evidence; that is precisely what is most dangerous to procedural democracy. These voters aren't asked to "deny what they think"; they're being asked to question what they think in light of copious amounts of evidence offered.
The other audience are GOP politicans and media figures who understood perfectly well that the election was not stolen, but judged it in their personal or professional interest not only to accept Trump's claims but to broadcast them and undermine the evidence offered against them. They aren't being asked to "deny what they think"; they're being asked to reveal what they think.
As for being unqualified for election to office, in the case of Trump the argument is not that he is unqualified because he believes he won in 2020, it's that he is unqualified due to the fact that he either holds that belief because he is unable to acknowledge overwhelming evidence that he lost or because he is lying about what he believes and risking the intergrity of the national electoral process for personal gain. The denialists who ran in this cycle are unqualified because they are either unable to recognize the baselessness of Trump's claims, despite overwhelming evidence, or they are lying about what they believe and risking the intergrity of the electoral process for personal gain.
If a sports figure disputes a call that causes her to lose, and maintains her view despite being shown a clear instant reply, and further attempts to disrupt subsequent games by claiming they are tainted by the "mistake" she has been shown was not in error, then there are indeed grounds for disqualifying her from future competitions. I don't believe there is a single sports figure who has ever done anything analogous to what former president Trump has done.
I partially agree with you. But it is not true that there is no evidence of fraud. There is. I personally think that Biden won. But I know many who do not and it is not just because Trump said that. They have looked into the data. I know for example that in New Mexico, we have a huge number of registered voters who do not reside at the location that is on their registration. This was determined by many people taking the time to visit those locations. In some cases the locations do not exist i.e. a parking lot. In other cases there are a very large number of people (over a hundred) registered at the same location). It appears than none or just a few of these voters voted. So it does not look like there was a problem in New Mexico. There certainly was a potential problem.
Many watched the film 2,000 mules. There has been some critique of this film. But I think it does show that ballot harvesting did occur but perhaps in only a few places. Our systems allow fraud to occur. In New Mexico you are not even allowed to produce ID at a polling location. You state your name and address and if there is a registered voter with that name at that address who has not yet voted you get to vote. Does that make sense?
I agree with you that the main problem is Donald Trump. But it does not seem to be right to me for a large number of people to be disenfranchised because Donald Trump is unscrupulous or mentally ill. He was not on the ballot.
I doubt that we will every know exactly how many candidates who said that Trump won in 2,000 believe it versus how many say this because a large percentage of their participants believe this.
If you reread my post you will see that what I said was that democracy was not in danger. I did not say the so called Election Deniers were correct. Candidates often lie and voters are often wrong about things. Are you assuming that everyone who voted Democrat was correct in their assumptions about what Biden plans to do and what the implications are of his policies.
That is never the case. If voters were correct we probably would not have such a wide spread in the stated views of candidates. There is no requirement in the U.S. Constitution for a voter to be correct. And if there was, who would decide?
I do not believe that President Biden was correct that candidates who claimed that the Trump won in 2000 were a threat to democracy. And I am not sure that he believes that they were. He might or he might believe it was effective politics to claim that. I think he is a lot smarter than Donald Trump.
I do not like this form of politics. I do not think it is healthy. I am not happy about a lot of the views of many Republicans and I am not happy about many of the views of Democrats. But I do not think that the views of either Party are a threat to democracy. But demonizing people for their views is. People should be allowed to express their views.
I think this is a complex issue and not unusual. Finding ways to discredit candidates is part of the process. It is not new. But I do not have to admire those who engage in it.
But I agree with you that no President has ever done anything as bad as Donald Trump did on January 6. But he has done good things also. In particular he bought my parent's property which allowed them to retire. And the intermediary treated my parents very well. But if I had been in a position to do so I would have exercised Amendment XXV and removed Trump from office.
I wish we did not even have to have this discussion. But unfortunately we do and it not your fault or my fault that it is a topic of discussion. It is nice however, that we are allowed to have this discussion so we both should be thankful for that.
Thank you for the detailed reply, Mr. Silber. You have clearly thought about this in detail.
There is a fundamental difference between there being exploitable flaws in an election system that individuals may take advantage of and massive fraud committed by one party sufficient to alter outcomes of races decided by many thousands of votes over multiple states. No election system could possibly avoid having potential for abuse: isolated cases have always occurred and always will. It is an unfortunate byproduct of the complexity of the democratic electoral process in countries with many millions of voters. To selectively exploit this inevitable fact in order to overturn outcomes you do not like is the threat to the legitimacy of electoral democracy we are discussing.
In my state a few years ago we had a well publicized case of vote fraud by an individual. It had no effect on the outcome of the race, but garnered attention because the person was the Republican Secretary of State. No Democrat in my Red state suggested that this was a sign of a GOP conspiracy or that the outcome (a GOP win) was illegitimate.
