Rufo admits that the only real answer is to defund public schools and give people no strings attached ESAs, but then only like 5% or less of his lobbying goes into that. Exposing CRT, transparency bills, and red state bans are nice, but it's precisely because they are easier that they are less effective. That these people are monsters is already transparent, the problem is nobody can do anything about it.
Taking on local county funding of public schools, especially in blue and purple areas, is both the most impactful and most difficult option. Probably Rufo sized up in his mind the odds of passing ballot initiatives to seriously threaten public school funding and decided that it would be a costly and low probability venture for him.
Lastly, I think the focus on CRT is probably the least objectionable thing about public schools right now. COVID is #1 and gender nonsense is #2. CRT is unpopular but is a distant third. I know Rufo doesn't like that other stuff either but CRT isn't going to dive enough outrage to defeat the teachers union on its own.
I am fully and completely on board with everything Rufo is doing. I hope to see even more of it. I think liberals objecting to it are beyond nuts, and anytime I hear a liberal critique of what Rufo is doing I lose a lot of respect for that person.
I agree that any defense against woke will need to win large victories, not create small niches. Or if it does create small niches they need to be scalable when successful. I fully support small victories as a way to generate emotional energy for bigger victories, provided the bigger victories are the end goal.
I imagine the absurdist script to one of those "The Ben Bernanke - Quantitative Easing Explained" YouTube videos:
"So, the liberalism is good?"
"Yes"
"And the CRT is false?"
"Yes"
"And the CRT is being taught as true in the public schools?"
"Yes"
"Should false things be taught in the public schools?"
"No"
"Should we stop the teaching of the CRT in the public schools?"
"No, that would against the liberalism."
"Is liberalism ok with teaching false things."
"No, but the liberalism is also not ok with stopping teaching of false things in the public schools."
"Ok, well, if I cannot stop teaching the false things, can we leave the false things, but also add the teaching of the true things, specifically, that the false things are false?"
"No, for two reasons."
"Two reasons? You've got to be sh***ing me?"
"No."
"Ok, what are the two reasons?"
"The first reason is that the liberalism also says you cannot make the teachers teach the true things that say that the false things are false."
"But doesn't someone already tell the teachers what they must teach?"
"Yes."
"And don't many of the public school tell the teachers to teach the CRT?"
"Yes."
"But the liberalism says we cannot tell the teachers to teach that the CRT is wrong?"
"Yes, the liberalism says you cannot do this in the public schools."
"Is there an alternative to the public schools?"
"Yes, the private schools."
"But to get private school, I must still pay the same taxes that go to public schools, and then I must also pay high tuition?"
"In most places, in general, yes."
"But in the private schools, they do not teach the CRT?"
"No, almost all the private schools teach the CRT. They taught it earlier than the public schools, and teach an even worse version of the CRT. But, I think, maybe there are some which don't."
"Can those private schools also teach that CRT is false?"
"No. You forgot there was a second reason."
"What was the second reason?"
"It is effectively against the law for the teachers in any school, whether the private school or the public school, to teach that the CRT is false. The private school will get sued for being racist and it will usually lose."
"Is this law part of the liberalism."
"No. Maybe. I don't think so, but, um ... the liberalism ... it's complicated."
"Ok, if it is not part of the liberalism, do the people who like the liberalism speak out against it?"
"No. Practically never. If they think it is illiberal, they almost always just tolerate it anyway, and keep quiet about it."
"Do they keep quiet about how stopping the CRT is illiberal?"
"No. Not remotely."
"Let me get this straight. The CRT is false and the CRT is being taught in the public schools. The liberalism says we cannot stop the CRT from being taught in the public schools, and we can neither insist that anyone teach that CRT is false in the public schools. There are some expensive private schools where the CRT is not taught but where the law also says that it cannot be taught that the CRT is false, and the liberalism is, in practice - as evidenced by the words and deeds and allocation of energy and effort of people who say they like the liberalism - cool with this. Do I have all that right?"
"Yes"
"Is the liberalism 'objectively pro-the-CRT', as Orwell might say?"
"Yes."
"So, the liberalism is against the teaching of the false things, but also, objectively pro-teaching-the-false-things?"
I think you nailed the big flaw in how American liberalism (as opposed to European/Everywhere Else liberalism) turned out. American liberals, i.e. the left, has no principles that put the breaks on their leftist tendencies. No enemies to the left, as they say, not because people to the left of any random leftist aren't crazy, but because their philosophy is more consistent and pure. A consistent centrist has to both say CRT is true to some extent and that there is no reason to expect perfect distribution of all jobs/status/affluence across every possible combination of race/sex/ethnicity/age/eye color/belly button size/etc., yet no principle provides the tension to pull them back from "Well, the right amount is always a little more towards CRT." I just don't think it likely that anyone on the left is going to be able to make the case that we need to do away with the suing people for being leftists bit on the grounds that it ended up doing more harm than good. Not without being eviscerated by everyone to the left of Sean Hannity. (That might not be the best name for that example... I think a lot of mainstream centrist Republicans would tear into them too is what I am aiming for, not that Hannity is centrist.)
Compare that to the old ACLU who (presumably) hated Nazi's but went to court to defend their rights. They had principles, while the left today holds no principles beyond perhaps "acquire power". What worries me is that the modern right does not seem to have a coherent set of principles either, with the elites aiming to acquire power while the populace has a mix of wanting to be left alone, sticking it to the left, and promoting their own agendas to replace CRT. I expect that is why the left has become so virulently hard to stop; there isn't much of a coherent vision against them.
ACLU have always been slippery customers and there are other plausible interpretations of their activity in the Skokie period than sturdy liberal principles.
---
Brandenburg [was] a clever Warren Court decision which cleared away the last ruins of American anticommunist legislation after one such law—Ohio’s “criminal syndicalism” law—was deployed against some hilariously-stereotypical gap-toothed Klansmen who were literally burning a cross. (If allergic to N-bombs in our highest court’s case law, dear reader, please skip that link. You can guess whom our defendants were fixing to send back to where.)
“Imminent,” to the Brandenburg court, didn’t mean “within the next 48 hours.” It meant you were putting together a real plan to do something concretely illegal. Conspiring to do something concretely illegal is already illegal, so there was not much left of Ohio’s law—originally written, perhaps by Klansmen, to suppress Bolshevik bomb-throwers.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, this “Skokie strategy” was a brilliant bureaucratic way to clean up the remnants of McCarthyism. By bending over backwards to grant the most liberal of rights to tiny groups of tacky, irrelevant cranks, the courts established precedents that threw the shield [I think the word he wanted was “aegis” – C.] of law over their much less irrelevant “activist” friends to the left. Hardly anyone noticed what they were doing. And once the cultural revolution had been completed, all these “Illinois Nazis” could have their “rights” taken away again.
The trouble is not so much a lack of a coherent vision as too many of them and the difficult of figuring out a way to get people to converge on one in particular given that one lacks the social status coordination advantage which the progressives enjoy.
Coherent, at least, among some select intellectuals. Obviously the general non-progressive public or whatever absurd tweet-based rough-consensus the GOP is selling on any particular day is just permanently and hopelessly incoherent. Unfortunately, so are most non-progressive intellectuals. But some of them have some good sets of ideas which hold together all right, it's just that they are all different and rival sets of ideas.
National Conservatism probably is as close as it gets at the moment, but there are a lot of loose ends that they leave untied on purpose.
The various flavors of libertarianism provide a range of visions, and one could even imagine a nationalist libertarianism / "liberty in one country" that hangs together well enough and with enough rough appeal to actually get somewhere. Unfortunately, most libertarians aren't willing to swallow the nationalism these days, like perhaps they once were in the Reagan era.
As another example, the Catholic Integralists like Vermeule have a coherent vision, it is based on valid insights about the inevitability of de facto 'state religion', and it can rely on a deep heritage of legal and ethical work that is very much incompatible with contemporary progressivism. But, it has a hard time recruiting converts (if you've can't get even Rod Dreher to say something nice ...) and even if by some miracle (ha!) somehow got all non-progressives on board, couldn't just tweak or reform their way to success: it would require regime change.
On the other hand, merely coming together to fight the common enemy is sometimes enough. Maybe we can agree to put off negotiating the new constitution until after we've stopped the bleeding.
I think you are generally correct, but without the overall view of the coherence I am aiming for. I am putting a lot of weight on the "no enemy to the left", which if I am remembering is nearly 100 years old at this point. I think Caplan's description of "the left is anti-market, the right is anti-left" pretty much covers it. While the American right has many internally consistent philosophies, they mostly want freedom from the left as well as the possibility of imposing their preferred philosophy on everyone else; they want less political power when they don't have it, or more opportunity to exercise it. The right pulls towards liberty sometimes, but partially by accident.
The left wants power to change every natural outcome of every process; they are against the world itself. Liberty is the last thing they want, instead preferring a world where they control the outcome of everything. They coherently pull towards power and control, no matter the realm.
It's probably best to think about this as an outright military war. We'd like to think of the anti-woke as being powerful enough to win battles, but this is wishful thinking.
In terms of relative strength, the Woke are in the position of The State. They're generally unpopular, but have overwhelming power. The Anti-Woke are the Opposition. There's widespread sympathy for them, but don't fall into the mistake of thinking this translates into the ability to win battles. The State has overwhelming conventional superiority. If the Opposition tries to fight this way, it will lose and lose badly.
