Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the latest ‘Curator’ post — riffs on the artistic and intellectual web. A lot of interesting pieces to delve into this week! I really love doing this, but, just to say it, these posts (‘Curator’ and ‘Commentator’ especially) take a lot of time and effort. Support — whether recommendations, comments, paid subscriptions — always very welcome!
All best,
Sam
ON LIBERALISM AND BLACK IDENTITY
I’ve made a sort of pact with myself in writing this Substack to be unafraid of any subject matter — and even for topics that are very uncomfortable for me, critiques of the pandemic response, trans debates, and so on, to address them if I feel that they’re important. The topic that is most uncomfortable, that brings me up short, though, is any issue related to black identity.
The question, as is becoming increasingly clear, is whether white people like myself get any say at all in anything related to black identity. The default position of people in the sort of ‘heterodox,’ IDW space where I’m finding myself is to appeal to the basic tenets of liberalism — that, of course, what should matter is open civic space, the free exchange of views, implicit rules of civility, etc. The problem there, though, is liberalism — and right at the period when it was formulating its ‘basic tenets’ — broke down almost completely over slavery. Liberalism was one thing for people with a degree of power, who had constituted themselves as the body politic; it was something very different for people who, based on race, were excluded from it.
That fundamental split over whether liberalism has the ability to speak to race issue informs my reading of a really bracing controversy at the Telluride Association’s summer school program. Vincent Lloyd, a professor at Villanova, tells the story in an article for Compact Magazine and on Persuasion’s podcast. Lloyd’s credentials for teaching a college-level class called ‘Race and the Limits of Law in America’ could not be more unassailable. As he writes of himself: “I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.”
But none of that protected Lloyd. His high school-age class, instigated by a recent college-graduate ‘factotum’ and by a series of anti-racism workshops, mutinied against him, reading him a list of accusations, orchestrating — apparently — the expulsion of two Asian-American students who were insufficiently progressive, and eventually boycotting his class. Lloyd wrote:
They alleged that I had used racist language. I had misgendered Brittney Griner. I had repeatedly confused the names of two black students. My body language harmed them. I hadn’t corrected facts that were harmful to hear when the (now-purged) students introduced them in class. I invited them to think about the reasoning of both sides of an argument, when only one side was correct.
In one harrowing encounter, the students, slated to have a lunch after class at Lloyd’s house, decided that they were too offended by Lloyd and the compromise proposed and accepted was for the students to eat, in the backyard, the food that Lloyd and his partner had prepared for them with Lloyd not allowed to join them.
It would be easy enough to view the Telluride incident as one more instance of woke outrage, but Lloyd himself — and I agree with him — is anxious that it be seen as a deeper and more subtle issue. Lloyd, as he makes clear in the Persuasion interview, is very much in agreement with his students’ fundamental premises. He says:
We are at a moment of paradigm shift in how we think about race in America. We were in a multicultural paradigm for a long time where blackness was one among many different racial identities, all of which were celebrated, all of which had different forms of oppression that we could stand in solidarity with but ultimately in the direction of all living happily together in a rainbow nation. Now, the demands of black justice movements and other movements are saying, ‘Actually, they are deep, deep problems in US culture, US institutions, and US laws. We don't need inclusion and integration. We need to imagine something new. We need to imagine black justice outside of the existing institutions' paradigms.’
My attitude is that the ‘multicultural paradigm’ was a really good, healthy place for a society to be. This was sort of the deepest belief of the era I was growing up in — and appeared to culminate in Obama’s presidency: that the past was awful but reform and social progress were possible, that we could correct for historical racism and achieve the pluralistic, liberal vision that was embedded in the nation’s founding principles. But, again, I’m white and it’s not clear that I get a say here.
Were I black, I might well be inclined to the separationist perspective — Malcolm X instead of Martin Luther King; the Reverend Wright instead of Obama — and to hold that America’s racism is deeper than its liberalism, that what matters isn’t adhering to some foundational set of principles which deliberately and callously excluded black people but the fight for power and the good life with whatever means are at one’s disposal. I disagree with that perspective but I do think it’s legitimate — and what’s interesting about reading Lloyd is, his bruising experience at Telluride aside, he is inclined to think that way or at least, and maybe more crucially, to treat it as strategy.
It’s perfectly possible to swap out the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ for ‘strategy’ in Lloyd’s assessment and arrive at the same place. The question, very simply, is what’s better for black people — and whether liberalism is a benefit or a hindrance.
