The End Of Litmus Tests?

Fascism is the real mind virus, and it needs to be eradicated by all people of good faith, woke and unwoke alike.

(Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Women's March)

Regular readers know my hobbyhorses. I think Democrats should emerge from defeat more willing to confront Republican corruption, and (relatedly) more intentional about creating and shaping media than they have been.

I thought this before the election, and still do. Apart from any unpredictable political implications, it’s a righteous goal, and one that has the potential to unite the party without heedlessly tossing various people and ideas under the bus. Democrats disagree with each other about policy in many realms, but I don’t know any who think Republicans play fair, or who think the party has done a great job defining their opponents by their most unappealing traits. They are alarmed, belatedly, that all the Trump-family corruption they left uninvestigated will soon get buried; they realize only now in defeat that it’s important to surface derogatory information about the opposition.

Hopefully these lessons will stick long-term. My fixations are important to me, and should be to the party, too. But on the face of it, they’re mostly about shrinking the GOP tent. How do we make what we know about Trump and the GOP more apparent to those who don’t pay close attention?

Recriminations are much more bitter and unproductive among those who disagree about how to grow the Democratic tent. They simply reprise debates that have been raging across the left for years: policy radicalism vs. incrementalism; neoliberalism vs. progressivism; equality vs. equity.

For the most part, these fights are unimportant now, many weeks before we have enough information to truly understand what happened in the election.

But that last category, widely derided as the “wokeness” debate, strikes me as one where the party might finally, lastingly, make productive headway. It’s admittedly a bit strange that liberals are fighting (again) over whether Democrats are too “woke” after a campaign that featured very little wokeness. If anything Democrats in competitive races emphasized their anti-wokeness, and overperformed the party as a whole. It isn’t the summer of 2020 anymore, much as Republicans would like us to think it is.

Despite all this, though, there are good reasons for Democrats to have it out over identity issues again, contingent on everyone operating in good faith. Donald Trump is coming back to power, and he will pour gasoline on the embers of social strife. People across the left really should think through how they will respond, and aim to do so both righteously and wisely.

That debate is also relevant to the challenge of recruiting new voters. For the growth process to be as effective and frictionless as possible, Democrats will want to appeal to people without sounding aloof or stilted; they want to offer people something (a popular agenda) not ask of them to embrace contested critiques of American society. Voters are electing representatives, not joining a movement.

This prospect alarms many progressives, including some elected officials, who suspect a reconstituted Democratic Party will join Republicans in appealing to citizens by scapegoating powerless people. They fear betrayal and want to hold the line.

Striking a balance between these two factions will, thus, not be a fun process! But it would be easier if everyone understood each other a little better.

COATES TAILS

I won’t use the term “woke” here, beyond paraphrasing others, because it’s a trap. People of good faith in the center of the political spectrum accept the term, and Republicans shift its meaning to encompass larger and larger realms of social justice. It starts with a small niche, like, critical race theory, but quickly comes to envelop the whole notion of equality under the law, and eventually entails stipulating to out and out racism. Black people are flying airplanes now? This wokeness has gone too far! Suddenly it isn’t an internal debate over discourse norms, it’s a fight with Republicans over how much of the Civil Rights Movement to roll back. A fight that Republicans relish.

The argument within the left, by contrast, pits an older conception of civil equality against a newer school of thought, where caste can’t be extinguished through the culture or through race-neutral policy reforms, because it’s baked into the system; where true justice will be elusive until enough people see the light, and we reform or rebuild the system itself.

This idea is at the heart of modern social-justice vernacular: intersectionalism, systemic racism, equity. And as a critique of the American state, I think it has a lot of merit. Bigotry in America is clearly more sweeping than the sum of every act of hatred. Even Republicans on this Supreme Court will occasionally write opinions influenced by critical race theory.

But it isn’t perfect dogma, either. I don’t think American governing institutions need to be dismantled en masse for justice to prevail. In part I just don’t think experience bears this out, but I’m also not confident better ones would replace them.

One of the lessons I’ve taken from the Trump era is to not assume progress means you never have to look around any corners. For instance, a subset of leftists wants to deconstruct American empire. Some of them even hopped the ends of the horseshoe into alignment with Trump because they liked that he weakened the global liberal order. But if the U.S. collapsed or blinked out of existence, or joined a new axis of fascism, or even just withdrew from the world a bit more—I don’t think most people on the left would like what filled the void.

Same goes domestically. Give me an opportunity to circumvent the Electoral College or the Senate and I’m here for it, but imagine writing a new Constitution today, or even just abolishing the carceral state, when half the country is aligned with MAGA.

So the critique is contested. Nobody should swallow it whole, just as nobody should support efforts to censor it. But that’s different from the question of whether it should form a basis for campaign politics, or movement building. And here I think the answer is clearly no.

Elon Musk coined or popularized the term “the woke mind virus” for the online right to wield against the entire left. Only MAGA and the MAGA-curious are unafflicted, and if you can shake off the virus, then you’ll finally see progressivism for all its evils.

