"But it’s worthwhile to remember that what’s animating these efforts are not just ideas or an aggrieved sense of fairness, but burning, passionate contempt for women and minorities."
Thank you. Thank you for your willingness to state this so plainly. I think many liberals and progressives only fleetingly notice this hugely important fact. But for many women and minorities, it is blindingly obvious that this is the affective fuel driving rightwing politics right now.
Yes, much of the DEI language and formal initiatives are bloodless. Some are pernicious (imo no one should have to submit or sign a "diversity statement" when they apply for a job). But formal DEI measures are an epiphenomenon of a slow but real shift, and shift that has permitted women and minorities to stop conceding to hoary ideas about their place in natural law and in the rise of "civilization." That shift has set off not just political opposition of various kinds. It has ignited gut level feelings of disgust, contempt, hatred. As the emails show, all kinds of people are susceptible to those feelings, including women like McDonald and gay men like Thiel.
Say you will about the excesses and sometimes silliness of identity politics and Twitter activism, a lot of people are in the fight because they know at a visceral level that the rightwing doesn't just want to preserve a social "order," they want to crush and humiliate and strip the dignity from the people they view as upstarts who don't know their place.
As I am eager to read more about in your book, there have long been some of these notes played on the right, but the two that strike me as especially prominent now
1. Really, genuinely believing there is nothing to save and preserve in actually existing America. The Flight 93 Election is jarringly blackpilled and that perspective hasn't changed. These guys were always disgusted with emergent cultures and trends, but they look at Main Street with disgust now.
2. The total absence of Christianity.
Both of them lend the movement to a more fascistic character.
Douthat has been making the point about the receding of religiosity and the baleful effects it may have on our racial politics for a while. Maybe I’m just getting older but it feels more compelling every day.
Yes, but Douthat--by my lights, anyway--seems to frame it as a thinly-veiled threat: "If you don't like religious conservatism, wait until you're subjected to irreligious conservatism." Why should these be the only two choices, Douthat?
Well, the set of instincts and personality traits that underlie conservatism are universal to humanity and will always play a major role in the politics of any society.
And make no mistake, the churchy "make the world safe for McDonalds" WASP managerialism of the 20th century left bodies stacked a mile high at home and abroad. It's not really a question of "better" or "less evil".
But that ideology saw more value in and was more tolerant of existing within a democratic polity (in the metropole of the American Empire at least), than the emerging millenarian cult of self-worship that Silicon Valley has produced.
The practical problem of secularization is that as religion loses its potency in public life, it allows a rear guard to capture institutional power and take religion in a retrograde direction. It happened in evangelical Christianity, where the line between religion and Republican ideology is blurred beyond recognition.
The same is occurring within Catholicism with "radtrads" ascendant and emboldened by the Catholic-majority Supreme Court and former Attorney General William Barr. Catholic Church is losing attendance and adherence overall. The settlement of sex abuse cases is leaving dioceses bankrupt as well as cutting back on its social-facing endeavors like schooling and immigrant resettlement -- both of which are notably open and offered to all backgrounds.
Wealthy rightwing Catholics see this as an entry point to gain lay influence over church affairs, such as the selection of conservative bishops that would filter up to the cardinalate and restore a papacy to the "good old days" before the Second Vatican Council.
I was blown away when the recent airplane door fiasco was turned into a means to criticize DEI. A plane falling apart midair was blamed on diversity campaigns at the airlines, with absolutely zero substance linking the two.
My $0.02 — These goons are beyond cynical, the likes of Musk Thiel and Hanania. They know DEI has nothing the f to do with such problems. But they also know that social fear drives conservative voting habits. And they know they don’t want minorities and women in their board rooms. So they push the fear button over and over and over. They are immersed in post-truth. Meanwhile, the conservative base has conditioned like Pavlov’s dog.
Researching a piece on how sensory differences impact thought and ideology, I was fascinated to learn of a psychological model — the dual process motivational model of ideology and prejudice. It delivers some excellent insights that can help understand right wing group dynamics, particularly the ones that drive prejudice. Social dominance oriented (like Musk) and right wing authoritarians (like the MAGA base) tend towards different beliefs, personality traits, motivational factors, though they are not mutually exclusive. Social dominance oriented focus on domination and power, push inequality etc because they think they will benefit due to their own feelings of superiority. They conform for self interest. Right wing authoritarians rather tend to act out of fear that the social order is breaking down, closing ranks and punishing the offenders. They conform for safety.
«My $0.02 — These goons are beyond cynical, the likes of Musk Thiel and Hanania. They know DEI has nothing the f to do with such problems.»
