Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a ‘Curator’ post. These feature discussions of a range of interesting/provocative articles from the ‘artistic/intellectual web.’ At the partner site
, has a really good piece on racial ambiguity.Best,
Sam
THE KENDI FALLOUT
The main story at the moment on the sort of intellectual web is the revelation of chronic misspending and institutional collapse at Ibram X. Kendi’s Boston University-affiliated Center for Antiracist Research. Whistleblowers described mismanagement on “a really fundamental level” and a “pattern of amassing grants without any commitment to producing the research obligated” by them.
With Kendi’s career apparently “imploding,” the question has been about how to take the news. In a fraught, absorbing conversation, John McWhorter accuses Glenn Loury of being “joyous” about it, to which Loury momentarily takes offense and then concedes that that’s pretty much true. “Schadenfreude,” Loury says. “Sure, that’s not very honorable, but everybody’s enjoying the disaster. They’re crowing.”
‘Schadenfreude’ is also the word used by Tyler Austin Harper in a tough-talking Washington Post op-ed.
As so often, McWhorter serves here as the voice of reason. He points out that there is no actual charge of grift — just poor administrative skills; and Kendi simultaneously getting rich through his book royalties, etc — and that a weakness in institutional management doesn’t by itself discredit Kendi’s ideas. “You know, if you tried to have me administrate something, I would have that thing a smoking hole in the ground in two weeks,” McWhorter graciously offers.
But everybody on the case — Loury, McWhorter, Harper — seems to agree that the ‘fall’ of Kendi is revelatory of something or other, some great blindspot in woke culture. Loury, not surprisingly, is the most splenetic. He says:
The whole thing fell apart because [Kendi] was an empty suit, which reveals the superficiality of the virtue-signaling mania that ensued after George Floyd got killed in Minneapolis in 2020. There was never any there there. That's been obvious from day one. So it's not about him, right? It's about the institutions and about the mania of that moment.
To which McWhorter pivots slightly by saying that the institutions that promoted Kendi essentially set him up — profiting off his fame while puffing up his very meager academic credentials. “What BU did is an insult to black achievement,” he says. “All of this fell apart because he was chosen for something that he shouldn't have been chosen for. But why be mad at him?”
Harper casts the net even a little wider by writing:
I think the blame lies not just with Kendi but with the rich donors, CEOs and universities that were eager to purchase their own absolution by bulk-buying anti-racist indulgences. His rise in 2020, and his ignominious decline today, are a mirror held up to liberal America. His failure, intellectual and moral, is as much ours as it is his.
So. Yes. The opportunism of liberal America — its lack of any genuine belief in what Kendi was saying, while at the same time piling on the accolade — is very much on display here. And it is striking to see, in 2023, a headline in The Washington Post calling Kendi’s rise “a cautionary tale” when, in 2019, Kendi made the cover of The Washington Post Magazine and, in 2022, was cited as a “celebrated scholar.” If — as Harper writers — both he and Robin DiAngelo were “charlatans,” places like The Washington Post, as well as the National Book Foundation and the MacArthur Fellows Program, were strikingly willingly to be taken in by them.
The point is that, for a significant, vital period of time, institutional America chose to suspend its critical thinking. It’s obvious, almost at a glance, that Kendi was making a series of insupportable points — that all action is divided into “racist” or “anti-racist,” that any action (or non-action) resulting in racial inequity is “racist” — and that his proposals (the establishment of a permanently-funded Department of Anti-racism and the passage of an Anti-Racist Constitutional Amendment) were as polarizing as they were impractical. But Kendi was cool and, with so much blue-state energy tilting towards identity politics and radical solutions, liberal institutions, when dealing with a figure like Kendi, allowed themselves to be almost completely swallowed up by progressivism. The result was an odd sort of spectacle — Kendi producing, in Harper’s words, “strange children’s books” like Antiracist Baby and Goodnight Racism while continuing to bask, between BU, the MacArthur Grant, the National Book Award, magazine covers, lavish speaking fees, Time Magazine’s ‘100 Most Influential’ issue, in every possible honor that the institutions could throw at him. Until, that is, the story about the Center for Antiracist Research broke and the institutions moved to put as much distance as they could between themselves and Kendi.
The results of these lapses of critical thinking are enduring. The institutions lost their credibility just when they needed it most: in the midst of sustained attacks from the right, they became, pretty much, exactly what the right was accusing them of being. And the discourse, through the promotion of ideas like Kendi’s, is now saturated with vituperative and nearly-militaristic rhetoric. “In my view the real damage that Kendi’s philosophy has wrought on American culture is in the way he turned words like ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacy’ into banal, everyday terms like any others,” writes Harper.
That sort of thinking comes through in a recent poll which shows that 51% of black Americans believe racism will get worse in their lifetimes while only 11% believe it will get better — a really startling finding at odds with decades of progress since civil rights, with the advancement of black individuals in a wide array of leadership positions. I can only blame thinkers like Kendi for that — for a profoundly pessimistic outlook that sees racism as intractable fact and any action, any progress, as only so much eyewash.