What it can do is wage a guerrilla war. The battles won't necessarily be scalable because whenever the Woke know they're being attacked, they can bring overwhelming force to bear. Instead:
1. Instead of a frontal assault like "defund public education", attack on a hundred less defended fronts that will weaken the woke regime.
2. Most of Rufo's ideas are good (political) guerrilla warfare concepts because they end up forcing the Woke to commit to a lot of difficult to defend positions.
3. Maintain and build popular support. Nobody's going to do a better job showing how corrupt and incompetent the Woke are than they're doing themselves. Never "otherize" the population. There are lots of good teachers, lots of students who would be happier if they learned something, and lots of parents who would like it if their schools didn't suck. Let the other guys "destroy the village in order to save it".
4. It'll probably take years of this kind of fight before the Anti-Woke could wage the political equivalent of an open battle.
The best path forward would be to try to develop a very robust pro-reform teachers movement. In the past the union has had a lot of solidarity because it was really just focused on getting more money. All this new nonsense, CFT, gender, COVID, is as abusive to the teachers as the students in most cases. You've basically got to run on "you hate working for these people too and ESAs will fund the competitors that will allow you to tell people putting you in a mask all day to take their job and shove it." You make the great enemy the bureaucrats rather than the teachers.
1: Rufo-Law: No CRT: The Superintendent of Public Instruction shall review everything for "inherently divisive concepts" and if found, get rid of them.
"For the purposes of this Executive order “inherently divisive concepts” means advancing any ideas in violation of Title IV and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including, but not limited to of the following concepts (i) one race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith is inherently superior to another race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith; (ii) an individual, by virtue of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex or faith, is racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously, (iii) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex or faith, (iv) members of one race, ethnicity, sex or faith cannot and should not attempt to treat others as individuals without respect to race, sex or faith, (v) an individual's moral character is inherently determined by his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith, (vi) an individual, by virtue of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, ethnicity, sex or faith, (vii) meritocracy or traits, such as a hard work ethic, are racist or sexist or were created by a particular race to oppress another race."
Stunningly illiberal because regulating curriculum. Or maybe incredibly liberal, because insisting on teaching in a manner consistent with treating people as individuals with equal standing and not as members of identity groups. It's confusing! Also, when public outrage gets a governor of the minority party a surprise win, and this is prominently the first thing he does, are we waiting for the backlash, or *is* this the backlash? Confusing again!
I guess if you really think about it, all of human history and everything anyone did or didn't do is just a giant chain of backlashes to backlashes. So long as there are chickens and eggs, every chicken needs to worry about laying an egg, and every egg about hatching a chicken, and so on and so on.
2: No School Mask Mandates: Parents can elect no, don't have to give any reason. Which I am doing starting Tuesday, thanks Youngkin, and special thanks to the intransigently pro-CRT-indoctrination progressives who got him elected.
I don't think Tracinski's argument is a very good one. What's even more depressing is that I worry it's culturally ingrained into both libertarianism and, if there is one, the American way of doing things.
To be clear, Tracinski's argument is basically the Peltzman effect. But if you step back, the Peltzman effect is incredibly overused. Because 1) Much of the time, the compensating behavior doesn't completely offset the primary behavior and 2) Peltzman always seems to define his costs and benefits arbitrarily narrowly (e.g. even if it's the case that on-net, more people die by using seatbelts than without, the benefits to society of EVERYONE and EVERYTHING being able to travel 70mph is much, much higher and should also be part of the equation.
Nonetheless, this kind of stilted, "aren't I cute" argument has become the de-facto rationale for the US bureaucracy (remember CDC testing?) and for pundits of inaction everywhere.
You can see this by returning to Tracinski. We can't persecute these guys (who are persecuting us), persecuting them will only make them stronger! What? I suggest he, and everyone else, actually look at the history of persecution. Unfortunately, it turns out to be quite effective. If you really want to put the lie to this argument, think about how much stronger a position conservatives in media and academia are now than in times past when they were weak and persecution free.
It's nonsensical rhetorical leechcraft. And it's endemic in thought. So much more thought is given to secondary consequences and hypotheticals, that we've become paralyzed by inaction.
"If you kill your enemy, they win." That's his argument, boiled down. It is risible. Most charitably, he is indulging in bad faith; most likely, he is a useful idiot.
I'd actually respect that argument more as a clear moral stance (although I think it's ridiculous). He'd be saying "fine, I'm a pacifist. I'm not going to fight back against that mean bully. I'll be the better man, and everyone will see that when he beats the snot out of me.". That'd be a morally defensible, if wrong-headed position.
It seems to me Tracinski isn't making that sort of argument though. He has no moral qualms with fighting back, he's just utterly conditioned to assume that the secondary or unintended consequences of fighting back will end up being counterproductive to the primary goal of... not getting curb stomped. That kind of position doesn't even have the tepid defense of the moral high ground. It's just wrong.
It's fine as a religious view (turning the other cheek will grant me eternal life). As a method of achieving desirable real world material outcomes its always been questionable.
Taking the possibility of 'backlash' into consideration in order to avoid counterproductive action can be perfectly reasonable and pragmatic.
But the actual question is "backlash 'compared to what'?'" Compared to proposing the abolition of government schools as the only certified kosher liberal way to deal with the issue? That backlash would make the American response to Pearl Harbor look like nothing, which, it seems pretty clear to me, is the reason most anti-anti-CRT pro-liberalism commentary avoids mentioning it.
On the other hand, what if you *are* the backlash the other guy should have worried about? The 'illiberal' approach of lashing back and getting CRT out of government schools is apparently so dangerously unpopular that ... it just won a Republican the governorship of a blue state which went strongly for Biden. Who backlashed against whom? One is not supposed to conduct a popular backlash because of the possibility of some hypothetical even more popular second-order backlash? Is that how we observe that our politics actually works, or is that the literal definition of concern trolling?
Ironically, if we are to take backlash concern trolling seriously as a guide to action, it argues against liberalism!
Here are the possibilities:
(1) Do Nothing, Liberally. Backlash points 0, but CRT indoctrination points -10.
(2) 'Illiberal' Rufo Laws. Probably still some CRT, but less egregious, so -5 points. Backlash points ... -5 to +5. Maybe, just maybe, second order meta backlash in a fickle, blueing electorate makes you a little worse off, eroding gains from reducing CRT in government schools. Then again, maybe you *are* the backlash. Overall, the range is from about where you started, to real improvement, assuming you don't assign it -9,999 points for sudden catastrophic erosion of the American consensus commitment to liberalism. How many liberalism erosion points do we give to fomenting permanent resentments of racial animus and humiliation by subjecting kids to 'white racism explains everything, and don't anyone dare say otherwise, or else'? 0? -40K?
So, the trouble is that it's just a truism that your opponents are always going to oppose you. Duh. That fact alone cannot yield a logical conclusion that one must never do anything about anything, so the question is when to flip from action to surrender.
Since it is hard to forecast the degree of backlash (or, I guess, the theoretical backlash to your actually existing, popular backlash), it's just used as a results-oriented rhetorical device. If I want you to go along with something, I will minimize the possibility, but if I want you to not do it, I will exaggerate my level of concern and 'worry', and unless we agree on some objective way to assess predictions - like, say, when everyone agrees a surprising election occurred due to the issue - then there is no way to come to agreement on whether to take it seriously or not, and no way to confirm you are genuinely worried about it as opposed to not really having any confident predictions one way or the other, but engaging in a kind of just-try-everything FUD campaign.
The problem with wokeness is that its zealots capture key positions of institutions which, on a functionalist definition, have nothing to do with wokeness and then use this institutional power to promote woke ends, to the detriment of the original function of the institution. It is no answer to this problem to say we need open debate, since the problem with wokeness is anterior to the conditions that make open debate possible. The woke will profess to be all about open debate right until the point when they have the critical mass to enshrine their favored substantive views by rule. It's happened again and again, and has been the plain pattern at least since Lenin.
Q: Others have laid out different strategies in fighting CRT. Some have suggested confronting Corporate HR Trainers either overtly or subtly so that fellow employees would 'see through' its illogic and inherent awfulness. Why are these approaches either useless or even counterproductive?
A: You can’t persuade zealots with logic, facts, and clever argumentation; they only understand the language of power. That’s why the campaign to prove that you’re “the real liberal” or “more antiracist than the antiracists” is doomed to failure. Like it or not, Critical Race Theory is the driving force of the modern intellectual Left; they’re not going back to the philosophy of FDR, LBJ, or MLK. And they scrupulously follow the old dictum of “no enemies to the left”—they will dispatch the centrist liberals with even more vitriol and brutality than they dispatch the conservatives. This is also the core dilemma of the IDW crowd: many of them cannot imagine aligning with political conservatives; they operate under the delusion that they can “recapture the centre” and convince the planet of the virtue of Enlightenment values. That’s not how politics works. We live in a polarized political system—one winner, one loser. You’ll remember that the Girondins went to the guillotine. If, metaphorically speaking, the centrist liberals want to avoid the same fate, they will have to make an alliance with Trump-loving, truck-driving, gun-toting Middle Americans. That’s reality. We’ll see if they heed it.