Christopher Rufo has pretty much admitted to this in multiple occasions. He can't help to gloat about successfully manipulating public perception, and yet he gets away with it nonetheless.
I use Christopher Rufo as a specimen to argue the case for a totalitarian personality type. Psychology professor Bob Altemeyer has argued for Rightwing Authoritarianism, RWA, as a personality type rather than a rational political preference. The RWA scale is meant to be assessed at the population level, rather than the individual level, to show that authoritarianism comes from external conditioning (parenting, privation and culture).
A totalitarian personality is the premium add-on to RWA with these features:
1. Mental fastidiousness: A compulsion to know "everything about everything" and furthermore arrange "everything about everything" into a coherent relationship. This is a hallmark of totalitarian leaders and intellectual texts, which are a totalized explanation of lived knowledge and experiences.
2. Completism: Rufo is a documentarian, a failed one but a documentarian nonetheless, so teleology is practically muscle memory to him. A fastidious mind craves to see ideas realized to their conclusion. Sunk costs are not fallacies, but a source of psychic pain and a crucial part of the process.
3. Lurid curiosity. This is a belief that truths lurk in dark places, with the preoccupations of politics, social status, wealth and morality all hogging the light. For people who go mining for truth in the darkest caves, their fastidiousness and completism makes them all the more motivated to indulge their fevered ideas. See Dr. Mengele or the Soviet scienticians who caused the Holodomor on what happens when they have power.
Rufo fits this triad aptly. So do Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon.
Crude biological determinism has one nice self-fulfilling element. If you assume that intelligence is a factor which is largely governed by race and gender and also assess the intelligence of others by their ability to reach conclusions identical to your own, then the fact that small numbers of women and racial minorities agree with you is now evidence for your correctness, rather than your bigotry. Convenient!
This is a beautifully written article especially on the rights biological determinism. But I’m increasingly convinced that the left can’t be given a free pass here. Kendi, DiAngelos et Al theories are toxic and, frankly illogical and inane. Their widespread adaptation by major cultural and business structures has poured fuel on the fire, allowing an opening for Claremont.
if kendi and diangelo did not exit then the right would just invent them, which they pretty much already do with their pantheon of monstered punching bags. excesses on the left should be resolved internally or ignored altogether, not made a worthy topic for discourse which only partly legitimizes reactionary backlash ie dont give ammo to the enemy by airing dirty laundry in public
I mean I think the point is that whether punching left or right, it is good politics to draw upon the (now) massively popular Civil Rights, MLK type ideas and rhetoric.
The biggest threat of White Fragility-type ideas in left politics is ceding that ground to the right. It's politically deadly, and just senseless given that, as evidenced in this article, the intellectual right remains trapped in an anti-New Deal, anti-Civil Rights Act set of ideological commitments that are themselves electoral poison.
Precisely. I highly disagree that the argument can be resolved internally as it’s not an internal issue. Kendi-ism has been embraced in the workplace, in academia and in culture and people see it and know that it’s stupid and wrong.
The lesson of that opening being that the target to attack is the overreach of your opponent rather than doing self-flagellating Sister Souljah rearguard actions all the way down.
No-go on this, SM. This is a fallacy of composition: "I’m increasingly convinced that the left can’t be given a free pass here."
This speaks of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi as representative of "the left," broadly defined as the 81 million people who voted for Biden in 2020. Other than voting for a single person, there is no evidence that these 81 million people are a disindividuated mass are of one mind.
I'm just one of the 81 million who votes Democratic, know that some allies in my tribe support DiAngelo and Kendi, but I can disagree DiAngelo and Kendi supporters without feeling alienated by them.
Now then, of this 81 million:
1. How many even know who DiAngelo and Kendi are? You can exclude the segment of people who say no, and you might end up cutting off 40.5 million or more voters. This is likely.
2. Of the people who know DiAngelo and Kendi, how many people have actually read their texts? Of this subset of people, you have people who may know the names as mere trivia questions but have no formed opinions on their work. This could also describe a majority of this subset.
3. Of the remaining segment who know of Kendi and DiAngelo and have read their work, how many would go on to agree with their conclusions? You will still find a vast room for disagreement among this minority group.
This No. 3 is not driving policy for the Democrats the way Trumpism is driving not only policy, but created reality, for Republicans.
Pew runs high-quality surveys on American politics and culture and the results you'll find are surprising, because they are surprisingly boring.
You're right in that I should have been more precise with my terms, as I hope I was elsewhere in the thread. I'm speaking specifically of institutional leadership in the workplace, universities and communal organizations who I actually do think are largely familiar with Kendi-ism.