But what Lloyd may well have discovered at Telluride is that excising liberalism in favor of a more revolutionary ethic has certain uncontrollable consequences. The push towards a framework of revolutionary zeal is likely inevitable; and so is the tendency to conduct revolutionary purges against anybody who seems to be wavering, anybody who happens to be close at hand. That is how Lloyd interprets what happened to him at the hands of the impressionable Telluride students:
For a 17-year-old at a highly selective, all-expenses-paid summer program, newly empowered with the language of harm, there are relatively few sites at which to use this framework. My seminar became the site at which to try out—and weaponize—this language.
Lloyd has the advantage of a long memory and he sees in his ordeal an echo of the breakdown of revolutionary movements in the 1970s. “Now my thoughts turned to that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion,” he writes. That’s a chapter that’s being quietly left out of political history — the memory of how glorious, ambitious revolutionary movements tend to disintegrate (a process, I would contend, that is inherent in revolutionary logic itself).
There is a quiet forgetting concerning the deeper past as well. The tendency at the moment is to see the entirety of American society before, let’s say, the civil rights movement as intrinsically, monolithically racist. That applies, certainly, to antebellum America, including the nation’s founding — and allows, really, for no exceptions, so that even Abraham Lincoln is finding himself deplatformed. What’s lost in that flattening of history is the understanding that the end of slavery didn’t suddenly happen — that it emerged precisely out of liberalism, out of the Enlightenment and abolitionism and a relatively new intellectual movement that shifted the perception of slavery from being seen as a ‘tradition’ to being morally inadmissible. This movement— which led to the Civil War and to Emancipation — had everything to do with the liberal tenets advocated for by Lloyd and which were critiqued so harshly by his Telluride students. What the past and present alike demonstrate is that they are very fragile ideas and that it takes real concerted work to sustain them.
DOWN WITH THE SAFETY CULTURE!
There’s another set of woke outrages that have to do with equity language and the mania for eliminating all possible ‘harms.’ Equity language is such a soft target, so easily dismissible, that I’ve been reluctant to spend much time in this Substack on it — and, yet, it seems to be inexorably gaining ground, and lots of people who should know better, well-educated people, loyal in theory to principles of free speech, subscribe to it.
In The Atlantic, George Packer deftly rips equity language a new one. He writes, à propos of the newest equity language guide, one by the Sierra Club:
The guides want to make the ugliness of our society disappear by linguistic fiat. Even by their own lights, they do more ill than good—not because of their absurd bans on ordinary words like congresswoman and expat, or the self-torture they require of conscientious users, but because they make it impossible to face squarely the wrongs they want to right, which is the starting point for any change. Prison does not become a less brutal place by calling someone locked up in one a person experiencing the criminal-justice system. Equity language doesn’t fool anyone who lives with real afflictions. It’s meant to spare only the feelings of those who use it.
The real question of course is how something like this could have come to pass —how, of all places, Stanford, the University of Washington, Columbia’s continuing education school, etc, would be part of a movement that seeks to replace the phrase ‘poor’ with ‘economically disadvantaged’ or ‘felon’ with ‘justice-involved person.’
Part of the answer has to do with a malady particularly on the Left — and, yes, this sort of censorship is the Left’s issue; the Right has its own problems — and is connected to the Left’s fascination with collectivism, the belief that by all pooling together we can advance not only our interests but the common cause of social progress. As Packer writes, the equity language initiative is coming from a good place, well-intentioned and idealistic: “a quest for salvation, not political reform or personal courtesy.” But the equity language — like Leftist movements of the past — utterly fails to recognize what it is doing to culture in the deepest sense. When you replace the word ‘poor’ with the words ‘economically disadvantaged,’ it’s just not a linguistic shift— you are consolidating cultural power in an institution like Stanford; you are creating a deeply fraught cultural schism between the ‘pious’ who use the correct (and incidentally ever-changing) vocabulary and the impious who do not or simply cannot keep up with it; and you are transforming language into a weapon of cultural sanctimony as opposed to a tool for actual communication. “The liturgy changes without public discussion, and with a suddenness and frequency that keep the novitiate off-balance, forever trying to catch up, and feeling vaguely impious,” Packer writes. It seems impossible that the deans of culture on the Left do not recognize the dangers in this sort of weaponized bureaucratization of language, but, as far as I can tell, they simply are oblivious to it — they are so convinced that they are on the right side of history that the sacrifice of a shared, comprehensible, eloquent language seems a fair price to pay.