What if Rufo is correct? And let's do a thought experiment. Say that Nazism was very popular among teachers and was being taught to our children. How should we respond?
It seems Rufo has moved from CRT is evil we should be able to ban evil shit to parents (through law makers) should be able to determine what their kids are taught. I think this is a mistake, at least on principle. CRT is an ideology and I don't think we should be teaching ideology. Furthermore it is a racist ideology, which I am further opposed to teaching. Again, what if parents and lawmakers wanted to teach Nazism? Should we stand by in accordance with federalism and states rights to teach what they want? Rufo has in the past posed this question to David French, clearly stumping him. Perhaps Rufo thinks CRT is so unpopular that by focusing on parents being able to determine what their kids should and shouldn't learn, it will best be defeated. This casts a bigger more liberal tent which includes people who haven't yet come around to CRT being awful.
Sullivan engages in the tendency of educated people to worry more about second order effects than first order effects. It's a strange phenomena. Obviously its good to consider possible reactions, but very educated people have a tendency to overweight second order possibilities and underweight first order actualities. Perhaps this is just the intellectual's bias: First order actualities require action, second order possibilities pondering and inaction.
One of the current problems is that you can't get people to agree on what is and is not an ideology. Even if it ever had a precise meaning reasonable people from opposite political camps could agree on (doubtful), today it is one of those irregular nouns. Proponents of CRT say it's not an ideology but sound science and morally unobjectionable principles. Opponents of teaching evolution in schools say it's an ideology or something close. Some say that democracy and liberalism are an ideology, and you'd have a tough time arguing about that (the usual reaction is point-and-sputter). It's easier to evade the landmines and go for federalism. As for teaching Nazism, a cynic would say that it doesn't matter if they did: a sizable proportion of US teaches its children various brands of fundamentalist Christianity but their retention rates are low, and surveys clearly show that the values of the remainder have been way more influenced by the socially prestigious classes than the reverse.
The social sciences and education at the university level are fully corrupted by critical theory. Any policy approaches will just be playing whack-a-mole unless fundamental reform of university system can happen.
First of all, he's so obliviously proud about using 'Hispanic', but all his criticisms of Latinx apply equally to Hispanic, which is just another Academia / US Government-invented term that no members of the group used to describe themselves prior to 1970. David Bernstein's upcoming book "Classified" goes into deep detail. Hispanic also faced inertial resistance on its road to replacing the former terms - I bet this is corroborated if one were to check out NYT word usage frequency stats - because elites just kept insisting that people do so, and then Tracinski, ahem, jumped on that bandwagon. And is so proud of it! While simultaneously criticizing bandwagons! Is this "representation without authorization"? Good grief!
Tracinsky is right about the climate change thing being out of place - lefty religion, sure, but not 'woke' - but he also knows full well why "drugs" belongs on Schellenberger's woke chart. Just because there is some overlap between progressives and libertarians on some policy preference doesn't mean the motivations and rationale are at all the same, and it always ends up being one of those "Libertarians as Progressive deluded mistress" situations. "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."
If you ask progressives why they are against drug prohibition, the answer is not because they believe in the fundamental principle of bodily autonomy against which the state has no right of interference (ha ha!) but because "disproportionately black and brown ... yadda yadda ... racist police and system ... yadda yadda" - i.e., because it is a system of racist oppression, the core "woke" tenet, which is the rationale for everything they do. They would be cool the drug war x100 and tell the libertarians to take a hike if only the people who tended to get arrested were white.
"But when someone like Christopher Rufo designates [woke] as a catchall for any idea on the left, he is confirming the left’s claim that the term is malleable and crudely partisan—because for him, it is."
"Someone like"? Nice. At any rate, that's just not a fair or accurate statement about what Rufo is doing. Rufo is all-in on "CRT", and indeed, the whole point of "intersectional critical theory" is precisely to weave all the isolated "system of oppression" fibers for all the identity groups into one big ideological tapestry as the foundation for political coalition. What should people call real-world manifestations of this concept if not "CRT" or Woke"? Does Tracinsky have a better term or brand?
"If the problem with wokeness is specifically that it quashes debate—that it delegitimizes all dissent—then the way to oppose it is to advocate for open debate, with many different viewpoints being heard."
Nice try, but no, that's not specifically "the problem" with wokeness. A means, not an end. Just one of several tools it uses to defend itself. The other problem with wokeness is that it is based on a premise which is a hateful, harmful falsehood of group libel. It is not just that the woke believe it is good and necessary to punish and heretics, but that they have the legal and social capacity to do so, and do it, all the time.
Sure, call for open debate! But then, also in the same breath please also call for non-discriminatory platforms and the total abolition of laws that allow someone to be sued, fired, or disciplined for offense. Otherwise, how are you going to get people to argue the other side of that debate? Tracinsky then goes on to say that the poor women swimmers had to complain anonymously, precisely because they didn't feel it would otherwise be safe to participate in open debate. Make it safe! Or would doing so be 'illiberal'?
"But if everything is “woke,” nothing is. ... But if wokeness is just a catchall for any ideas held by supporters of a rival party or faction, then the way to oppose it is to oppose any expression of your opponents’ ideas."
This is kind of nuts. *The* way to oppose it? *Any* expression? There are lots of ways besides that to oppose wokeness, but it's not "just a catchall". He recited Pluckrose's description, but let's face it, 95% of the woke don't have any clue about all that "knowledge is culturally constructed" academic jargon.
Here, I'll make it easy. My favorite economist has a great expression, "Price Discrimination Explains Everything." A lot of people don't realize it, but it's everywhere, if you learn about it you'll start to see how it explains so much, and so often when something seems to deviate from the nice, simple story about how things are supposed to work, it's usually to blame.
What does 'CRT' really mean?
It means, "White Racism Explains Everything."
What does 'Woke', i.e., "Intersectional Critical Theory" really mean?
It means "Bigoted Oppression Explains Everything."
In the alternative, just replace 'price' with 'unjust' = "Unjust Discrimination Explains Everything."
Again, I'd ask Tracinsky, "If we don't want public schools to teach kids the lie that 'white racism explains everything', then, according to you, do we just have to suck it up, or if not, then what's the text of the law that would effectively stop it and which you are cool with? Is your answer just, 'Abolish public schools'?"
Open debate of political correctness is already for the most part banned within universities. You'll get kicked out if you're a student, and you'll be fired if you work there. Some star faculty get exemptions, but then the administration finds some indirect way to shiv you (see Amy Chua for an example meant to encourager les autres). We are already suppressed by the existence of pervasive Test Acts within institutions designed to exclude anyone who does not tow the line with PC.
If we just call wokeness political correctness, it exposes the stasis in American culture and politics. The chart by Boghossian and Shellenberger that Tracinski links to is interesting, but I have the sense that this is really about, for them, shoring up the secular humanist project which has diminished nigh to the point of doom. Tracinski also at the close of his article makes a plea for a secular liberalism that he seems to believe is deeper-rooted than it really is. This is part of a category of moderation that I find both funny and pervasive: "the causes are good, but I am resolutely opposed to the effects of those causes!"
What would Carl Schmitt say about this attempt to declare political correctness to be a religious doctrine? He would of course say political doctrines are religious doctrines.
In Chapter 3 of Political Theology, Schmitt writes:
"All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development -- in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver -- but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts."
He then goes on to say (my paraphrase) that the modern constitutional state is inseparable from a deistic conception which 'banished the miracle from the world.' It is futile to try to forever banish the religious sensibility from politics. A leftist politics of the Jim Jones variety is always going to clean the clock of schoolboy secular leftism. The constitutional liberalism of the founders was written around a Christian culture. Find-and-replacing Christianity with nothing creates a vacuum rapidly filled by cults like those of Jim Jones. We have seen how Jim Jonesism as preached by the apostle Kendi has trivially crushed and conquered most of the feeble outposts of secular humanism in education: that is an accomplished fact.
CRT is a natural outgrowth of certain mainstream assumptions going back to civil rights. The obvious counter would be something like The Bell Curve, but even Murray admits it will never be taught in K-12 schools. So what we are going to end up with is K-12 students getting a steady of diet of stories about how terrible they were in the past, how terrible things are now, and that its all their fault. The most any of these CRT bans do is say "its so ugly to make your anti-white racism explicit, can't you just make it loudly implicit!" Kids are going to exist in this miasma of racial guilt lessons and draw the most likely conclusions. Logic and debate isn't how kids decide what the truth is, and anyway the best facts on one side will be withheld anyway.
Since any *REAL* discussion of race would involve Sailer level "noticing", the best approach is to just not talk much about race in K-12. When I was growing up we got the usual "its February, here are a few lessons about how slavery is bad, now let's move on". That seems appropriate to me. IDW types that want to teach both sides are deluding themselves. More race talk will inevitably just mean "here are some more examples of how whites are shit."
Problem is educators are being asked to do the impossible (close the racial gaps in performance) and they are running out of excuses as to why they can't, so they are just going to call small children racist and beat it out of them. If that seems like harsh criticism, the level of child abuse schools did during COVID I never would have guessed in my wildest dreams.