To observers like McWhorter, Loury, and Harper, closely following the Kendi story, the convenient narratives of ‘hucksterism’ or ‘grift’ don’t convey the underlying dynamics here. Liberal America enthusiastically overpaid for its anti-racist indulgences — and allowed itself to be diverted into hopeless narratives of congenital racism, in which no meaningful progress could ever possibly be made.
AN ANNOYING NEW YORK MAGAZINE ARTICLE
I already wrote a long post this week about the sexual revolution and touching on the startling finding by the University of Chicago’s Sam Peltzman that married Americans claim, by a factor of 30 percentage points, to be happier than the unmarried.
I’d like to just briefly mention the inchoate response by New York Magazine’s Rebecca Traister to that survey. To Traister, the mere discussion of the virtues of marriage is a right-wing canard — a distraction from questions of “money, and the racist and economically unjust policies that leave some Americans with less of it to begin with, regardless of their marital status.”
The political fault-lines in America come to be drawn between single women — women who have gained access to “legal abortion, to affirmative action, to no-fault divorce,” which has “enabled them to have economic and social stability independent of marriage,” and who vote Democratic by 30 percentage points — as opposed to the pot-bellied, priggish traditionalists who are looking to turn back the clock and to re-entrap women in suffocating marriages. Even to bring up concerns about the breakdown of the family structure, as Ross Douthat, David Brooks, and Nicholas Kristof do in response to the Sam Peltzman study, is to play into the pro-natalist fetishes of the right. “Go on. Make something reciprocal and fertile. A bridge, a bond, a marriage, and while you’re at it, another Republican voter,” writes Traister.
I find almost everything about this argument so self-defeating that it’s not really worth diving into. It’s very hard to argue, from anybody’s life experience, that women have nothing to do with the propagation of marriage as an institution — that it’s all some patriarchal ploy. And, in arguing that readier access to divorce boosts women’s careers, Traister doesn’t consider that divorce laws in most states tend to favor women — that being married and then getting divorced yields far better financial outcomes for women, especially women with children, than does remaining unmarried. And being concerned about consistent childcare for children isn’t, as Traister writes, some wicked hard-right plot to “re-center (hetero) marriage as the organizing principle of American family” — it’s just responding to some very troubling data and some obviously deleterious trends in the American social structure.
What an essay like Traister’s, like the case of Kendi, makes clear is the utter lack of moderation of contemporary liberalism, the tendency to box itself in to some very radical and dogmatic narratives. Traister opens her essay by describing a run-in with an older woman who plants tulips in the spring to commemorate her divorce from a verbally-abusive husband. Traister writes:
By the time the tulips bloomed the next spring, her baby had arrived and she had left her husband. Tulips always made her smile, she told me, her arms now full of a new bunch of them. They reminded her of how she had come by her liberty.
But the older woman’s “cheerful” disposition is not really the triumph that Traister makes it out to be. It sounds like a very difficult situation (one only hopes she did well in the divorce settlement). For Traister to make her encounter with the older woman the anchor of her piece (and, by extension, a whole worldview) is a very strange foreshortening of all of the complexities of family life. Nobody — not Douthat, Brooks, Kristof, or Sam Peltzman’s data — is preventing women from staying unmarried or getting a divorce if they’re unhappy in their marriage. But there is the gentle suggestion that single motherhood isn’t necessarily the easiest thing in the world, let alone the rallying point for a whole worldview — that the society can take a little more interest in bolstering the family structure without (as Traister strongly implies) being homophobic or racist.
All of this is the unfortunate legacy of the woke era — the left battening down the hatches around its most uncompromising, most bellicose positions and impatient even of attempts to see the other side (Traister is particularly upset that The New York Times has devoted as much column space as it has to this issue). What bothers me most about this is what a political dead end it is. This is the moment when liberal Democrats have to start thinking very seriously about political coalition-building, about how to win back, from the clutches of MAGA, an electorate that is not doing at all well, that is suffering from a dizzying array of social ills. Calling them all white supremacists was a bad start. Accusing them of being homophobic, misogynist bigots for even thinking about getting married is no better.
WHAT DO ANY OF US MEAN WHEN WE SAY WE ‘ARE LIBERALS’?
What I’m dealing with in both of the above pieces is a schism within liberalism — this one fairly straightforward between a more classical liberalism and an emboldened progressivism — but there are a couple of articles out that argue that the splits within liberalism are deeper than is usually understood.
The favorite intellectual parlor game at the moment has to do with something called post-liberalism. As far as I can tell, that’s a wishful and incoherent philosophy. It’s based off the writings of Patrick Deneen and has to do with “wielding the state apparatus to implement the true common good,” which sounds fine in the abstract but in Deneen’s rendition turns out to be, ahem, Catholic communitarianism.