Ballot harvesting, where legal, can be abused, but election officials understand this and there are multiple checks to detect it. The only known case sufficient to affect results in recent history was in a Congressional race in the North Carolina 9th District in 2018: a new election was ordered by the GOP-majority state Board of Elections. The harvesting was done by a GOP political operative and had resulted in a narrow GOP voctory. (The same operative had almost certainly affected earlier outcomes in two GOP primaries.) So far as I know, since the days of big city political machines that largely ended in the 1970s, when systematic vote fraud of various kinds was often alleged, the NC case is the largest case of systematic vote fraud uncovered. Individual cases of fraud--impersonation, submission of ballots for dead relatives, non-citizen voting, etc.--occur in very small numbers in every election cycle, and to the degree I've tracked them, they split between the two parties. The most publicized case of this recently has been in The Villages, a retirement community in Florida, where those convicted of vote fraud who had party registrations, just three people, were Republicans. I have, however, seen reports of small numbers of individual cases in Texas that divided between parties.
Now to build on these inevitable flaws, which have no clear partison pattern, and to allege that election results are being massively distorted by a Democratic conspiracy involving international conspiracies of voting machine manipulation, ballot harvesting, truckloads of premarked ballots, and so forth, is to set out on a path that can only delegitimize *any* voting system. Look at your own statement. You cite evidence friends have told you they found that indicates potential problems, hypothetical abuse of New Mexico's procedures, and the evidence of a film that has been systematically debunked in such excruciating detail that nothing about it is reliable other than the fact that the filmmaker's willingness to build a case on false evidence has been conclusively demonstrated. (If you know who Dinesh D'Souza is this is completely unsurprising.)
Donald Trump has built a political career on sowing doubt. He fabricates facts, claims that he's heard them from others, and spreads them with inflammatory rhetoric. He dismisses everything that does not fit his own narrative as "fake" and uses his invented TV persona as a brilliant businessman to persuade millions of followers that his version of reality is true and what evidence shows is false, that their doubts can be accepted as certainties, and that those who dispute them are "so evil."
"Election denialism" is built on this framework of massive distortion. Ask an election denier what would change their mind. They will inevitably say something like "clear evidence that there was no fraud"--doesn't matter if they are true believers or pretenders. The only thing you can, in fact, do is to show them that every instance they assert was fraud was, in fact, either fictitious or misinterpreted (there is no way to actually prove an absence). That will not change their commitment to election denial--they will either fall back on yet more bogus reported cases or on an assertion that their "gut feeling" remains the same and is a perfectly legitimate basis for their belief. They are making faith-based claims, and their faith is in Donald Trump or the election-denial wing of the GOP.
Of course, voters are "entitled to their opinions," but if this is the way opinions are formed then we are moving towards a competition of Democratic and Republican religions, where the latter includes the dogma that every Democratic electoral victory in a contested race is the result of fraud. If that's the politics American voters want, they have every right to it. If you go down that road far enough, it's likely we will no longer be allowed to have this discussion, and we'll have very little to be thankful for.
Why is it a problem for election integrity if the registration system has the wrong address for people? In any case, I’m not sure you’re describing any problems with the system - where do you think homeless people put their address as for registration if not a parking lot? And wouldn’t the hundreds of residents of a dorm or apartment building all put the same place as their registration address?
The New Mexico system seems like it would be *possible* to abuse, if you try to steal someone else’s vote by declaring their name and address. But then when that person shows up to vote and is told they already voted, do you think they’re not going to leave an official complaint? If this were actually happening more than a few dozen times, this would be all over public records and the news.
If your solution to a problem that gets a few dozen votes wrong is something that prevents a few hundred people from voting, then it is against the spirit of democracy, which is about getting the most accurate representation of the will of the people.
2020 had massive voter turnout by American standards - about 62% of voting age Americans went to the polls. A typical mid-term election, like this one, is about 50%.
The big challenge to American democracy is not that the wrong people are voting but not enough eligible voters are voting. Most of the developed world is typically high 60s to 80% of voting age population and higher percentages of registered voters. Much of the voter fraud is people applying for absentee ballots of people who are not voting. That becomes much less possible if there is a high probability that those people are voting.
As a naturalized US citizen, I will point out that the only voter ID that proves somebody is eligible to vote is a current US passport proving they are an American citizen and have not renounced their citizenship (a possibility if they show up with a US birth certificate or naturalization certificate). Only about one-third of Americans have a current passport, so it would definitely limit the number of people voting, mainly people in the top 50% income bracket. I haven't heard any politicians proposing limiting voter ID to current US passports, even though that would be about the only way to get real proof they are eligible to vote. It would eliminate too many of their voters. Even Real ID drivers licenses don't work as voter ID because they just say your identity has been verified, not that you are a US citizen - a permanent resident can get a Real ID driver license.
