It pains me thoroughly as an economic leftie, but I believe that right wing paranoia about CRT is more than 50% justified.
CRT is a moving target in terms of definition, motte-and-bailey style, which is inherently not trustworthy. If something is undefinable yet repulsive on contact then an honest bigotry against it is justified, like medieval peasants without a germ theory but who figure out the hanging around sick people gets you sick and therefore brick plague victims inside their homes.
But even on its simplest and least academic form, CRT is a racially essentialist worldview. It transfers some kind of Marxist style analysis from economic relations, where Marxism at least kinda makes sense, to race relations, where it is utter nonsense. Instead positing a hostile exploitation of the proles by the owning class, it instead posits a hostile exploitation of blacks by whites. The fact that the initial relationship between whites and blacks in American history was literally a hostile economic exploitation by rural proles by the plantation owners makes that assertion particularly galling by reversing cause and effect, like saying hay fever causes you to inhale pollens.
Racialism used to critique American horrors (both historical, current, and in the near future) still has a assumption baked into its bedrock that race is an objective division of humanity; that class interest, national identity, or shared religion will dissolve onto contact with stark reality.
Thanks for making me squirm yet again. I too am aiming to achieve “not a complete asshat” status before I die.
And yet my family and I watch Maddow religiously. About a year ago I read “White Fragility” as the gospel truth.
*sigh*
I suspect that as long as I keep following you, Heaton & JuRY I think I’m on the right path. I’m also expanding my horizons by reading George Will and Jonah Goldberg columns.
Hi Jeff. Thank you for so perfectly (and hilariously) articulating precisely the perspective I hold regarding the pernicious and destructive impact of performative identity politics. My background: I'm a fifty-five year old white suburban dad with a wife of almost thirty years and three kids - a "normie" by any measure. Well, perhaps not exactly. I passionately believe that rapacious capitalism exemplified by rampant, unchecked wealth inequality is destroying the very fabric of our society, that our core democratic institutions are withering under unrelenting assault by right-wing authoritarianism, manmade climate change is clearly causing widespread and catastrophic environmental upheaval and destruction, law enforcement and crime policy in general are in desperate need of systemic reform, etc. My path to where you are now began, of all places, on the World Socialist Web Site, specifically with its trenchant criticism several years ago of the New York Times' 1649 Project. In a nutshell, those hoary old school Trotskyists (I don't count myself among them, BTW) argued that a reductive and ahistorical emphasis on race and identify could only undermine the societal cohesion as a necessary for widespread social and economic change. Fuckin' A. For once, history proved the socialists correct. And it's gotten so, so much worse. Yeah, Pajama Boy was vomit-inducing. But was any AOC's attendance at the Met Gala wearing her "Tax the Rich" dress much better? Could anyone conceive of Bernie Saunders attending that same event? Progressives are at a cross-roads: embrace a more inclusive agenda or perish This is no third option.
As someone who viscerally dislikes Republicans, this all really goads me because we just totally deserted the moral high ground and let them mosey right in. “Oh you’re done with aspiring towards post-racialism? Cool, we’ll take it! Might take us a few cycles to get this puppy running again but we can figure it out.” Gah. Don’t make me vote for these people.
Judging by the "readers picks" comments on Charles Blow's most recent "everyone who votes Republican is a Nazi" column, the rank and file liberals have had their fill of the "racial reckoning." They were willing to flirt with it for about a year, but have finally realized that the ideology is largely bullshit, wrapped around a kernel of truth.
But the next step in this evolution is for these people to recognize that Covidianism is a symptom of the same underlying mental illness. It will take much longer to ease these symptoms because the messaging and censorship apparatus is far more organized and disciplined than the woke flakes in the DEI departments. It will at some point become clear to most that the Covid policies being imposed across the country bear no relation to the evidence and are not based on anything resembling a rational cost-benefit analysis. Vaccine mandates and passports, school masking, social distancing, other mask mandates, restrictions on gatherings, etc., became utterly indefensible once everyone who wanted a vaccine got one.
