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 β and allowed itself to be diverted into hopeless narratives of congenital racism, in which no meaningful progress could ever possibly be made."
Have been turning over what negative capability could mean in prescriptions practical for a year. Looked it up to talk here , - literary?!-circa 1817, but Bellows used the idea as the street lamp for Herzog to navigate a divorce of mutuall recriminations...The idea presumes a mismatch between systems and any body feeling more creative than destructive. Simply is consonant with democracy in a pluralist representative nearly urban agglomeration. For instance in Herzog , if your exwife is working her lived experience into her legalcase, Herzog like all of us has to grasp that people expressing grievances have a posse of simply everybody who accepts that they have been misused. George Simmel's 1908 correlate, just listen, is his definition of society. What is society? It is everybody who can stand up for 1 minute after you turn the lights on. From a ground level perspective the person who repeats a catchphrase to the nth is either obeying the comics law of repetition or else is really claiming priority in the society in the room with you now.
Iβll have to check out the podcast. I like John and can tolerate Glenn at times. The picture you paint in the first item item is why I call myself a John McWhorter liberal (knowing that your last item discusses the fraught mess of the L word)
For more in the Traister vein, see Amanda Montei's "Touched Out," which compares the experience of motherhood to the experience of assault.
"After #MeToo, however, [Montei] began to see a connection between how women were feeling in motherhood and the larger culture of assault in which she had grown up. In American society, women are expected to prioritize their children, often by pushing their bodies to the limit and ignoring their own desires and needs. As she struggled to adjust to the new demands on her body, this stirred memories of being used, violated, and seen by men. She had the desperate urge to finally say no, though she didnβt know how, or to whom she might say it."
Perhaps one day children will be writing memoirs about the emotional damage of seeking affection and being rebuffed on these grounds.
When I say you wrote another fabulous article, you know what that means: another Felix rant. XD XD
While I'm glad to see this racist fall from grace, his charlatanism isn't the witch in the woods kind. It's the kind that, like Marx and Foucault, we in the West have accepted in order to ensure our own self-destruction. He is certainly the most flamboyant Woke ideologue and cult leader. (If there's one place people tend to suspend critical thinking, it's when they are part of a cult; if you think I'm extreme, just read Arthur Deikman's studies of cults and you'll know what walks like a duck and talks like a duck) But those who are against Wokeness (and they aren't all right-wingers) were right to reject him from day one; it was a matter of principle but so much more. This guy is using Orwell as a guidebook, thereby showing that he most probably possesses evil, Big Brother motives; on top of that, his vision, if implemented, will most probably liquidate racial conciliation, as you've mentioned. (Although I am of the group that is pessimistic about repairing race relations, though I take no pleasure in being a pessimist) What's interesting here is that it's Kendi's inability to handle an institution that is finally causing the powers that be to turn their backs on him. Very interesting.
Gramsci is most certainly laughing about this down in hell. But the point is: Kendi didn't appear in a vacuum, and neither did DiAngelo. They are the most recent peak of decades of not civil rights "content of your character" thinking, but the anti-White side of this issue that criminalizes every White person through the "sins" of their ancestors. Kendi, suffice to say, is not a liberal and his ideas have nothing to do with Martin Luther King; only naive liberals think this. (or those less naive who equivocate helping Black people with anti-Whiteness, so they respond with "you're a racist for caring about White people") Kendi is for the most part regurgitating what academia has taught him on this issue from a critical race perspective, albeit with his own personal flair. I've been to such seminars myself where no matter what White people do, they are always evil racists and they must be anti-racists because colorblindness is just as racist as the Klan. (Even though it's not, and in the 90s it actually worked, but the rise of the Internet made it feel like we'd failed) The language and terms are, perhaps, a bit different. But the underlying message is the same.
In this sense, Kendi is more like Trotsky or Bukharin than anyone else. The difference being that the latter could handle power better than him.
In terms of happiness, being engaged has definitely bolstered my happiness, so I believe those people who say they are happier. And Traiser sounds like a crackpot; though for the good of the maligned and misunderstood institution I hope he keeps spewing narratives about "right-wing pro-natal fetishes" because then the term "right-wing" will become as harmless as "racist." "Fetishizing" marriage isn't supposed to be a political issue, and those who think that are hypocrites who fetishize power, a much more sinister and wicked idol than matrimony. Perhaps half the divorces that go on in the US would be less likely to happen if people stopped viewing it as a political arrangement. For this reason religion maintains, and will continue to maintain, the high ground when it comes to marriage because unlike secularists, it recognizes marriage as a sacred union. Something more than just a big party where you spend a lot of money and feel rich. Naturally, it makes no sense to anyone who doesn't believe in divine sanctity to value marriage in a comparable fashion, except insofar as some individuals believe in love occupying a higher plane. But it is unprecedented in history: no matter how different we are as human beings, marriage and funerals are found in every society on planet earth.