The voter ID requirements currently being pushed can be easily met by non-US citizens (I had several of them when a Resident Alien). However, non-US citizens who vote illegally can be deported if discovered and convicted of voter fraud which is a felony. There was no way I was going to try to vote when I was not a US citizen, even though it would have been easy to do. Very few people are going to take that life-changing risk so the voter ID issue is largely a red herring to suppress lower class voters who often don't have the ID documents being demanded.
For me, the fight shouldn’t be about “democracy,” that’s a given --it’s about expanding democracy. In 1929 US population was 121M. From 1927-1929 there were 5 women in Congress. From 1929-1931 there were 9 women in Congress. From 1929-1931 there was one Black member of Congress. The average member of Congress in 1929 represented 278k people. The population of US now is 331.9M people. The average member of Congress represents 763k people. Is there any wonder so many people are angry because the feel unheard, unrepresented? Is it any wonder that money talks, bullshit screams at people on Fox? 1n 1929 Congress capped the number of representatives at 435. Article 1, Section 2 of the US Constitution states there shall no more than 1 member of Congress for every 30,000 people. So by the express terms of the Constitution we could have 11,063 members in Congress. I’m not saying 11,000 is the right number (or the wrong number) but the Constitution contemplates much more representation than we have today. Simply by expanding the numbers on membership, you dilute the voices of the MTGs. You limit the impact of gerrymandering as more districts would have to be drawn, thereby exposing further the perniciousness of the practice. If you gave a small budget to each Comp Sci and Geography Dept at each State University, you’d easliy get maps drawn if there was no regard for party affiliation. It would cost much much more to control Congress by money. Party organization would have to be wider and deeper, requiring more reach and participation. I’d argue that 11,001 is the right number. But it should start at 1191, which is about 2.75 times the number now, simply adjusted for population growth. And I’m not so sure the 435 number, so so good even then -- these are the people who set the stage for the Great Depression. More voices, participation needed.
I agree with you.
One thing I would add is that what the U.S. ought to be doing is redrawing state boundaries rather than congressional boundaries.
Borders are arbitrary things. There's a national border, of course, but the word nation is both a map (government and institutions) and a territory (people with a shared sense of self). At subsidiary levels, like states, there isn't anything sacred about boundary lines. You can move from one state to another and not have to worry about learning a new language or converting currency. You also don't have to worry about a governor declaring war on another governor and intrastate warfare.
There's a more cohesive geographic unit that would actually be a better basis for governance: the metropolitan statistical area or the consolidated statistical area (the latter is when two MSAs touch and have commuting relationships at their edges).
If you decide the New York City CSA (which stretches to Connecticut, New Jersey and northeast Pennsylvania) should be a state and partitioned off from the rest of New York state, you have about 25 million people. And if 25 million people give or take were the basis of state populations, the U.S. would return to the original 13 states (actually 14).
If you want to keep 50 states, you'd divide populations into about 6 million residents apiece. This would mean partitioning places like New York City, L.A., and Chicago but having about 50 economically functional governments. (As it stands today, we have very wide GDP disparities by state and a very hamfisted way of redistributing wealth.)
We've seen in China recently how much worse it is to have a dictator than an autocracy.
I don't have any hope that DeSantis will be "less authoritarian" than Trump - especially after Trump has shown what is possible and was cheered on by the party for it.
But I do think it could be a healthy sign for American democracy if the GOP can manage to elevate anyone other than Trump in the presidential primary. It'd be healthier if it were not someone seen as a successor to the MAGA movement, and it'd be healthier if they didn't win the ability to enact their authoritarian plans - but a key thing is the decentralization of power within both parties.
GOP strategists and donors are excited about DeSantis but it remains to be seen whether GOP primary voters will follow.
Pre-midterms primary polls show Trump ~45% to DeSantis ~25%, I'd be highly surprise if those numbers flip among ideologically committed but not politically savvy primary voters.
If Trump maintains an unassailable lead in early primary voters, I predict GOP strategist will chicken out again and bow down to dictator Trump because they "see which way the wind is blowing".
I want to emphasize here that presidential primary polls this early are not always a meaningful predictor of what will actually happen in the primary (remember Jeb?) - but that won't stop it from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Left appears to have given up Enlightenment liberalism and embraced post-liberal wokeness. That means intersectional group victim status trumps individual rights -- Kendi is explicit about this. If Patrick Deneen is correct, liberalism is already dead. Perhaps the Democrats were wise to move on instead of playing Weekend at Bernie's with its corpse the way the GOP is.
The mainstream Right is still trying to find its head with both hands after the postmodernists detonated a truck bomb in the middle of the Declaration of Independence. Turns out Locke's "self-evident rights" aren't so self-evident to the postmodernists, and the Right can't figure out how to prove they exist without God, who no one really wants to invite back to the party. He was a real killjoy, and the guests were all secretly thrilled when Nietzsche killed Him off.