Covid policy should consist of making sure vaccines are available to all who want them and investing in treatment research, especially treatments than can be administered on an outpatient basis. That's it. Everything else is just another manifestation of the same obnoxious smug virtue signaling and moralizing that has been exposed for what it is in the "anti-racism" context. So, after disassociating from woke nonsense, the left will have to further purge itself of its Covidianism to build the big tent it needs to consistently win the elections it ought to win. But seeing as how San Francisco is now going to require 5 year olds show their papers to attend birthday parties, it looks like we've got a long, long way to go in this department.
As someone who thinks of himself as a moderate conservative (i.e,. "Nazi" in AOC-speak), my outside observation of the Left is that the Left lacks joy and happiness. Making fun of conservatives isn't joyful, any more than conservatives making fun of liberals is. But in centrist and conservative circles, politics is just one part of life. One part. Go to a party with a large conservative contingent, and they're talking about all kinds of things other than politics: sports, TV, movies, music, their kids, their vacation plans, etc. Go to a gathering that is largely leftist, and the only topic of conversation seems to be politics. It's an all-consuming fixation that is, frankly, exhausting for the rest of us - who mostly want to find a way to get along with people without first having to convert them to our way of thinking.
The left is dour, depressed, and seemingly without hope for the future. Nothing is ever good enough, nothing is ever simply ENOUGH. Where's the attractiveness in that?
As recently as the '80s, the left was optimistic about the future, proud of societal improvements in matters of economics, ethnicity and gender, and wanting to build upon them.
Now, those improvements are blithely dismissed out of hand as fictitious, epheral, or just not enough.
Telling people that racism is worse today in the 1950s is provably nonsense - and yet, many Democrats adhere to this argument (and, presumably, worldview) as if it were simple, observable fact.
I'm old enough to remember separate water fountains at public parks in the NORTH in the 1960s, so the odds of convincing me that today's supposedly invisible racism is actually more corrosive than what was going on a half-century ago are nil.
Albert Camus wrote some 65 years ago that what most ailed the Left was a lack of humility.
When Barack Obama was elected back in 2008, you really could see the "campus radical" element on the left flooding into mainstream democratic politics, liberal media and the broader political conversation. It was roughly around that time that phrases like "white privilege" and creepy Mao-like demands to "confess" said privilege emerged and proliferated.
Even as a political conservative, I was already familiar with this language at that time because I had been a public school teacher in the 90's. And this kind of talk was fully integrated into graduate level education curricula at most education schools before then. "Teaching for social justice" was well established in the 1990's and I can even recall attending meetings where Weatherman Bill Ayers, by then an education professor at University of Illinois Chicago, presided. Back then I was pretty surprised by how openly Marxist all these professors were. Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States was their bible. Alex Kotlowitz was all the rage too. The Chicago Public Schools frequently brought in Marxist activists and ironically, very well-paid communist consultants to 'educate' students.
Its sad that it has taken Americans so long to awaken to the menace wokeness. This nonsense has been around a long time. This kind of leftism is a far cry from the kind of democratic politics that so many of my JFK/FDR/working class loving family members practiced.
As an ardent Never Trumper today, no one has hated to see the GOP lurch into the fevered fascist stupidity of Trumpism more than I, but I keep reminding my liberal friends and family that the democrats have their own serious problem here - A big and unhealthy dose of Maoism/Marxism in their political bloodstream right now. It doesn't seem Orwellian - It IS Orwellian. And I am glad to hear some liberals at least, recognize it.
There's also a sort-of-materialist explanation: We live in a society that's in large part hierarchically organized according to educational achievement; people without college degrees are excluded from many positions of influence and privilege. For someone who believes that's unfair, it seems pretty natural to imagine Pajama Boy as the personification of that system.
I mean, yeah, this is pretty much it for me. I've always been very repelled by othodoxy and proselytizing. Growing up, I got that mostly from the right, and like you, I think that caused me to identify with the left for a long time. I still don't like the right much, and I'm definitely not a conservative. So, it says something weird when I feel like I can speak my mind more freely in front of people from the right these days than people from the left, because I really don't have particularly incendiary opinions by any reasonable standard. (Though, if we're just judging based on which scenario I prefer for Pajama Boy's destruction, I'm apparently far-right, because while I'd accept any of them, a rocket to the sun is definitely my preference.)