As for Hilary: I don't think she was joking since she's the one who came up with that amusing yet asinine phrase "basket of deplorables." (I'm still wondering why deplorables would be in a basket and not, say, a bucket; I guess it sounds better) And if she was, in my opinion it was a terrible joke. Not because people aren't allowed to make mean jokes about the other side, that's typical. But because she is validating a current view on the extreme left that the "evil conservatives," especially Trump supporters, should be brainwashed to think the right way, theoretically by a leftist state with all the power in its hands. (How else would they do it?) To my knowledge, Hilary is the first high-profile person to condone this genocidal narrative. Meaning, brainwashing conservatives to think the right way is now mainstream.
Those liberals and leftists who genuinely care about helping people made a mistake by condoning Kendi. This is another example where they will most probably make the same exact mistake; their hatred of conservatives, much of it media-stoked, appears to supersede their ability to think rationally, let alone critically. We saw this with all the insane media coverage of Trump where they believed he was literally Hitler; and liberals bought it. Coverage that has primed much of the nation to reconcile itself with an idea as extreme and evil as "denazifying" conservatives. What was that vague line they used in V For Vendetta? "We did what had to be done." This mistake with Kendi (and the possible repeat of a mistake with Hilary) should be a warning that the American left is on the road to potential genocide.
I already left a long message, so I should probably end here. But the concept of what is a liberal is very interesting. My big takeaway: the political identity of liberal is extremely malleable. Depending on the scenario, this is both a blessing and a curse.
It seems to me that there is a tension between your rejection of James Fitzjames Stephenβs βcoercive technocracyβ and your response to Rebecca Traister. You write:
> [T]here is the gentle suggestion that single motherhood isnβt necessarily the easiest thing in the world, let alone the rallying point for a whole worldview β that the society can take a little more interest in bolstering the family structure without (as Traister strongly implies) being homophobic or racist.
To which I might respond, exactly how much βgentle suggestionβ is to be involved when society βtake[s] a little more interestβ in boosting marriage? The most likely kind of coercion for Traister to be concerned about is precisely the type that you claim to be against, when you reject Stephen-style liberalism! And here you are pooh-poohing the very idea of being worried by the possibility such a thing!
Traister is not, as you falsely claim, accusing anyone of βbeing homophobic, misogynist bigots for even thinking about getting married.β At no point in her article does she express any opposition to the idea that people should get married if they want to. Her opposition is to the idea of promoting marriage as a solution to societal ills, in part because she fears sexist coercion on that point.
You may well disagree with Traister here β and I can certainly see reasons to do so β but if so, itβs not because youβre some sort of pure βMill liberal.β
I agree that the allegation of grift is glib and likely unfair. But I donβt agree that mismanagement is the only thing going on here. I think itβs reasonable to suggest that failures of character and intellectual heft are part of the story; I know that when Iβve been hired to do something I wasnβt entirely qualified to do, I busted my ass trying to get up to speed. And i was not in a position to hire an army of people to make me look better.
And Iβd like to believe that if I were handed multiple million dollars for almost any project, I would
A. not have immediately spent a bunch of money on physical renovation
B. have reasoned that it made sense to allocate (letβs say) a million dollars hiring an extraordinary team to make plans that would avoid a huge embarrassing crisis, game out obvious ruinous scenarios, etc.
In fact, Iβm pretty sure that with the kind of scratch he was handed, my odds of success would have been better than a coin flip even in an area where i had zero experience. So, for me, any scenario where we accept that his conceptual premise is entirely valid means we ought to accept that his level of hubris is extraordinary, and lack of critical thinking is extreme, particularly for someone seen as an important and revolutionary thinker.
I recognize that this is big talk from an armchair quarterback, but he lost a LOT of money in a VERY short time. I think the verdict ought to be somewhere closer along the culpability spectrum to βgriftβ than to βsomebody elseβs faultβ
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 β 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
Excellent & timely!