Only the very far-Right is willing meet the Left on its own post-liberal terms. Ibram Kendi says we should all see race first; the white-nationalists say the same thing. They only disagree about which race ought to be on top. Fortunately, the Nazis have little mainstream following, but they grow stronger as the Left keeps pushing race essentialism. If you thought the Christian Right was scary, just wait until you meet his brother: the non-Christian Right.
For those of us who actually liked Enlightenment liberalism and would prefer to live in a broadly liberal, tolerant society built on Judeo-Christian philosophy... we're hosed. Deneen's right; Humpty Dumpty isn't going back together.
Sorry. Noah, but I don't share your optimism. In David Reapoi's terminology, most people don't seem to know what time it is, and the hour is far later than many realize.
“Post liberal wokeness”
“Leftist race essentialism”
“Intersectional group victim status”
“Post modernism”
So many buzzwords but no actual substance.
Adam, the words mean things whether you know their meanings or not.
"post liberal wokeness” - the belief that group outcomes are more important than individual rights, a direct repudiation of John Locke's theory of individual moral worth via natural law.
"race essentialism” - a belief that the most important attribute of any person is their race and should dictate their social and economic outcomes.
"Leftist race essentialism” - a belief that black people are uniquely oppressed by white people in American society and thus deserve to be treated differently because of that oppression. (see my comment on Kendi above.)
“Intersectional group victim status” - a hierarchy of oppression in which those who have greater levels of oppression, by being members of multiple oppressed groups, like race, sex, disabled, poor, fat, etc...
"postmodernism" - a belief that objective reality is unknowable and what we believe to be "the real world" is actually just a shared delusion constructed by the language we use to describe the world.
All of these ideas are in common use in the academy, govt and NGOs today. The vocabulary may be foreign to you, but its not to those in positions of power. Your society is permeated with these ideas. I hope that helps.
"Post-liberal wokeness is the belief that group outcomes are more important than individual rights, a direct repudiation of John Locke's theory of individual moral worth via natural law."
Therein lies the problem. None of the people you group into the "post-liberal wokeness" category actually believe that individual rights are at odds with group outcomes. What they argue is that individual rights have historically not been respected for social and racial minorities, and it is this complex history of socioeconomic conditions, rather than genetic differences (yuck) that accounts for massive disparities in outcomes. You cannot just make up a phrase like "post-liberal wokeness," assign it a definition you came up with on the spot and then straw-man the position of others in order to group them under this label.
"Race-essentialism is a belief that black people are uniquely oppressed by white people in American society and thus deserve to be treated differently because of that oppression."
1. Brian, that is not the definition of race-essentialism. Race essentialism is the belief that racial groups form discrete genetic categories; that individuals of the same racial category are biogenetically similar; and that different races are fundamentally different. It has nothing to do with believing minority groups are or have been oppressed.
2. Putting that aside, black people have in fact been uniquely oppressed by white landowners in American society, and the consequences of this oppression did not magically go away with the abolition of slavery or the 1960s civil rights movement. This is what self-identified 'antiracists' such as Kendi et al believe. There are real consequences of racist policy making that has had a direct impact on the lives of millions of people.
Now, you are free to disagree with the solutions proposed by the likes of certain antiracists such as Kendi et al and propose alternatives. For example, I tend to agree with Noah that race-based affirmative action is no longer the best way to address education and employment disparities, and that affirmative action should be class-based instead. That said, there is no doubt that inequalities these "woke scholars" describe are indeed real, and are primarily consequences of historical and contemporary policy making.
"Post-modernism is a belief that objective reality is unknowable and what we believe to be "the real world" is actually just a shared delusion constructed by the language we use to describe the world."
Post-modernism is not a single "belief." Postmodernism is an intellectual movement characterised by an attitude of skepticism toward the "grand narratives" associated with modernism, scepticism to notions of absolute epistemic certainty, and emphasis on the role of ideology in maintaining systems of socio-political power.
In any case, what you have presented here is simply not what most post-modernist scholars believe. Post-modernists don’t reject truth, such as the statement 2+2=4. Or claim that reality is completely unknowable. Rather they argue that how we understand, describe and interpret reality is a reflection of our identities, values, and socioeconomic conditions rather than having intrinsic properties that can be understood in isolation.
For example, one’s definition of a chair maybe a seat for one person with four legs. Travel to a different part of the world and their image or definition of a chair may look completely different because of their culture and history.
Another example would be the word *woke.* Initially, being woke was an African American vernacular adjective that referred to being aware of systemic inequality and injustice (particularly the legacy of racial discrimination which has been a big problem for decades there). Now, the word is used almost exclusively by conservative western politicians and their supporters to signal their disdain for any person or organisation that has socially progressive ideas.