The other aspect of how something like the equity language guides could have come about has to with the attempt to eliminate suffering in the culture-at-large. Katherine Boyle, writing 18 hours before going into labor (!), has a thoughtful piece on this in The Free Press — discussing the West’s deep discomfort with suffering of any sort. This cast of thought I don’t associate particularly with the Left but wends all the way back to Francis Bacon and the vision of the science and tech-driven utopia. Society itself becomes disentangled from natural biological processes. The point of culture is not, as in the older religious models, to provide solace for the inherent tragedies of life; the point is to gradually ameliorate material conditions and, through distant innovations, to eliminate physical suffering altogether.
Boyle discusses the way that childbirth, apparently the most sacred and untouchable of all natural processes, had come to be subject to the same ameliorative thinking. Boyle writes:
Last year, various tech pioneers expressed a dire need for artificial wombs to end the ‘high burden of pregnancy.’ When I asked a group of young women based in Silicon Valley what they thought of this idea, to my surprise, they celebrated the development. One summarized her views of childbirth saying: ‘I look forward to artificial wombs because it will finally equalize men and women. Women have always had to bear this unique suffering.’
I write frequently on this Substack about the way that two very pernicious modes of thought — Bacon’s technological determinism and an eschatological vision of social justice — have been combined in our era, and one of the more interesting (and annoying) side-effects of that combination is in this abiding sense of frailty. We are so close to the tech-and-social-justice utopia, this way of thinking runs, that we must not in any way disturb it — it goes without saying that we must not question its basic premises. Any ‘harms,’ any suffering at all, are deemed a moral lapse — a failure to be, again, on the right side of history.
There are two charming articles out that fly in the face of the emphasis on safety. Brooke Allen has a very compelling piece in The Wall Street Journal arguing that “College Should Be More Like Prison.” She teaches humanities classes at a men’s maximum security prison and says, basically, that it’s just great — “In many ways, it is the Platonic ideal of teaching, what teaching once was,” she writes — and very different from the experience she had within the university system. The main differences are that her students want to be there — they are eager participants in their classes — and that they are not such shrinking violets as the college students are. All of them have had “rough experiences out in the real world,” writes Allen, and they are not particularly concerned about the ‘harms’ of language; they are able to perceive literature for what it is, a chance to test one’s limits, take in other perspectives, go beyond oneself. “If prison inmates, many of whom have committed violent crimes, can pay close attention for a couple of hours, put aside their political and personal differences, support one another’s academic efforts, write eloquent essays without the aid of technology and get through a school year without cheating, is it too much to ask university students to do the same?” Allen writes. Fair enough — but, in the end, it’s not really up to the students. That ethic isn’t possible if administrations continue to prioritize ‘harm reduction’ and safety above all.
The other charming essay is by Justin E. H. Smith, whom I’ve discussed elsewhere on this Substack. Smith, better than just about anybody else I’ve come across, managed to document heightened levels of alienation during the pandemic — and to track back alienation and tech-dependence to some very misguided philosophical ideas. I wasn’t quite sure why Smith was writing so much more fluidly and impassionedly than other philosophers and now I have part of the answer — he was going through a profound psychedelic journey. In an era where psychedelic use is commonplace and almost uncontroversial, it clearly is not within Smith’s academic community — and the risk he’s taking in sharing his journey is palpable throughout his Wired essay. “So I’m just going to come right out and say it: “I am a philosopher who has taken an interest, of late, in psychedelic experimentation,” he writes, and “Here I am, still philosophizing like a stoned undergrad in a black-lighted dorm room.”
And Smith finds — not so surprisingly — that the exploration of altered states allows him to be a better philosopher. “Philosophers aren’t supposed to philosophize; they’re supposed to ‘do philosophy,’ as the professional argot has it,” he writes. But, under the influence, he is able to consider such quaint, non-tenure-track questions as the meaning of life and the structure of consciousness. “Our liminal states of consciousness may well be consciousness at its most veracious,” he writes, and this brings him as well to a non-Baconian, non-Cartesian perspective — to a more Idealistic, more pre-modern sensibility in which the ground of reality is more closely intertwined with one’s consciousness than in the strict materialist model. “My undrugged mind delivers to me a world of ‘medium-sized dry goods’ and little else,” writes Smith. “My drugged mind delivers to me spirits or djinni or angels or I don’t know what to call them.” The sense of risk is important here. Courage is very important to a psychonaut — it takes nerve to undo one’s usual perceptual framework, to ‘float downstream’ — and great courage is needed too to be a respectable 21st century academic who admits to being in contact with djinns, ‘theriomorphic divinities’ and ‘fugacious beings.’ Simply put — and this should be obvious enough to anybody who’s made it to the end of a Hollywood movie or a book or has gone through any adversity in their life — safety only takes you so far. If you want to grow, you have to forget who you think you are; you have to take real risks.
