Check out a podcast I did a little while ago with comedian Lou Perez about how we’re all “Gary” now.
You remember Gary, the Lou Perez character repeatedly forced to “defend” Donald Trump because he just can’t stop himself from correcting inaccurate criticisms of him.
We are all Gary now—caught between the competing hysterical claims of rival factions.
For example, there’s been a certain amount of gaslighting recently about whether the set of ideas that has come to be know as “Critical Race Theory” is being brought into secondary school curricula. Partly, this is due to some looseness about what “Critical Race Theory” means, which is not helped by otherwise useful critics like Christopher Rufo using CRT as a “toxic brand” to be expanded to include “all of the various cultural insanities.” (By contrast, see Helen Pluckrose’s precise and substantive overview of “Critical Social Justice” published in Symposium.)
This then allowed others to respond with a constricted definition of Critical Race Theory, referring only to a very specific area of legal scholarship, something that you would only learn in graduate school, to claim that the whole thing is just a bogeyman.
But this effort was undermined when the National Education Association came out in favor of Critical Race Theory in K-12 education.
At its yearly annual meeting, conducted virtually over the past few days, the NEA adopted New Business Item 39, which essentially calls for the organization to defend the teaching of critical race theory….
Consistent with its defense of CRT, the NEA will also provide a study “that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.” The implication is that these critiques are aspects of critical race theory, which in a weird way makes this an example of the activist left basically accepting the activist right’s new working definition of CRT as “all of the various cultural insanities.”
But here we are as Gary again, forced to “defend” one side and then the other, alternately, as the claims of the partisans keep overshooting the facts.
Thus, the preferred conservative solution to the “various cultural insanities” is legislation intended to enforce the conservatives’ own cultural values on social media and in the schools.
Their attempt to regulate social media has already been shot down on First Amendment grounds in the courts. As for the schools, the must-read for liberals in the last week is a New York Times op-ed by four writers from across the spectrum of liberalism, Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley, and Thomas Chatterton Williams, who describe themselves as (not necessarily in this order) “a progressive, a moderate, a libertarian, and a conservative.” I was particularly struck by the participation of David French, who has spent much of his career litigating against left-wing campus speech codes and identifies this as a right-wing variant of the same idea.
Let’s not mince words about these laws. They are speech codes. They seek to change public education by banning the expression of ideas. Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education, it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression.
There will always be disagreement about any nation’s history. The United States is no exception. If history is to judge the United States as exceptional, it is because we welcome such contestation in our public spaces as part of our unfolding national ethos. It is a violation of this commonly shared vision of America as a nation of free, vigorous and open debate to resort to the apparatus of the government to shut it down.
In other words, the argument is that this is an illiberal answer to an illiberal problem.
In case you were thinking it’s an exaggeration to imply that the right has its eye on using the power of the state to impose its own favored ideology, along comes conservative agitator Charlie Kirk to relieve us of any doubt.
To see how far this sort of thing can be carried by the more determined partisans, consider the reaction by a religious conservative to revelations about mass graves of children at a Canadian school run by the Catholic Church.
First, the context. From the late 19th Century through the late 20th Century, tens of thousands of Indigenous children were forced to live at state-funded boarding schools, ostensibly to better assimilate them into Canadian society. But many of the schools were run by Catholic missionaries whose goal was to use the power of the state to assimilate their charges into the Church. These schools became notorious for abuse and neglect, and the whole system has since been completely dismantled.
But there is no horror that does not have its defenders, and so at The American Conservative, Declan Leary defends the schools because of all the children “Christianized by the union of Church and state.” “[T]he enduring belief of Christians that the Gospel is true and must be spread, is paramount,” he writes, and “everything else is secondary.” This is a succinct statement of the code of the fanatic.
But a note of panic creeps in at the end.
Whatever sacrifices were exacted in pursuit of that grace—the suffocation of a noble pagan culture; an increase in disease and bodily death due to government negligence; even the sundering of natural families—is worth it.
It must be, else two millennia of Christian civilization, in which oceans have been bridged, wars waged, continents conquered, and the lives of a million Jean de Brébeufs given in service to the Lord’s final commandment—Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.—all has been for nought.
Note how fragile this worldview is. It must be regarded as true, no doubt can be permitted, because otherwise believers would have to question all the other atrocities, all the wars and conquests committed in the name of faith, and then they would be doomed to despair.
Somehow, this doesn’t seem like the strident defense it is trying to be.
Now, this is just one person, albeit an associate editor at a moderately prominent conservative publication. But he’s not alone. See my review of Sohrab Ahmari’s new book purporting to defend religious traditionalism by means of knocking down an endless series of straw men for liberalism, in the process offering his own share of defenses of the indefensible.
All of this is a reminder of the profoundly illiberal trends that are being unleashed right now from both sides. Like Gary, we had better be stubborn about keeping our intellectual clarity and be prepared to disentangle, identify, and oppose both challenges.