Essentially, 'post-modernist' scholars argued that our understanding of the terms we use change depending on the social and cultural context, and thus cannot be used to refer to universal, timeless and unchanging truths. Leading us back to our previous example, no 'post-modernist' intellectual would reject the idea that two sticks and two sticks make four sticks. But our decision to label these figures "two" and "four" and our use of a base 10 system is something that is subject to our unique historical circumstances.
I think it is more beneficial to actually engage with people's ideas rather than throwing around poorly defined buzzwords. I hope in your Civics class you encourage your students to do the former.
You're entitled to your views of postmodernism, and it's clear yours are less negative than mine. You were the one who said these were buzzwords without meaning though.
Mr. Villanueva, I have little use for the approach Kendi is known for--although I think his book on anti-racism is actually far better and more nuanced--basically liberal rather than illiberal--than his subsequent public writings and proposals like the Dept. of Antiracism (!). But I think it's a gross error to say that his ideas represent "the Left." Very few Democrats in office have adopted Kendi's illiberal positions, and those that have tend to have little influence on party policy, except in the area of economic policy, where their influence comes from their social democratic orientation (with Bernie and Warren as faction leaders), not from anti-racism. Of course, the Democrats continue to address issues of racial discrimination and fairness, but this has been the party's tradition since at least the mid-1960s. Is there a single Democratic figure who has endorsed the creating a Department of Antiracism? Do you really foresee one doing so?
There is certainly a small caucus of progressives in the House who foreground Kendi-like positions on racism and associated gender issues, and woke progressives--like white nationalists--are overrepresented in digital publications, on social media, and on elite college campuses, where their influence is particularly strong.
Your original formulation illustrates what I mean: "The Left appears to have given up Enlightenment liberalism and embraced post-liberal wokeness." Then you go on to equate "the Left" with "the far-Right." What I think you should be writing is "The woke Left appears to have given up Enlightenment liberalism and embraced post-liberal wokeness." I think any analysis of political outcomes on the Left over the past couple of years will demonstrate that the largest segments of the Left are very strongly resisting post-liberal wokeness in its policies and choices of political candidates.
I want to second Kenny Easwaran's point that your equation of white nationalist and the woke Left positions on race is an error. Woke ideology does indeed foreground racial identity (far too much, in my view), but it does so primarily in support of an imagined path to a non-discriminatory society, in the belief that because there are no intrinsic disparities of essential ability between races, a society without the traces of past racism or current racist orientation will have roughly equal levels of accomplishment among people of all races. "Approximately" isn't a weasel word; it's a statistical factor. White nationalists no longer call themselves supremacists, but if you read what they write (both the blogger-level stuff and the "intellectual dark web" magazines) they are straightforward about their race essentialism and their belief that "white Christians of European descent" are intellectually, temperamentally, and morally superior.
If the illiberalism that Kendi and those who celebrate him have fallen into is dangerous, the last think we should be doing is raising it to a caricature of the Left and the political party that represents it. (For years I maintained the same position with regard to the Alt-Right and the GOP, and then Rand Paul called Biden's inauguration appeal against white nationalism an attack on Republicans, Fox News mainstreamed replacement theory, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Green joined Nick Fuentes' annual Alt-Right conventions, Tommy Tuberville equated Blacks and criminals, our former president smeared his own former cabinet minister with a racist slur becuase she is of Chinese descent . . . )
Everyone talks about Jan 6, but it was actually the Jericho March a month earlier that showed me that the crazies on the Right were more numerous than I imagined. Eric Metaxis and MyPillow Dude openly comparing Trump to Jesus! What the heck?
However, every major cultural power center in America is currently held by the Left: academy, media, major tech, occupational licensing boards, professional associations, unions, and K-12 ed. There are loons on the Right and they need to be countered. But in terms of societal influence, the loons on the Left (who are obsessed with Critical Theory / group identity politics) are capable of inflicting far more damage.
"it does so primarily in support of an imagined path to a non-discriminatory society, in the belief that because there are no intrinsic disparities of essential ability between races, a society without the traces of past racism or current racist orientation will have roughly equal levels of accomplishment among people of all races."
I agree with you 100% on this. This is what MLK believed too. However, Kendi's approach effectively uses these percentages to intentionally handicap one group so that another can rise. I know you don't want to see him that way, but there's no other way to interpret the idea that white people need to stop talking and just listen, or stand aside -- because they're white. Since writing Antiracist, he's also embraced intersectionality, which takes us near Harrison Bergeron territory. (That's a great short story if you don't know it -- Vonnegut figured out the endpoint of intersectionality and equity 50 years ago.) This sort of pitting of groups against each other is not only anti-liberal but runs the very real risk of creating a white identity backlash the likes of which we haven't seen in most of a century.