DOWN WITH THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX!
There are a couple of nicely-paired pieces on the rot of the cozy publishing and journalistic world as opposed to the exuberance of the alternative space that it is opening up — on Substack above all. As
— again in The Free Press — writes, culture right now is really doing incredibly well. People are so creative — there is so much being made and much of it is really good. “The world of alternative culture is flourishing,” Gioia writes. “It really is boom times….I wouldn’t grasp the scope of this myself if I weren’t on Substack. But most days it feels like I stumbled, by chance, onto a rocket ship that is taking off to the heavens.”That’s exactly how I feel as well. I made a very conscious effort about three years ago to open the aperture wider in my reading — to tune out publishing industry buzz and ‘critical opinion’ and to just try to take in as much as possible of what was out there — and, basically, that’s been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Substack is a big part of that but so are the indie presses, the small magazines, etc. Somehow I’d always believed, like some sort of free market purist, that exposure correlated to quality, and that turned out just to not be true at all. There was lots of great work and there often was no good reason that it hadn’t found its way to the ‘center of the culture.’ There was no point really in hoping that that phenomenon would change — ‘the center’ always has its corruptions and, by definition, the leading property of the cultural center is to exclude the vast majority of endeavor — and the only viable approach was simply to change oneself, to put more time into artistic exploration and artistic consumption and to do so, as much as possible, without preconceptions.
That process of changing my mode of consumption has made me realize just how dependent I used to be (and to some extent still am) on the commercial interests of very narrow and very self-serving artistic industries. As Gioia writes, “The brutal truth is that there’s an ocean of stuff out there, but consumers sip it through a narrow straw.” And, speaking specifically of music, he continues, “In this stratified culture, millions of songs are released, but the rewards go to a few dozen superstars. Everything else is lost in the noise. It’s a culture by the elites, for the benefit of the elites.”
There really is no point in hoping — as Gioia halfway does — that that culture will ever change. Industry exists almost entirely by creating some idea of artificial scarcity — by guiding the conversation, by making people believe that such-and-such hot book is the book that they absolutely have to read, by claiming that there are only so many books worth reading in a given month, by awarding prizes to the best books in a given year. There’s something very cozy and self-satisfied in thinking this way — that if one only reads X many ‘important’ books then one is sufficiently educated — but, as real readers know, culture is infinite and the more abiding pleasures it offers have to do with letting oneself sink into that infinitude.
What starts to emerge — and there are precedents for this in probably every era in history — is a ‘dominant culture,’ narrow, self-regarding, self-satisfied; and then an ‘alternative,’ ‘sub-dominant culture,’ which is actually much larger, much richer, and much more expressive of life as it is really lived. As Gioia writes:
The people in those legacy institutions ought to have figured this out already. If they don’t, they will soon find themselves operating in a shrinking echo chamber. But the problem with echo chambers is that people rarely tell you the truth inside those bastions of groupthink. Meanwhile, with each passing day, real folks in the real world take you less and less seriously.
The perfidy of the publishing industry is nicely illustrated in a Millions piece on blurbs by fellow Substacker
. There can be nothing more echo chamber-ish than the blurbs. Spy Magazine — the bastion of alternative culture in the ‘90s — used to run a feature called ‘Logrolling In Our Time,’ which featured such gems as Cynthia Ozick’s blurb of Edmund White’s book — “A seduction through language, a mosque without mask” — and answered not too long after by White blurbing Ozick as “the best American writer to have emerged in recent years.”Most people who think about blurbs treat them as a sort of necessary evil of the publishing industry. George Orwell, not surprisingly, was attuned to their ludicrousness and wrote of “the disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers.” David Foster Wallace was very much on an Orwellian wavelength when he described “blurbspeak” as “a very special subdialect of English that’s partly hyperbole, but it’s also phrases that sound really good and are very compelling in an advertorial sense, but if you think about them, they’re literally meaningless.” Camille Paglia was even more incensed about the blurbs and said that it was time “to end the corrupt practice of advance blurbs on books.” She continued, “This advance blurb thing is absolutely appalling, because it means that they send your book around to your friends, they scratch your back, and you scratch theirs. This is part of the coziness of the profession that I think has just been pernicious….That has got to stop.”