Have been turning over what negative capability could mean in prescriptions practical for a year. Looked it up to talk here , - literary?!-circa 1817, but Bellows used the idea as the street lamp for Herzog to navigate a divorce of mutuall recriminations...The idea presumes a mismatch between systems and any body feeling more creative than destructive. Simply is consonant with democracy in a pluralist representative nearly urban agglomeration. For instance in Herzog , if your exwife is working her lived experience into her legalcase, Herzog like all of us has to grasp that people expressing grievances have a posse of simply everybody who accepts that they have been misused. George Simmel's 1908 correlate, just listen, is his definition of society. What is society? It is everybody who can stand up for 1 minute after you turn the lights on. From a ground level perspective the person who repeats a catchphrase to the nth is either obeying the comics law of repetition or else is really claiming priority in the society in the room with you now.
Iβll have to check out the podcast. I like John and can tolerate Glenn at times. The picture you paint in the first item item is why I call myself a John McWhorter liberal (knowing that your last item discusses the fraught mess of the L word)
WOW - just WoW!! I stopped at a certain early paragraph and will dissect/ revisit - much appreciated
Well most folks who can comment-
Can read/ basically literate-
Have access to Substack
May have a hidden agenda
May want to say their book/ worldview better
May be full of Cow dOo dOo π©
I like to write Haiku do you?
For more in the Traister vein, see Amanda Montei's "Touched Out," which compares the experience of motherhood to the experience of assault.
"After #MeToo, however, [Montei] began to see a connection between how women were feeling in motherhood and the larger culture of assault in which she had grown up. In American society, women are expected to prioritize their children, often by pushing their bodies to the limit and ignoring their own desires and needs. As she struggled to adjust to the new demands on her body, this stirred memories of being used, violated, and seen by men. She had the desperate urge to finally say no, though she didnβt know how, or to whom she might say it."
Perhaps one day children will be writing memoirs about the emotional damage of seeking affection and being rebuffed on these grounds.
When I say you wrote another fabulous article, you know what that means: another Felix rant. XD XD
While I'm glad to see this racist fall from grace, his charlatanism isn't the witch in the woods kind. It's the kind that, like Marx and Foucault, we in the West have accepted in order to ensure our own self-destruction. He is certainly the most flamboyant Woke ideologue and cult leader. (If there's one place people tend to suspend critical thinking, it's when they are part of a cult; if you think I'm extreme, just read Arthur Deikman's studies of cults and you'll know what walks like a duck and talks like a duck) But those who are against Wokeness (and they aren't all right-wingers) were right to reject him from day one; it was a matter of principle but so much more. This guy is using Orwell as a guidebook, thereby showing that he most probably possesses evil, Big Brother motives; on top of that, his vision, if implemented, will most probably liquidate racial conciliation, as you've mentioned. (Although I am of the group that is pessimistic about repairing race relations, though I take no pleasure in being a pessimist) What's interesting here is that it's Kendi's inability to handle an institution that is finally causing the powers that be to turn their backs on him. Very interesting.
Gramsci is most certainly laughing about this down in hell. But the point is: Kendi didn't appear in a vacuum, and neither did DiAngelo. They are the most recent peak of decades of not civil rights "content of your character" thinking, but the anti-White side of this issue that criminalizes every White person through the "sins" of their ancestors. Kendi, suffice to say, is not a liberal and his ideas have nothing to do with Martin Luther King; only naive liberals think this. (or those less naive who equivocate helping Black people with anti-Whiteness, so they respond with "you're a racist for caring about White people") Kendi is for the most part regurgitating what academia has taught him on this issue from a critical race perspective, albeit with his own personal flair. I've been to such seminars myself where no matter what White people do, they are always evil racists and they must be anti-racists because colorblindness is just as racist as the Klan. (Even though it's not, and in the 90s it actually worked, but the rise of the Internet made it feel like we'd failed) The language and terms are, perhaps, a bit different. But the underlying message is the same.
In this sense, Kendi is more like Trotsky or Bukharin than anyone else. The difference being that the latter could handle power better than him.