Let me give you an example from my own life. I have never felt affinity for white people as a racial group. Are there advantages that I derive from being white, absolutely. They are the same advantages that the racial majority derives in every society on Earth. However, race consciousness is simply not part of my being; I grew up on MLK and believed him. I still do.
(On a side note, I also derive advantages from being male, and being tall, but I am disadvantaged by not being particularly attractive, being overweight, and having a slight lisp. Perhaps those of you who embrace postmodernism can tell me how I rank in the intersectional victimization Olympics that increasingly characterize Western society.)
Back to my my anecdote... After the summer of Floyd, there were a number of charities that sprang up to help rebuild the city blocks that had been destroyed by the "peaceful protests". Nearly all of these were to "help rebuild BIPOC businesses". That was the first time in my life that I ever felt affinity for "white people" as a racial group: who was going to help white (non-BIPOC) business owners rebuild? Joe Biden's attempt to prioritize farm aid by race did the same thing to me. The AMA's attempt to favor minorities in monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID did too. In the last 2 years, I have been made increasingly aware of my identity as a "white" person, in a way that I have never felt before. And it was the Left that pushed me that way, not the Right. I realize this is a single anecdote, but if it's happening to me, it's happening to other people who also are also too afraid to talk about it. Whites (re-)developing racial affinity is bad; it takes us further from MLK's vision not closer.
You may be correct that I am underestimating the danger from the Right. But I believe many of you here underestimate the danger from the Left. I want to believe they are well intentioned, but they are driving this society into a race war. Most of the average, working-stiff, 30 year old, white guys will only embrace ethno-nationalism if the Left pushes them toward it and the mainstream Right simultaneously refuses to defend them. But so far, that is the pattern playing out.
All of you are certainly welcome to your opinions. I didn't respond to the other commenters here not because I didn't think they made good points, but because I think back and forth arguing in blog comments isn't that productive. Overall though, I think y'all are seeing Kendi / CRT / intersectionality through rose-colored glasses.
I'm going to start by echoing some of what Richard has already written, Mr. Villanueva. I agree with him that you're overestimating the influence of the identitarian Left (which is a good term--especially since those folks use it, and "identitarianism" is very much a creature of European white nationalism).
What I see as your overstatement seems to me to derive from two issues: you're using an all-or-nothing lens to measure progressive influence in cultural institutions, and you're attributing all activity that aligns with aspects of the "identitarian Left" with the agenda and activism of that group.
For example, looking at your claim that "every cultural power center in America is currently held by the Left," let me speak to a few of your examples. My perception has been that in academia, identitarian/intersectionality values are represented very strongly in the humanities and some social sciences, moderately in STEM disciplines and some professional schools (e.g., journalism, social work), and not at all in other professional schools (e.g., engineering, business, medicine--the big dogs). In K-12 education, the politics of the school district is the primary determinant of how "woke" the public schools are--the county I live in is rather starkly divided blue/red geographically, and the two school districts and teachers union locals are moderately-woke/not-a-bit-woke. Those are local observations that I think align with a national situation. As for media, thinking of TV I guess you've got some pretty wokish stuff on Lefty cable channels like CNN and MSNBC, and some pretty out white nationalism on Fox and OAN. And when it comes to corporate organizations of all types, I think wokism is almost comical: company after company contracts to have their workforce exposed to DEI training, and the Robin DiAngelos who lead the thought reform struggle sessions can't get over how little impact it actually has. It seems like political theater. (I don't mean to say that DEI/implicit bias training can't be useful, but the woke incarnation of it is so over-the-top that it has no impact. No one of any color is going to respond well to being treated as a stereotype.) A lot of the cultural impact I think you're thinking of is simply corporate America responding to the fact that while progressives are not a particularly large group of consumers, they are on average a particularly wealthy group of consumers.
So where you're picturing domination I think what you actually have is a mixed bag.
And when it comes to activity on the part of schools, corporations, and so forth, I think you're conflating liberal action and progressive action--they share many features. For example, affirmative action in hiring is a liberal program with a long history. Whether you approve or disapprove, the fact that affirmative action hiring programs continue to be practiced by universities, businesses, etc., is simply not an indication of CRT influence. So far as I can tell locally, there has been not much change over the three-plus decades I've lived where I do, and this is in a city with not a single elected GOP officeholder: a problem in itself--the real influence of progressivism here concerns road/traffic policy (woke bicyclists rule).