Imagine the Venn diagram with a circle for "Laws that effectively prevent CRT / woke orthodoxy from being taught in public schools" and another circle for "Laws that are not illiberal."
Are these disjoint sets, or is there an intersection? If there is an intersection, can you tell us what it looks like and how it is different from the text of prominent bills in circulation*?
If there was a law that teachers may not teach that members of (insert group label here) are 'inferior', would that also be 'illiberal'?
Is it that trying to do literally anything with public schools is inherently 'illiberal' and the only way to be 'liberal' while preventing public money going to woke indoctrination is to just abolish public schools altogether? Maybe, though, you gotta admit, that would surprise a lot of people who think they are liberal, like public schooling, but think its ok to stop those schools from teaching hateful lies.
If they are disjoint sets, then what the hell good or use is being liberal if it means having to let the progressives abuse public schooling to shove their pernicious and illiberal lies down the throats of our kids?
*Or, if we are to avoid cherry picking, how about the bills that show signs of actual prospects and consideration and have gotten a little further than merely being introduced by one or two legislators in a kind of performative mic-drop, which happens all the time?
ETA: I gotta say it's just kind of bizarre that this is the hill pro-liberals are willing to die on. Everybody looks at the Youngkin victory in now solidly blue Virginia as a kind of referendum on CRT in public schools, an expression of extreme displeasure and frustration at what is going on and strong demand to do something to stop it. But liberals are saying to these people, "Either you gotta give up public school, or give up trying to stop CRT in public schools, or you gotta give up on liberalism." Most effective - if inadvertent - marketing against liberalism ever.
I think that, unfortunately, abolishing monopolistic public school systems is the only answer. Having control over the school system is just too much of a power lever for the illiberal to ignore. So long as the power to control people exists, those who want power to control people are going to fight to be the one to use it. We created a soulless monster, and it is only a question of what corrupted soul wants to occupy it; no angels are lining up for it.
Now, maybe public schooling with open charter schools, or straight vouchers, or something similar might work well enough, reducing the lever's power enough that people can still get what they want. I don't know, and I wish people would experiment a bit more around that.
Still, the problem with powerful institutions is that crazy people want to take control of them to abuse that power. We can't get rid of crazy people, so the answer seems to be getting rid of the powerful institutions, and stop creating them in the first place.
I am totally fine with this answer insofar as it is coherent and honest.
But notice two things:
First, how many of the articles opposing prohibition of teaching CRT just come out and say "At root, the problem is public schooling, and in the final analysis, liberalism requires the total abolition of public schooling. Really, we need not analyze or grapple at all with all the talk about whether we should or shouldn't pass laws about what public school teachers must or must not say, and anybody who does so is wasting time and missing the point. All that is just a distracting sideshow to the real question, which is whether public schooling should exist at all, to which liberalism answers that it should not." The answer so far as I've seen is none of them.
Second, if having public schooling at all is the big illiberal sin and transgression, then why do we have to be so binary about it, that is, what's wrong with 'harm reduction'? Does liberalism really require one to conclude that public schooling without CRT bans is more liberal / preferable to public schooling with CRT indoctrination?
One reads a lot about how the problem with anti-progressive groups is that they know what they are against, but they don't say what they're *for*. Well, ok. Can I see the liberalism-compliant version of how to teach the truth about CRT's falseness in the schools that could be implemented under current law? There isn't one and that's the point: you can't fix it without a change in the law. Or, like you said, just show your cards and lead with "the undeniable necessity of the total abolition of public schooling" as the forthright thing to do.
To the first point, yes, I agree: the devil is public schooling (or most any state monopoly) but the authors are either unaware of the diabolism inherent or do not wish to make that claim for fear of being called an extremist and ignored. I wrote about it back in July here (https://dochammer.substack.com/p/why-libertarians-are-so-awkward-with) I think there is far too much fear of being viewed as an extremist these days, personally.
To the second point, I agree that harm reduction is a good idea since we probably are not going to convince everyone that the public education system as currently exists is a really bad idea any time soon. While we are trying to do that, we ought to also look at how we can limit the current madness that exists in education, whether it be CRT, gender math, racialized physics, not bothering to teach kids to read, whatever. The trouble there might be that reducing harm thusly might be more damaging than good if we are not careful. The whole civil rights thing seemed like a good idea until it caused the rise of evil HR because everyone was getting sued for every damned thing. Probably a foreseeable consequence, but tricky enough that we need to craft rules about what public schools can and cannot teach carefully.
Personally, I think the right should be taking the opportunity to push school choice with vouchers or something really hard. If I were running for state representative or congress this year, I would nail that plank into the platform early and often. Alas, I think that "Give this office the power to dictate what is taught, then give me the office and I will dictate what you want!" is more compelling than "Take this power away from the office, then we don't need to care who gets elected!"
Am I the only one who seems to have noticed that critical race theory is itself illiberal, in that it fails/refuses to consider people as individuals, and instead treats them as non-descript members of racial groups that are themselves then crudely lumped into categories of good/bad, oppressed/oppressor, unprivileged/privileged based on a very selective reading of the last 400 hundred years of (Euro-centric) history? When I've got my classical liberal hat on, it's still a bit hard for me to get worked up about CRT being firewalled from primary and secondary schools given it's own afore-mentioned violation of liberal principles and the fact that, as a socio-historical "theory," it's a pile of hot garbage.
This is the key and totally fair question. And I gotta say, the fact that I haven't seen anyone try to answer it leads me to conclude that a lot of the rhetoric is just fake and hollow posturing without any genuine and sincere commitments to a coherent set of principles. Don't come for us, woke progressive inquisitors, we're not with those guys! See, we are not cool with their anti-CRT efforts! Good luck with that.
it is really, really disappointing to read so many purported intellectuals cry 'illiberal!' over and over, but never get into the nitty gritty of why and what liberalism requires as to the setting of limits for curriculum for public schooling.
A law that says, "A public school teacher may not teach his students that God exists and the Christian religion is true," is that liberal or illiberal? If it's illiberal, then, because it actually is the law, then why don't liberals spend even 0.00001% of their anti-illiberal energies speaking out against it? "Well, we're cool with *that* illiberalism."?
If it's liberal, then what do I get to replace "God exists and the Christian religion" with, and it would still be liberal? "White racism explains everything"? Or what is the rule for distinguishing whether a replacement would be 'liberal' or 'illiberal'? If these are hard problems and good liberals aren't sure about the answers, then why don't they admit that uncertainty, instead of coming right out with extreme confidence in asserting that this one particular move against CRT would absolutely definitely be illiberal?
Again, it's hard not to conclude that a lot of this is just fundamentally disingenuous.
Maybe not disingenuous, but more lazy/sloppy. I don't think most people have the ability to figure out why one is ok and one isn't, and just prefer the certainty of "Mine is good, theirs is bad, because obvious reasons I don't need to go into. Obviously." It isn't as though people change their minds much anyway, so we are heavily incentivized to just claim our side is right and bask in their approval, or try to please both sides and hope we aren't the first up against he wall.
The question of disingenuousness is whether what an author is writing seems to flow out of sincerely held and consistently applied principles, with critical energies seeming to be allocated evenly across similar issues, and acknowledgement of trade-off costs "yes, this means accepting that ...", and socially undesirable implications, "yes, this means the right answer is [insert very unpopular proposal here]."
Kling is a great example of this kind of virtue, which is why I hang out here, but he is a prince among many knaves that is quite rare in the anti-Rufo-law "uh, because liberalism" commentary that's out there.
Indicators of disingenuousness are double standards, all kinds of bad arguments and refusal to address holes that get poked in them, isolated calls for rigor while giving similar claims or contexts a pass, and inconsistencies that are out of character and show that one is being merely opportunistic and manipulative of *the audience's* affection for the principles which you yourself mock or oppose in every other instance.
One sees this in politics all the time. Politicians who chafe at nationalist patriotic sentiment and bristle at constituional limits and spend 95% of their time saying that it's absurd we are bound by an obsolete parchment drafted by evil founders, but then, when in the rare case they can manipulate some chumps, start expressing pride in country and the necessity of fidelity to the sacred texts in the most absurdly exaggerated (and palpably fake) ways.
When someone is being genuine and principled, it should be easy to be figure out their 'model' in terms of commitments, preferences, ideological values, etc., and make accurate predictions about what they would say in response to new questions, at least, if they were being honest.
With a lot of this anti-Rufo 'because liberalism' crowd, I feel like Scott Sumner trying to pin down Kelton and the MMTers on "What, exactly, does MMT say and mean?" After you try and fail to get straight, coherent, non-infinitely-hedgeable answers over and over, you start to conclude, you know what, maybe there's actually no there, there.
Rufo admits that the only real answer is to defund public schools and give people no strings attached ESAs, but then only like 5% or less of his lobbying goes into that. Exposing CRT, transparency bills, and red state bans are nice, but it's precisely because they are easier that they are less effective. That these people are monsters is already transparent, the problem is nobody can do anything about it.
Taking on local county funding of public schools, especially in blue and purple areas, is both the most impactful and most difficult option. Probably Rufo sized up in his mind the odds of passing ballot initiatives to seriously threaten public school funding and decided that it would be a costly and low probability venture for him.
