Is Ross Douthat right to say that we think “pathologizing critics as bigoted and phobic can be an effective way to finish up debates”? Assuming he is, even if we wouldn’t put it in exactly those terms, are we right?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Douthat could be right if that’s what is happening. Is it?
We would need an argument and some evidence. Unfortunately, what Douthat gives is anecdote, and that’s not the same thing.
If calling out people and making them uncomfortable, even making them suffer the consequences of their racism and bigotry, is “PC” then I’d rather have that than open bigotry and racism unchecked.
Ross wants the status quo circa 1958. What a surprise given who that benefits.
I agree with the “calling out” entirely. You have to confront bad behavior. But HOW you confront it can be very important.
If you want to change a behavior, you rarely do so through “punishment.” You can sometimes stop a specific behavior through punishment, but you rarely ingrain true change that way.
In some cases, racism and sexism are so deeply held, all you can do is censure and condemn and drive it away from public discourse.
But when efforts are made to say, “You’re not X, so you can’t have a valid opinion on Y” you’re not changing anyone’s behavior. You’re feeding your own feelings, not advancing a progressive or liberal agenda.
I would, however, suggest that there is very little of the sort of censoring behavior Chait decried. Maybe in “the Academy” but rarely beyond that.
Chait and Douthat both miss the mark when they talk about PC from Left or the Left shutting down debates or showing their assertiveness. What they’ve done is target the responses that the Left is giving without asking the how, what and where the Left is assertively PC responding.
The Left is responding to Right Wing talking point sound bites poured into MSM interviews and panels that are virtually irrefutable in a 15 second response time. Often the Left voice finds himself just trying to stop the onslaught but instead has to follow along and can’t make the Left’s factual response.
Well, BooMan, let’s start with this: are the retrograde policy and cultural positions Douthat supports, or the current cultural censorship claims made by Chait and others, “finished up debates”? Doesn’t appear so. Douthat, Chait, and the rest are all vigorously executing their free speech rights to this day. And 19th century moral and economic political debates and public policy positions are in the ascendance.
“The Left is responding to Right Wing talking point sound bites poured into MSM interviews and panels that are virtually irrefutable in a 15 second response time.” Oh, good God, YES.
Chait complains that it’s exhausting for him and his friends to have to deal with critics. I’d claim that it’s much more exhausting for us to have to constantly pull the Overton Window back from factually incorrect and morally flawed frames of debate. Chait’s equating of those who hurt his widdle feewings with “Marxists”, a term which REALLY HAS been poisoned in public discussions, is among the fraudulent things being done here.
I love the paragraphs Chait spends in his essay on the horrible, repugnant oppression which has been experienced by poor, poor Hannah Rosin. Her very flawed “The End Of Men” critiques were refuted with copious use of FACTS, satire and sarcasm by many people. From this, Chait elevates Rosin’s claims of “banishment” from public debate on modern social media and elsewhere.
All with eyes that they wish to use can see the ridiculousness of an additional claim by Rosin, again a claim that Chait chooses to highlight: “”If you tweet something straight-forwardly feminist, you immediately get a wave of love and favorites, but if you tweet something in a cranky feminist mode then the opposite happens.” Try telling that to those, particularly women, who have been engaged in online debates with supporters of the PUA and MRA movements.
This all makes me think of the stupid right-wing trope that “America elected a Black President so all subsequent claims of institutional and cultural racism are patently ridiculous.” That’s so painfully and obviously wrong, but people don’t often want to revisit their assumptions or consider the possibility that a statement they made was wrong and/or offensive.
I’ve made statements before groups and said “African-American” and had a person ask me not to use that term. In front of another group I said “Black” and a person asked me not to use THAT term. Do I then decide that political correctness has run amok, or that automatically one person or POV is right and the other wrong? Of course not. Two people responded to me, and I got to respond to them and consider my plans for future presentations.
Russ Donuthead is attempting to sanitize his bigotry. When one gets down to the lick-log their bigotry and phobias are irrational. That is the criticism. It is certainly pathological to behave irrationally.
God, I would love to debate that smug little shithead, and not to take advantage he can select the topic and side he defends.
They are who we thought they were.