The institutions that did try Kendi and especially DiAngelo as doctrine have realized that there's blowback not only from the right but even from who would be their political allies. DiAngelo's "White Fragility" is, as the youngfolk say, cringe.
The support their ideas have from the academies is largely due to universities having the ability to police DEI -- like actual administrators to monitor and enforce it. Things get really awkward because DEI becomes reified -- an idea that is turned into material reality. This affects who gets hired, gets classroom time, is awarded tenure and gets to participate in academic life.
Workplace DEI, when reified, curdles into dictatorship of the HR office. Rather than a positive telos for a more diverse, equitable and inclusive workforce, it's mostly rearguard investigative work into harassment, offensive speech, and mandatory empathy lessons. The primary aims are to avoid lawsuits, state or federal regulatory investigations, and PR crises. More ominously, workers and management use these policies to keep and settle scores.
Not a new observation by any means, but I constantly return to how goddamn childish they all are. Say what you will about the liberal technocrats, but they at least putatively want to improve the lives of real people. All of these 'Leave it to Beaver is our biological-cultural steady state' people evoke nothing more than a group of boys on the playground debating the details of exactly how boys rule and girls drool.
I think that what you are saying here is correct and portends an ominous future for any institution in which these people find a foothold.
What I have not seen anyone point out is that many of these DEI initiatives that so rile these guys seem (to me at least) to increase in corporate and liberal institutional settings after the financial crisis in '08. The neoliberal center (particularly after the election of Obama) decided that this kind of superficial cultural liberalism was going to work as a legitimating ideology in face of all of that exploding inequality. That their version of this elided any political debate about economic distribution was why they could half-heartedly embrace it.
Of course, this section of the right's obsession with all this belies their class status. Surely, the origin story of many of these reactionaries can be traced back to having to sit through some kind of DEI PowerPoint in an air-conditioned conference room a few years ago and concluding that Maoists had seized control of the mid-sized insurance company they worked as middle manger in. This is why pols like DeSantis or Blake Masters eat shit in a way that Trump doesn't. Trump's celebrity is able to channel all this into a much wider and broader coalition of aggrievement.
This analysis makes sense only after you name the identities of Trump's base.
I'll take the liberty of doing so.
"Trump's celebrity is able to channel all this into a much wider and broader coalition of aggrievement." is correct when you say "Trump's celebrity is able to channel all this into a much wider and broader coalition of *White* aggrievement." It's also correct when you say "Trump's celebrity is able to channel all this into a much wider and broader coalition of *male* aggrievement."
The whiteness and maleness of Trump's coalition are salient features of aggrievement, and cannot be denied or set aside. It is an aggrievement rooted in identity.
The urtext for understanding Trump remains Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The First White President" published in the Atlantic in 2017.
Coates actually did the math on who Trump's coalition was. The bedrock of Trump's support is White men. Trump's floor was 60% with them, and even when cross checking with education level, income, or where they live, Trump won white men of all education levels, all income cohorts, and in red and blue states alike. Trump's support among White women was similar, though he did lose some White women in suburbs (a trend that repeated in 2020).
UPenn professor Diana Mutz invalidated the economic anxiety explanation in findings that echo Coates in "Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote":
Foreign Policy's headline is "The Jan. 6 Insurrectionists Aren’t Who You Think They Are," but they are exactly who non-Trump voters knew who they are. The subheadline says "The people who stormed the U.S. Capitol weren’t poor, unemployed red-staters. Many were middle-class professionals motivated by the “great replacement” conspiracy theory."
Would be helpful if the GOP just cut to the chase and officially adopted the Führerprinzip. They could give it some of that Boer panache and call it the Baaskap Beginsel. Trump’s list of enemies has become the foundation text of the party, and it’s the only law they recognize. And the list is *much* longer than it was four years ago.
Next time there won’t be any doddering generals or technocrats in the White House muttering ineffectually about the “rule of law”. It will be all Stephen Miller and whatever drone army he trails in with him. Mitchell will drop dead of something or other, Collins will continue to be “concerned”, Johnson will pray to his phantoms, and the destruction will fully commit this time.
People have to savvy to the fact that fascism is a process, it doesn’t hatch fully formed, it feels its way, it reacts to opportunities, and eventually…it arrives.