Lastly, I think the focus on CRT is probably the least objectionable thing about public schools right now. COVID is #1 and gender nonsense is #2. CRT is unpopular but is a distant third. I know Rufo doesn't like that other stuff either but CRT isn't going to dive enough outrage to defeat the teachers union on its own.
I am fully and completely on board with everything Rufo is doing. I hope to see even more of it. I think liberals objecting to it are beyond nuts, and anytime I hear a liberal critique of what Rufo is doing I lose a lot of respect for that person.
I agree that any defense against woke will need to win large victories, not create small niches. Or if it does create small niches they need to be scalable when successful. I fully support small victories as a way to generate emotional energy for bigger victories, provided the bigger victories are the end goal.
I imagine the absurdist script to one of those "The Ben Bernanke - Quantitative Easing Explained" YouTube videos:
"So, the liberalism is good?"
"Yes"
"And the CRT is false?"
"Yes"
"And the CRT is being taught as true in the public schools?"
"Yes"
"Should false things be taught in the public schools?"
"No"
"Should we stop the teaching of the CRT in the public schools?"
"No, that would against the liberalism."
"Is liberalism ok with teaching false things."
"No, but the liberalism is also not ok with stopping teaching of false things in the public schools."
"Ok, well, if I cannot stop teaching the false things, can we leave the false things, but also add the teaching of the true things, specifically, that the false things are false?"
"No, for two reasons."
"Two reasons? You've got to be sh***ing me?"
"No."
"Ok, what are the two reasons?"
"The first reason is that the liberalism also says you cannot make the teachers teach the true things that say that the false things are false."
"But doesn't someone already tell the teachers what they must teach?"
"Yes."
"And don't many of the public school tell the teachers to teach the CRT?"
"Yes."
"But the liberalism says we cannot tell the teachers to teach that the CRT is wrong?"
"Yes, the liberalism says you cannot do this in the public schools."
"Is there an alternative to the public schools?"
"Yes, the private schools."
"But to get private school, I must still pay the same taxes that go to public schools, and then I must also pay high tuition?"
"In most places, in general, yes."
"But in the private schools, they do not teach the CRT?"
"No, almost all the private schools teach the CRT. They taught it earlier than the public schools, and teach an even worse version of the CRT. But, I think, maybe there are some which don't."
"Can those private schools also teach that CRT is false?"
"No. You forgot there was a second reason."
"What was the second reason?"
"It is effectively against the law for the teachers in any school, whether the private school or the public school, to teach that the CRT is false. The private school will get sued for being racist and it will usually lose."
"Is this law part of the liberalism."
"No. Maybe. I don't think so, but, um ... the liberalism ... it's complicated."
"Ok, if it is not part of the liberalism, do the people who like the liberalism speak out against it?"
"No. Practically never. If they think it is illiberal, they almost always just tolerate it anyway, and keep quiet about it."
"Do they keep quiet about how stopping the CRT is illiberal?"
"No. Not remotely."
"Let me get this straight. The CRT is false and the CRT is being taught in the public schools. The liberalism says we cannot stop the CRT from being taught in the public schools, and we can neither insist that anyone teach that CRT is false in the public schools. There are some expensive private schools where the CRT is not taught but where the law also says that it cannot be taught that the CRT is false, and the liberalism is, in practice - as evidenced by the words and deeds and allocation of energy and effort of people who say they like the liberalism - cool with this. Do I have all that right?"
"Yes"
"Is the liberalism 'objectively pro-the-CRT', as Orwell might say?"
"Yes."
"So, the liberalism is against the teaching of the false things, but also, objectively pro-teaching-the-false-things?"
"Yes."
"Isn't that totally crazy?"
"Yes."
I think you nailed the big flaw in how American liberalism (as opposed to European/Everywhere Else liberalism) turned out. American liberals, i.e. the left, has no principles that put the breaks on their leftist tendencies. No enemies to the left, as they say, not because people to the left of any random leftist aren't crazy, but because their philosophy is more consistent and pure. A consistent centrist has to both say CRT is true to some extent and that there is no reason to expect perfect distribution of all jobs/status/affluence across every possible combination of race/sex/ethnicity/age/eye color/belly button size/etc., yet no principle provides the tension to pull them back from "Well, the right amount is always a little more towards CRT." I just don't think it likely that anyone on the left is going to be able to make the case that we need to do away with the suing people for being leftists bit on the grounds that it ended up doing more harm than good. Not without being eviscerated by everyone to the left of Sean Hannity. (That might not be the best name for that example... I think a lot of mainstream centrist Republicans would tear into them too is what I am aiming for, not that Hannity is centrist.)
Compare that to the old ACLU who (presumably) hated Nazi's but went to court to defend their rights. They had principles, while the left today holds no principles beyond perhaps "acquire power". What worries me is that the modern right does not seem to have a coherent set of principles either, with the elites aiming to acquire power while the populace has a mix of wanting to be left alone, sticking it to the left, and promoting their own agendas to replace CRT. I expect that is why the left has become so virulently hard to stop; there isn't much of a coherent vision against them.
ACLU have always been slippery customers and there are other plausible interpretations of their activity in the Skokie period than sturdy liberal principles.
---
Brandenburg [was] a clever Warren Court decision which cleared away the last ruins of American anticommunist legislation after one such law—Ohio’s “criminal syndicalism” law—was deployed against some hilariously-stereotypical gap-toothed Klansmen who were literally burning a cross. (If allergic to N-bombs in our highest court’s case law, dear reader, please skip that link. You can guess whom our defendants were fixing to send back to where.)
“Imminent,” to the Brandenburg court, didn’t mean “within the next 48 hours.” It meant you were putting together a real plan to do something concretely illegal. Conspiring to do something concretely illegal is already illegal, so there was not much left of Ohio’s law—originally written, perhaps by Klansmen, to suppress Bolshevik bomb-throwers.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, this “Skokie strategy” was a brilliant bureaucratic way to clean up the remnants of McCarthyism. By bending over backwards to grant the most liberal of rights to tiny groups of tacky, irrelevant cranks, the courts established precedents that threw the shield [I think the word he wanted was “aegis” – C.] of law over their much less irrelevant “activist” friends to the left. Hardly anyone noticed what they were doing. And once the cultural revolution had been completed, all these “Illinois Nazis” could have their “rights” taken away again.
[quote from https://graymirror.substack.com/p/censorship-a-21st-century-approach]
The trouble is not so much a lack of a coherent vision as too many of them and the difficult of figuring out a way to get people to converge on one in particular given that one lacks the social status coordination advantage which the progressives enjoy.
Coherent, at least, among some select intellectuals. Obviously the general non-progressive public or whatever absurd tweet-based rough-consensus the GOP is selling on any particular day is just permanently and hopelessly incoherent. Unfortunately, so are most non-progressive intellectuals. But some of them have some good sets of ideas which hold together all right, it's just that they are all different and rival sets of ideas.
National Conservatism probably is as close as it gets at the moment, but there are a lot of loose ends that they leave untied on purpose.
The various flavors of libertarianism provide a range of visions, and one could even imagine a nationalist libertarianism / "liberty in one country" that hangs together well enough and with enough rough appeal to actually get somewhere. Unfortunately, most libertarians aren't willing to swallow the nationalism these days, like perhaps they once were in the Reagan era.
As another example, the Catholic Integralists like Vermeule have a coherent vision, it is based on valid insights about the inevitability of de facto 'state religion', and it can rely on a deep heritage of legal and ethical work that is very much incompatible with contemporary progressivism. But, it has a hard time recruiting converts (if you've can't get even Rod Dreher to say something nice ...) and even if by some miracle (ha!) somehow got all non-progressives on board, couldn't just tweak or reform their way to success: it would require regime change.
On the other hand, merely coming together to fight the common enemy is sometimes enough. Maybe we can agree to put off negotiating the new constitution until after we've stopped the bleeding.
I think you are generally correct, but without the overall view of the coherence I am aiming for. I am putting a lot of weight on the "no enemy to the left", which if I am remembering is nearly 100 years old at this point. I think Caplan's description of "the left is anti-market, the right is anti-left" pretty much covers it. While the American right has many internally consistent philosophies, they mostly want freedom from the left as well as the possibility of imposing their preferred philosophy on everyone else; they want less political power when they don't have it, or more opportunity to exercise it. The right pulls towards liberty sometimes, but partially by accident.
The left wants power to change every natural outcome of every process; they are against the world itself. Liberty is the last thing they want, instead preferring a world where they control the outcome of everything. They coherently pull towards power and control, no matter the realm.
The libertarians happy with nationalism are numerous and powerful. They are the mainstream Republicans. Therefore unhip.
I think there are bits which will turntext to cartoons. Do you can probably out this this thing on. YouTube with relatively little effort.
It's probably best to think about this as an outright military war. We'd like to think of the anti-woke as being powerful enough to win battles, but this is wishful thinking.
In terms of relative strength, the Woke are in the position of The State. They're generally unpopular, but have overwhelming power. The Anti-Woke are the Opposition. There's widespread sympathy for them, but don't fall into the mistake of thinking this translates into the ability to win battles. The State has overwhelming conventional superiority. If the Opposition tries to fight this way, it will lose and lose badly.