The former Wall Street Journal columnist Sohrab Ahmari puts together a more palatable version of post-liberalism, which emphasizes a return to the strong state of the New Deal era. In a discussion of Ahmari in The Point Magazine, J. Colin Bradley calls Ahmari’s rendition of the middle part of the 20th century “flimsy history” resulting from “gauzy memory.” But it’s not bad history, it’s just not particularly “post-liberal.” It’s completely standard Social Democratic-ish history packaged in a form that Ahmari, as a self-described “man of the right,” can circulate among his ideological cohort.
A very interesting and far-reaching article by Greg Conti in Ahmari’s Compact Magazine argues that a more fruitful way to understand liberalism’s fault-lines may be in the doctrine’s development within Victorian England. What Conti shows is that John Stuart Mill’s liberalism, “although nothing less than gospel to many Victorian readers,” was not without its ferocious critics, most subtle among them James Fitzjames Stephen, probably best remembered now as the dour uncle of Virginia Woolf (and the symbol of much that Bloomsbury was revolting against).
Steeped in imperialist administration and in conservative fears of the tyranny of the majority, Stephen was a liberal — but not of a kind that we would find immediately recognizable. Stephen’s liberalism proudly “empowered elites, suppressed the popular will, licensed the imperial rule.” He regarded Hobbes as his favorite philosopher; believed that, as “the minority are wise and the majority foolish,” the only fit conclusion was that “the wise minority are the rightful masters of the foolish majority”; and viewed imperialism as a testing ground for statist and coercive administrative methods that could be profitably applied to rule within the U.K. “If it was right for the British, being more highly developed, to rule over the Hindoos, why then may not educated men coerce the ignorant [at home]?” Stephen asked.
What Stephen had in mind was what would come to be known as technocracy. Democratic values had their place but weren’t to be taken too seriously — “The waters [of democracy] are out but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god,” he wrote in vintage Victorianism. What mattered was a self-perpetuating, “wise” elite, which would be at the head of an active, engaged state, would act through clever “coercion” in a sort of “domestic imperialism,” and would keep at bay the sentimentalizing democratizers and the libertarians.
Mill’s doctrines would become the liberal gospel — ’negative liberty,’ the state keeping well clear of the sacred garden of the individual — but they had their internal contradictions and gave little direction to the state on how to operate. Stephen’s smugly utilitarian technocracy offered those in power with a far more useful playbook. And, reading about Stephen in Conti’s article, there is the unpleasant shiver of recognition to ideas like Cass Sunstein’s ‘nudge,’ with the ever-wise, ever-benevolent state constantly pushing its desired outcomes on people whether they want them or not, to Hillary Clinton’s patronizing comment this week that there may need to be “a formal deprogramming of [MAGA] cult members.” (I’m pretty sure she was joking but still….)
The point is that Mill’s very wonderful theories — like a national anthem of liberalism — were basically pablum. They were the exoteric side of liberalism. Stephen — with his greater attention to the practical difficulties of governance — was closer to its actual heart. “Stephen’s bracing unsentimentality does enable us to ask what we might hope, and fear, from the return of a more aggressively technocratic strain of liberalism we are witnessing,” Conti writes.
I am, I would say, a Mill liberal. I believe that the society’s protection of the autonomous sphere of the individual is the really important thing. I suspect that anything that anything that tends in a different direction — whether Stephen’s coercive technocracy or Carl Schmitt’s ‘sovereignty’ — tends to come to a bad end. But I’m aware that Mill’s liberalism leaves more unaddressed than it probably should about the role of government or the paradox of ‘voluntary coercion.’ It is not so easy either to extract Mill, like anything of the Victorian era, from the imperialist legacy.
What is particularly unfortunate is that ‘liberalism’ comes to be something like a cultural badge or status marker — and, as we’ve discovered on the left over the last five or ten years, those claiming to have ‘liberal’ beliefs can often disagree profoundly on the fundamentals. The muscular state that Lincoln and FDR produced, that Deneen and Ahmari, with their ulterior motives, call for a revival of, doesn’t seem like a particular departure from Mill’s liberalism, more a variation on it. But Stephen’s technocratic coercion, Kendi and Traister’s scorched-earth radicalism, feel like something different — liberalism dedicated not to the extension of individual liberty but to a certain collective perfecting. I find myself having real problems whenever that collectivist, progressivist mindset shows up. The fault may lie, as Conti suggests, in a certain vagueness in the doctrines of liberalism when they were first formulated. So this becomes an important moment to try to clarify what any of us mean when we say that we ‘are liberals.’ What I would mean is that I am in favor of broadening individual liberty on an egalitarian basis through the society and the state, where necessary, providing the means to do so. Anything else belongs to a different doctrine.
I just warned you about "critical thinking!"
I really appreciate how you call out the absurd but handle other points with nuance. I'm with McWhorter that the important flaw was in the theory and thought process, not in the mismanagement.
I thought your summary quote below was very apt.
"Liberal America enthusiastically overpaid for its anti-racist indulgences — and allowed itself to be diverted into hopeless narratives of congenital racism, in which no meaningful progress could ever possibly be made."
robertsdavidn.substack.com/about