Largely agree with this, but you're being too soft on Kirn (and by extension too hard on Williams). Kirn is often well out beyond the borders of skepticism into full bore crankery.
And Williams himself is hardly woke—he’s at least semi-heterodox. I think there’s a dividing line between those who reject wokeness but still regard Maga as a substantially greater threat (like Williams and McWhorter) and those who increasingly downplay the Maga threat (like Kirn et al).
It kind of sounds like you are justifying the political cast that the mainstream media have taken by identifying which movement is the bigger threat, and that seems to be the whole problem, although the article also leaned that way at times, if I'm being honest. Is the point of journalism to report on stuff or to disable threats? Is it to provide 'moral clarity' or line up the facts and then let the reader decide? Is this article in favor of the media's ideological excesses or not?
Sam, I always appreciate your deftness with terminology. Heterodox is a new one to me, and I like it in some ways but not in others. I wonder if we might not have more than one mainstream view? George Packer identifies four different Americas in "Last Best Hope," and I think all four are pretty alive and well. They can't be easily simplified any longer along party lines, because there are internal divisions (moreso on the left) between the Obama/Clinton brand of liberalism (Packer's Smart America) and the Bernie/Cornel West brand (Just America). Similarly, Free America (Reagan, Romney, John McCain) is quite distinct from Real America (Palin, Trump). I wonder if every member of that camp sees themselves as a dissenter from the others and therefore heterodox?
You identify 2020 as a turning point, but some of what you're describing here in the critique of the left was articulated in 2016 by Mark Lilla (another moderate liberal). He is a very different kind of heterodox thinker from Christopher Rufo, who I was surprised to see you reference. Rufo is, in my mind, a terribly sloppy writer (basically a conservative version of Ibram Kendi) who has explicit goals of aligning with the alt-right. The problem with Rufo, IMO, is that he often begins with a kernel of truth (as Kendi does) and then at some point takes an alarming logical leap that leads to balderdash conclusions. I see someone like Lilla as a believer in institutions and in rationalism. He is therefore not a true believer in anything. Rufo is totally a true believer, and often not a good faith scholar, and that is what makes him worthy of a different kind of scrutiny.
@Daniel - Curious to hear more about what you think is crankery in Kirn. I haven't seen anything, either from The Racket or from briefly scrolling his Twitter feed, that I'd consider beyond the pale. The main point I come across is identifying a new iteration of the security state in the "disinformation industry," and I take seriously the reporting that The Racket, Tablet, and others have done on this. They may not be right on all the particulars - I don't know if Renee DiResta is really acting in bad faith, for instance - but I'm fairly convinced by that basic thesis tbh.
@Evets - I didn't want to get bogged down on this in the post itself, but Williams is an interestingly equivocal figure. He's often broadly included in the ranks of the heterodox, but in this post - https://www.racket.news/p/the-atlantic-compares-walter-kirn - Kirn and Taibbi clearly feel deeply betrayed by Williams' Atlantic piece. Reading between the lines, I kind of think Williams had trouble selling the piece to The Atlantic and was able to do so only on condition that he really held Kirn's feet to the fire over downplaying the danger of Trump. The piece seems a bit unsure of itself and is an odd fit for The Atlantic. The Atlantic recently has emerged as a real skeptic of the 'heterodox' and I think very much wanted a hit piece.
@judith - Maybe I wasn't as clear as I meant to be in the article. I believe that the point of journalism is to report on stuff and above all to hold to account those who are currently in power. It's been a problem that the 'liberal media' has been very soft on all Democratic presidents from Clinton to Obama to Biden (and probably long before then) - and it has not gone unnoticed by the right, which manages to run successful campaigns by attacking 'the media' in toto.
