The People's Front of Judea

 Monty Python's bit about the People's Front of Judea remains an incisive satire of Leftist politics despite being 40 years old. The reason is that there are left and right psychologies. If you are more reliant and respectful of hierarchies, you are more likely to be right wing. If you are more tolerant of openness, you are more likely to be left wing. Obviously, the further left you go, the closer you get to anarchy and the further right you go, the closer you get to fascism, but there is a grey area in between those extremes.

Matthew Yglesias's latest missive on the subject of the intellectual problems with some of the anti-racist consultants focuses on Tema Okun. In it, he focuses on the fact that what Okun is attacking are hallmarks of more traditional ways of thinking and structuring societies. She describes efforts to put results over process as inherently racist. Because society is systematically racist, anything that society has produced in inherently racist. So teaching grammar is racist. 

As Yglesias notes, some of the things she decries are, in fact, bad. Perfectionism and closed-minded obedience to authority can be damaging, but they are not "racist." However, if you can convincingly label something as racist, you basically shutdown any criticism of the criticism. Basically, if we take Okun and others as being intensely anti-hierarchical, then their positions make sense, but they are also fundamentally unworkable. Label them as "anti-racist" and suddenly people will pay attention.

There is a reason anarchism fails. Society is based around rules, and those rules undergo constant negotiation among the members of that society. Sometimes those rules stifle people. Sometimes those rules are unfair. Sometimes those rules are indeed racist. We should get rid of racist rules!

However, let's look at a slide from Okun's work:

Most of these are simply things taken too far and they are all basically an argument against people having authority by simply labelling decision making as authoritarian. Yglesias calls this an almost perfect COINTELPRO psy-op designed to make progressive organizations impossible to function. It does suck when decisions are made by my bosses that impact my life and work. I would like it if that didn't happen. However, the absence of decision making is arguably worse.

The most famous recent attempt at anarchism was that Portland autonomous zone that grew from a subset of people protesting police brutality towards Black people, but were really just anarchists who hate cops. They wound up shooting Black people. Meanwhile, people were alarmed at how well Trump did amongst Hispanic and Black voters, given how empirically racist he is. While I believe much of that was simply the advantage of incumbency, both incumbency and "Defund the Police" alarmed a certain segment of Black and Brown communities who rely on police to keep some sense of order (or are themselves police). Anti-hierarchical thinking is not, itself, a racial characteristic.  

In effect, we are looking at the intellectual mindset of a certain type of White (Okun is White) Progressive as a default for anti-racism, but it seems more like anti-authoritarianism smuggled in under the laudable goal of fighting racism. And if you argue against this...well, you have a racist mindset.

Some of this is simply the way a lot of energy on the Left is spent creating bizarre neologisms like "Birthing People" to describe mothers. In his analysis of his friend objecting to "Birthing People," Paul Campos does admit that there is a problem, but I think he identifies the wrong one. Here's the passage:

These arguments aren’t completely baseless — people do in fact have anxieties about unintentionally giving offense because of shifting semantic practices — but they are almost always wildly overstated. I really like Bill, and very much admire how he was willing to pretty much upend his entire political world view in response to America’s right wing horrorshow. Nevertheless, is he really worried that he, or people like him, will get criticized for not using the term “birthing people” instead of “mothers?” Is this actually going to happen to anybody?

The issue is that, yes, you will, and secondly, this is really, really bad politics - if by politics we mean the competition for power. 

There is a very laudable goal in wanting to reckon with and address centuries of systemic racism in this country. While there are African Americans and other minority groups who hold those Anti-Black racist ideas, too, I think we are safe in admitting that the overwhelming problems with racism in America (and Europe) is White people. 

So the project needs to be: have fewer racist White people. 

You're not going to do that this way. 

When I think about successful movements by historically disadvantaged groups, they almost always appealed to some sort of universal value. The reason MLK and the Civil Rights Movement was successful in winning voting rights was because voting is a central value and practice of equal citizenship, which should have been American practice all along. Similarly, "same sex marriage" was unpopular, but "marriage equality" and "love is love" were more popular. 

Ultimately, successful politics is about addition, and the strange, Chomksyite focus on narrowly parsing language to reflect academic standards of increasingly Byzantine terminology is basically the Judean People's Front arguing about what to argue about. It's politics by division.

Will a compromise police reform bill end racism in America? Of course not, but neither will Defunding the Police. That compromise bill will very likely lead to fewer African Americans dying at the hands of police, though, and I consider that a good thing. 

In the year since George Floyd, my school has had to reckon with the fact that we don't address or see certain racist behaviors in our midst. There was an Instagram account set up to air these problems, and it was incredibly painful to read. We have done a lot of "training" on this issue, and some of it is valuable in shining a light on blindspots that we have as an overwhelmingly White faculty. However, the biggest problem we have is that we have a handful of racist and racial insensitive rich White kids who feel no qualms about behaving really, really badly. 

In order to make our school less racist, we have to address student behavior. There are certainly things we need to do differently as a faculty and we have worked a lot over the past year to do that. Has it been successful? I hardly know. Have we reached the students that we most need to reach? I think the answer has to be a firm no. 

Much of this work is basically appealing to people who are already concerned about racism. It STARTS from the position that America - and therefore our school - is inherently racist and goes from there. And parts of our school ARE inherently racist. That's not an unreasonable position, but it is not a universally shared position. The problem with too much of the Anti-Racism training is it spends a great deal of time thinking it can change certain aspects of language, when they first need to reach the very people who are causing most of the problems. It is, in fact, the sort of perfectionism that Okun decries.

A lot of this is rambling over a lot of terrain, so I'll try and summarize. 

- Political perspective is a combination of cultural identifier and psychology, and Leftist politics has a definite psychology.
- The anti-hierarchical psychology is using a needed moment about racism to advance an agenda that has little to do with racism.
- By focusing on narrow, semantic distinctions (Faculty Lounge Politics, in James Carville's phrase) the very agenda of anti-racism misses the ability to practice "politics of addition" and instead falls into the traditional left-wing trap of "politics of division."

I can only write this, because no one reads this blog. If I were to advance this position as a White man - sorry, White, cisgendered, heterosexual man, we have to keep drawing those lines - in a faculty meeting, I honestly don't know what would happen to my career.