Thank you for writing about this argument. Actually I read some tweets of Richard Hanania and it’s quite scary & racist what he proposes. I admire America civilization because it advanced so much in woke idealogy that Europe should follow. It’s very positive that people of minorities could reach positions that they can’t normally reach. Actually it happened because of woke that secretary of defense reached his position and it’s sad that he had some difficulties lately. I just hope America doesn’t cancel advancement that it made to include everyone. It’s shining example to imitate.
to raise a point of yours--that the dreyfus affair is a more instructive historical analogy--the rancor of these chattering and professional-managerial class reactionaries is not at a revolutionary transformation of society (whatever their apocalyptic fantasies might indicate) but at a diversification of high society. then with dreyfus it was the incorporation and elevation of jewish people, now with claudine gay it is the integration and advancement of black people, liberal women, and other minorities. in both cases there is resentment against formerly oppressed colleagues and competitors and paranoia around imposter citizens and civic interlopers. they rage against not communism or revolution but civic nationalism and cosmopolitan modernity.
a coincidental crisis of elite overproduction only further intensifies their status anxiety and vengeful legacy entitlement.
happy to see you acknowledge the psychological aspect to this because libidinal economy is more determinative than orthodox political economy i think.
1. I wouldn't say that the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers reflect consensus big business very well. They went partisan and ideological a long time ago. The Business Roundtable or the Bipartisan Policy Center are more representative of big business thinking. Or perhaps the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party.
2. It's all about racism, masculinism, and ressentiment. They define almost the entirety of conservative social policy, such as it is. Racism and masculinism have some policy autonomy: ressentiment-driven policies are mere negations of whatever the conservatives think their opponents desire.
Writer Scott Lemieux hits the bulls-eye: "... the right attack on DEI isn’t on particular bureaucratic manifestations of the practice that just create meaningless busywork and no-work jobs or act as a cover substitute for actual equality and inclusion. It’s on the very concepts of equality, inclusion, and diversity themselves."
Julian Sanchez, a rare libertarian who didn't cross the Peter Thiel Memorial Bridge to neoreaction, reinforces Lemieux's point in a tweet: "As happens with some frequency, DEI is a fine idea in principle, frequently executed very badly by fundamentalists, but defended anyway because the most vocal criticism comes from bad people who object more to the good principle than the bad execution."
Bad people who object more to the good principle than the bad execution. Whoomp, there it is.
"Liberal authoritarianism" is how he describes the system here. It is by no means the worst place in the world, but he glosses over a lot of the problems and the underbelly of the place, which is what you get when you have an elite caste (Emirati citizens) ruling over a succession of other castes (professional westerners, Filipino, IndoPak, and African office functionaries and service and construction workers). For example, he didn't mention the full extent of the vice - bars packed with a United Nations of desperate whoredom.
But he might have thought it was a virtue of the place too delicate to mention. I think this is what they would like the US to become. An authoritarian state led by an elite, with libertarian business regulation, and a majority population without political rights and willing to sell their bodies cheaply.
"Race is just one aspect:, but on every issue from gender to sexual expression, they view mankind in all its manifestations as a primordial slime mold that just seeks to expand and dominate."
It kind of just seems like we need to impute an absence of intelligible thought, also known as psychosis, on radical activists (whether or not they're on wingnut welfare). There is a little 'every accusation is a confession' involved in doing that, but that's why we pray to something and are very observant of our surroundings. Humility and Zen.
I'd disagree on the principle that we shouldn't pathologize people's politics. One, it weaponizes psychology to declare political boundaries that can be used to crazify political opponents and out-groups.
Two, as a first principle hold to the assumption that politics is a consequence of agency. Kanye West has bipolar disorder. Kanye West is an antisemite. Because he is an accomplished musician, Ye's fandom and contemporaries treat his antisemitism as a symptom of his condition. Most people with diagnosed bipolar disorder are not their condition and functionally hold political positions that are in the mainstream, and are no more bigoted than anyone undiagnosed. Ye's antisemitism comes from what he chooses to think about and act on, so he's demonstrating agency.
Agency is certainly the critical component of this subject.
I don’t think it’s wise to show much respect or appreciation for psychology as a discipline within the public square.
I start from the perspective of there being people who need to be excluded from The Discourse, based on the documented history. One of several problems with trying to keep our democracy is that we humans enjoy mimicking one another so much, the core values that sustain peaceful and meaningful discourse are in short supply.
All I really mean is to choose against the status quo as a matter of principle, and let things take their course while keeping your heart open.
(But seriously, Western psychology is basically Larry Summers in a lab coat.)
"But it’s worthwhile to remember that what’s animating these efforts are not just ideas or an aggrieved sense of fairness, but burning, passionate contempt for women and minorities."
Thank you. Thank you for your willingness to state this so plainly. I think many liberals and progressives only fleetingly notice this hugely important fact. But for many women and minorities, it is blindingly obvious that this is the affective fuel driving rightwing politics right now.