What it can do is wage a guerrilla war. The battles won't necessarily be scalable because whenever the Woke know they're being attacked, they can bring overwhelming force to bear. Instead:
1. Instead of a frontal assault like "defund public education", attack on a hundred less defended fronts that will weaken the woke regime.
2. Most of Rufo's ideas are good (political) guerrilla warfare concepts because they end up forcing the Woke to commit to a lot of difficult to defend positions.
3. Maintain and build popular support. Nobody's going to do a better job showing how corrupt and incompetent the Woke are than they're doing themselves. Never "otherize" the population. There are lots of good teachers, lots of students who would be happier if they learned something, and lots of parents who would like it if their schools didn't suck. Let the other guys "destroy the village in order to save it".
4. It'll probably take years of this kind of fight before the Anti-Woke could wage the political equivalent of an open battle.
The best path forward would be to try to develop a very robust pro-reform teachers movement. In the past the union has had a lot of solidarity because it was really just focused on getting more money. All this new nonsense, CFT, gender, COVID, is as abusive to the teachers as the students in most cases. You've basically got to run on "you hate working for these people too and ESAs will fund the competitors that will allow you to tell people putting you in a mask all day to take their job and shove it." You make the great enemy the bureaucrats rather than the teachers.
Youngkin "Day 1" Executive Orders:
https://www.governor.virginia.gov/news-releases/2022/january/name-918519-en.html
1: Rufo-Law: No CRT: The Superintendent of Public Instruction shall review everything for "inherently divisive concepts" and if found, get rid of them.
"For the purposes of this Executive order “inherently divisive concepts” means advancing any ideas in violation of Title IV and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including, but not limited to of the following concepts (i) one race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith is inherently superior to another race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith; (ii) an individual, by virtue of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex or faith, is racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously, (iii) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex or faith, (iv) members of one race, ethnicity, sex or faith cannot and should not attempt to treat others as individuals without respect to race, sex or faith, (v) an individual's moral character is inherently determined by his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith, (vi) an individual, by virtue of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, ethnicity, sex or faith, (vii) meritocracy or traits, such as a hard work ethic, are racist or sexist or were created by a particular race to oppress another race."
Stunningly illiberal because regulating curriculum. Or maybe incredibly liberal, because insisting on teaching in a manner consistent with treating people as individuals with equal standing and not as members of identity groups. It's confusing! Also, when public outrage gets a governor of the minority party a surprise win, and this is prominently the first thing he does, are we waiting for the backlash, or *is* this the backlash? Confusing again!
I guess if you really think about it, all of human history and everything anyone did or didn't do is just a giant chain of backlashes to backlashes. So long as there are chickens and eggs, every chicken needs to worry about laying an egg, and every egg about hatching a chicken, and so on and so on.
2: No School Mask Mandates: Parents can elect no, don't have to give any reason. Which I am doing starting Tuesday, thanks Youngkin, and special thanks to the intransigently pro-CRT-indoctrination progressives who got him elected.
I don't think Tracinski's argument is a very good one. What's even more depressing is that I worry it's culturally ingrained into both libertarianism and, if there is one, the American way of doing things.
To be clear, Tracinski's argument is basically the Peltzman effect. But if you step back, the Peltzman effect is incredibly overused. Because 1) Much of the time, the compensating behavior doesn't completely offset the primary behavior and 2) Peltzman always seems to define his costs and benefits arbitrarily narrowly (e.g. even if it's the case that on-net, more people die by using seatbelts than without, the benefits to society of EVERYONE and EVERYTHING being able to travel 70mph is much, much higher and should also be part of the equation.
Nonetheless, this kind of stilted, "aren't I cute" argument has become the de-facto rationale for the US bureaucracy (remember CDC testing?) and for pundits of inaction everywhere.
You can see this by returning to Tracinski. We can't persecute these guys (who are persecuting us), persecuting them will only make them stronger! What? I suggest he, and everyone else, actually look at the history of persecution. Unfortunately, it turns out to be quite effective. If you really want to put the lie to this argument, think about how much stronger a position conservatives in media and academia are now than in times past when they were weak and persecution free.
It's nonsensical rhetorical leechcraft. And it's endemic in thought. So much more thought is given to secondary consequences and hypotheticals, that we've become paralyzed by inaction.
"If you kill your enemy, they win." That's his argument, boiled down. It is risible. Most charitably, he is indulging in bad faith; most likely, he is a useful idiot.
I'd actually respect that argument more as a clear moral stance (although I think it's ridiculous). He'd be saying "fine, I'm a pacifist. I'm not going to fight back against that mean bully. I'll be the better man, and everyone will see that when he beats the snot out of me.". That'd be a morally defensible, if wrong-headed position.
It seems to me Tracinski isn't making that sort of argument though. He has no moral qualms with fighting back, he's just utterly conditioned to assume that the secondary or unintended consequences of fighting back will end up being counterproductive to the primary goal of... not getting curb stomped. That kind of position doesn't even have the tepid defense of the moral high ground. It's just wrong.
It's fine as a religious view (turning the other cheek will grant me eternal life). As a method of achieving desirable real world material outcomes its always been questionable.
Taking the possibility of 'backlash' into consideration in order to avoid counterproductive action can be perfectly reasonable and pragmatic.
But the actual question is "backlash 'compared to what'?'" Compared to proposing the abolition of government schools as the only certified kosher liberal way to deal with the issue? That backlash would make the American response to Pearl Harbor look like nothing, which, it seems pretty clear to me, is the reason most anti-anti-CRT pro-liberalism commentary avoids mentioning it.
On the other hand, what if you *are* the backlash the other guy should have worried about? The 'illiberal' approach of lashing back and getting CRT out of government schools is apparently so dangerously unpopular that ... it just won a Republican the governorship of a blue state which went strongly for Biden. Who backlashed against whom? One is not supposed to conduct a popular backlash because of the possibility of some hypothetical even more popular second-order backlash? Is that how we observe that our politics actually works, or is that the literal definition of concern trolling?
Ironically, if we are to take backlash concern trolling seriously as a guide to action, it argues against liberalism!
Here are the possibilities:
(1) Do Nothing, Liberally. Backlash points 0, but CRT indoctrination points -10.
(2) 'Illiberal' Rufo Laws. Probably still some CRT, but less egregious, so -5 points. Backlash points ... -5 to +5. Maybe, just maybe, second order meta backlash in a fickle, blueing electorate makes you a little worse off, eroding gains from reducing CRT in government schools. Then again, maybe you *are* the backlash. Overall, the range is from about where you started, to real improvement, assuming you don't assign it -9,999 points for sudden catastrophic erosion of the American consensus commitment to liberalism. How many liberalism erosion points do we give to fomenting permanent resentments of racial animus and humiliation by subjecting kids to 'white racism explains everything, and don't anyone dare say otherwise, or else'? 0? -40K?
(3) Abolish Government Schooling, Liberally. CRT points 0. Liberalism points +10. Backlash points -999,999,999.
So, the trouble is that it's just a truism that your opponents are always going to oppose you. Duh. That fact alone cannot yield a logical conclusion that one must never do anything about anything, so the question is when to flip from action to surrender.
Since it is hard to forecast the degree of backlash (or, I guess, the theoretical backlash to your actually existing, popular backlash), it's just used as a results-oriented rhetorical device. If I want you to go along with something, I will minimize the possibility, but if I want you to not do it, I will exaggerate my level of concern and 'worry', and unless we agree on some objective way to assess predictions - like, say, when everyone agrees a surprising election occurred due to the issue - then there is no way to come to agreement on whether to take it seriously or not, and no way to confirm you are genuinely worried about it as opposed to not really having any confident predictions one way or the other, but engaging in a kind of just-try-everything FUD campaign.
Same as this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMyKGNy3CI4
The problem with wokeness is that its zealots capture key positions of institutions which, on a functionalist definition, have nothing to do with wokeness and then use this institutional power to promote woke ends, to the detriment of the original function of the institution. It is no answer to this problem to say we need open debate, since the problem with wokeness is anterior to the conditions that make open debate possible. The woke will profess to be all about open debate right until the point when they have the critical mass to enshrine their favored substantive views by rule. It's happened again and again, and has been the plain pattern at least since Lenin.
Q: Others have laid out different strategies in fighting CRT. Some have suggested confronting Corporate HR Trainers either overtly or subtly so that fellow employees would 'see through' its illogic and inherent awfulness. Why are these approaches either useless or even counterproductive?
A: You can’t persuade zealots with logic, facts, and clever argumentation; they only understand the language of power. That’s why the campaign to prove that you’re “the real liberal” or “more antiracist than the antiracists” is doomed to failure. Like it or not, Critical Race Theory is the driving force of the modern intellectual Left; they’re not going back to the philosophy of FDR, LBJ, or MLK. And they scrupulously follow the old dictum of “no enemies to the left”—they will dispatch the centrist liberals with even more vitriol and brutality than they dispatch the conservatives. This is also the core dilemma of the IDW crowd: many of them cannot imagine aligning with political conservatives; they operate under the delusion that they can “recapture the centre” and convince the planet of the virtue of Enlightenment values. That’s not how politics works. We live in a polarized political system—one winner, one loser. You’ll remember that the Girondins went to the guillotine. If, metaphorically speaking, the centrist liberals want to avoid the same fate, they will have to make an alliance with Trump-loving, truck-driving, gun-toting Middle Americans. That’s reality. We’ll see if they heed it.
https://niccolo.substack.com/p/the-dushanbe-interviews-christopher
What if Rufo is correct? And let's do a thought experiment. Say that Nazism was very popular among teachers and was being taught to our children. How should we respond?