If they use dogwhistle racism, sexism, or dumbfuckism, it’s not our job to let them say it loudly, over and over and over again.
They can say that bullshit on Fox “News”.
Anyone on the left who engages in debate has every right to point out their bullshit and call them on it. Period.
Oh, and 85% of Cardinal Douthat’s BS is pure projection.
Republicans are getting ready to get the popcorn to watch the left tear itself into pieces?
Has this paid hack not been around for the last 2 clown cars AKA Republican primary season?
The right is so entrapped in its bubble that all they see is warped reflections of themselves, and all they hear are their own lunatic ravings. And they attribute it to the libruuls outside of the bubble, because all they know is that their images and rantings are hitting them head-on.
There is talk of the SEC states having a GOP primary. They want to put the clown car on a tour of the south. I assume Douthat would prefer we ignore a gathering of Santorum, Huck, Jindal, Carson, Cruz plus his dad, and whoever preaching the hate.
Bring them on! I live for the day that one of these asshats goes on stage in a Confederate uniform.
Entrapped in their own bubble nobly and bravely fighting off armies of strawmen.
I don’t believe I’m politically correct. I just believe I respect other people’s cultures.
What I get from this kind of whining is a certain kind of White person who wants to go back to the ‘ good old days’, where they could insult who they want, and do it WITHOUT REPERCUSSIONS.
because, that’s what this is about. They want to be able to insult others WITHOUT REPERCUSSIONS.
As a Southern white guy who has seen for over 50 years how it works, this is indeed it.
They can’t put people in their places anymore without repercussions.
That is a serious sense of loss of one of the mechanisms of white privilege.
Personalizing and individualizing social criticism is the way that the rugged individualists of the conservative movement deny social and cultural criticism.
And opinion might be bigoted, an attitude might be phobic, but large swaths of the conservative movement seek power, wealth, and influence through institutionally promoting those opinions and attitudes to the public at large.
Douthat, as usual, hasn’t a clue because his frame of understanding excludes sociality altogether.
Also, notice the projective nature of the tactic of pathologizing critics or pathologizing different others in general.
With conservatives, it is no longer possible to move from polemic to politics.
Getting away from the specific wink-wink, nudge nudges that lie behind Douthat’s screed, is what motivates our debates and how we conduct them. I believe there is a particularly American way of attempting to influence public opinion, or controlling it, which is no more characteristic of the left than the the right.
Alexander de Toqueville wrote about it in the early 19th century in Democracy in America.
Toqueville describes it as the “tyranny of the majority,” but it is just as characteristic of the underdog, whatever the issue, because the form of discourse is always cast as a struggle to gain the majority, so the same techniques of argument and mass dissemination are used.
“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. In any constitutional state in Europe every sort of religious and political theory may be freely preached and disseminated; for there is no country in Europe so subdued by any single authority as not to protect the man who raises his voice in the cause of truth from the consequences of his hardihood. If he is unfortunate enough to live under an absolute government, the people are often on his side; if he inhabits a free country, he can, if necessary, find a shelter behind the throne. The aristocratic part of society supports him in some countries, and the democracy in others. But in a nation where democratic institutions exist, organized like those of the United States, there is but one authority, one element of strength and success, with nothing beyond it.
In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger of an auto-da-fe, but he is exposed to continued obloquy and persecution. His political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority that is able to open it. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before making public his opinions he thought he had sympathizers; now it seems to him that he has none any more since he has revealed himself to everyone; then those who blame him criticize loudly and those who think as he does keep quiet and move away without courage. He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort which he has to make, and subsides into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth.
Fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments that tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself, though it seemed to have nothing to learn. Monarchs had, so to speak, materialized oppression; the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind as the will which it is intended to coerce. Under the absolute sway of one man the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. The master no longer says: “You shall think as I do or you shall die”; but he says: “You are free to think differently from me and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people. You may retain your civil rights, but they will be useless to you, for you will never be chosen by your fellow citizens if you solicit their votes; and they will affect to scorn you if you ask for their esteem. You will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind. Your fellow creatures will shun you like an impure being; and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in their turn. Go in peace! I have given you your life, but it is an existence worse than death.” etc.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/DETOC/1_ch15.htm
The failure of actual politics that opened the US polity to the ability of Bernays-style marketing to corrupt the political system itself.
