SJW culture: Dormant, not Dead

YouTuber Prince of Queens is convinced that SJW culture is going to vanish quickly, as though it had never existed.  I wish I could agree with this.  I'd like to see that happen, but doubt we'll be so lucky.  But they are past the peak of their vigor and influence, and will enter a phase of decline, rather like the religious right did after Obama became president.  They've made too many enemies now to have any chance of sustaining the momentum they had in the 2011 to 2016 time frame.  Good news.  In light of what's now in the White House, congress and most state legislatures, I'm finding the enthusiasm to celebrate hard to muster.  Why am I afraid I'll be wishing we had Obama and the SJWs back long before 2020 rolls around?

But few things ever truly end up being dead and gone forever in American politics.  Trends tend to be cyclical rather than linear.  While history never repeats itself precisely, recurring patterns are the rule rather than the exception.  We've seen stuff like the SJWs before, and we'll see them again.  So don't hang up those guns just yet, Prince of Queens.  We'll be needing your vigorous opposition to regressive leftism for a while yet.

The SJW movement itself wasn't new.  It innovated in some key respects compared to previously, but its overall ideology is, at its most innovative, old wine in a new bottle.  Or rather a mixture of old wines.  Look at these Antifa rioters or Black Lives Matter.   We've seen it before.  In fact, earlier incarnations of these were, if anything, more radical.  Look at the Weather Underground or the Black Panthers of the 1970s.  The Maoist student groups.  Feminism too went through a phase of radicalism in the 1970s, up to the point that many of them actually physically separated from mainstream culture and moved onto women-only communes.  If only more of them would do this today.  You can't say they didn't put their money where their mouth is, though.

In fact, a long look at American history shows a 30 to 40 year cycle - give or take a few years - of growing idealism, explosive radicalism, a descent into disillusionment and nihilism and finally retreat on the radical left.  The real reason for this is actually quite simple.  Radicalism is hard.  It's tiring.  Imagine being an Antifa guy who's been swept into this culture of intersectionality, postmodernism, the progressive stack, and so on.  It's a very hard life.  Very austere.  So many everyday actions and things we take for granted are seen as oppressive or "problematic" in some form or another.  It's a rare soul that can keep it up indefinitely, especially after a serious setback.  Like the presidential election results of 1968 or 2016.

And it's always been that way.  In fact, our Berkeley Antifa member of 2017 has it easy compared to most radicals in American history.  The early 2nd wave feminists went through it in the 70s.  When “the personal became the political” in the burgeoning body of feminist theory, in-group policing of one another’s personal lives became quite extensive – to the point where even activist’s sex lives were called out by movement purists who infamously equated sexual and romantic love to rape and enslavement.  This was an understandably hard circle to square for a movement that also insisted that women had a libido to rival that of the male.  

Radical environmentalists - Earth First and groups like that went through similar problems in the 1990s.  Lifestyle demands to eschew the use of fossil fuels, among other things, were incredibly hard to sustain.  Plus, these groups are inevitably absolutely riven with ideological purity, and are prone to paralyzing inefficacy due to preoccupations with consensus decision making and are often hamstrung by bitter divisions over the most paltry matters of doctrine.  People's Front of Judea, anyone?    

Victories are few, seen as being “merely institutional” and serve only to remind the rank and file of just how big a job the road ahead of them is.  Defeats are much more common, and very devastating since radical left groups tend not to have many resources.  Groups are torn apart over leadership disputes.  They're quite often harassed and ridiculed by the outside world and by domestic law enforcement.  The FBI's COINTELPRO was very effective at disrupting these kinds of groups.  The vague and sweeping goals of the movements lend themselves to the often correct assumption  that these goals are simply unattainable. 

Go back further, and you had McCarthyism or the Red Scares.  Further back still, and they were massacred more indiscriminately.  Labor disputes stopped being potentially fatal for strikers only after the New Deal.  Civil rights workers had to wait a few more decades.  Quite a few of them were lynched, found dead or disappeared under suspicious circumstances well into the 1960s, culminating in Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination.  None of this is a lot of fun.  On the grand scheme of things, the online stress suffered by the likes of Zoe Quinn or Lindy West at the hands of 4chan trolls, MRAs or the YouTube Skeptic Community has been very mild.

Taken as a whole, all of this is very exhausting and few people can sustain it for more than a few years. Today's version of it - the intersectional SJWs enjoyed a lot of privileges - how ironic - compared to previous cycles.  Loyal strongholds in the form of humanities and social sciences departments on college campuses, a lot of favorable media bias and so on.  That's quite unusual in the history of western leftism.  Usually the radical left is ignored in the media, if not attacked openly.  