On two points I agree with you completely, both related to backlash. (1) Woke rhetoric and the way race-conscious policy is being applied in a time of income inequality and social dislocation is marginalizing white men, particularly low-income young white boys and men, and that's unacceptable. (2) These trends do indeed create the danger of a race war because the groups that feels most excluded is easily moved towards racism and is well armed. And ironically, the chief targets in any race war will be low-income Black people, who are *not* overall a woke group--the real "race" conflict is between subgroups of relatively low-income rural white people and relatively high-income urban white people. Militia-backed white nationalists are the ones who are intrinsically dangerous; the identitarian Left is, to my mind, dangerously foolish. (I'm sympathetic: I was a dangerously stupid antiwar activist in the '60s, and have had to observe the negative consequences since Nixon's election. I'd rather not see that movie again--or a worse one, since guns were so much rarer back then.)
As for Kendi, when people talk about his book, all I ever hear is that it tells us that if you're not an antiracist you're a racist. Well, Kendi did say that, and it resonates with the old union motto that if you're not with the union you're against it--you can make sense of the idea, even if you don't agree. But for me the unexpected thing about the book, which I had to force myself to read, was that the overwhelming headline was, "Don't stereotype people because of superficial chatacteristics, like race, sex, or gender affinity" . . . or height, or lisps, or looks. It's a terrific message, delivered with great nuance via a powerful personal narrative, and I'd really like to know where that Kendi went, and where this illiberal identitarian intersectionalist using his name came from.
You know, this is really a very rich topic, and we could go on like this for days. I just saw your response to Richard--you're way overstating the university situation, at least based on my experience, although I understand what it must look like given specific cases that make the news. We're not likely to agree on specifics, but I think we actually share a basic point of view. [A late edit: I hadn't read down to your comments on trans issues when I wrote: I'm not going to follow your--or anyone's--unnuanced take on that.] If you want the last word I'll leave the field to you.
Actually, I think people are saying you’re overestimating the power and influence of the identitarian Left in all those areas you cited. Count up the number of folks who agree with Kendi and those who agree with Thiel in tech, for instance. Care to take a stab at who you think has more adherents?
It’s easiest to count up reps in Congress, where the mainstream moderates far out number the identitarian Left on the Dem side but it’s the authoritarian Right who outnumber mainstream moderates in the GOP.
Richard, stop counting and look around. Your world has completely embraced postmodernism.
Kendi charges thousands of dollars to speak at executive retreats. HR departments throughout the Western world are running unconscious bias training where people confess their white guilt. Universities are holding racially segregated graduations. DEI statements (effectively Leftist loyalty oaths) are now required for all essentially all university faculty hires. Speakers with broadly liberal (both Enlightenment and JS Mill) views are routinely shouted down at campuses and the administrations do nothing. BLM flags are encouraged in classrooms but whoa to the teacher who wears a cross. Writers are disavowed by their publishers for writing characters that don't share the author's race. US embassies throughout the world flew gay pride flags for the entire month of June. A 6 foot "woman" with a dick just demolished half the records in women's swimming and a 250 lb dude just won a county-level, Miss America beauty pageant in new Hampshire, thus taking $10K in scholarship money from an actual girl. The President of the United States declares it a civil right that boys can use HS girls locker rooms (any girls who protest are bigots) and a Supreme Court candidate says "men can get pregnant" in her confirmation hearing.
You say the identiarian Left isn't really that powerful? How exactly would the world be different if they were powerful?
Kendi is pretty explicit - the point of seeing race in an official capacity is to understand which policies are leading to more equal racial outcomes so you can choose those. He declares anything other than that to be racist, including things that *appear* racially neutral but have the effect of leaving one racial group wealthier than another.
We both know the destination of good intentions.
Kendi: "Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing. An example of racial equity would be if there were relatively equitable percentages of all three racial groups living in owner-occupied homes."
This blurs "stand on equal footing" with "get the same results regardless of effort", but let's let that go and assume the goal to be worthy. The problem is credit worthiness (Kendi would say banks are racist, but there is simply no truth to that and hasn't been for decades). The only ways to improve black mortgage issuance rates would be: to have different mortgage qualification ratios for different races (whites need an LTV or 31, but blacks can have LTVs up to 50); mandate that credit bureaus consider race in their scores (blacks get scores 100 points higher than whites); or simply raise the income of black people (racial welfare payments). Kendi would likely support all 3 of these.
Once you've done that though, you also need to consider sex, transness, and immigration status as overlapping intersectional oppressions too. Pretty soon the first question on your mortgage application (and job application and grant application) is: "What is your intersectional oppression level?" and that's the only question that really matters. I don't want to live in that society; I doubt you really do either.
Elsewhere, Kendi talks about establishing a federal Dept of Antiracism (unelected, of course) that can overturn any federal, state, or local law that it finds to be racist. This is the same basic govt structure that Iran has: elected leadership with a council of religious elders who get the final say over all laws. You can believe races should "stand on the same equal footing" but still have problems with creating a Critical Race Theory theocracy.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/06/ibram-x-kendi-definition-of-antiracist
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/
I'm teaching Ibram Kendi to my civics class tomorrow. Those were their readings for him from last week.
