Weekend Reading
Four Terrific Posts by Authors from The Center-Right and Left, on The Culture War. Plus a Bonus or Two.
Summer days are slower times. People go on vacations and otherwise take breaks from many routines. People tire and move on from cable news to sports (go England!) and movies, which are slowly coming back. All good.
There are exceptions, and our current culture war is one. Just ask Loudoun County, Virginia, parents. Or parents elsewhere.
And “critical race theory” apologists are fighting back. Perhaps you saw this turgid piece of propaganda about Critical Race Theory on CNN this week that carefully selected and taped a few opponents to look like ignorant rubes. There are plenty of us who can answer intelligently the questions posed by Elle Reeve.
In a sense, culture wars have always been with us, and especially since the early 19th century, starting between the north and south. It took a bloody and violent war to resolve that one, and even then, it persisted and evolved as it crawled into the 20th Century. The temperance movement that led to the 18th Amendment - later repealed by the 21st Amendment - was another.
Marxism generated lots of literal wars that emerged in the early 20 century. German philosopher Karl Marx divided people between the elite ruling class “proletariat” and middle/working class “bourgeoisie.” The most recent example of that in the United States was the 1999 Seattle riots around a meeting of the World Trade Organization. I was there and witnessed black-clad anarchists engaged in violence, very much like last summer’s George Floyd riots.
But something began to change, starting in academia, back in the 1960s. German-born Herbert Marcuse and others in 1965 conceived and promoted “repressive tolerance.” That is, unacceptable thought and speech must be suppressed. Sound familiar? Marcuse, who passed away in 1969, may also deserve some credit for shifting Marxists’ focus on “class struggle,” which he rejected, to a struggle today focused on race. After all, Marxist governments in the 20th century weren’t known for their human rights and economic successes. Just ask your average Venezuelan today.
Prominent leftists scholars such as the late Derek Bell, Duncan Kennedy, and others evolved and largely incorporated Marcusian thought into “Critical Theory” during the 1970s. Today, critical race theory is the battleground du jour of our constantly shifting culture war. What are we to make of it, and what is it doing to our politics?
Three keen observers of American culture and politics, Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan on the left, and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan on the anti-Trump center-right, have nailed it. So has this post from Great Britain’s Spiked! by its US Correspondent, Sean Collins. Some excerpts, starting with Drum, a former Mother Jones writer.
Now: maybe you're personally delighted by the Democratic Party's leftward march and maybe you're not. It doesn't matter. Despite endless hopeful invocations of "but polls show that people like our positions," the truth is that the Democratic Party has been pulled far enough left that even lots of non-crazy people find us just plain scary—something that Fox News takes vigorous advantage of. From an electoral point of view, the story here is consistent: Democrats have stoked the culture wars by getting more extreme on social issues and Republicans have used this to successfully cleave away a segment of both the non-college white vote and, more recently, the non-college nonwhite vote.
Does The Left really believe that “polls show that people like our positions?”
CRT proponents, especially in academia and the media, have a new spin on all this. Let me quote from a Roanoke Times editorial about Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin’s campaign (the election is this Fall): “Is Glenn Youngkin really going to try to run a whole campaign for governor on transgender students and some faddish educational theory that no one can really define and which may not even be being taught anyway (emphasis added)? See the spin? Or, more like this:
As has well been documented, CRT is being taught in schools, and oh yes, it is well defined.
Now, from Andrew Sullivan’s post (the full post may be behind his paywall. I subscribe):
Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?
What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.
And then Peggy Noonan, with whom I occasionally differ but not here (to get behind the paywall, go to http://www.opinionjournal.com, where I believe the WSJ’s editorial pages are available for free). She quotes Drum extensively, then ends with this:
I end with what I think is the left’s misreading of its position. They act as if they’ve got everyone on the run, including those who show their movement the greatest respect in corporate suites and private offices. But I think something unspoken is going on. As a journalist based in New York, you meet a lot of executives, corporate leaders, people in the arts and education. They publicly support the woke regime, speak the lingo, are on board with the basic assumptions, and much early support was sincere. But they have grown indignant at and impatient with the everyday harassments of woke ideology. Deep down, many of them would like to see the left knocked back on their feet. I think the left is overplaying its hand.
Just check Rasmussen Reports for polling on public policy issues. Or, as a bonus, take some time and meander through the slides of non-partisan Eschelon Insight’s most recent survey on the American electorate. You can almost feel the beginning rumbles of a political earthquake beneath your feet.
Some of these numbers don’t comport with other surveys I’ve seen on some issues, and some responses are troubling to this conservative, but it depends largely on how you word these things. Polling can be rather subjective. Still, this is insightful. CRT has gained quite a foothold here, but it’s probably at a high watermark. A more recent YouGov poll tells us more.
Watch this space. It’s going to be a long, hot summer. It’s “The Woke” versus “The Awake.” And wait until school begins.
SECOND BONUS: If you missed it, read this great Twitter thread from @martyrmade, who hosts a podcast with Jocko Willink, it is just brilliant in how it captures how a majority of Republicans feel about the 2020 election and how they see their government right now.