Good interview with Rufo on Sullivan's podcast.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/christopher-rufo-on-crt-in-schools
It seems Rufo has moved from CRT is evil we should be able to ban evil shit to parents (through law makers) should be able to determine what their kids are taught. I think this is a mistake, at least on principle. CRT is an ideology and I don't think we should be teaching ideology. Furthermore it is a racist ideology, which I am further opposed to teaching. Again, what if parents and lawmakers wanted to teach Nazism? Should we stand by in accordance with federalism and states rights to teach what they want? Rufo has in the past posed this question to David French, clearly stumping him. Perhaps Rufo thinks CRT is so unpopular that by focusing on parents being able to determine what their kids should and shouldn't learn, it will best be defeated. This casts a bigger more liberal tent which includes people who haven't yet come around to CRT being awful.
Sullivan engages in the tendency of educated people to worry more about second order effects than first order effects. It's a strange phenomena. Obviously its good to consider possible reactions, but very educated people have a tendency to overweight second order possibilities and underweight first order actualities. Perhaps this is just the intellectual's bias: First order actualities require action, second order possibilities pondering and inaction.
One of the current problems is that you can't get people to agree on what is and is not an ideology. Even if it ever had a precise meaning reasonable people from opposite political camps could agree on (doubtful), today it is one of those irregular nouns. Proponents of CRT say it's not an ideology but sound science and morally unobjectionable principles. Opponents of teaching evolution in schools say it's an ideology or something close. Some say that democracy and liberalism are an ideology, and you'd have a tough time arguing about that (the usual reaction is point-and-sputter). It's easier to evade the landmines and go for federalism. As for teaching Nazism, a cynic would say that it doesn't matter if they did: a sizable proportion of US teaches its children various brands of fundamentalist Christianity but their retention rates are low, and surveys clearly show that the values of the remainder have been way more influenced by the socially prestigious classes than the reverse.
The social sciences and education at the university level are fully corrupted by critical theory. Any policy approaches will just be playing whack-a-mole unless fundamental reform of university system can happen.
Tracinski is really blowing smoke with that one.
First of all, he's so obliviously proud about using 'Hispanic', but all his criticisms of Latinx apply equally to Hispanic, which is just another Academia / US Government-invented term that no members of the group used to describe themselves prior to 1970. David Bernstein's upcoming book "Classified" goes into deep detail. Hispanic also faced inertial resistance on its road to replacing the former terms - I bet this is corroborated if one were to check out NYT word usage frequency stats - because elites just kept insisting that people do so, and then Tracinski, ahem, jumped on that bandwagon. And is so proud of it! While simultaneously criticizing bandwagons! Is this "representation without authorization"? Good grief!
Tracinsky is right about the climate change thing being out of place - lefty religion, sure, but not 'woke' - but he also knows full well why "drugs" belongs on Schellenberger's woke chart. Just because there is some overlap between progressives and libertarians on some policy preference doesn't mean the motivations and rationale are at all the same, and it always ends up being one of those "Libertarians as Progressive deluded mistress" situations. "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."
If you ask progressives why they are against drug prohibition, the answer is not because they believe in the fundamental principle of bodily autonomy against which the state has no right of interference (ha ha!) but because "disproportionately black and brown ... yadda yadda ... racist police and system ... yadda yadda" - i.e., because it is a system of racist oppression, the core "woke" tenet, which is the rationale for everything they do. They would be cool the drug war x100 and tell the libertarians to take a hike if only the people who tended to get arrested were white.
"But when someone like Christopher Rufo designates [woke] as a catchall for any idea on the left, he is confirming the left’s claim that the term is malleable and crudely partisan—because for him, it is."
"Someone like"? Nice. At any rate, that's just not a fair or accurate statement about what Rufo is doing. Rufo is all-in on "CRT", and indeed, the whole point of "intersectional critical theory" is precisely to weave all the isolated "system of oppression" fibers for all the identity groups into one big ideological tapestry as the foundation for political coalition. What should people call real-world manifestations of this concept if not "CRT" or Woke"? Does Tracinsky have a better term or brand?
"If the problem with wokeness is specifically that it quashes debate—that it delegitimizes all dissent—then the way to oppose it is to advocate for open debate, with many different viewpoints being heard."
Nice try, but no, that's not specifically "the problem" with wokeness. A means, not an end. Just one of several tools it uses to defend itself. The other problem with wokeness is that it is based on a premise which is a hateful, harmful falsehood of group libel. It is not just that the woke believe it is good and necessary to punish and heretics, but that they have the legal and social capacity to do so, and do it, all the time.
Sure, call for open debate! But then, also in the same breath please also call for non-discriminatory platforms and the total abolition of laws that allow someone to be sued, fired, or disciplined for offense. Otherwise, how are you going to get people to argue the other side of that debate? Tracinsky then goes on to say that the poor women swimmers had to complain anonymously, precisely because they didn't feel it would otherwise be safe to participate in open debate. Make it safe! Or would doing so be 'illiberal'?
"But if everything is “woke,” nothing is. ... But if wokeness is just a catchall for any ideas held by supporters of a rival party or faction, then the way to oppose it is to oppose any expression of your opponents’ ideas."
This is kind of nuts. *The* way to oppose it? *Any* expression? There are lots of ways besides that to oppose wokeness, but it's not "just a catchall". He recited Pluckrose's description, but let's face it, 95% of the woke don't have any clue about all that "knowledge is culturally constructed" academic jargon.
Here, I'll make it easy. My favorite economist has a great expression, "Price Discrimination Explains Everything." A lot of people don't realize it, but it's everywhere, if you learn about it you'll start to see how it explains so much, and so often when something seems to deviate from the nice, simple story about how things are supposed to work, it's usually to blame.
What does 'CRT' really mean?
It means, "White Racism Explains Everything."
What does 'Woke', i.e., "Intersectional Critical Theory" really mean?
It means "Bigoted Oppression Explains Everything."
In the alternative, just replace 'price' with 'unjust' = "Unjust Discrimination Explains Everything."
Again, I'd ask Tracinsky, "If we don't want public schools to teach kids the lie that 'white racism explains everything', then, according to you, do we just have to suck it up, or if not, then what's the text of the law that would effectively stop it and which you are cool with? Is your answer just, 'Abolish public schools'?"
Open debate of political correctness is already for the most part banned within universities. You'll get kicked out if you're a student, and you'll be fired if you work there. Some star faculty get exemptions, but then the administration finds some indirect way to shiv you (see Amy Chua for an example meant to encourager les autres). We are already suppressed by the existence of pervasive Test Acts within institutions designed to exclude anyone who does not tow the line with PC.
If we just call wokeness political correctness, it exposes the stasis in American culture and politics. The chart by Boghossian and Shellenberger that Tracinski links to is interesting, but I have the sense that this is really about, for them, shoring up the secular humanist project which has diminished nigh to the point of doom. Tracinski also at the close of his article makes a plea for a secular liberalism that he seems to believe is deeper-rooted than it really is. This is part of a category of moderation that I find both funny and pervasive: "the causes are good, but I am resolutely opposed to the effects of those causes!"
What would Carl Schmitt say about this attempt to declare political correctness to be a religious doctrine? He would of course say political doctrines are religious doctrines.
In Chapter 3 of Political Theology, Schmitt writes:
"All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development -- in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver -- but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts."
He then goes on to say (my paraphrase) that the modern constitutional state is inseparable from a deistic conception which 'banished the miracle from the world.' It is futile to try to forever banish the religious sensibility from politics. A leftist politics of the Jim Jones variety is always going to clean the clock of schoolboy secular leftism. The constitutional liberalism of the founders was written around a Christian culture. Find-and-replacing Christianity with nothing creates a vacuum rapidly filled by cults like those of Jim Jones. We have seen how Jim Jonesism as preached by the apostle Kendi has trivially crushed and conquered most of the feeble outposts of secular humanism in education: that is an accomplished fact.
CRT is a natural outgrowth of certain mainstream assumptions going back to civil rights. The obvious counter would be something like The Bell Curve, but even Murray admits it will never be taught in K-12 schools. So what we are going to end up with is K-12 students getting a steady of diet of stories about how terrible they were in the past, how terrible things are now, and that its all their fault. The most any of these CRT bans do is say "its so ugly to make your anti-white racism explicit, can't you just make it loudly implicit!" Kids are going to exist in this miasma of racial guilt lessons and draw the most likely conclusions. Logic and debate isn't how kids decide what the truth is, and anyway the best facts on one side will be withheld anyway.
Since any *REAL* discussion of race would involve Sailer level "noticing", the best approach is to just not talk much about race in K-12. When I was growing up we got the usual "its February, here are a few lessons about how slavery is bad, now let's move on". That seems appropriate to me. IDW types that want to teach both sides are deluding themselves. More race talk will inevitably just mean "here are some more examples of how whites are shit."