@Josh - I included Rufo, who I think has a gone through a considerable evolution. In the 2010s, Rufo was an early critic of Critical Race Theory - it's interesting to read this New Yorker piece (https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory) and to see at that point just how unknown the intellectual tree of Critical Race Theory was in mainstream discourse. Early on, Rufo was mostly a commentator and critic. His association with DeSantis and then his plagiarism campaign came later He is a textbook instance of somebody who was seen to be in a 'heterodox' space and then became pretty much a Republican Party operative.
I really like Packer's piece, but I guess the framing here would be a bit different. It comes ultimately from Bari Weiss' 2018 piece on the Intellectual Dark Web (when she was still with The New York Times) - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html. The premise is that there is a group-think that can often be unconscious on the liberal left and in mainstream discourse, that discreetly avoids a wide variety of controversial topics and sort of pre-organizes the conversation. At the time of Weiss' piece it seemed like the IDW didn't have that much to complain about - a certain fixation on Trump and Russia-Gate and some ideological conformity within identity politics. But that group-think really became much more obvious in 2020/2021 with, in no particular order, a) the reluctance to discuss the lab-leak theory; b) the vilification of anyone questioning vaccine efficacy; c) the free pass given to rioters during the Floyd protests; d) the free pass given to Antifa and the autonomous zones in western cities; e) the cancelation of dissenting voices from social media platforms and the widespread social media practice of 'deamplification' f) the prevalence of fairly extreme 'woke' narratives in centers of learning. It's very possible to argue that none of these are the most important issues in the world - that, taken together they are all less important than the threat posed by Trump - but these all seemed to be fair questions for intellectuals to tackle. The idea with 'heterodoxy' is that anyone who is willing to step on any of these third rails in liberal course becomes 'heterodox' and tends to receive a certain amount of opprobrium. I do continue to find it a useful term even if, by definition, it is somewhat slippery.
Given your description of frustration at responses to Bowles' book that don't engage with what she's written, I'm curious what you think of this piece; which has disagreements with significant parts of the book but attempts to engage with curiosity: https://thewhitepages.substack.com/p/trying-to-be-curious-about-an-incurious
Largely agree with this, but you're being too soft on Kirn (and by extension too hard on Williams). Kirn is often well out beyond the borders of skepticism into full bore crankery.
And Williams himself is hardly woke—he’s at least semi-heterodox. I think there’s a dividing line between those who reject wokeness but still regard Maga as a substantially greater threat (like Williams and McWhorter) and those who increasingly downplay the Maga threat (like Kirn et al).
Totally agree with this. Williams is a moderate liberal.
It kind of sounds like you are justifying the political cast that the mainstream media have taken by identifying which movement is the bigger threat, and that seems to be the whole problem, although the article also leaned that way at times, if I'm being honest. Is the point of journalism to report on stuff or to disable threats? Is it to provide 'moral clarity' or line up the facts and then let the reader decide? Is this article in favor of the media's ideological excesses or not?
Sam, I always appreciate your deftness with terminology. Heterodox is a new one to me, and I like it in some ways but not in others. I wonder if we might not have more than one mainstream view? George Packer identifies four different Americas in "Last Best Hope," and I think all four are pretty alive and well. They can't be easily simplified any longer along party lines, because there are internal divisions (moreso on the left) between the Obama/Clinton brand of liberalism (Packer's Smart America) and the Bernie/Cornel West brand (Just America). Similarly, Free America (Reagan, Romney, John McCain) is quite distinct from Real America (Palin, Trump). I wonder if every member of that camp sees themselves as a dissenter from the others and therefore heterodox?
You identify 2020 as a turning point, but some of what you're describing here in the critique of the left was articulated in 2016 by Mark Lilla (another moderate liberal). He is a very different kind of heterodox thinker from Christopher Rufo, who I was surprised to see you reference. Rufo is, in my mind, a terribly sloppy writer (basically a conservative version of Ibram Kendi) who has explicit goals of aligning with the alt-right. The problem with Rufo, IMO, is that he often begins with a kernel of truth (as Kendi does) and then at some point takes an alarming logical leap that leads to balderdash conclusions. I see someone like Lilla as a believer in institutions and in rationalism. He is therefore not a true believer in anything. Rufo is totally a true believer, and often not a good faith scholar, and that is what makes him worthy of a different kind of scrutiny.