Well. It won’t stop. So long as publishers make money from the practice, they will continue to do it. But here’s the point. They will only make money if readers are credulous enough to take the blurbs as proof of authority as opposed to a mark of the industry’s cronyism. I used to think this way — and to pay attention to things like blurbs and prizes. It’s been hard work undoing that mechanism in myself, but, really, it’s been well worth it. Culture is vast and gorgeous. Industry makes you think it’s the province of some narrow circle.
WHAT BECOMES OF THE HERETICS?
In the culture’s slide towards wokeism — towards safety-first and the capture of legacy liberal institutions by really radical progressive thought — the first figures to sound the alarm were the loose constellation of figures dubbed, in 2018, “the intellectual dark web.” Two articles — a profile on Bari Weiss in The New Statesman and a diatribe by Christopher Rufo on his Substack — offer contrasting perspectives of what’s become of that movement.
The admiring profile on Weiss is, essentially and movingly, a treatment of what maturity looks like. Weiss became the heretic of heretics for The New York Times and the liberal media crowd, but, early on, she really wasn’t so different from the people she fell afoul of.
An acquaintance remembers “a young journalist who wanted to be Nora Ephron, who hosted literary parties for the New York media in her flat on the Upper West Side; always trenchant in her opinions, but carefree.”
“There was a lightness to her,” the acquaintance continued. Writing in The New Statesman, Harry Lambert continues, “She hadn’t yet paid a price for her views. There was a lightness to her. Weiss lost that life. And built another.”
I’ve been an avid reader of Common Sense and The Free Press but didn’t pay attention to Weiss in her New York Times incarnation. The surprise — which I was dimly aware of but not to the full extent of it — was how reviled she really was at The Times. “You are dating a fucking Nazi,” another Times editor said to Nellie Bowles, Weiss’-now-wife, at the time the two of them started dating. There was an enormous Twitter scandal when Weiss, praising a U.S. figure skater with a Japanese name, inaccurately referred to her as an “immigrant.” And Lambert quotes from Chapo Trap House, a media-focused podcast that zeroes in over and over again on Weiss. “Because there’s just nothing there, just absolute zero, so fucking vacant, just an empty case,” one of the podcasters said of Weiss, and then, losing all composure on the podcast, addressed Weiss directly, “This is bullshit man, this is bullshit, what the fuck is this? This is nothing, you’re an asshole. It’s like when a guy who had one big song two years ago says ‘I’m selling NFTs’ — fuck off.”
The issue with Weiss always was that she didn’t quite behave in the way that she was meant to. She seemed like a standard-issue New York liberal journalist — “I dated the way they dated,” she said in an interview with Jordan Peterson. The fact that her politics veered in a different direction — just slightly center-right in The New York Times days — came across as a personal betrayal. “She was meant to be on the team,” says a friend quoted in The New Statesman. When she didn’t conform to the rules of the team, continues Lambert, she was deemed “an apostate.” But with Weiss’ resignation and open letter directed to A.G. Sulzberger and the runaway success of Common Sense and then of The Free Press, Weiss clearly moved into a different category. It wasn’t just that she was an apostate — it was that she really was creating an entire rival church. “How Bari Weiss Broke The Media,” The New Statesman headlines its profile of her — and is only exaggerating slightly. And, in the piece, Lambert continues, “They tried to make an example of her, but Weiss is increasingly eclipsing them all.”
“The core insight behind Weiss’s success,” Lambert writes, “is that there has been this ideological capture of the institutions. And they are rotten with it.” And that’s true, but in a way the schism is even more fundamental than that. It’s that Weiss simply had to stop believing in the authority of the liberal institutions and of the entire echo chamber that they are part of. “It would be considered very gauche,” says ‘one denizen of New York media’ interviewed by The New Statesman, “to go around saying you liked Bari Weiss in young to youngish journalist circles here. She drives large portions of the New York commentariat into a state of fury.” But Weiss — who was apparently ‘crushed’ by the figure skater controversy and by the treatment of her in The Times’ newsroom — managed with time to tune it all out. That simply wasn’t her culture anymore. She decided to create a new one.
