politics

Is Left-Wing Illiberalism the Greatest Threat to American Democracy?

Tufts University
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
August 20th, 2020
Not long ago, those of us who warned about rising illiberalism on the left were often told we were making far too much of some loud college kids. In an article in early 2018, I argued that campus radicalism of a particularly troubling kind—identity-obsessed, intolerant of dissent—was spreading fast beyond campuses. I wish I hadn’t been quite so vindicated.
In the past couple of months, we have seen countless incidents of people punished for offenses against progressive dogma. The Vermont school principal booted for a post criticizing some aspects of Black Lives Matter. The San Francisco museum curator forced out because, while talking about diversifying the collection, he noted that rejecting all new work by white artists would be “reverse discrimination.” (“Toxic white supremacist beliefs,” according to the petition for his removal.) The Philadelphia Inquirer editor pushed to resign over a “Buildings Matter Too” headline on an article about property destruction. And, most alarming, people driven out of their jobs or out of business because their display of anti-racism was seen as inadequate.
One could blame these excesses on an emotional “anti-racism moment.” But none of this is new, just more frequent. Two years ago, for instance, the progressive magazine The Nation took down a poem, with apologies, because a white man wrote in the voice of a homeless black woman.
True, the social justice activists have no political power (not nationally, anyway). But their cultural influence—not only in academia but in the media, in K-12 schooling, in art, publishing, nonprofits, even corporations—can hardly be overstated. Twitter, the world’s second largest private social media platform, just gave $10 million for “antiracist work” to Ibram X. Kendi, a radical scholar/activist who wants a federal Department of Anti-Racism tasked to root out all racial disparities and “monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas.” (For Kendi, that includes Barack Obama’s 2008 Father’s Day speech criticizing father absence in the black community.)
The problem isn’t just people getting “canceled.” It’s the rise of an illiberal culture that explicitly judges people on the basis of race, gender and other identities, seeks to segregate culture by race and ethnicity, and insists that speech must be rigorously monitored as a tool of oppression.
Are these trends worse for liberal democracy than Donald Trump-style right-wing populism? In a way, it’s the wrong question, since right-wing and left-wing illiberalism feed off each other. A backlash against “political correctness” may have helped Trump win in 2016; hopefully, backlash against violent protests and “defund the police” extremism won’t have that effect in 2020.
But left-wing illiberalism by itself is an increasingly intrusive presence in people’s lives. Moreover, one of its dangers is that it subverts the very institutions that have traditionally resisted right-wing authoritarianism. The other day, a progressive group in New York canceled a talk by black Marxist scholar Adolph Reed Jr. because his view that progressives should be more focused on class, not race, was deemed “tone-deaf” and offensive. Leftists silencing a Marxist: Joe McCarthy would be proud.
0 Comments