Thank you all for comments.
@Daniel - Curious to hear more about what you think is crankery in Kirn. I haven't seen anything, either from The Racket or from briefly scrolling his Twitter feed, that I'd consider beyond the pale. The main point I come across is identifying a new iteration of the security state in the "disinformation industry," and I take seriously the reporting that The Racket, Tablet, and others have done on this. They may not be right on all the particulars - I don't know if Renee DiResta is really acting in bad faith, for instance - but I'm fairly convinced by that basic thesis tbh.
@Evets - I didn't want to get bogged down on this in the post itself, but Williams is an interestingly equivocal figure. He's often broadly included in the ranks of the heterodox, but in this post - https://www.racket.news/p/the-atlantic-compares-walter-kirn - Kirn and Taibbi clearly feel deeply betrayed by Williams' Atlantic piece. Reading between the lines, I kind of think Williams had trouble selling the piece to The Atlantic and was able to do so only on condition that he really held Kirn's feet to the fire over downplaying the danger of Trump. The piece seems a bit unsure of itself and is an odd fit for The Atlantic. The Atlantic recently has emerged as a real skeptic of the 'heterodox' and I think very much wanted a hit piece.
@judith - Maybe I wasn't as clear as I meant to be in the article. I believe that the point of journalism is to report on stuff and above all to hold to account those who are currently in power. It's been a problem that the 'liberal media' has been very soft on all Democratic presidents from Clinton to Obama to Biden (and probably long before then) - and it has not gone unnoticed by the right, which manages to run successful campaigns by attacking 'the media' in toto.
@Josh - I included Rufo, who I think has a gone through a considerable evolution. In the 2010s, Rufo was an early critic of Critical Race Theory - it's interesting to read this New Yorker piece (https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory) and to see at that point just how unknown the intellectual tree of Critical Race Theory was in mainstream discourse. Early on, Rufo was mostly a commentator and critic. His association with DeSantis and then his plagiarism campaign came later He is a textbook instance of somebody who was seen to be in a 'heterodox' space and then became pretty much a Republican Party operative.
I really like Packer's piece, but I guess the framing here would be a bit different. It comes ultimately from Bari Weiss' 2018 piece on the Intellectual Dark Web (when she was still with The New York Times) - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html. The premise is that there is a group-think that can often be unconscious on the liberal left and in mainstream discourse, that discreetly avoids a wide variety of controversial topics and sort of pre-organizes the conversation. At the time of Weiss' piece it seemed like the IDW didn't have that much to complain about - a certain fixation on Trump and Russia-Gate and some ideological conformity within identity politics. But that group-think really became much more obvious in 2020/2021 with, in no particular order, a) the reluctance to discuss the lab-leak theory; b) the vilification of anyone questioning vaccine efficacy; c) the free pass given to rioters during the Floyd protests; d) the free pass given to Antifa and the autonomous zones in western cities; e) the cancelation of dissenting voices from social media platforms and the widespread social media practice of 'deamplification' f) the prevalence of fairly extreme 'woke' narratives in centers of learning. It's very possible to argue that none of these are the most important issues in the world - that, taken together they are all less important than the threat posed by Trump - but these all seemed to be fair questions for intellectuals to tackle. The idea with 'heterodoxy' is that anyone who is willing to step on any of these third rails in liberal course becomes 'heterodox' and tends to receive a certain amount of opprobrium. I do continue to find it a useful term even if, by definition, it is somewhat slippery.
Wow now that is a thorough response! Well done - and on the column too.
Given your description of frustration at responses to Bowles' book that don't engage with what she's written, I'm curious what you think of this piece; which has disagreements with significant parts of the book but attempts to engage with curiosity: https://thewhitepages.substack.com/p/trying-to-be-curious-about-an-incurious