Yes, much of the DEI language and formal initiatives are bloodless. Some are pernicious (imo no one should have to submit or sign a "diversity statement" when they apply for a job). But formal DEI measures are an epiphenomenon of a slow but real shift, and shift that has permitted women and minorities to stop conceding to hoary ideas about their place in natural law and in the rise of "civilization." That shift has set off not just political opposition of various kinds. It has ignited gut level feelings of disgust, contempt, hatred. As the emails show, all kinds of people are susceptible to those feelings, including women like McDonald and gay men like Thiel.
Say you will about the excesses and sometimes silliness of identity politics and Twitter activism, a lot of people are in the fight because they know at a visceral level that the rightwing doesn't just want to preserve a social "order," they want to crush and humiliate and strip the dignity from the people they view as upstarts who don't know their place.
As I am eager to read more about in your book, there have long been some of these notes played on the right, but the two that strike me as especially prominent now
1. Really, genuinely believing there is nothing to save and preserve in actually existing America. The Flight 93 Election is jarringly blackpilled and that perspective hasn't changed. These guys were always disgusted with emergent cultures and trends, but they look at Main Street with disgust now.
2. The total absence of Christianity.
Both of them lend the movement to a more fascistic character.
Douthat has been making the point about the receding of religiosity and the baleful effects it may have on our racial politics for a while. Maybe I’m just getting older but it feels more compelling every day.
Yes, but Douthat--by my lights, anyway--seems to frame it as a thinly-veiled threat: "If you don't like religious conservatism, wait until you're subjected to irreligious conservatism." Why should these be the only two choices, Douthat?
Well, the set of instincts and personality traits that underlie conservatism are universal to humanity and will always play a major role in the politics of any society.
And make no mistake, the churchy "make the world safe for McDonalds" WASP managerialism of the 20th century left bodies stacked a mile high at home and abroad. It's not really a question of "better" or "less evil".
But that ideology saw more value in and was more tolerant of existing within a democratic polity (in the metropole of the American Empire at least), than the emerging millenarian cult of self-worship that Silicon Valley has produced.
The practical problem of secularization is that as religion loses its potency in public life, it allows a rear guard to capture institutional power and take religion in a retrograde direction. It happened in evangelical Christianity, where the line between religion and Republican ideology is blurred beyond recognition.
The same is occurring within Catholicism with "radtrads" ascendant and emboldened by the Catholic-majority Supreme Court and former Attorney General William Barr. Catholic Church is losing attendance and adherence overall. The settlement of sex abuse cases is leaving dioceses bankrupt as well as cutting back on its social-facing endeavors like schooling and immigrant resettlement -- both of which are notably open and offered to all backgrounds.
Wealthy rightwing Catholics see this as an entry point to gain lay influence over church affairs, such as the selection of conservative bishops that would filter up to the cardinalate and restore a papacy to the "good old days" before the Second Vatican Council.
Yeah, its ugly. Thanks for stating it so clearly
I was blown away when the recent airplane door fiasco was turned into a means to criticize DEI. A plane falling apart midair was blamed on diversity campaigns at the airlines, with absolutely zero substance linking the two.
My $0.02 — These goons are beyond cynical, the likes of Musk Thiel and Hanania. They know DEI has nothing the f to do with such problems. But they also know that social fear drives conservative voting habits. And they know they don’t want minorities and women in their board rooms. So they push the fear button over and over and over. They are immersed in post-truth. Meanwhile, the conservative base has conditioned like Pavlov’s dog.
Researching a piece on how sensory differences impact thought and ideology, I was fascinated to learn of a psychological model — the dual process motivational model of ideology and prejudice. It delivers some excellent insights that can help understand right wing group dynamics, particularly the ones that drive prejudice. Social dominance oriented (like Musk) and right wing authoritarians (like the MAGA base) tend towards different beliefs, personality traits, motivational factors, though they are not mutually exclusive. Social dominance oriented focus on domination and power, push inequality etc because they think they will benefit due to their own feelings of superiority. They conform for self interest. Right wing authoritarians rather tend to act out of fear that the social order is breaking down, closing ranks and punishing the offenders. They conform for safety.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-023-00161-4#Tab1
«My $0.02 — These goons are beyond cynical, the likes of Musk Thiel and Hanania. They know DEI has nothing the f to do with such problems.»
Christopher Rufo has pretty much admitted to this in multiple occasions. He can't help to gloat about successfully manipulating public perception, and yet he gets away with it nonetheless.
I use Christopher Rufo as a specimen to argue the case for a totalitarian personality type. Psychology professor Bob Altemeyer has argued for Rightwing Authoritarianism, RWA, as a personality type rather than a rational political preference. The RWA scale is meant to be assessed at the population level, rather than the individual level, to show that authoritarianism comes from external conditioning (parenting, privation and culture).