The idea that differences in economic outcomes across groups are, ipso-facto evidence of racism/ sexism/ ableism/ beautyism/ etc-ism is a Pandora's Box which my managed to mostly close in the 1960's. I would prefer to keep it shut.
BTW: If Kendi is right:
This (https://vafloc02.s3.amazonaws.com/isyn/images/f400/img-142400-f.jpg) is racism.
This (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CbN2U-tXIAA8u5R.jpg) is antiracism.
Differences in outcome mean racism, and racism can only be defeated with antiracism. So the NHL needs to be forced to stop hiring white guys until they achieve 15% black representation for each team. The NBA can keep hiring blacks though, because they're oppressed.
Yes, there are all sorts of criticisms of Kendi. But not one of them is that he thinks black people should be above others. He is not in any way saying the same thing as the alt right just with a different group on top.
What was so alarming about Dobbs wasn't the abortion issue as much as the way the autocratic GOP triumphantly activated their forced-birth, no exceptions, trigger laws without the slightest consideration of the negative consequences. 10 - year - old rape victims, snooping into Doctors medical records, rheumatoid arthritis patients who need a medication that could be used for abortion and enforcing that by snooping into Pharmacy records. And it should be obvious that that would be exactly the way they will continue to govern as long as they are in charge.
If the GOP winds up with the house and they spend two years investigating Biden with Trump whining on the sidelines and being indicted which will make him crazier than ever and alienate more people than ever by 2024 an actually conservative party might Rise From the Ashes and Lindsey would be proven right. " every nominate Trump it will destroy our party and we will deserve it."
Agreed. Long-term trend is away from traditional, white elitism and toward a multi-racial democracy. But the right wing won’t go easily, and I predict political terrorism will increase out of desperation.
I think optimism at this point is foolish. There are Q Anon elected officials in office! As a Democrat I celebrate that it seems half the country doesn’t like Marjorie Taylor Green and those like her. But the cancer is there and it is hungry and will not just go away. Spend time in a Fox News living room and you will feel the power of angertainment. DeSantis is a nightmare for education, lgbt issues, reproductive rights, etc. I’m happy the category 5 hurricane likely moving our way has slowed, but the conditions conducive to development remain.
What feels unstable to me is not the proliferation of traditional conservative politics per se but that Republicans are still pushing and getting votes for perpetuating the “stolen election” lie, undermining confidence in election processes, denying Jan 6th was anything serious, calling for Dr Fauci to be jailed and/or hanged for some imaginary crime. The conspiracy theorists are now in office and controlling their own news sources. I just don’t think the push to turn the USA into Hungary (like Tucker Carlson and Bannon advocate) is going away. Things haven’t been stable since Trump was elected.
They're pushing, sure, but they're also losing. That's the big difference between the US and Hungary.
Some of the key differences between U.S. and Hungary:
1. U.S. is still economically mighty and demographically still growing. Hungary is an economic laggard in Europe and it is depopulating. Population peaked in 1980 and since then, it's been in decline with birth rates low, death rates high and out-migration by young adults.
2. U.S. has had a continuous government since the Civil War. Hungary had several government regimes in the 20th century alone: Austro-Hungarian empire, transitional regime, a Nazi satellite government, post-Nazism, Soviet communism 1.0, the failed 1956 uprising, Soviet communism 2.0, and European-style democracy. Orban was premier twice; it's his second and current reign that has perfected authoritarianism. (The sad fact is that there's something festering in the Danube. Hungary still has elections with pretty high turnout -- the most recent one was about 67%. Of that 67%, three far-right parties could claim about 60% of the vote -- Fidesz, Jobbik and Mi Hazank. Hungarians are far right AF.)
What the far-right parties have thus far not been able to do is capture Budapest. The capital remains politically and socially more liberal than the remainder of Hungary. Also, its governance structure is distributed, and this frustrates the far right. Within Hungary, Budapest has a status of a city-state. It doesn't belong to any county, and Pest County surrounds it.
Furthermore, Budapest is divided into 23 districts. Each district has a mayor and a partisan district council. The 24th is what used to be called the Lord Mayor of Budapest -- the mayor of mayors who heads the municipal general assembly. All residents can elect the lord mayor directly.
If you think that the Republicans are going to be more "Bipartisan" now, I want whatever you are smoking!
Well, they might go through a GOP civil war first, between those who want to win elections and MAGA.
If they win the House by only 3 votes, their first test will be in coming up with a Speaker of the House that can get 218 votes.
Scalise can probably outmaneuver McCarthy if he wants to. The clown show caucus (Boebert, MTG, and any other trolls who survived NOT YOU CAWTHORN the election) may at least respect that he took a literal bullet from a loon with left-wing politics.