This is almost completely backwards. Nothing about intersectional thinking is contagious. It implies the need for a politics of sacrifice for the greater good; for asking people to acknowledge that they’ve benefited from unfairness in society. It is the antithesis of the MAGA appeal, to anyone who will listen, that the world has been unfair to them, and that only in unity can they vanquish the sources of that unfairness: Jews, Mexicans, liberals, socialists, whoever. That is the real mind virus. It deserves to be eradicated. And eradicating the fascist mind virus will require offering people something more tempting than uncut self-indulgence.

Yet progressive gatekeepers implicitly ask people to set their individual interests aside as a precondition of membership in the coalition. Opening your mind to their critique can be a powerful intellectual exercise. I think it’s made me a better person. But the reasons it shouldn’t form the basis of mass politics in America should be quite obvious.

The idea and its implications are inherently counter-solidary. Asking people to think a certain way is a much tougher sell than telling people they’re right to think the way they already do. Our two-party system is a popularity contest, and, knowing how people are, which approach do you think would prove more popular?

That doesn’t discredit the theory itself. Unpopular ideas aren’t inherently wrong. It is certainly worth asking liberal political leaders to attune themselves to ingrained social and political and economic biases; to take even controversial ideas seriously. But it’s also worth understanding that, if those leaders embraced the critique with both arms, it would prefigure huge setbacks for everyone who cares about equal human dignity.

Barack Obama read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essays during his presidency, and respected Coates as a thinker. The two men had a steady public and private dialogue reflecting, I imagine, both mutual admiration and frustration. They didn’t see the world alike, and even if they did, their roles wouldn’t allow them to forge a public alliance. Obama is the one who believed “better is good;” Coates is the one who associated himself with the Malcolm X line, “You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches, and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress." These are two remarkably accomplished men, possessed of formidable critical thinking skills. But it should come as no surprise that Coates thrived as a public intellectual and Obama as a politician.

TIL SETH DO US PART

The way Coates and Obama related—how they appreciated the best about each other—could serve as a model for today’s progressives and Democrats who frustrate one another.

In the current climate, the relationship is much too distrustful.

When Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) told the New York Times, “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” one of his top aides quit, and his alumni asked him to apologize. A political science professor at Tufts threatened to bar his students from interning in Moulton’s office.

To end where we started, this is all, in one sense, way off base. Moulton’s notion that trans kids playing sports is one of the “challenges many Americans face” is ludicrous. Kamala Harris didn’t campaign on trans issues at all, Republicans did. And Republicans will always be able to find some quote or bill cosponsorship or association or even just some wacky activist to portray Dems as scary, alien, and perverse.

But in another sense it underscores how political and ideological differences on the left can make the whole Democratic, pro-democracy project uninviting.

It isn’t wise to paint Moulton as a heretic for this, even if his defensive crouch is unbecoming. By contrast, it’d be perfectly fair to ask him to simultaneously make clear that, whatever he thinks about this issue or any other, he wants no part of the far right and its gratuitous cruelty.

I’ve spent most of this newsletter teasing out one way progressive thinking is at odds with big-tent politics; the flipside is that Democrats really do need to be governed by some fundamental principles.

Building a bigger coalition that can reliably defeat the reactionary right can’t mean playing dumb about who’s most at risk. In different iterations, fascists have assailed different minorities; today’s American formation appears most fixated on brown-skinned immigrants and trans people, with a high tolerance for rogue acts of violence against Jews, Muslims, and others. I don’t believe this is because the MAGA movement harbors a precise hierarchy of hatred. It’s that pretexts for cruelty to illegal immigrants and trans people are easier to justify to a naive public. Some Trump supporters revel in the hatred; other can convince themselves they’re just on the side of fairness: The immigrants broke the law; trans equality is a trojan horse for inviting men into women’s spaces.

It would be foolish to blind ourselves to this dynamic, and a moral failure to abandon entire communities to Republican degeneracy. But I do suspect that defeating fascism will require Democrats to remain at odds with the social-justice catechism, and for social-justice activists to recognize the political pitfalls of their beliefs. In the past year, we’ve seen Democrats drift away from their past insistence that immigration reform pair border-security with legal authorization for most immigrants, and part with activists on the precise dimensions of trans rights. I don’t expect them to race back to “woke” views on these matters, and I don’t necessarily think it would be good idea if they did. Certainly nobody should blow up the party over it. By the same token, it would be a disgrace if, confronted with systemic abuse of these or any other classes of Americans, they abandoned the vulnerable and tried to change the topic. Republicans aren’t going to limit themselves to deporting violent criminals; they aren’t sincerely fixed on sports fairness or the rights of prisoners—they’ll come after immigrants of all kinds, and trans health care wherever it’s offered. What will Democrats like Moulton and the activists who condemn him say when that happens? Will they find it within themselves to speak with one voice? The answer should be yes. Capturing the center can go hand in hand with protecting people from cruelty and rallying the public against oppression. If it doesn’t, we are lost.