Photo by Dragos Gontariu on Unsplash
Three pieces from the New York Times have got me thinking today. You'll need a subscription to read them if you're out of free content, so I'll briefly summarize them below.
First, Why Liz Cheney Matters by David Leonhart. (FYI, I was able to read this free via email by signing up for the Morning Newsletter.) This piece identifies that because Rep. Cheney "is a pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-regulation, deeply conservative Republican," her stance on "the Big Lie" and her defense of democracy matters. It makes the point that there are a lot of Americans who identify with this conservative ideology but are in conflict with the far-right idea that the election is stolen and that Donald Trump is America's new messiah.
I listened to Potomac Watch podcast by the Wall Street Journal in which they criticized Cheney for stirring the waters, responding to Trump, and in general not allowing the Republican Party to ignore what they've caused with regard to political division and the Capitol Riot, which is causing an interparty split that Republicans are trying to patch up. To be fair, they also blamed Donald Trump for his refusal to shut up.
But this is missing the point. Cheney is exposing division that exists, and it's not going to go away. This is, at its most extreme, an attempt at thought control of the American people. "We will not give you an option to criticize Donald Trump or uphold the election in this party." However, it's an interesting glimpse into the political party mindset that I believe plagues both parties to a certain extent, but Republicans to the extreme: It's more important to shut up and toe the party line than it is to have debate. It's more important to have the appearance of unity than the honesty of disagreement.
In that vein, this article also points to another that criticizes Democrats for their inability to tolerate debate, referred to as "left wing illiberalism." Although it seems clear that "cancel culture" has become an essentially meaningless term wielded by whomever wants to defend their own point of view, this article makes a very good point, calling by name the unease I and others have felt at hearing the "you shouldn't even ask" position shut people down over and over again.
Let me say that there is a time and place for this but also that if my good friends hadn't patiently continued to hear my ignorant, well-intentioned thoughts over the years, I might never have changed them. Hate and harassment on social media, however, is not OK. I generally operate by the rule that if I'm not sure of my position on something, I usually don't talk about it in public. A lot of people could do well by taking this to heart.
This is one of the best parts, and something liberals and progressives should take seriously:
Writing in the 1990s, at a time when feminists like Catharine MacKinnon sought to curtail free speech in the name of equality, the great left-libertarian Ellen Willis described how progressive movements sow the seeds of their own destruction when they become censorious. It’s impossible, Willis wrote, “to censor the speech of the dominant without stifling debate among all social groups and reinforcing orthodoxy within left movements. Under such conditions a movement can neither integrate new ideas nor build support based on genuine transformations of consciousness rather than guilt or fear of ostracism.”
...
Even sympathetic people will come to resent a left that refuses to make distinctions between deliberate slurs, awkward mistakes and legitimate disagreements. Cowing people is not the same as converting them.
In this article, Elizabeth Goldberg also makes the interesting point that those concerned with the ramifications of cancel culture in the workplace (typically conservatives, or conservative-leaning moderates) should do more to strengthen worker protections. Once again, we come across an ideological contradiction that the right holds firmly in the space of cognitive dissonance.
(There's this wonderful piece that I have to sneak in here: No, You're Not Getting Canceled for Being a Conservative.)
Also there's this great quote: Because Trump poisons everything he touches, his movement’s hypocritical embrace of the mantle of free speech threatens to devalue it, turning it into the rhetorical equivalent of “All Lives Matter.”
Finally, we have...Covid. God, I am sick of talking about Covid. Yet here we are.
Covid's Partisan Errors, also by David Leonhart, however, is the piece I've been looking for to make sense of how I feel about what's going on with the whole pandemic debate. As a longtime distruster of mainstream medical advice and governmental health agency advice, I have felt like I'm on a seesaw with all the contradictory recommendations out there. It seems clear to me that if the CDC and the White House actually know what they're talking about with regard to Covid, they are doing the best job imaginable to hide that fact from the American people.
Unsurprisingly, as a result "both liberals and conservatives suffer from misperceptions about the pandemic—in opposite directions," according to a Gallup and Franklin Templeton study this article cites. Generally, Republicans have their facts wrong, and Democrats have a grossly overexaggerated sense of the risk and severity of Covid.
I won't go into my own thoughts except that this seems like a situation where a little common sense and big-picture perspective on both sides would have gone a long way.
That's it for Thoughts for Thursday! Email me at flanneryacarson @ the google email with your responses!
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