Problem is educators are being asked to do the impossible (close the racial gaps in performance) and they are running out of excuses as to why they can't, so they are just going to call small children racist and beat it out of them. If that seems like harsh criticism, the level of child abuse schools did during COVID I never would have guessed in my wildest dreams.
And to the extent he inspires illiberal bills in red states?
Imagine the Venn diagram with a circle for "Laws that effectively prevent CRT / woke orthodoxy from being taught in public schools" and another circle for "Laws that are not illiberal."
Are these disjoint sets, or is there an intersection? If there is an intersection, can you tell us what it looks like and how it is different from the text of prominent bills in circulation*?
If there was a law that teachers may not teach that members of (insert group label here) are 'inferior', would that also be 'illiberal'?
Is it that trying to do literally anything with public schools is inherently 'illiberal' and the only way to be 'liberal' while preventing public money going to woke indoctrination is to just abolish public schools altogether? Maybe, though, you gotta admit, that would surprise a lot of people who think they are liberal, like public schooling, but think its ok to stop those schools from teaching hateful lies.
If they are disjoint sets, then what the hell good or use is being liberal if it means having to let the progressives abuse public schooling to shove their pernicious and illiberal lies down the throats of our kids?
*Or, if we are to avoid cherry picking, how about the bills that show signs of actual prospects and consideration and have gotten a little further than merely being introduced by one or two legislators in a kind of performative mic-drop, which happens all the time?
ETA: I gotta say it's just kind of bizarre that this is the hill pro-liberals are willing to die on. Everybody looks at the Youngkin victory in now solidly blue Virginia as a kind of referendum on CRT in public schools, an expression of extreme displeasure and frustration at what is going on and strong demand to do something to stop it. But liberals are saying to these people, "Either you gotta give up public school, or give up trying to stop CRT in public schools, or you gotta give up on liberalism." Most effective - if inadvertent - marketing against liberalism ever.
I think that, unfortunately, abolishing monopolistic public school systems is the only answer. Having control over the school system is just too much of a power lever for the illiberal to ignore. So long as the power to control people exists, those who want power to control people are going to fight to be the one to use it. We created a soulless monster, and it is only a question of what corrupted soul wants to occupy it; no angels are lining up for it.
Now, maybe public schooling with open charter schools, or straight vouchers, or something similar might work well enough, reducing the lever's power enough that people can still get what they want. I don't know, and I wish people would experiment a bit more around that.
Still, the problem with powerful institutions is that crazy people want to take control of them to abuse that power. We can't get rid of crazy people, so the answer seems to be getting rid of the powerful institutions, and stop creating them in the first place.
I am totally fine with this answer insofar as it is coherent and honest.
But notice two things:
First, how many of the articles opposing prohibition of teaching CRT just come out and say "At root, the problem is public schooling, and in the final analysis, liberalism requires the total abolition of public schooling. Really, we need not analyze or grapple at all with all the talk about whether we should or shouldn't pass laws about what public school teachers must or must not say, and anybody who does so is wasting time and missing the point. All that is just a distracting sideshow to the real question, which is whether public schooling should exist at all, to which liberalism answers that it should not." The answer so far as I've seen is none of them.
Second, if having public schooling at all is the big illiberal sin and transgression, then why do we have to be so binary about it, that is, what's wrong with 'harm reduction'? Does liberalism really require one to conclude that public schooling without CRT bans is more liberal / preferable to public schooling with CRT indoctrination?
One reads a lot about how the problem with anti-progressive groups is that they know what they are against, but they don't say what they're *for*. Well, ok. Can I see the liberalism-compliant version of how to teach the truth about CRT's falseness in the schools that could be implemented under current law? There isn't one and that's the point: you can't fix it without a change in the law. Or, like you said, just show your cards and lead with "the undeniable necessity of the total abolition of public schooling" as the forthright thing to do.
To the first point, yes, I agree: the devil is public schooling (or most any state monopoly) but the authors are either unaware of the diabolism inherent or do not wish to make that claim for fear of being called an extremist and ignored. I wrote about it back in July here (https://dochammer.substack.com/p/why-libertarians-are-so-awkward-with) I think there is far too much fear of being viewed as an extremist these days, personally.
To the second point, I agree that harm reduction is a good idea since we probably are not going to convince everyone that the public education system as currently exists is a really bad idea any time soon. While we are trying to do that, we ought to also look at how we can limit the current madness that exists in education, whether it be CRT, gender math, racialized physics, not bothering to teach kids to read, whatever. The trouble there might be that reducing harm thusly might be more damaging than good if we are not careful. The whole civil rights thing seemed like a good idea until it caused the rise of evil HR because everyone was getting sued for every damned thing. Probably a foreseeable consequence, but tricky enough that we need to craft rules about what public schools can and cannot teach carefully.
Personally, I think the right should be taking the opportunity to push school choice with vouchers or something really hard. If I were running for state representative or congress this year, I would nail that plank into the platform early and often. Alas, I think that "Give this office the power to dictate what is taught, then give me the office and I will dictate what you want!" is more compelling than "Take this power away from the office, then we don't need to care who gets elected!"
Doctor Hammer for PA State House District 166!
Am I the only one who seems to have noticed that critical race theory is itself illiberal, in that it fails/refuses to consider people as individuals, and instead treats them as non-descript members of racial groups that are themselves then crudely lumped into categories of good/bad, oppressed/oppressor, unprivileged/privileged based on a very selective reading of the last 400 hundred years of (Euro-centric) history? When I've got my classical liberal hat on, it's still a bit hard for me to get worked up about CRT being firewalled from primary and secondary schools given it's own afore-mentioned violation of liberal principles and the fact that, as a socio-historical "theory," it's a pile of hot garbage.
https://pen.org/stop-woke-act-fits-disturbing-pattern-education-culture-war/
https://www.arcdigital.media/p/laws-aimed-at-banning-critical-race
For starters
"What precisely is illiberal about it?"
This is the key and totally fair question. And I gotta say, the fact that I haven't seen anyone try to answer it leads me to conclude that a lot of the rhetoric is just fake and hollow posturing without any genuine and sincere commitments to a coherent set of principles. Don't come for us, woke progressive inquisitors, we're not with those guys! See, we are not cool with their anti-CRT efforts! Good luck with that.
it is really, really disappointing to read so many purported intellectuals cry 'illiberal!' over and over, but never get into the nitty gritty of why and what liberalism requires as to the setting of limits for curriculum for public schooling.
A law that says, "A public school teacher may not teach his students that God exists and the Christian religion is true," is that liberal or illiberal? If it's illiberal, then, because it actually is the law, then why don't liberals spend even 0.00001% of their anti-illiberal energies speaking out against it? "Well, we're cool with *that* illiberalism."?
If it's liberal, then what do I get to replace "God exists and the Christian religion" with, and it would still be liberal? "White racism explains everything"? Or what is the rule for distinguishing whether a replacement would be 'liberal' or 'illiberal'? If these are hard problems and good liberals aren't sure about the answers, then why don't they admit that uncertainty, instead of coming right out with extreme confidence in asserting that this one particular move against CRT would absolutely definitely be illiberal?
Again, it's hard not to conclude that a lot of this is just fundamentally disingenuous.
Maybe not disingenuous, but more lazy/sloppy. I don't think most people have the ability to figure out why one is ok and one isn't, and just prefer the certainty of "Mine is good, theirs is bad, because obvious reasons I don't need to go into. Obviously." It isn't as though people change their minds much anyway, so we are heavily incentivized to just claim our side is right and bask in their approval, or try to please both sides and hope we aren't the first up against he wall.
The question of disingenuousness is whether what an author is writing seems to flow out of sincerely held and consistently applied principles, with critical energies seeming to be allocated evenly across similar issues, and acknowledgement of trade-off costs "yes, this means accepting that ...", and socially undesirable implications, "yes, this means the right answer is [insert very unpopular proposal here]."
Kling is a great example of this kind of virtue, which is why I hang out here, but he is a prince among many knaves that is quite rare in the anti-Rufo-law "uh, because liberalism" commentary that's out there.
Indicators of disingenuousness are double standards, all kinds of bad arguments and refusal to address holes that get poked in them, isolated calls for rigor while giving similar claims or contexts a pass, and inconsistencies that are out of character and show that one is being merely opportunistic and manipulative of *the audience's* affection for the principles which you yourself mock or oppose in every other instance.
One sees this in politics all the time. Politicians who chafe at nationalist patriotic sentiment and bristle at constituional limits and spend 95% of their time saying that it's absurd we are bound by an obsolete parchment drafted by evil founders, but then, when in the rare case they can manipulate some chumps, start expressing pride in country and the necessity of fidelity to the sacred texts in the most absurdly exaggerated (and palpably fake) ways.
When someone is being genuine and principled, it should be easy to be figure out their 'model' in terms of commitments, preferences, ideological values, etc., and make accurate predictions about what they would say in response to new questions, at least, if they were being honest.
With a lot of this anti-Rufo 'because liberalism' crowd, I feel like Scott Sumner trying to pin down Kelton and the MMTers on "What, exactly, does MMT say and mean?" After you try and fail to get straight, coherent, non-infinitely-hedgeable answers over and over, you start to conclude, you know what, maybe there's actually no there, there.