I suspect these perks, such as they were, were part of a Faustian bargain wherein intersectional social justice activism would get some institutional support in exchange for staying away from - or better yet derailing - questions of economics, class and political economy.  The powers that be learned a hard lesson with Martin Luther King Jr, whom they had to assassinate when he started straying away from strict racial equality issues and began to agitate around poverty, worker's rights and economic inequality.   Better to buy out groups like Black Lives Matter well in advance, and save themselves the hassle.   

But the SJWs still had a less than easy go of it, though more of it was their own doing.  There's a lot of tedious legwork that goes into organizing marches, protests and so on.  Especially if it's all grass roots and not funded or directed from above in any real way, though it often was for the SJWs, especially on College campuses. Still, ongoing regimens of meeting attendance and organizing and planning around the schedules of activist members takes time and effort.  After a while, a family and a steady paycheck starts to seem like a better deal for most people.

The period of peak SJW success was predicated on a number of things: a liberal trend in western politics in the late Bush/early Obama years and the rise of social media.  The early SJWs - then attached to the so called new atheist movement, discovered that if you took on a belligerent and macho tone and postured and argued from intimidation - "agree with us or else you're a Nazi" - you could win a lot of arguments without actually having to answer hard questions.  This worked for a while, first when the new atheists deconstructed the religious right, then against white male liberals who didn't know quite how to respond to it all, but generally took claims that it was sexist and racist to argue with the SJWs at face value.  But people quickly grew resentful of what basically amounted to ongoing emotional blackmail for political purposes, and the inevitable backlash that ensued resulted in stuff like GamerGate, the alt-right and Donald Trump. 

For a lot of SJWs, it's just no fun anymore.  Trolling the castration anxieties and sexual insecurities of young white dudes online was fun and easy for its core base of white college educated women.  For a while.  It's not so fun being on the receiving end of the same kind of lambasting coming from black women, or LGBT women.  Intersectionality was intrinsically flawed that way.  Increasingly, people perceive - quite rightly – that as a form of activism, it’s highly ineffective.  There were few tangible results in exchange for what really boils down to competitive victimhood and grievance mongering.  Winning gold in the oppression olympics bore few real benefits.  Plus being the internet's favorite punching bag does get old after a while.

But let’s not rest on our laurels just yet.  When surges of radicalism pass from their summer of idealistic success and into the autumn of mounting nihilism and disillusionment, this is actually when they become the most dangerous.  Like a cornered animal who knows its time is limited, they become desperate and fearful.  This is what drove the LA race riots of the late 1960s, the debacle that was the 1968 democratic party convention, and the rise of the violent Weather underground.  2017 thusfar bears an uncanny resemblance to all of this. 

Rising tensions between Antifa and Trump supporters have the frightening potential to take us to a place not unlike what happened in Italy between the late 1960s and early 1980s, the so called "years of lead" wherein cyclical and retaliatory acts of terrorism between far right and left factions resulted in hundreds of deaths.  Worse still, all the way back to Germany in the 1920s and early 30s.  We all know how that turned out.  Wise and enlightened leadership in Washington would do well to take steps to prevent this.

Did I just say wise and enlightened leadership in Washington?  Ha ha ha!  Yes I did.  Ha ha ha!  What planet would this version of Washington be on, anyway?

Moreover, these waves of radicalism never fail to leave the broader society unchanged.  Indeed, the cyclical pattern of advancing and retreating progressivism is much more a mark of social justice activism working long term rather than failing, even if it never perfectly achieves its objectives and some progress is lost in the more conservative periods.  That said, Eisenhower did not repeal the New Deal, Nixon did not repeal the Civil Rights Act, Reagan did not manage a reversal of Roe v Wade and the eras of Newt Gingrich as House Speaker and George W. Bush as president did not see a retreat of political correctness on college campuses, or even slow its advance into the broader society.  Given this pattern, I would not bet heavily on Trump rescinding gay marriage either.

Indeed, the whole SJW phenomenon is a clear demonstration of the fact that the seeds of racial and gender radicalism that took root on college campuses back in the 1970s never ceased bearing fruit.  Do not mistake dormancy for death.  Come the next season, whether in ten years or thirty, a whole new batch of romanticized militancy will ripen, and we’ll be eating again from its bountiful harvest whether we want to or not.