A totalitarian personality is the premium add-on to RWA with these features:
1. Mental fastidiousness: A compulsion to know "everything about everything" and furthermore arrange "everything about everything" into a coherent relationship. This is a hallmark of totalitarian leaders and intellectual texts, which are a totalized explanation of lived knowledge and experiences.
2. Completism: Rufo is a documentarian, a failed one but a documentarian nonetheless, so teleology is practically muscle memory to him. A fastidious mind craves to see ideas realized to their conclusion. Sunk costs are not fallacies, but a source of psychic pain and a crucial part of the process.
3. Lurid curiosity. This is a belief that truths lurk in dark places, with the preoccupations of politics, social status, wealth and morality all hogging the light. For people who go mining for truth in the darkest caves, their fastidiousness and completism makes them all the more motivated to indulge their fevered ideas. See Dr. Mengele or the Soviet scienticians who caused the Holodomor on what happens when they have power.
Rufo fits this triad aptly. So do Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon.
Crude biological determinism has one nice self-fulfilling element. If you assume that intelligence is a factor which is largely governed by race and gender and also assess the intelligence of others by their ability to reach conclusions identical to your own, then the fact that small numbers of women and racial minorities agree with you is now evidence for your correctness, rather than your bigotry. Convenient!
This is a beautifully written article especially on the rights biological determinism. But I’m increasingly convinced that the left can’t be given a free pass here. Kendi, DiAngelos et Al theories are toxic and, frankly illogical and inane. Their widespread adaptation by major cultural and business structures has poured fuel on the fire, allowing an opening for Claremont.
Yes and I have criticized them in the past
if kendi and diangelo did not exit then the right would just invent them, which they pretty much already do with their pantheon of monstered punching bags. excesses on the left should be resolved internally or ignored altogether, not made a worthy topic for discourse which only partly legitimizes reactionary backlash ie dont give ammo to the enemy by airing dirty laundry in public
I mean I think the point is that whether punching left or right, it is good politics to draw upon the (now) massively popular Civil Rights, MLK type ideas and rhetoric.
The biggest threat of White Fragility-type ideas in left politics is ceding that ground to the right. It's politically deadly, and just senseless given that, as evidenced in this article, the intellectual right remains trapped in an anti-New Deal, anti-Civil Rights Act set of ideological commitments that are themselves electoral poison.
Edgelords win threads, normies win elections.
Precisely. I highly disagree that the argument can be resolved internally as it’s not an internal issue. Kendi-ism has been embraced in the workplace, in academia and in culture and people see it and know that it’s stupid and wrong.
There's a simple explanation why "White Fragility" is a dead end as theory and practice that even a kindergartner can understand.
No one likes a scold.
The lesson of that opening being that the target to attack is the overreach of your opponent rather than doing self-flagellating Sister Souljah rearguard actions all the way down.
No-go on this, SM. This is a fallacy of composition: "I’m increasingly convinced that the left can’t be given a free pass here."
This speaks of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi as representative of "the left," broadly defined as the 81 million people who voted for Biden in 2020. Other than voting for a single person, there is no evidence that these 81 million people are a disindividuated mass are of one mind.
I'm just one of the 81 million who votes Democratic, know that some allies in my tribe support DiAngelo and Kendi, but I can disagree DiAngelo and Kendi supporters without feeling alienated by them.
Now then, of this 81 million:
1. How many even know who DiAngelo and Kendi are? You can exclude the segment of people who say no, and you might end up cutting off 40.5 million or more voters. This is likely.
2. Of the people who know DiAngelo and Kendi, how many people have actually read their texts? Of this subset of people, you have people who may know the names as mere trivia questions but have no formed opinions on their work. This could also describe a majority of this subset.
3. Of the remaining segment who know of Kendi and DiAngelo and have read their work, how many would go on to agree with their conclusions? You will still find a vast room for disagreement among this minority group.
This No. 3 is not driving policy for the Democrats the way Trumpism is driving not only policy, but created reality, for Republicans.
Pew runs high-quality surveys on American politics and culture and the results you'll find are surprising, because they are surprisingly boring.
https://www.pewresearch.org/
You'll see that Democratic voters remain mainstream, while most radicalization comes from the red tribe.
You're right in that I should have been more precise with my terms, as I hope I was elsewhere in the thread. I'm speaking specifically of institutional leadership in the workplace, universities and communal organizations who I actually do think are largely familiar with Kendi-ism.
The institutions that did try Kendi and especially DiAngelo as doctrine have realized that there's blowback not only from the right but even from who would be their political allies. DiAngelo's "White Fragility" is, as the youngfolk say, cringe.
