Back in December, there were a bunch of news stories about Iran disbanding their morality police following months of protest after the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who was arrested for allegedly failing to wear the hijab. From the NYT coverage of the story on December 4, 2022:
A senior Iranian official said this weekend that Iran had abolished the morality police, the state media reported, after months of protests set off by the death of a young woman who was detained by the force for supposedly violating the country’s strict Islamic dress laws.
The morality police “was abolished by the same authorities who installed it,” Attorney General Mohammad Javad Montazeri said on Saturday during a meeting at which officials were discussing the unrest, according to state media reports.
At the time, I believe I said something about it being some public relations nonsense and that it was silly of western media to cover it so credulously. Not to go all The Hives on you, but, I don’t know how you enforce this sort of thing without a morality police:
Reuters: Iran's judiciary says women will be punished for violating Islamic dress code
Women violating the Islamic dress code will be punished, Iran's Judiciary Chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei said on Monday according to the official IRNA news agency, reaffirming the law after months of unrest that brought a deadly security crackdown.
"Removing one's hijab is equivalent to showing enmity to the Islamic Republic and its values. People who engage in such an abnormal act will be punished," Ejei said.
In Iran, the question “what is a woman” is very easy: anyone who is punished for not wearing the hijab. That is a woman. Matt Walsh and his ilk would fit right in over there.
NYT: The MAGA-fication of North Idaho College
G.O.P. activists set out to root out the “deep state” at home. An Idaho community college may never be the same.
This story was interesting to me because of what was missing from it. Specifically, it is missing anything of substance regarding the content of the battle over the ideological direction of the school, which is ostensibly the fight that is being waged here. In short, an Idaho community college has had its board remade by the local conservatives over the last couple of years. They have voted in a Republican-backed majority on the school’s board of trustees, apparently as a result of a backlash to a statement issued by the school’s diversity office following the death of George Floyd. George Floyd, who was killed in…Missouri. But I digress. From the article:
That year, the committee began vetting and endorsing candidates for county board positions in what are technically nonpartisan elections. In the Coeur d’Alene Press, a committee precinctwoman accused the school of supporting a “radical, racist and Marxist organization” and “guilting white male students,” and urged county residents to vote for two candidates endorsed by the committee “to balance the N.I.C. Board” in the November election.
Brent Regan, the committee’s chairman, argues the endorsements are no different from those of the local Rotary Club or newspaper.
“The mission of the Republican Party in Kootenai County is to try to find people who will run for office — any office, from sewer districts to school boards to trustee boards — who embrace the policies of the Republican Party as outlined in our platform,” Mr. Regan said.
I can’t find anything on the website of the Kootenai County GOP that resembles a platform, so maybe that guy is referring to the national GOP platform, which I believe was last updated at the 2016 Republican convention and re-affirmed in 2020 to some internal controversy, basically just saying that their platform is whatever Trump says it is. Either way, all this guy really means is that he wants candidates who will be mad at people for being liberals, and pushing their liberal agenda, and whathaveyou. Not really policy, just those good GOP vibes. As is their right, certainly.
The trustees have cycled through a couple of presidents since gaining control of the board, been the subject of multiple lawsuits from two of its last five presidents, and as a result had its debt rating downgraded by Moody’s, which has in turn threatened its accreditation and therefore its ability to function as a school at all. The best part is that all of the infighting seems to be about nothing more specific than the general idea that the school is an appropriate place to play out one’s feelings about the totality of American culture being overrun by the LIBERAL AGENDA.
In an email to a conservative student, Mr. Banducci wrote that he was “battling the N.I.C. ‘deep state’ on an almost daily basis,” and complained that “the liberal progressives are quite deeply entrenched.”
(…)
In a conversation after the election, Mr. Banducci chided Mr. MacLennan, then the college president, for his wife’s support for Hillary Clinton and told him that he would give him “marching orders,” according to Mr. MacLennan.
(…)
In November, Greg McKenzie, the current board chair, dismissed the prospect of losing accreditation as “Fake News” in a letter to constituents.
If there’s more to the story in terms of the specifics of the local Republicans’ concerns, I couldn’t find it on their website or Twitter feed. The whole thing just seems to be their belief that this college is the best place that they can do battle in the culture war, particular issues with running a school being entirely beside the point. It is a war being fought for a higher purpose, where there doesn’t appear to be any proof of any ground level things to hang a specific fight on. It is, in other words, perfectly representative of the way the vast majority of the culture war is fought—entirely divorced from anything that is actually happening in the real world and concerned only with fighting largely imaginary ideological enemies that you have no interest in ever talking to. Great!