Also, "Soft-Handed Dandy University, where I majored in Fancy Lad studies" had me rolling. Questions. Do you get a top hat? Do you get one of those little gloves to slap people with when they insult your honor? Do they take chicks? Because if all three answers are "yes", I'm in!
I think the 'CRT cost us the election' stuff is overblown and this election's results were more tied to Biden being unpopular / the general 'vote against the people in charge / the party out of office has better turnout' midterm phenomenon. 'The Democrats start to do poorly in off cycle elections and tank hard during the midterms' would have been the safe prediction to make in 2020, especially given that Republicans get to run in these races with Trump (relatively) out of the picture. There's this instinct to see politics as a TV show with a clear running narrative and voters are all responding to and part of that narrative and I think it's good to fight that instinct, reality is a lot more abstract and multicausal. Most people who say that they were 'energized because of CRT' are just Republicans pointing to the sign with the soup of the day on it.
That said, I think it's great if Democrats react as if this *were* the CRT election because a lot of stuff that's crept up during the Great Awokening is poisonous for the left's longer-term prospects, we can barely cobble together a winning political coalition today and pushing traditional liberals into a broader Republican coalition is a path to a one party system.
Also, it's kind of insulting to us skeptics, the way they parse "not in the curriculum" when there are plenty of (rather large) receipts from consultancies and "DEI trainings". So, CRT is only "curriculum adjacent"? Okay. +3 to Quibble.
Here we are, post Virginia election, and many of the leading lights of leftism (those with platforms) are doubling down on the, IT'S RACISM AND WHITE SUPREMACY!!!! that caused the Dems to lose the governor's race.
I have little faith the Dems will learn any meaningful lessons from this. The far-left activist/academic/journalist class are un-teachable.
Isn’t asking someone like McAuliffe to denounce crazy instances of race essentialism in schools like convincing Youngkin to denounce the “Big Lie”? The moderate coalition doesn’t vote in primaries and they’re not enough to carry you in a highly contested election so neither of these parties can afford to lose their respective crazy wings. “Don’t upset the radical wings and gaslight the moderate voting bloc since they’re the least likely to bring the heat as they are busy living normal lives not steeped in politics has been the strategy.” Republicans were lucky that the salient issue involved the children and Covid was no longer top of the list like last November. (Shorism at play.) For Dems to make the move you’re suggesting there needs to be structural changes like open primaries and ranked choice voting otherwise we’ll keep spiraling further into insane propaganda devoid of real problem solving.
"The 1619 project developed curriculum teaching that racism was not just a large part of American history, but its defining feature."
Call *me* crazy, but it's not at all a crazy idea that notions of race and racism have fundamentally been defining features of American society from the very beginning. The project also prominently features the historic contributions of Black Americans towards making the nation "a more perfect union." These purposes are considered controversial for many Americans because they are crucially at odds with the "who" and "what" of our national founding myth, which became a more concretely-defined narrative over the course of the 20th century. Among these Americans are several of the historians who dismissed the validity of the entire project based on contested claims concerning slavery and the Revolution and slavery and capitalism in two of the project's essays. This is subjective, but the historical criticisms seemed to carry a tone of indignity and incredulity to me, as if to suggest that the project's visionary, Hannah Nikole-Jones, had done an inherently un-American thing, not just by how she presented historical arguments about slavery in the Revolutionary era in the opening essay, but for even conceiving of such a project to begin with. The underlying question here is essentially: who does America really and truly belong to, and who gets to shape the American narrative?
It pains me thoroughly as an economic leftie, but I believe that right wing paranoia about CRT is more than 50% justified.
CRT is a moving target in terms of definition, motte-and-bailey style, which is inherently not trustworthy. If something is undefinable yet repulsive on contact then an honest bigotry against it is justified, like medieval peasants without a germ theory but who figure out the hanging around sick people gets you sick and therefore brick plague victims inside their homes.