Ann Coulter to Speak at UC Berkely

Former Clinton secretary of Labor and current professor of public policy at UC Berkeley Robert Reich has spoken well of Berkeley's decision to reschedule rather than prevent entirely a speaking engagement by conservative commentator Ann Coulter.  Reich's words on his Facebook page were eloquent:

Free speech is the central idea of a university. If unpopular views can't be expressed at a university, university education is severely compromised, and the First Amendment is reduced to a popularity contest. 

Speech should not be blocked because it's offensive, provocative, or even hateful. The essence of education is provocation. Students should be able to directly hear and question someone who utters offensive or hateful things so they can understand why such statements are brainless and vacuous, and also gain a deeper appreciation for openness and tolerance. 

The only exception is when hateful speech is calculated to -- and is likely to -- incite violence by others toward groups or people against whom the hateful speech is directed. But even then, universities must make every effort to protect those individuals or groups rather than prevent such speech.   

Other luminaries in the US progressive establishment agree.  Quote Bernie Sanders:

Obviously Ann Coulter’s outrageous ― to my mind, off the wall. But you know, people have a right to give their two cents-worth, give a speech, without fear of violence and intimidation.

To me, it’s a sign of intellectual weakness.  If you can’t ask Ann Coulter in a polite way questions which expose the weakness of her arguments, if all you can do is boo, or shut her down, or prevent her from coming, what does that tell the world?” 

What are you afraid of ― her ideas? Ask her the hard questions.  Confront her intellectually. Booing people down, or intimidating people, or shutting down events, I don’t think that that works in any way.

 This after it was discovered that "groups responsible for recent clashes during demonstrations on campus and throughout the city planned to target Coulter’s event."

Representative  and deputy chair of the DNC, Keith Ellison (D-Minn) agrees:

Absolutely protest these people you don’t like, absolutely write against them, denounce them.  But the solution to bad speech is good speech, the solution to bad speech is more speech. Once you start saying, ‘You can’t talk,’ then whoever’s in power gets to impose that on whoever’s not in power and that’s not good.

The dissenting views turned up in the comments sections on Reich's Facebook page.  There are several stock responses on part of those who would advocate the no-platforming of Coulter, and they are worth considering.

Objection: "Free Speech means that the government cannot regulate your speech, and cannot punish you for it. It does not mean that you are entitled to a platform for that speech, or money for that speech, or an audience for that speech, or that people will not pelt you with tomatoes when issuing such speech."

Response: This is true, as far as it goes.  But the authority to deny a platform, and the authority to provide one, are ultimately the same.  If UC Berkeley has the right to deny Coulter a platform to speak, they also have the right to grant her one.  It looks like they offered to grant her one.  Now what?
 
This is a bogus response.  The right of UC Berkeley to choose who to allow to speak is not the issue here.  The kinds of progressives that raise this objection made perfectly clear their respect for UC Berkeley's right to make these kinds of decisions when they rioted and burned half the campus down in reaction to Milo Yiannopoulos's Feb 2 scheduled speech, among others. Entitled and self righteous regressives reserve for themselves and themselves only the right to decide who may or may not speak.  This is a consummately authoritarian mindset.  Recognize it as such.

Objection: "I think it is easy for people who have historically not been impacted by structural violence to say that people who spill vile from their mouths should speak. It would be a very different if Ann Coulter's rhetoric was her own and did not have any real impact on people however that is not the case. The White Nationalist anti-immigrant words that spill from her mouth have been widely supported and have translated to policies that target people based in their race and have over simplified a problem. The things that she is saying are dangerous and have real life very violent consequences for the Undocumented, Mixed Status people who they affect."

Response: I've seen multiple variations of this idea.  They all boil down to the idea that censoring hate speech is a necessary measure to take to protect the rights of the marginalized.  It is based on what is essentially a slippery slope argument. Which is itself a logical fallacy.  Violent and hateful speech leads to violent and hateful actions, especially on part of the privileged against the marginalized, or so we are told.

I would suggest that the real centers of power and privilege would be those with the authority to decide who may or may not speak.  A common error among those who suggest that oppression and hate are "structural" or "institutional" is that they then proceed to attach the label of "powerful" or "privileged" to identities rather than institutions.  The ears of one marginalized group are thus protected from "hate speech" only by marginalizing another group through censorship.  Censorship has always been the tool of the powerful, never of the marginalized.