A similar but even more complicated case is Christopher Rufo. On his Substack, Rufo argues, very passionately, that the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ (a term first popularized by Weiss, incidentally) lost its way, “tapping out” on a series of hot-button issues and becoming a “spent force.” Rufo charts out a string of critical events that separated those who were genuinely committed to ‘free speech’ and ‘heterodoxy’ from those who were just playing at it. Those points were the Trump ‘resistance’; the Covid lockdowns; and DEI. For Rufo, all three events were fundamentally tests of IDW figures’ ability to retain their critical capacities in the face of strident liberal orthodoxy. And Rufo concludes, “So at the end of these three decision points, you’re left with very few people still standing. You have a splintering, you have a decomposition, you have really, honestly, a collapse of this movement as a coherent ideological force, intellectual force, and certainly political force.”
What Rufo is really upset about, in other words, is that more of the IDW figures didn’t become Republican and that they stayed intellectuals rather than become political activists. I find those arguments a bit absurd. Lambasting his former IDW colleagues for staying ‘on the fence,’ Rufo writes (speaking for them), “I won’t choose because choosing is uncomfortable, because choosing is distasteful because there is a lurking figure with an ugly orange-hued skin tone that I just can’t, for aesthetic reasons or political reasons or reasons of conscience, even contemplate.” Well, yeah, if a person for ‘political reasons’ can’t support Trump, then it’s very unlikely that they will join Rufo’s anti-woke crusade. And, assailing the movement for being inadequately active, Rufo writes, “The IDW wanted to remain in the mode of criticism in perpetuity.” And, again, that stands to reason — intellectuals see it as their jobs to be intellectuals; political organizing is a different profession.
But I read Rufo’s piece feeling that I was reading something that could prove important. A few of the IDW figures have drifted into politics.
ran for governor of California on an independent ticket. The Medical Freedom Party suddenly materialized on ballots in response to the pandemic. Needless to say, none of these got very far. Rufo, who moved from documentary film to grassroots activism to a role as an advisor for DeSantis, basically thinks that everybody in the IDW world should be part of DeSantis’ campaign. “Because of Duverger’s Law, because of the historical reality of the last 250 years of the United States, it looks like [there is a choice of] one of two political parties as your vehicle for political change and as a necessary operator in your theory of social, intellectual, cultural, and political change,” Rufo writes — which is a very long-winded way of asking people to vote Republican.And this, I suspect, will turn into a wildly divisive point. IDW figures tend to spend most of their time witheringly attacking Democratic leadership and liberal institutions — the clear sense is that something has gone very wrong within liberalism — but at the same time remain loyal Democratic voters. DeSantis, in Rufo’s construction, is a bridge figure — as committed on cultural issues as the IDW is but also a palatable Republican. Rufo, being a bit mean, argues that if the IDW wants to retain any intellectual coherence, any validity, it has to dedicate itself to active change. “Although the movement deserves credit for pointing out the problem of left-wing overreach in America’s institutions, this critique is now part of conventional wisdom and is no longer sufficient,” he writes.
But, here, Rufo is missing the point. The underlying belief of the IDW always was that liberal institutions were fundamentally good — that the bedrock of American civil society should be preserved (but had gone somewhat astray given wokeism, progressivism, etc). If the institutions took in the IDW critique and managed to course-correct — as The New York Times, for instance, seems to be doing under Joe Kahn — then, fine, then there was no longer a need for the IDW to be as harsh on the institutions. Rufo, a long time ago, clearly tipped over from critique to radicalism. The put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is assault on the IDW is a misperception of what that energy is about — and what the role of a ‘public intellectual’ is. The IDW isn’t a Trojan Horse for the Right. It really is about restoring liberalism to its true self.
Great piece. I wonder if the harm-terrified are being Newtonian along with Baconian: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. We live in scary times. Maybe the more scared you are and the more fear is top of mind every waking moment, the more dedicated you are to erasing the possibility of any kind of harm just to get through the day. And since we are social beings, and need one another, you have to try to make sure that others don’t experience harm, either, because ultimately, you need them to keep you safe. Is altriusm and sensitivity really just selfish fear?
I hate blurbs. Don't plan on using them for my books. (maybe if Salman Rushdie reads them and says they're cool?) The idea of a writer begging for adulation doesn't sit right with me. As the Warsaw Courier wrote in the early 19th century once they discovered a local pianist making a name for himself: "Mr. Chopin must not hide [his genius and talent] and must let himself be heard publicly; but he must also be prepared to hear voices of envy, which usually spare only mediocrity."