But even on its simplest and least academic form, CRT is a racially essentialist worldview. It transfers some kind of Marxist style analysis from economic relations, where Marxism at least kinda makes sense, to race relations, where it is utter nonsense. Instead positing a hostile exploitation of the proles by the owning class, it instead posits a hostile exploitation of blacks by whites. The fact that the initial relationship between whites and blacks in American history was literally a hostile economic exploitation by rural proles by the plantation owners makes that assertion particularly galling by reversing cause and effect, like saying hay fever causes you to inhale pollens.
Racialism used to critique American horrors (both historical, current, and in the near future) still has a assumption baked into its bedrock that race is an objective division of humanity; that class interest, national identity, or shared religion will dissolve onto contact with stark reality.
Thanks for making me squirm yet again. I too am aiming to achieve “not a complete asshat” status before I die.
And yet my family and I watch Maddow religiously. About a year ago I read “White Fragility” as the gospel truth.
*sigh*
I suspect that as long as I keep following you, Heaton & JuRY I think I’m on the right path. I’m also expanding my horizons by reading George Will and Jonah Goldberg columns.
Maybe there’s hope.
Heh. You're getting funnier with each article. This was really good. Thanks, man.
Hi Jeff. Thank you for so perfectly (and hilariously) articulating precisely the perspective I hold regarding the pernicious and destructive impact of performative identity politics. My background: I'm a fifty-five year old white suburban dad with a wife of almost thirty years and three kids - a "normie" by any measure. Well, perhaps not exactly. I passionately believe that rapacious capitalism exemplified by rampant, unchecked wealth inequality is destroying the very fabric of our society, that our core democratic institutions are withering under unrelenting assault by right-wing authoritarianism, manmade climate change is clearly causing widespread and catastrophic environmental upheaval and destruction, law enforcement and crime policy in general are in desperate need of systemic reform, etc. My path to where you are now began, of all places, on the World Socialist Web Site, specifically with its trenchant criticism several years ago of the New York Times' 1649 Project. In a nutshell, those hoary old school Trotskyists (I don't count myself among them, BTW) argued that a reductive and ahistorical emphasis on race and identify could only undermine the societal cohesion as a necessary for widespread social and economic change. Fuckin' A. For once, history proved the socialists correct. And it's gotten so, so much worse. Yeah, Pajama Boy was vomit-inducing. But was any AOC's attendance at the Met Gala wearing her "Tax the Rich" dress much better? Could anyone conceive of Bernie Saunders attending that same event? Progressives are at a cross-roads: embrace a more inclusive agenda or perish This is no third option.
As someone who viscerally dislikes Republicans, this all really goads me because we just totally deserted the moral high ground and let them mosey right in. “Oh you’re done with aspiring towards post-racialism? Cool, we’ll take it! Might take us a few cycles to get this puppy running again but we can figure it out.” Gah. Don’t make me vote for these people.
Ps- Liked for “2 Fast 2 Fragile” alone.
Judging by the "readers picks" comments on Charles Blow's most recent "everyone who votes Republican is a Nazi" column, the rank and file liberals have had their fill of the "racial reckoning." They were willing to flirt with it for about a year, but have finally realized that the ideology is largely bullshit, wrapped around a kernel of truth.
But the next step in this evolution is for these people to recognize that Covidianism is a symptom of the same underlying mental illness. It will take much longer to ease these symptoms because the messaging and censorship apparatus is far more organized and disciplined than the woke flakes in the DEI departments. It will at some point become clear to most that the Covid policies being imposed across the country bear no relation to the evidence and are not based on anything resembling a rational cost-benefit analysis. Vaccine mandates and passports, school masking, social distancing, other mask mandates, restrictions on gatherings, etc., became utterly indefensible once everyone who wanted a vaccine got one.
