Andrew Sullivan on the spillover of campus politics into society at large

This week I was interviewed by an editor of the student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, who plans to write a profile of me. That was flattering, but of course I’m always wary of these things because, after all, it’s a reporter.

It turned out that she was friendly (that says nothing, of course, about what she’ll write), but had also done her homework about the topics that interest me, my books, this website, and so on. During the hourlong conversation, she asked me a question that gave me pause. It went something like this: “You often criticize ‘social justice warriors’. What is your problem with social justice?”

After a moment’s thought, I realized that I have no problem with social justice itself. After all, the term simply means struggling for equal rights for groups that have no rights, or are the subjects of oppression and bigotry. How could anyone oppose that? After all, the struggle for the rights of blacks in the Sixties, both in America and South Africa, and for women’s rights in the same era, are simply struggles for social justice, and I participated in and supported those struggles.

No, my problems aren’t with social justice itself, but with the tactics of the “intersectionalists” who use the term. And so I told the reporter that the modus operandi of social justice intersectionalists (SJIs) involves setting up a hierarchy of oppression, placing each individual and group on their own rung, and then decreeing that those on a given rung have the right to tell all those on lower rungs to shut up in the face of their “lived experience.” Further, individuals on lower rungs who try to say something, or violate the ideological standards of those above, are not just criticized, but demonized, excoriated, or even fired. This stifles discussion, creates a chilling effect, and leads to people simply shutting up about issues involving people higher on the ladder. The combination of the hierarchy and the increasing viciousness and censoriousness of the Authoritarian Left is toxic.

Often these people are explicitly against free speech—or rather, the form they call “hate speech”, which is speech considered offensive to those higher on the ladder than the speaker. As someone who takes a very liberal stand on free speech, I oppose this—and the censorship and deplatforming it creates. I see no downside to allowing free speech as the U.S. courts have defined it, and plenty of upside: the airing of ideas, no matter how odious, will lead to progress.

I’ve long written about the shenanigans of social justice intersectionalists on college campuses. Although those are  rarified institutions, I feel that what happens in those places will seep into society at large. After all, college students will be the leaders of the next generation, and, if they’re sufficiently numerous and sufficiently ideological, won’t (as some people predict) simply temper their views when they enter society after college. Rather, they can change the political tenor of society at large, corrupting classical liberalism into a form of authoritarianism that brooks no dissent. Dissent, after all, is the lifeblood of not just liberalism, but of social progress.

And this is what is happening: we already see the infiltration of SJIs into mainstream Leftist media like the New York Times the New Yorker, and National Public Radio, which are slowly moving towards higher-class versions of the Huffington Post.  It happened during the Obama adminstration when the “Dear Colleague” letter changed the Title IX standard of guilt for campus sexual misconduct from “beyond reasonable doubt” (the legal standard) to “preponderance of the evidence” (50.5% judgement of guilt; close to a coin toss).

And while the Republican administration certainly doesn’t consist of SJIs, the extreme antics of SJIs have, I think, enabled the Right—especially when they call for censorship or silencing of views that deserve to be heard. The silliness of some of these antics is trumpeted daily on sites like Breitbart and The College Fix. It’s not out of the question that SJIs hold some responsibility for turning people toward Trumpism—something far more odious than authoritarian Leftism.

Anyway, I thought of my interview when I read a new piece by Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine,“We all live on campus now.” Over the past few years, Sullivan has moved increasingly leftward and become increasingly vocal about the malfeasance of Trump and the Republicans. In this piece, which I largely agree with, Sullivan describes (with many examples) the spillover of SJI culture into mainstream culture, and decries the results. I’ll give just a few quotes:

When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges — your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression — will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.

And, sure enough, the whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping from the discourse. The idea of individual merit — as opposed to various forms of unearned “privilege” — is increasingly suspect. The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment — untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights — are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites. Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of “hate,” rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency. And anyone who questions these assertions is obviously a white supremacist himself.

Polarization has made this worse — because on the left, moderation now seems like a surrender to white nationalism, and because on the right, white identity politics has overwhelmed moderate conservatism. And Trump plays a critical role. His crude, bigoted version of identity politics seems to require an equal and opposite reaction. And I completely understand this impulse. Living in this period is to experience a daily, even hourly, psychological hazing from the bigot-in-chief. And when this white straight man revels in his torment of those unlike him — and does so with utter impunity among his supporters — there’s a huge temptation to respond in kind. A president who has long treated women, in his words, “like shit,” and bragged about it, is enough to provoke rage in any decent person. But anger is rarely a good frame of mind to pursue the imperatives of reason, let alone to defend the norms of liberal democracy.

And yes, I’m not talking about formal rules — but norms of liberal behavior. One of them is a robust public debate, free from intimidation. Liberals welcome dissent because it’s our surest way to avoid error. Cultural Marxists fear dissent because they believe it can do harm to others’ feelings and help sustain existing identity-based power structures. Yes, this is not about the First Amendment. The government is not preventing anyone from speaking. But it is about the spirit of the First Amendment.

Sullivan then gives example after example of the transfer of SJI culture into mainsteam culture; you can read the piece to see them (you’ll already know many of them). But his most thoughtful quote is at the end of his piece, which I’ve put in bold:

Look: I don’t doubt the good intentions of the new identity politics — to expand the opportunities for people previously excluded. I favor a politics that never discriminates against someone for immutable characteristics — and tries to make sure that as many people as possible feel they have access to our liberal democracy. But what we have now is far more than the liberal project of integrating minorities. It comes close to an attack on the liberal project itself. Marxism with a patina of liberalism on top is still Marxism — and it’s as hostile to the idea of a free society as white nationalism is. So if you wonder why our discourse is now so freighted with fear, why so many choose silence as the path of least resistance, or why the core concepts of a liberal society — the individual’s uniqueness, the primacy of reason, the protection of due process, an objective truth — are so besieged, this is one of the reasons.

The goal of our culture now is not the emancipation of the individual from the group, but the permanent definition of the individual by the group. We used to call this bigotry. Now we call it being woke. You see: We are all on campus now.

Sullivan’s piece sounded familiar, and, sure enough, it’s similar in both ideas and examples to a piece from the Boston Globe on January 26, “How campus politics hijacked American politics.” (I’m not implying plagiarism here–just writing about the Zeitgeist.)  Both pieces are worth reading, and both raise the alarm that the tactics of identity-politics Leftism might discredit the traditional Left, and further entrench Republicans as our political masters.