In terms of happiness, being engaged has definitely bolstered my happiness, so I believe those people who say they are happier. And Traiser sounds like a crackpot; though for the good of the maligned and misunderstood institution I hope he keeps spewing narratives about "right-wing pro-natal fetishes" because then the term "right-wing" will become as harmless as "racist." "Fetishizing" marriage isn't supposed to be a political issue, and those who think that are hypocrites who fetishize power, a much more sinister and wicked idol than matrimony. Perhaps half the divorces that go on in the US would be less likely to happen if people stopped viewing it as a political arrangement. For this reason religion maintains, and will continue to maintain, the high ground when it comes to marriage because unlike secularists, it recognizes marriage as a sacred union. Something more than just a big party where you spend a lot of money and feel rich. Naturally, it makes no sense to anyone who doesn't believe in divine sanctity to value marriage in a comparable fashion, except insofar as some individuals believe in love occupying a higher plane. But it is unprecedented in history: no matter how different we are as human beings, marriage and funerals are found in every society on planet earth.
As for Hilary: I don't think she was joking since she's the one who came up with that amusing yet asinine phrase "basket of deplorables." (I'm still wondering why deplorables would be in a basket and not, say, a bucket; I guess it sounds better) And if she was, in my opinion it was a terrible joke. Not because people aren't allowed to make mean jokes about the other side, that's typical. But because she is validating a current view on the extreme left that the "evil conservatives," especially Trump supporters, should be brainwashed to think the right way, theoretically by a leftist state with all the power in its hands. (How else would they do it?) To my knowledge, Hilary is the first high-profile person to condone this genocidal narrative. Meaning, brainwashing conservatives to think the right way is now mainstream.
Those liberals and leftists who genuinely care about helping people made a mistake by condoning Kendi. This is another example where they will most probably make the same exact mistake; their hatred of conservatives, much of it media-stoked, appears to supersede their ability to think rationally, let alone critically. We saw this with all the insane media coverage of Trump where they believed he was literally Hitler; and liberals bought it. Coverage that has primed much of the nation to reconcile itself with an idea as extreme and evil as "denazifying" conservatives. What was that vague line they used in V For Vendetta? "We did what had to be done." This mistake with Kendi (and the possible repeat of a mistake with Hilary) should be a warning that the American left is on the road to potential genocide.
I already left a long message, so I should probably end here. But the concept of what is a liberal is very interesting. My big takeaway: the political identity of liberal is extremely malleable. Depending on the scenario, this is both a blessing and a curse.
It seems to me that there is a tension between your rejection of James Fitzjames Stephenβs βcoercive technocracyβ and your response to Rebecca Traister. You write:
> [T]here is the gentle suggestion that single motherhood isnβt necessarily the easiest thing in the world, let alone the rallying point for a whole worldview β that the society can take a little more interest in bolstering the family structure without (as Traister strongly implies) being homophobic or racist.
To which I might respond, exactly how much βgentle suggestionβ is to be involved when society βtake[s] a little more interestβ in boosting marriage? The most likely kind of coercion for Traister to be concerned about is precisely the type that you claim to be against, when you reject Stephen-style liberalism! And here you are pooh-poohing the very idea of being worried by the possibility such a thing!
Traister is not, as you falsely claim, accusing anyone of βbeing homophobic, misogynist bigots for even thinking about getting married.β At no point in her article does she express any opposition to the idea that people should get married if they want to. Her opposition is to the idea of promoting marriage as a solution to societal ills, in part because she fears sexist coercion on that point.
You may well disagree with Traister here β and I can certainly see reasons to do so β but if so, itβs not because youβre some sort of pure βMill liberal.β
I agree that the allegation of grift is glib and likely unfair. But I donβt agree that mismanagement is the only thing going on here. I think itβs reasonable to suggest that failures of character and intellectual heft are part of the story; I know that when Iβve been hired to do something I wasnβt entirely qualified to do, I busted my ass trying to get up to speed. And i was not in a position to hire an army of people to make me look better.
And Iβd like to believe that if I were handed multiple million dollars for almost any project, I would
A. not have immediately spent a bunch of money on physical renovation
B. have reasoned that it made sense to allocate (letβs say) a million dollars hiring an extraordinary team to make plans that would avoid a huge embarrassing crisis, game out obvious ruinous scenarios, etc.
In fact, Iβm pretty sure that with the kind of scratch he was handed, my odds of success would have been better than a coin flip even in an area where i had zero experience. So, for me, any scenario where we accept that his conceptual premise is entirely valid means we ought to accept that his level of hubris is extraordinary, and lack of critical thinking is extreme, particularly for someone seen as an important and revolutionary thinker.
I recognize that this is big talk from an armchair quarterback, but he lost a LOT of money in a VERY short time. I think the verdict ought to be somewhere closer along the culpability spectrum to βgriftβ than to βsomebody elseβs faultβ