Covid policy should consist of making sure vaccines are available to all who want them and investing in treatment research, especially treatments than can be administered on an outpatient basis. That's it. Everything else is just another manifestation of the same obnoxious smug virtue signaling and moralizing that has been exposed for what it is in the "anti-racism" context. So, after disassociating from woke nonsense, the left will have to further purge itself of its Covidianism to build the big tent it needs to consistently win the elections it ought to win. But seeing as how San Francisco is now going to require 5 year olds show their papers to attend birthday parties, it looks like we've got a long, long way to go in this department.
As someone who thinks of himself as a moderate conservative (i.e,. "Nazi" in AOC-speak), my outside observation of the Left is that the Left lacks joy and happiness. Making fun of conservatives isn't joyful, any more than conservatives making fun of liberals is. But in centrist and conservative circles, politics is just one part of life. One part. Go to a party with a large conservative contingent, and they're talking about all kinds of things other than politics: sports, TV, movies, music, their kids, their vacation plans, etc. Go to a gathering that is largely leftist, and the only topic of conversation seems to be politics. It's an all-consuming fixation that is, frankly, exhausting for the rest of us - who mostly want to find a way to get along with people without first having to convert them to our way of thinking.
The left is dour, depressed, and seemingly without hope for the future. Nothing is ever good enough, nothing is ever simply ENOUGH. Where's the attractiveness in that?
As recently as the '80s, the left was optimistic about the future, proud of societal improvements in matters of economics, ethnicity and gender, and wanting to build upon them.
Now, those improvements are blithely dismissed out of hand as fictitious, epheral, or just not enough.
Telling people that racism is worse today in the 1950s is provably nonsense - and yet, many Democrats adhere to this argument (and, presumably, worldview) as if it were simple, observable fact.
I'm old enough to remember separate water fountains at public parks in the NORTH in the 1960s, so the odds of convincing me that today's supposedly invisible racism is actually more corrosive than what was going on a half-century ago are nil.
Albert Camus wrote some 65 years ago that what most ailed the Left was a lack of humility.
I'm not sure much has changed.
Great article!
When Barack Obama was elected back in 2008, you really could see the "campus radical" element on the left flooding into mainstream democratic politics, liberal media and the broader political conversation. It was roughly around that time that phrases like "white privilege" and creepy Mao-like demands to "confess" said privilege emerged and proliferated.
Even as a political conservative, I was already familiar with this language at that time because I had been a public school teacher in the 90's. And this kind of talk was fully integrated into graduate level education curricula at most education schools before then. "Teaching for social justice" was well established in the 1990's and I can even recall attending meetings where Weatherman Bill Ayers, by then an education professor at University of Illinois Chicago, presided. Back then I was pretty surprised by how openly Marxist all these professors were. Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States was their bible. Alex Kotlowitz was all the rage too. The Chicago Public Schools frequently brought in Marxist activists and ironically, very well-paid communist consultants to 'educate' students.
Its sad that it has taken Americans so long to awaken to the menace wokeness. This nonsense has been around a long time. This kind of leftism is a far cry from the kind of democratic politics that so many of my JFK/FDR/working class loving family members practiced.
As an ardent Never Trumper today, no one has hated to see the GOP lurch into the fevered fascist stupidity of Trumpism more than I, but I keep reminding my liberal friends and family that the democrats have their own serious problem here - A big and unhealthy dose of Maoism/Marxism in their political bloodstream right now. It doesn't seem Orwellian - It IS Orwellian. And I am glad to hear some liberals at least, recognize it.
There's also a sort-of-materialist explanation: We live in a society that's in large part hierarchically organized according to educational achievement; people without college degrees are excluded from many positions of influence and privilege. For someone who believes that's unfair, it seems pretty natural to imagine Pajama Boy as the personification of that system.
I mean, yeah, this is pretty much it for me. I've always been very repelled by othodoxy and proselytizing. Growing up, I got that mostly from the right, and like you, I think that caused me to identify with the left for a long time. I still don't like the right much, and I'm definitely not a conservative. So, it says something weird when I feel like I can speak my mind more freely in front of people from the right these days than people from the left, because I really don't have particularly incendiary opinions by any reasonable standard. (Though, if we're just judging based on which scenario I prefer for Pajama Boy's destruction, I'm apparently far-right, because while I'd accept any of them, a rocket to the sun is definitely my preference.)
