This is effectively a continuation of last night’s post, Habermas and the Robits and the NYT vs. Your Humble Blogger, and that one should be read first. It should probably just be one big long blargh, but I was falling asleep at the keys after a grueling evening of practice on the t-ball field and dealing with a sick kid, and rather than just deliriously throw in the last couple of points at the end—especially after finding myself rather lazily deploying a “the dice are loaded” cliché—I thought these thoughts worthy of a follow-up blog after some rest.
I don’t want to oversell the idea, here, but I think I’m nipping around the edges of something that’s bothered me for a long time that I haven’t been able to quite properly express before. I have long thought that the way we talk about things is just as important as—if not actually more important than—the content of what we’re saying or trying to achieve. Not just that rhetoric matters—of course it does—but that effective public communication demands first and foremost deference to the humanity and dignity of all who might be listening. Think of it as the opposite of the Donald Trump or Scott Adams approach to effective and “persuasive” communication. Those two deploy hysterically divisive hyperbolic language to amass attention, and then walk things back to a slightly more reasonable position and expect you to be relieved. Did you really believe that I meant what I said, out loud, over and over again? You fool! You liar!
BRIEF ASIDE: This is actually my favorite part of the move—calling people liars or idiots for claiming to have believed that you meant the thing you said. You were supposed to be offended by what I said! It’s the only way I can reach the people who most need reaching! I’m doing the real social justice work here, you morons.
BRIEF ASIDE, CONT: The adults in the room who claim not to know that I didn’t mean what I said are liars and trying to distract from my good points. Never mind that I concluded that the only way to have this conversation was to be as inflammatory as possible so as to generate a great deal of attention for myself. You’ll notice that this mode of expression leaves no room for the person to be wrong, ever. Offended? That was the point! Think you disagree? That was the point! Whatever parts you disagree with, you simply didn’t have the full context, or it’s obvious hyperbole. It’s not exactly post-truth or post-shame, it’s post-meaning. What he means is whatever it is you think he means so long as that also includes him being right. Everything else? He didn’t mean.
Their primary mode of communication is to offend a large portion of the audience’s humanity and dignity. The ones who delight in it are “persuaded,” and the ones who are offended are alienated and in an immediate defensive crouch from the righteous moral high ground—and, as outlined above, definitionally wrong—leaving those who are neither to eventually pick a side. Wounded defensiveness is pitiable but not particularly attractive, especially when it’s paired with an attitude of sniffling rectitude, while even cruel delight has a sort of winning charm. (Not for everyone! Sheesh.) Their method is abhorrent to me. It is undeniably effective at achieving its wretched aims.
The reverse of this mode of boisterous offense is the sort of detached view-from-30,000-feet that insists on its objectivity even as it makes assertions that are not mutually agreed-upon. You can see it in the article referenced in yesterday’s post, or you can see it…basically everywhere else. Do you remember the “Harper’s letter?” It was an expression of support for freedom of speech that called Donald Trump a “threat to democracy” at the same time that it expressed concern about a creeping illiberalism coming from the political left. It raised quite a stink in mainstream political discourse and became part of a wider “is ‘cancel culture’ even a thing” debate that satisfied no one, but certainly reinforced tribal divisions among people with otherwise generally less than unbridgeable political differences. I cannot speak for anyone else, of course, but what I’m getting at is, I think, the same sort of ineffable feeling that the Harper’s letter was getting at. It’s difficult to nail down, particular instances are always dismissed as mere anecdote and/or simply not that big of a deal, and we are expected to simply accept that shifting norms around acceptable speech are simply reflections of the Good becoming more firmly entrenched. (The “it’s not happening, it’s not happening, it’s not happening…it’s happening and it’s good” model of denial of alleged progress.) But there’s something there! And I think that the something is the mostly unstated overriding concern about ultimate—and ultimately unknowable!—consequences that compels people to frame the world as it ought to be without acknowledging that that’s what they’re doing. Because this is often subtle and unacknowledged, any pushback to it is met with a lot of “what are you even talking about, and why?” It is a feeling that the ground has shifted under our feet, that an ideal worth striving for has suddenly become, unjustifiably, a foundational plank—that where there was once room for conversation there is now acceptable thought and unacceptable thought, true freedom of expression having been subsumed by false certainty about how things really are, or what positions are self-evidently moral. We are not living at the “end of history” so much as the end of uncertainty.
BRIEF ASIDE: To be clear, they all do this. Michael Knowles says that transgenderism is a lie that must be eradicated from society. To question his position is to be called a groomer or pederast or enabler of such things. On the other side is the insistence that children know themselves and must be socially and medically transitioned, and to question that is to be called a genocidaire. This isn’t politics, this is war. Anyone who insists it can be politics simply doesn’t have real convictions, and is ultimately enabling the enemy.