Too many echoes and too few choices, even in opinions. The sad irony of the racist corruption of Goldwaterism. Yes, I know that Goldwater did his share of winking.
This and Marie2’s previous comment are close to what I was thinking. Communication is mass-marketed, so that becomes the form in which we “debate” issues, even amongst ourselves. We’ve long since internalized that form.
Obviously mass communication exacerbates the problem. For the most part we don’t really discuss issues, we just hurled dumbed-down, preset positions at each other and try to put them in group-approved meme boxes in which all nuance and all possibility of consensus on anything is lost. Fox News and talk radio have made this much worse, but in America today most communication tends to go this way.
“Opinion”, for the most part, leaves the manufacturer in factory-sealed boxes anyway, but if there is any nuance left, there is little chance it will get through the filters of dumbed-down public algorithms.
Amazing that Toqueville could see this in 1835. Unlike some of the commenters, I do not think he was referring to any issues in particular, he was making a general observation about the way in which opinion is disseminated and controlled in America.
I’ve had experiences with friends, probably we all have, where having done extensive reading and thought on something, and believing I’ve got a new perspective, I immediately find myself placed in boxes set opposite another set of boxes, forced to have the same meaningless discussion as ever because there are only a limited number of boxes and everything else is incomprehensible.
There’s a lot of witty French salon-speak in that passage: making a case for the paradox, we’re freer under Louis-Philippe than they are under Mr. Jackson. Representing his own patrician point of view and exaggerating for effect. I’d also say the early Jackson administration when Tocqueville was in the US was an especially dishonest moment in American political discourse, with the slave power falsely claiming to represent the common man and the opposition Whigs allowing themselves to be treated as haughty elites.
IMHO, that wouldn’t be on my list of de Tocqueville keen and well thought out observations. As you note, it abstracts from a particular time in the US. Early in the establishment of the second major political party and somewhat late but still not universal suffrage for white males in state constitutions by dropping the property requirement. (Interestingly as more men were given the right to vote, states codified prohibitions on women and people of color to vote.)
Did Jackson get on the right side of any important issue of his day would and could be seen to have long term consequences for the nation?
Jackson despised corporations as I recall.
But yes, the shadow of slavery hangs in the background of that de Tocqueville observation. It is five years after the Nat Turner rebellion and the solidification of opinion in the South. The mood is very much one of policing the further ranges of political opinions. This is a period that is missing from most library shelves in the US (except very large or university libraries).
That this strikes priscianus jr as a significant response to Douthat’s pleading is to me a significant confirmation of what my spidey sense has been telling me lately. There is a definite mood (or is it a strategy) among conservatives to try to put the shift of opinion after Occupy Wall Street and #blacklivesmatter back into the box. The accusation of political correctness served to silence a lot of academic liberals in the 1980s; the elite conservatives are trotting it out again seeking the same results just as they used Ukraine to restart the familiarity of the Cold War. To succeed at that they need to impose once again a stultifying majority opinion like that that Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy created during the 1950s based on the cowardice of liberal elites. Thus Douthat and Chait pairing the same message, useful idiot that Chait is.
I think there is some comparative insight in the DeTocqueville quote. The political cynicism rampant these days is very much Jacksonian. Even the GOP House is reminiscent of the mob who ransacked the White House.
Corporations as we know them arose after Jackson’s time. He didn’t inherit wealth but built his own in the fine tradition of other agrarians — buying/stealing lands and slaves that grew his cash crops.
Isn’t the American experience one of the elites continuous efforts to tamp down and stamp out any and all efforts by common men and women for a fair deal? Mostly successful except in rare points in time when making some concessions works. Not so much because that revision accords with some singular and significant majority but because it draws just enough voices away from and lines just enough previously penniless pockets that the commoners are reduced to a status insufficient to drive public opinion and public policy further in the direction of what they seek.
Jackson advanced the policy that the common man could have his own land stake by removing more Native Americans from their lands. Avoided the whole issue of taking from one white group for the benefit of another white group.
