[I have a much better new post at Econlog, on monetary economics.]
Many intellectuals see politics in terms of left vs. right. Today, I wonder if the more important split is between those obsessed with identity politics and those who are not. In other words, left wing ideologues obsessed with identity issues are closer to white nationalists then they are to mainstream liberals (both progressives and classical liberals.)
Matt Yglesias has a cute tweet that illustrates this concept:
It seems to me that the far left and the far right increasingly share a view that identity trump’s everything else. As a result, both extremes agree that George Washington and Robert E. Lee are equally deserving (or undeserving) of being cancelled. In contrast, mainstream liberals on both the left and right believe that identity issues can be important, but lots of other stuff is also important.
White nationalists are so focused on defending white rights that they cross over from highly plausible claims (Washington’s accomplishments are more important than his faults) to much more doubtful claims, (former Confederate leaders deserve our respect.)
Extreme leftists believe that identity is such an all-important issue that Washington is roughly as tainted as Lee.
White nationalists believe that NFL teams should cancel sincere black protesters like Colin Kaepernick, while extreme leftists want to cancel highly respected scientists like Steven Pinker. Liberals believe people should be fired (if at all) only for extremely offensive views, such as advocating Nazi or KKK ideas.
At the bottom of this post you’ll see a list of the people who signed the petition favoring free speech. Notice that it includes many highly respected people on both sides of the ideological spectrum. (And one idiot, who backed off from the letter once she found out who else signed it.) Perhaps we have a new ideological spectrum, and just don’t know it yet.
Right now, I’m more worried about white nationalists, because they are the people in power in DC. But if someone claimed that 10 or 20 years from now the biggest threat will be “woke” people on the left, I would not necessarily disagree. We (liberals) are fighting a two front war. The key is to stick to our principles and don’t get drawn to either extreme based on phony “enemy of my enemy” arguments.
It’s often noted that left wing “woke” people are helping Donald Trump by pushing moderates to the right. Perhaps they believe that if only they and the white nationalists are left standing, they can win the battle. But can they? Didn’t the German communists believe they could win a battle with the fascists, once the moderate parties were made irrelevant via chaos in the streets?
[Don’t blame me for the analogy overreach—it’s Godwin’s Law.]
One solution is education. Not in the sense of telling students they should support free speech—that won’t work. You need to show them, to make them see that they should believe in free speech. Every student in high school should be exposed to several weeks of coverage of the right wing European nationalistic ideologies of the interwar years, and several weeks on left wing Maoist movements such as the Chinese Red Guards and the Khmer Rouge. They need to understand what happens when the extremes of the right or left take control. And please describe the torture in vivid detail; they also need to be toughened up. The world’s a brutal place.
PS. I waver back and forth in terms of how to view the thought control people on the left. At times their arguments seem funny, easy to mock, like something out of The Onion. Because it doesn’t affect me personally (yet), it seems like a big joke. But then I recall people I knew and respected who were badly (and unfairly) damaged by PCism run amok, back in the 1990s.
PPS. If you are a millennial interviewing for a company dominated by boomers, don’t you have an incentive to come across as a tough, irreverent person, who can take a punch and likes self-deprecating humor? Wouldn’t that make boomers feel safer about hiring the person? Or might they fear this person ends up fighting with coworkers? In other words, is it already too late? I’d be interested in the views of those closer to the job market.
PPPS. The recent NASCAR “noose hoax” perfectly encapsulates this moment in time. Some see racism everywhere, even where it doesn’t exist, while others want to scapegoat black people for mistakes made by white people.