Finally, stopping Ann Coulter speaking at UC Berkeley will not stop those who really harbor white nationalist views from having access to those views.  It is not at all hard to access those views online.  No-platforming Coulter only legitimizes the far right's own narratives of victimhood and marginalization.  It is bad strategy for Coulter's opponents to adopt.

Many other responses simply degenerate into "everybody who disagrees with me is evil Hitler."  With all of the vacuous signalling and faux cleverness that so often attend the expression of regressive views, some commenters suggested that "What could have stopped Hitler was 'moar freeze peach!'  Wow.  Just wow.  He mispelled "more" and "free speech."  What cleverness!  What wittiness!  I just can't get past how brilliant the online social justice crowd is!

Does anybody remember when, during the Bush administration, liberals used to say that if we curtail civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism, the terrorists win? If we give into fear, the terrorists win?

That's what Al Qaeda wanted. To make our hatred and fear of them be the cause of our remaking our society in their image: violent, repressive and fundamentalist. A lesson the alt-right would do well to learn.

Now apply that same logic to fascism.

We adopt fascist methods in order to defeat fascism, the fascists win. We censor them, they win. We violently disrupt their meetings, they win.

Do you want to truly defeat fascism and fundamentalism? Do it by openly challenging their ideas. Rather than no-platforming them, give them all the platform in the world and let them hang themselves on their own stupidity. Of course, that also requires good, smart liberals - of the Sam Harris and Bill Maher mold, to step in and rip their ideas to shreds. 

Not so long ago, the likes of Maher and Harris had the religious right on the run. They didn't do this by trying to censor the evangelicals. They did it by making damn good and sure everybody knew exactly what the evangelicals had to say and how utterly ridiculous it was. How hard could it be to do this with the alt-right? If you can't be bothered to prove that Hitler was a complete maniac who slaughtered tens of millions because of utter nonsense racial conspiracy theories, that's just inexcusable intellectual laziness.

But this seems to be too much to ask of a progressive establishment characterized by the twitter social justice mob, who regards unquestioned agreement with their views as being their birthright because "marginalization", rather than their responsibility to win due to sound argument.  Instead, let's contribute to the Hitler mystique by trying to hide and bury his ideas and turn complete poppycock racial pseudoscience into an alluring forbidden fruit. Good thinking!

You try to censor and no platform fascists, you're telling them you're afraid of them. That feeds them. That makes them stronger. You can't stop people from accessing fascist ideas. I can download Mein Kampf right now on PDF. How are you going to no platform that?

You recognize the fact that people turn to extremist politics when they've lost confidence in mainstream politics. That means cleaning up the corruption and getting money out of politics. Actual government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Fascism arose the first time in the 1930s - the height of the great depression. An empty stomach will vote for anyone who promises to change that.  A fearful populace, as the population of Weimar Germany were of the Soviet threat, and a humiliated and shamed populace, as the population of Weimar Germany were after the Versailles Treaty, are more receptive to the honeyed words of demagogues delivering scapegoats and easy answers.   

What you don't do is blame the rise of fascism on the presence of free speech and other civil liberties. That's like blaming the outbreak of war on the existence of peace. They became authoritarian because they weren't authoritarian in the first place? Sure.

As something of an aside, I do think there are are legitimate public safety concerns here.  It is becoming apparent that Berkeley mayor Jesse Arreguin has ties with radical left groups in the Berkeley area.  While he is within his rights to hold whatever views he wishes, it bears mentioning that he also owes a duty of care to the citizens of Berkeley and to the students attending UC Berkeley.  The lack of police presence at the Milo riots and more recent clashes with alt-right counter protesters has been noted.  

Arreguin should be subject to a federal investigation to determine whether he's had a hand in this.  So too should staff and faculty at UC Berkeley, and those found having a hand in inciting or participating in riots should lose their jobs in addition to being subject to prosecution.  Students who participate in or incite riots must face expulsion and charges.  These consequences need to be made clear ahead of time, so that wannabe revolutionaries can think long and hard about how much this ridiculous LARPing is really worth to them.  This in stark contrast with the right to peaceful, non-violent and non-disruptive protest, which must be protected for student, faculty and political representatives alike.

It's worth noting that the violence has been escalating, and that following recent violent clashes, Berkeley antifa has expressed an interest in acquiring guns and learning how to use them.   

This is no laughing matter.  Injuries may now become fatalities.  It is Arreguin's responsibility to deploy Berkeley law enforcement to actually do their jobs and arrest rioters guilty of offenses, on both sides.  If they cannot do this alone, State and Federal officials should be contacted and the National Guard deployed to restore order, if needed.