What I’m saying, and likely rather poorly, is that at no time in this country has there been a mass and singular majority position. The battle lines sometimes fade through exhaustion or seeming helplessness. They get pushed around at different times. And once the two major political parties became mature, every freaking issue that has never been resolved gets shoved into one of two boxes and those outside those two boxes either conform to one or the other or gets marginalized. (Guess I should make an exception for the periods immediately after winning a war against a foreign power. Then almost everyone rallies around one flag and appears to be united. Could have been such a period when de Tocqueville was in the US.)
Douthat is saying we do that because he somehow hopes that we stop doing that – and stop doing it just at the moment when the nation seems poised to elect the first woman to the Presidency….or certainly nominate her anyway.
This is no accident.
That column is about gender.
Douthat’s got a subtext that wriggles its way out in this paragraph. Ostensibly he’s just been cheering on Jonathan Chait and hoping for a division between the liberals and the even-the-liberals, but here he breaks into what he’s really thinking about, the extraordinary success of the marriage equality movement. How the fuck did that happen, he wonders, and answers, we must have cheated:
It’s certainly the case that most Americans have come to understand in the last few years that opponents of same-sex marriage are “bigoted and phobic”. Or putting it another way, they’ve–we’ve–realized there are no adequate rational grounds for opposing it, which implies, correctly, that opposing it is stupid and/or irrational. Sorry!
Douthat and all those typical US conservatives with some decent intellectual training, going back I guess to Buckley, always want us to keep the debate on a respectful plane and take (or politely pretend to take) their specious rationalizations seriously. “How dare you call me pro-slavery, I’m just deeply concerned about the correct interpretation of the Tenth Amendment” etc. etc. And sure enough, that does make it harder to win, because when we accept it we are prevented from talking about what is really at issue.
And then of course they don’t wish to be under any such restraints, because their unquestionable passion for liberty entitles them to be as rude as they like. It virtually forces them to be rude, and if we call them out on it we’re invoking “political correctness”. When we stop being so fucking urbane and clubbable and call them out, yes, people understand, and they’ve been starting to understand better, and debaters-for-hire like Douthat are out of their comfort zone. But it’s not an unfair debating tactic, as he suggests here. They’re uncomfortable because their bad faith is on display. Let them start thinking about what is really right and wrong instead of what profits their patrons. Really.
Bigotry is an artifact of ignorance. One cannot debate ignorance. It’s a prima facie cause for disqualification from any debate.
One thing I think is being missed here is that Chait and Douthat are not talking about calling out the Right on issues of sensitivity on gender and race. This isn’t about the Right/Left divide but the fight within the Center-Left/Left. To argue that the Left shouldn’t call out Fox News bullshit is a straw man. Chait (and Douthat) aren’t writing about that.
The question is will there be a Liberal/Left civil war over issues of – for lack of a better phrase – identity politics.
What Douthat misses in his argument about marriage equality is that movement succeeded because in the end people realized that granting marriage equality was “easy”. My ox was not gored, my pocket was not picked.
Now, I’m making a good faith effort to understand the last letters in LGBTQQIAAP. And I want to be polite and accommodating. I don’t want to offend. But the increasingly smaller slices of human sexuality are hard to keep track of and my lack of urgency on that is caused by the many other things going on in my life, not cis-gendered oppression.
And ultimately, I come down on the side of civility. And, yes, occasionally that civility is in short supply from the more radical reaches of the Left, and we all know it’s absent from the far reaches of the Right. I don’t think there’s an equivalency at play here, and I don’t think Chait or even Douthat are arguing that.
“What Douthat misses in his argument about marriage equality is that movement succeeded because in the end people realized that granting marriage equality was “easy”. “
Douthat is by far not the only one who misses that point.
Actually what the TP/GOP members would love is for all to let them say anything they want unchallenged. Since that is not happening and they are being called out for their numerous policies that enrich the rich and take away from the poor. The TP/GOP are going on the attack with the only argument they feel they can safely call out. See they do not care if it is true or not for what it does is pull the attention away from their main drive to destroy the middle class and poor. This very thread for the most part shows that they have accomplished the distraction part.
I take note that most of the so-called victims of this PC nonsense are celebrities, pundits, journalists, and other social media hacks. Their version of the culture war debates are not resolving anything and pretty much only useful as entertainment.