Also, "Soft-Handed Dandy University, where I majored in Fancy Lad studies" had me rolling. Questions. Do you get a top hat? Do you get one of those little gloves to slap people with when they insult your honor? Do they take chicks? Because if all three answers are "yes", I'm in!
> at every point in my life, thinking about myself from five years ago causes me to be mortified to the point of paralysis.
I’m glad it’s not just me.
I think the 'CRT cost us the election' stuff is overblown and this election's results were more tied to Biden being unpopular / the general 'vote against the people in charge / the party out of office has better turnout' midterm phenomenon. 'The Democrats start to do poorly in off cycle elections and tank hard during the midterms' would have been the safe prediction to make in 2020, especially given that Republicans get to run in these races with Trump (relatively) out of the picture. There's this instinct to see politics as a TV show with a clear running narrative and voters are all responding to and part of that narrative and I think it's good to fight that instinct, reality is a lot more abstract and multicausal. Most people who say that they were 'energized because of CRT' are just Republicans pointing to the sign with the soup of the day on it.
That said, I think it's great if Democrats react as if this *were* the CRT election because a lot of stuff that's crept up during the Great Awokening is poisonous for the left's longer-term prospects, we can barely cobble together a winning political coalition today and pushing traditional liberals into a broader Republican coalition is a path to a one party system.
I'm eagerly awaiting 𝐼𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑀𝑎𝑥: 𝐹𝑟𝑎𝑔𝑖𝑙𝑒 𝑅𝑜𝑎𝑑.
Also, it's kind of insulting to us skeptics, the way they parse "not in the curriculum" when there are plenty of (rather large) receipts from consultancies and "DEI trainings". So, CRT is only "curriculum adjacent"? Okay. +3 to Quibble.
Here we are, post Virginia election, and many of the leading lights of leftism (those with platforms) are doubling down on the, IT'S RACISM AND WHITE SUPREMACY!!!! that caused the Dems to lose the governor's race.
I have little faith the Dems will learn any meaningful lessons from this. The far-left activist/academic/journalist class are un-teachable.
Isn’t asking someone like McAuliffe to denounce crazy instances of race essentialism in schools like convincing Youngkin to denounce the “Big Lie”? The moderate coalition doesn’t vote in primaries and they’re not enough to carry you in a highly contested election so neither of these parties can afford to lose their respective crazy wings. “Don’t upset the radical wings and gaslight the moderate voting bloc since they’re the least likely to bring the heat as they are busy living normal lives not steeped in politics has been the strategy.” Republicans were lucky that the salient issue involved the children and Covid was no longer top of the list like last November. (Shorism at play.) For Dems to make the move you’re suggesting there needs to be structural changes like open primaries and ranked choice voting otherwise we’ll keep spiraling further into insane propaganda devoid of real problem solving.
"The 1619 project developed curriculum teaching that racism was not just a large part of American history, but its defining feature."
Call *me* crazy, but it's not at all a crazy idea that notions of race and racism have fundamentally been defining features of American society from the very beginning. The project also prominently features the historic contributions of Black Americans towards making the nation "a more perfect union." These purposes are considered controversial for many Americans because they are crucially at odds with the "who" and "what" of our national founding myth, which became a more concretely-defined narrative over the course of the 20th century. Among these Americans are several of the historians who dismissed the validity of the entire project based on contested claims concerning slavery and the Revolution and slavery and capitalism in two of the project's essays. This is subjective, but the historical criticisms seemed to carry a tone of indignity and incredulity to me, as if to suggest that the project's visionary, Hannah Nikole-Jones, had done an inherently un-American thing, not just by how she presented historical arguments about slavery in the Revolutionary era in the opening essay, but for even conceiving of such a project to begin with. The underlying question here is essentially: who does America really and truly belong to, and who gets to shape the American narrative?