The support their ideas have from the academies is largely due to universities having the ability to police DEI -- like actual administrators to monitor and enforce it. Things get really awkward because DEI becomes reified -- an idea that is turned into material reality. This affects who gets hired, gets classroom time, is awarded tenure and gets to participate in academic life.
Workplace DEI, when reified, curdles into dictatorship of the HR office. Rather than a positive telos for a more diverse, equitable and inclusive workforce, it's mostly rearguard investigative work into harassment, offensive speech, and mandatory empathy lessons. The primary aims are to avoid lawsuits, state or federal regulatory investigations, and PR crises. More ominously, workers and management use these policies to keep and settle scores.
Not a new observation by any means, but I constantly return to how goddamn childish they all are. Say what you will about the liberal technocrats, but they at least putatively want to improve the lives of real people. All of these 'Leave it to Beaver is our biological-cultural steady state' people evoke nothing more than a group of boys on the playground debating the details of exactly how boys rule and girls drool.
I think that what you are saying here is correct and portends an ominous future for any institution in which these people find a foothold.
What I have not seen anyone point out is that many of these DEI initiatives that so rile these guys seem (to me at least) to increase in corporate and liberal institutional settings after the financial crisis in '08. The neoliberal center (particularly after the election of Obama) decided that this kind of superficial cultural liberalism was going to work as a legitimating ideology in face of all of that exploding inequality. That their version of this elided any political debate about economic distribution was why they could half-heartedly embrace it.
Of course, this section of the right's obsession with all this belies their class status. Surely, the origin story of many of these reactionaries can be traced back to having to sit through some kind of DEI PowerPoint in an air-conditioned conference room a few years ago and concluding that Maoists had seized control of the mid-sized insurance company they worked as middle manger in. This is why pols like DeSantis or Blake Masters eat shit in a way that Trump doesn't. Trump's celebrity is able to channel all this into a much wider and broader coalition of aggrievement.
This analysis makes sense only after you name the identities of Trump's base.
I'll take the liberty of doing so.
"Trump's celebrity is able to channel all this into a much wider and broader coalition of aggrievement." is correct when you say "Trump's celebrity is able to channel all this into a much wider and broader coalition of *White* aggrievement." It's also correct when you say "Trump's celebrity is able to channel all this into a much wider and broader coalition of *male* aggrievement."
The whiteness and maleness of Trump's coalition are salient features of aggrievement, and cannot be denied or set aside. It is an aggrievement rooted in identity.
The urtext for understanding Trump remains Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The First White President" published in the Atlantic in 2017.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/
Coates actually did the math on who Trump's coalition was. The bedrock of Trump's support is White men. Trump's floor was 60% with them, and even when cross checking with education level, income, or where they live, Trump won white men of all education levels, all income cohorts, and in red and blue states alike. Trump's support among White women was similar, though he did lose some White women in suburbs (a trend that repeated in 2020).
UPenn professor Diana Mutz invalidated the economic anxiety explanation in findings that echo Coates in "Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote":
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29686081/
UofChicago political scientist Robert A. Pape analyzed the Jan. 6 insurrectionists:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/06/trump-capitol-insurrection-january-6-insurrectionists-great-replacement-white-nationalism/
Foreign Policy's headline is "The Jan. 6 Insurrectionists Aren’t Who You Think They Are," but they are exactly who non-Trump voters knew who they are. The subheadline says "The people who stormed the U.S. Capitol weren’t poor, unemployed red-staters. Many were middle-class professionals motivated by the “great replacement” conspiracy theory."
Would be helpful if the GOP just cut to the chase and officially adopted the Führerprinzip. They could give it some of that Boer panache and call it the Baaskap Beginsel. Trump’s list of enemies has become the foundation text of the party, and it’s the only law they recognize. And the list is *much* longer than it was four years ago.
Next time there won’t be any doddering generals or technocrats in the White House muttering ineffectually about the “rule of law”. It will be all Stephen Miller and whatever drone army he trails in with him. Mitchell will drop dead of something or other, Collins will continue to be “concerned”, Johnson will pray to his phantoms, and the destruction will fully commit this time.
People have to savvy to the fact that fascism is a process, it doesn’t hatch fully formed, it feels its way, it reacts to opportunities, and eventually…it arrives.
