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There are times when you feel like a dam is bursting, and this is one of them. As an illiberal, race-obsessive politics begins to take over the mainstream, from college campuses to big corporations, more and more voices are finding the courage to so “no” to it, to call out call-out culture.
Consider a tweetstorm sent out over the weekend by Sean Ono Lennon, a musician and songwriter but best known as the son of Yoko Ono and John Lennon—a “progressive” icon if ever there was one.
Lennon said what is probably on a lot of our minds: “It’s not working.”
I grew up in a time when there was zero political correctness. I literally saw political correctness being invented right in front of me (at certain schools) and then distributed and eventually enforced as a mindset and ideology. I want to say that one might have imagined at the time that the politically correct mindset and resulting implementation and enforcement would lead to a better society in which cultures and peoples were more integrated and more mutually understanding.
But it is often the case that seemingly obvious solutions fail and even make matters worse—I often think about the terrible track record we have in science of artificially modifying an ecosystem in order to “re-balance” a problem we created but ultimately wind up making things worse by creating bigger unforeseen problems. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” We’ve been trying this kind of morality policing for awhile now and I would posit things are arguably getting worse….
When I grew up New York truly felt like a melting pot. It wasn’t perfect, but people did not self-segregate along tribal lines to the degree that I am seeing today. There is something wrong with the strategy and direction we have chosen, in academia, in politics, and elsewhere.
It’s not working. And to be clear I am not blaming all of the bad things we are seeing in culture today on political correctness.… I am simply saying we should check our strategy if we are not getting the results we intended. I don’t know what the solution is, but I suspect that over sensitizing people to arbitrary characteristics like skin color may be doing more harm than good.
I know very well that the idea of being “color blind” is out of fashion, that MLK’s vision of character over skin color is considered to be naive. But that vision surely made our society better. I’m not sure the modern vision of “race consciousness” is making things better.
There’s more, and you should read the whole thread.
What is notable here is just the honesty of being willing to observe the results—that the more “antiracism” we get, the more racial conflict we seem to have—and to start asking big questions. Enough people do that and the dam will definitely break.
Meanwhile, we got a nasty reminder of what illiberalism looks like and how urgent a threat it poses.
The regime of Belarussian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, often hailed as “Europe’s last dictator”—or the first of their return—diverted a Ryanair passenger jet on its way from Athens to Vilnius, citing a fake bomb threat and forcing it to land in Minsk. Why? So Lukashenko’s operatives, who still call themselves the KGB, could arrest one of the passengers, opposition blogger Roman Protasevich.
Ryanair’s CEO called this “state-sponsored hijacking” and the foreign minister of Ireland, where Ryanair is based, called it “aviation piracy.” I would also note that this undermines international efforts against terrorism by using a fake terror threat as cover to kidnap a political opponent.
It is a reminder of the dangerous world to which a resurgence of authoritarianism is returning us: one in which writing is a capital crime, passenger jets may be forced down by fighter jets, one in which the rule of law is openly and flagrantly flouted—and most of all, a world in which dictatorships extend their reach to those who believed themselves to be protected by the guarantees of the free societies in which they lived. Protasevich was flying from Greece to Lithuania on an Irish airline and should thus have enjoyed the protection of all of these countries and of the European Union—and for that matter, the protection of NATO, of which Greece and Lithuania are both members.
We have had enough domestic shocks to realize that authoritarian dictatorship is not just a threat “over there.” But this is a reminder that without extremely firm pushback, the threat over there will attempt to assert itself here, and the reconstitution of illiberal ideologies in places like Belarus and Russia will ultimately threaten all us.