This is all made possible—or at least given an awful steroidal boost—by The Trumppening. With the cultural dominance of someone so willing to be awful and wrong and to cause offense—someone so pathetically easy to stand against—it becomes much easier to let consequentialist concerns overtake foundational principles. Foundational principles that, I feel I must insist, are incredibly important to the proper functioning of any public domain. Why would you quibble with the rhetorical excesses of people you generally agree with when Donald fucking Trump is out there? Don’t you understand what we’re up against? Why would you whine about your “right” to unfettered expression when it is unfettered expression that is driving so much pain into the hearts of society’s downtrodden? Didn’t you hear what he said? But the shift to a more morally certain public posture by Trump’s opponents is itself an awful symptom of The Trumppening, not a defense against it. This posture is very difficult to drop when turned upon the next thing. The derangement is thus to the system, to all of us, not to one side or the other. Out of genuine concern for negative consequences, uncertainty and opinion are transformed into certainty and objective reality because Donald Trump and his ilk are so thrilled to provide an object of easily comprehensible immorality. But look around! The negative consequences are here! They are the water we’re drowning in! And the way out is not another false plank of moral certainty placed in the water beneath our feet—it is humility and generosity, the true antithesis of what Trump brings to the discourse.
1200+ goddamn words of blather before a single goddamn real-world example. christ on a crutch!
What does this look like, in practice? For one, it looks like that article I talked about in yesterday’s blog. It’s the adoption of the wildly politically-freighted phrase “gender-affirming care” by the entire NPR Class before anybody even had a chance to think about what that means, for example. It’s an NHL team’s Twitter account looks like this for a night:
It looks like an article in Slate, with the following headline:
This piece claims that the only reason that black folks would endorse the white, tough-on-crime guy is because they “oppose progress.”
For any of Chicago’s Black political and business leaders to endorse a candidate like Vallas demonstrates that some oppose progress and instead favor keeping the political establishment intact, according to two Black political experts that the TRiiBE interviewed for this story.
The “experts” are a journalist who is also a political consultant, and a retired professor. In other words, they are two people who would reinforce the thesis of the piece, given an air of authority and knowing-better over the progress-opposers of whom they speak. They are simply people making assertions about the motives of other people whose politics the writer abhors.
Vallas’ right-leaning campaign has employed racist dog whistles to stoke voters’ fears through his conservative tough-on-crime rhetoric. In addition, he was criticized by Mayor Lori Lightfoot about his messaging on the campaign trail, telling voters that his campaign is “about taking back our city,” which Lightfoot compared to 1983 mayoral candidate Bernie Epton’s racist slogan, “Before It’s Too Late.”
“I think [Vallas] is bad for Black Chicago because he is blaming the violence and crime solely on African Americans. Therefore, he wants to put more police in Black communities,” Starks said.
Though this is an essay on the internet, no links are provided to examples of the racist dog whistles, but I guess maybe they happened. Or, maybe, the writer is simply asserting that “tough-on-crime rhetoric” is itself a racist dog whistle. But the expert pops in to insist that the candidate is blaming all the violence on African Americans, and cites the candidate’s position of more police in Black communities as apparent evidence. Never mind that polls always say that black Americans want more police presence in their communities, because black opinion is not actually the monolith imagined by experts, and because people who live in high crime areas always want more police, because people generally abhor crime.
The Slate article assumes plenty of truths—including that it is weird for black people to support the tough-on-crime guy, that the experts have relevant expertise that grants them authority over the minds of others, that such a thing as correct Black opinion exists, that critical race theory is undebatable and good, that one of these candidates represents progress, and one of them is racist and homophobic. Of course, not racist and homophobic in any way that is really recognizable, because the candidate denies the allegations, is a Democrat, would disclaim any racist and homophobic action. No, the hate is hidden, on the inside, legible only to the experts.
I used the expression “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze” in yesterday’s post because I intended to eventually reference a situation that unfolded at Stanford last week, in which an obnoxious conservative judge invited to speak by the Law School’s chapter of the Federalist Society was heckled and shouted down by student protestors and a somehow even more obnoxious Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. She’s the one who kept asking the judge if the juice was worth the squeeze—explaining that what she meant is that the pain being caused by the judge’s speech should at least overwhelm his willingness to speak, and perhaps overwhelm his very right to speak.
“And I understand why people feel like the harm is so great that we might need to reconsider those [free speech] policies. And luckily they're in a school where they can learn the advocacy skills to advocate for those changes.” Dean Tieren Steinbach is here suggesting that there is some legitimate question about whether free speech rights should be secondary to the rights of others to not experience the harm of potentially hearing that speech. She, and anyone who agrees that “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze,” is literally doing the thing I’m worried about—replacing a fundamental right with a consequentialist concern about harm.
It is to Stanford’s credit that they suspended this person for a failure to abide by and enforce the school’s free speech policies. What a relief that one of our country’s elite law schools is not yet ready to bow to those who would drown out someone else’s right to speech, and everyone else’s right to assemble and listen. But the institutions always operate by the mercy of the people, not the other way around—and the kids are less interested in our precious notions of free speech than their parents were, and more interested in keeping people safe from harm. How long will the juice be worth the squeeze?
More to come on this, I’m sure.