I like David French. He is a good podcast guest and has reasonable things to say in his column, a lot of the time. This, however, is very silly.
Take Threats of ‘National Divorce’ Seriously
About two weeks ago, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia kicked off a conversation about a “national divorce,” and it hasn’t really stopped. Greene says she doesn’t mean a true national division but rather an extreme form of federalism, in which red and blue states essentially live under completely different economic and constitutional structures while maintaining a nominal national union.
The very idea is absurd. It’s incompatible with the Constitution. It’s dangerous. It’s unworkable. It would destroy the economy, dislocate millions of Americans and destabilize the globe. Even in the absence of a civil war — it’s beyond unlikely that vast American armies would clash the way they did from 1861 to 1865 — national separation would almost certainly be a violent mess. There is only one way to describe an actual American divorce: an unmitigated disaster, for America and the world.
It could also happen. It’s not likely, but it’s possible, and we should take that possibility seriously.
(…)
This is not a new concern for me. In 2020, I published a book arguing that political polarization had grown so extreme that it was time to be concerned about our national union. The second sentence stated the thesis: “At this moment in history, there is not a single important cultural, religious, political or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pushing us apart.”
(…)
Animosity is the enemy of American liberty. It is hard to muster the will to defend the rights of people you despise. But it’s also the ultimate enemy of American unity. Hatred and fear are the foundation of “unreasoning fury,” and the fury that divided us once before may well do so again.
The United States is not going to go through a national divorce, or endure a legitimate attempt at secession by a bunch of states, or enter into a Civil War. There is so much fucking money to be made in this ceaseless culture war fight that would cease to be meaningful if we somehow organized a MAGA-XIT or whatever. We are far more likely to see the rise of a third party following the final cleaving of the Trump GOP than we are to see a national divorce, and we aren’t seeing that anytime soon, either. That we could mitigate the worst effects of the culture wars with something as simple as ranked-choice voting—which would drive candidates back to the middle rather than to the extremes—means we won’t see that, either, but it also means that the problem isn’t actually intractable. We just aren’t yet motivated to manage it.
Jon Haidt recently put up a long piece on his blog that’s worth a read, and might actually point us in a direction out of the culture war—a culture war that I think might have its roots in the way we consume media more than it reflects any real unbridgeable divides between our Various Americas.
Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest
In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:
They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).
They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).
They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).
Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas. These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups. Just as Greg had feared, many universities and progressive institutions embraced these three untruths and implemented programs that performed reverse CBT on young people, in violation of their duty to care for them and educate them.
I think that one of the perhaps many ways the entire culture war can be reduced to a single point of contention is that “liberals” have generally embraced the idea that the world is happening to them, while “conservatives” insist that you can happen to the world, if only you try. It is, of course, not that simple. And both are right, and neither actually believe that generality in practice nor in all things. Another way of thinking about it is that “bootstrapping”—a sort of nonsectarian American, somewhat libertarian belief in the possibility that any person can achieve their goals through hard work and determination given the freedom to do so, once venerated by politicians of all stripes—became purely ideologically valenced.
In keeping with the Haidt hypothesis, this has possibly redounded in very unfortunate ways through the culture, with liberal girls experiencing more experiential dread at being in the world than any other group. The extent to which this anxiety is justified by the world itself is interesting and entirely beside the point if, in fact, one can find more happiness or satisfaction—or simply less crushing angst—by framing one’s experience of the world in less psychologically punishing ways.
I’ve seen plenty of articles through the years about how conservatism and liberalism is basically inborn, that our genetic or very early formative experiences all but concretize the way we ideologically see the world. What if, with the internet, we invented a way of constantly delivering to our brains a reinforcement mechanism whose entire task is to build those foundations deeper, and erect those walls higher? Could it result in the sort of spreading human misery that so many in the national press have been talking about lately? Virtually all of human interaction for all of human history took place face-to-face, or at least voice-to-voice, until the internet transformed the way we interact with each other. It was billed as an empathy machine that would expand our horizons, give us the ability to interact with people of other cultures and see how they are like us, and become more compassionate and understanding human beings.
Um. I invite you to look around!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