Thank you for writing about this argument. Actually I read some tweets of Richard Hanania and it’s quite scary & racist what he proposes. I admire America civilization because it advanced so much in woke idealogy that Europe should follow. It’s very positive that people of minorities could reach positions that they can’t normally reach. Actually it happened because of woke that secretary of defense reached his position and it’s sad that he had some difficulties lately. I just hope America doesn’t cancel advancement that it made to include everyone. It’s shining example to imitate.
to raise a point of yours--that the dreyfus affair is a more instructive historical analogy--the rancor of these chattering and professional-managerial class reactionaries is not at a revolutionary transformation of society (whatever their apocalyptic fantasies might indicate) but at a diversification of high society. then with dreyfus it was the incorporation and elevation of jewish people, now with claudine gay it is the integration and advancement of black people, liberal women, and other minorities. in both cases there is resentment against formerly oppressed colleagues and competitors and paranoia around imposter citizens and civic interlopers. they rage against not communism or revolution but civic nationalism and cosmopolitan modernity.
a coincidental crisis of elite overproduction only further intensifies their status anxiety and vengeful legacy entitlement.
happy to see you acknowledge the psychological aspect to this because libidinal economy is more determinative than orthodox political economy i think.
1. I wouldn't say that the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers reflect consensus big business very well. They went partisan and ideological a long time ago. The Business Roundtable or the Bipartisan Policy Center are more representative of big business thinking. Or perhaps the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party.
2. It's all about racism, masculinism, and ressentiment. They define almost the entirety of conservative social policy, such as it is. Racism and masculinism have some policy autonomy: ressentiment-driven policies are mere negations of whatever the conservatives think their opponents desire.
Liberal blog Lawyers Guns and Money had a good take about this issue earlier this week.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/01/the-anti-dei-backlash-is-about-the-theory-not-the-execution
Writer Scott Lemieux hits the bulls-eye: "... the right attack on DEI isn’t on particular bureaucratic manifestations of the practice that just create meaningless busywork and no-work jobs or act as a cover substitute for actual equality and inclusion. It’s on the very concepts of equality, inclusion, and diversity themselves."
Julian Sanchez, a rare libertarian who didn't cross the Peter Thiel Memorial Bridge to neoreaction, reinforces Lemieux's point in a tweet: "As happens with some frequency, DEI is a fine idea in principle, frequently executed very badly by fundamentalists, but defended anyway because the most vocal criticism comes from bad people who object more to the good principle than the bad execution."
Bad people who object more to the good principle than the bad execution. Whoomp, there it is.
I'm in Dubai now, not my first visit. So I re-read Michael Anton's paean to this place.
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-road-to-dubai/
"Liberal authoritarianism" is how he describes the system here. It is by no means the worst place in the world, but he glosses over a lot of the problems and the underbelly of the place, which is what you get when you have an elite caste (Emirati citizens) ruling over a succession of other castes (professional westerners, Filipino, IndoPak, and African office functionaries and service and construction workers). For example, he didn't mention the full extent of the vice - bars packed with a United Nations of desperate whoredom.
But he might have thought it was a virtue of the place too delicate to mention. I think this is what they would like the US to become. An authoritarian state led by an elite, with libertarian business regulation, and a majority population without political rights and willing to sell their bodies cheaply.
"Race is just one aspect:, but on every issue from gender to sexual expression, they view mankind in all its manifestations as a primordial slime mold that just seeks to expand and dominate."
It kind of just seems like we need to impute an absence of intelligible thought, also known as psychosis, on radical activists (whether or not they're on wingnut welfare). There is a little 'every accusation is a confession' involved in doing that, but that's why we pray to something and are very observant of our surroundings. Humility and Zen.
I'd disagree on the principle that we shouldn't pathologize people's politics. One, it weaponizes psychology to declare political boundaries that can be used to crazify political opponents and out-groups.
Two, as a first principle hold to the assumption that politics is a consequence of agency. Kanye West has bipolar disorder. Kanye West is an antisemite. Because he is an accomplished musician, Ye's fandom and contemporaries treat his antisemitism as a symptom of his condition. Most people with diagnosed bipolar disorder are not their condition and functionally hold political positions that are in the mainstream, and are no more bigoted than anyone undiagnosed. Ye's antisemitism comes from what he chooses to think about and act on, so he's demonstrating agency.
Agency is certainly the critical component of this subject.
I don’t think it’s wise to show much respect or appreciation for psychology as a discipline within the public square.
I start from the perspective of there being people who need to be excluded from The Discourse, based on the documented history. One of several problems with trying to keep our democracy is that we humans enjoy mimicking one another so much, the core values that sustain peaceful and meaningful discourse are in short supply.
All I really mean is to choose against the status quo as a matter of principle, and let things take their course while keeping your heart open.
(But seriously, Western psychology is basically Larry Summers in a lab coat.)
What's with Hanania liking this article? What is he trying to pull?
id say an incoherent combination of gloating, ingratiation, and lack of self awareness
I did a DNA test and it came out 90% gloating, 9% lack of self awareness and 1% ingratiation.