I Can’t Believe That Free Speech, Color Blindness, and Meritocracy Became Right-Wing Issues

How did the left fumble those away?

President Trump at his inauguration. (photo by Kevin Lamarque via Getty)

The message of every inauguration speech is “suck it, losers”.¹ The new president — having executed the modern-day equivalent of beheading his enemy and drinking wine from his skull — gets to crow about how great everything will be now that he’s in charge. Oh, sure: He typically throws in some “let’s come together” bullshit to appear magnanimous, but that’s but a brief way-station on the way to inviting his enemies to kiss his victorious ass and lick his presidential wang.

Trump’s speech went as expected. He didn’t go so far as to actually say “bite me”, but “bite me” was strongly implied. He listed all the amazing things he plans to do, from lowering gas prices to “saving” the auto industry to ending the Green New Deal (that last one should be easy, because the Green New Deal failed unanimously in the Senate in 2019). He also vowed to take back the Panama Canal in a bit of retro ‘80s fan service, kind of like how The Mandalorian made a bunch of Empire Strikes Back callbacks. Republicans cheered and Democrats smoldered, which was the whole point.

In between rhetorical touchdown dances, a few sentences shivved me right in my liberal ribs. It was these sentences:

“After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.”

…

“This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will force a society that is colorblind and merit-based.”

Those sentences hurt not because I disagree, but because I can’t believe that the left has fucked things up so badly that free speech, color blindness, and meritocracy are now issues that the right feels they own. In fact, those issues are so right-coded that they made the list of Things To Throw In Democrats’ Faces At The Inauguration Speech. A little more than a decade ago, those were bedrock liberal ideals. How did we screw this up?

The answer, of course, is that radical leftists pushed a bunch of shit-for-brains ideas, and liberals were too dickless to say “what you’re saying is dumb and wrong”.

Leftists’ singular principle is “America sucks”. I view their activism as a sort of performative LARPing driven by guilt over their privilege, and I understand that they define themselves by their rejection of mainstream society. This is why they can never admit it when something good happens — America must always be the The Worst. Of course, most people consider the end of Jim Crow, the expansion of personal freedoms, and the erosion of societal attitudes that denied opportunities based on dint of birth to be “good”. This creates a problem for leftists, and their solution is to just pretend that the good things never happened.

In the leftist narrative, Jim Crow never ended — it just became “mass incarceration”, an idea expressed in the popular book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. And in fact, leftists like Nikole Hannah-Jones held that American racism could never be overcome, because racism is “in the very DNA of this country”. In this telling of the story, calls for meritocracy and color blindness are a stitch-up, and the only solution is to keep race (and gender, and sexual orientation) front-of-mind at all times. At the apex of their influence, leftists actually got liberals to embrace — or at least not laugh out of town — a man who actually wrote “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”

Censorship efforts flowed from this totalizing ideology. Racial slurs were deemed not just vile and wrong, but acts of literal violence. And once that was accepted, the definition of “violence” reached bold new horizons: Honest misunderstandings became "violence”, and so did disagreement, and eventually even silence. “Misinformation” came to serve the exact same rhetorical function on the left that “fake news” does on the right — it means “information I don’t like.” And because many leftists never held free speech principles to begin with,² they didn’t hesitate to declare mini-jihads against anyone who stepped out of line. Most liberals bit our tongues instead of getting into toxic Twitter fights and possibly losing our jobs.

These mistakes were tragic in two ways. The first is that these beliefs didn’t even reflect the views of the people they were ostensibly “for” — they were quite clearly the views of a mostly white, mostly elite activist class. The second tragedy is that I don’t think many liberals really believed these ideas — we were just slow to be critical of ideas that wrapped themselves in antiracist clothing, and we were terrified of being called racist. And so, we mostly stayed quiet while leftists shat on ideals that did so much to improve life in this country.

There is not a single cell in my body that thinks Donald Trump has a principled belief in free speech, color blindness, or meritocracy. He’s currently suing a pollster in a clear attempt to silence a critic. He has a long record of race baiting and division, from discriminating against Black renters in the ‘70s to promoting the Obama birther nonsense to spreading lies about Haitian immigrants. He hires relatives and lackeys almost exclusively. It’s less that Republicans have embraced these beliefs and more that Democrats left popular ideas sitting around unclaimed, so Republicans said “oh, nice,” picked up those ideals, and are now using them to bash Democrats’ brains in.

I’m hard-pressed to think of another example of a person or group of people who promoted ideas, saw those ideas gain widespread acceptance, and then abruptly abandoned them. It’s really remarkable — it’s like if Stephen Hawking had belatedly decided that black holes are caused by Jesus, or if Susan B. Anthony’s last book was called “On Second Thought, Bitches Be Crazy”. It really hurts to have liberal ideals flung in our faces by a guy who obviously doesn’t believe in them at all. But those ideals are his now, and that’s probably part of the reason why he got to stand up there and say “bite me” and all we could do was sit there and listen.

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1. The lone exception is Lincoln’s second inaugural address, whose message was “We must not tell the losers to suck it, even though they are, indeed, losers.”

2. I should point out that some old school socialists do hold free speech principles and stood up for free speech during the Great Awokening; for example, Cornel West and Noam Chomsky both signed the Harper’s letter.