For example, you can be a powerful high-ranking advisor to the President and spew all sorts of nasty racist garbage, but you can inhabit a world of friendly media and cheering crowds and you'll never feel encumbered by anything. At the same time, you can be a regular Joe at a regular Office and say something mildly eye-brow raising and be fired.
Choose your crowd and you can in fact say whatever you want and pretend you're both a victim and victor. Demanding that a crowd put up with you, well that's a hard sell.
Nothing is being conserved. Today's conservatives are espousing values that sound the same as 2005's liberals, and are not even as conservative as Bill Clinton.
Current public policy reflects the left’s view on these matters, and a new one joins the list every few years.
Cynically phrased, a critique of liberals from progressives would be that liberals are okay dithering and letting injustices stand. A liberal criticism of progressives is that they have adopted an “ends justify the means” philosophy. Additionally liberals might question whether the “ends” are good and on what authority that determination was made.
For much of my life it has felt that progressives and liberals were closely enough aligned to more be interchangeable in practice. But, I think the aforementioned cancel culture is one area where progressives see necessary change, while liberals see a sacrifice of ideals.
I’m not sure my definition of progressive vs. liberal is accurate historically speaking, but this is how I interpret the current left-left divide in at least the US.
> Cynically phrased, a critique of liberals from progressives would be that liberals are okay dithering and letting injustices stand. A liberal criticism of progressives is that they have adopted an “ends justify the means” philosophy. Additionally liberals might question whether the “ends” are good and on what authority that determination was made.
I think this is a very clear and succinct summation. It shows that both sides aren't exactly wrong, but they aren't exactly right either. That's what makes politics hard.
I'm kinda reminded of something I was taught about English Common Law: hundreds of years ago, it was basically the law in England, but it became so focused on consistent application that it ossified and failed to provide legal relief for many clear injustices. When that happened, someone could directly appeal to the King for relief, and out of those appeals developed a Equity, a whole different body of law. There's nothing wrong with consistent application of a process, but I think sometimes some people get so focused on it that they loose sight of the actual goal the process was meant to achieve.
progressives eschew that subtle hypocrisy.
I think that's very much not what 'neo-liberal' means. I think that it means free-market liberalism — where 'liberalism' in the previous clause means 'classical liberalism,' as opposed to socialism, Communism or progressivism.
Many of the neo-liberals were, as I recall, leftists (for U.S. values of, anyway) who fled not conservatism but Communism/socialism as they saw that the math simply didn't work out.
For example, I've heard it argued that the modern success of the LGBT movement can be traced back to Clinton getting a blowie and the dems deflecting from the perjury he committed by making it a public issue of sexual freedom/privacy. I'm not doing the argument justice here, but I tend to give it a bit of weight because the left is so comically bad at "sex positivity" that it's barely more than a new flavor of sex negativity with different boundaries.
There is more than one dimension in American culture or politics.
There are two political parties. That doesn't mean there are two groups, nor two orthodoxies.
To try to compress American culture to one dimension is rarely useful and often a disservice to peoples' actual opinions or beliefs.
This is fundamentally true for everything in the universe. Every single category breaks down. Even if I were to drill down into, say, five dimensions, your basic argument would still hold true.
If we took the raw complexity of reality into consideration, we'd never be able to move forward because we'd be stuck in an endless debate over categorization. It's why I included caveats at both the beginning and the end of my statement.
Yes, but that's neither here nor there, if most of public discourse falls along two, at best three, lines.
>To try to compress American culture to one dimension is rarely useful and often a disservice to peoples' actual opinions or beliefs.
On the contrary, it's a very useful proxy, and the only sane way to make sense of a stream of 40% opinions towards one direction, 40% towards another, and some opinions all over the place... You prune the statistically irrelevant ones...
and for politicians, this is the greatest job security they could ever imagine. probably 50%, if not far more, of their votes are gained simply via the letter next to their name. really, does any politician actually care about any national or local issues? why would they even waste energy to think about it. simply follow their tribe's consensus and ensure self preservation, salary, perks, social status and power.
This is a good description for something I have experienced emotionally for some time, but couldn't put a finger on until very recently.
I grew up in the South and moved out (escaped?) in large part to get away from people whose belief system didn't align with my own. I consider myself "liberal" in the sense that I am anti-hierarchical and think people with a diverse range of beliefs, preferences, and lifestyles deserve dignity and to live their lives unencumbered from shame.
When I was younger, that's what the liberal side felt like. Gay, black, woman, atheist, trans, just, like, really into LARPing? Whatever, fly your freak flag and the liberal camp is happy to have you. Where the conservative tribe demanded that you must submit to the authority and ideally be white, Christian, straight, and male, the liberal side said all are welcome. It felt welcoming. There were no purity tests because the whole concept of purity tests was antithetical to the philosophy. The whole shtick was that there was no out-group.
But that's not what it feels like now. If you are not sufficiently liberal/progressive in all the right ways, you risk being shunned. I think this is a reaction to the paradox of intolerance and the rise of the alt-right/authoritarianism/fascism/whatever the hell you want to call what's going on now.
Once you have a tribe that clearly considers you to be the out-group relative to them, it becomes very hard to not close ranks and define them to be your out-group. When you are actually, literally, under attack by an enemy group, accurate tribal signifiers are a necessity to determine who is a threat and who is not.
I don't know if there's an easy way to walk this back. Maybe if fascism and white supremacy die back things will settle down. It's a hard time for those of us who aren't naturally wired to be fighters.
These roughly align with a lot of other social dichotomies (e.g. they map approximately to right/left, respectively) in the US, although not quite coterminously. There’s a lot of fuzzy leakage around the edges on a lot of issues that primarily map directly to this split.
At least in America, at one time people could say, "I don't believe in everything x wants, but I do agree with core policies a, b and c and so I'm voting for them." Today we are much more polarized and people desperate for a political home may start internalizing and adopting policies they may not totally agree with just so they don't feel left out in the middle.
Cancel culture makes harder, if not impossible, to be in the middle. Are you against racism, but not for the specific BLM organization? You're opinion is not acceptable to the Democratic/politic-left. Is that a hill you're going to die on? If not, you move on and ignore it.
This gets into some pretty dangerous territory because now you cannot say certain beliefs publicly without fear of ostracization from your political home. You may be able to keep that belief secret, or you may just start to believe the opposite. Viewpoints within each false-dichotomy lose their diversity, and both sides could bend, consciously and subconsciously, to a narrow, homogeneous world view.
"anti-PC" is power retaliating against change, and "woke" is the disenfranchised calling for change. conservative and progressive also map to this same dichotomy.
Note that label of science has been as politicized ( to the detriment of all of us ) as pretty much everything else. If you dare to question "Science!", you are, by default, backwood white trash racist or something along those lines, which happens to ignore that science encourages healthy debate and constantly questions underlying assumptions. This is literally how we get progress.
Now, there is an argument to be made that words of a PhD carry more weight than FB educated person, but I think everyone here met a person with no formal education, who was still sharper than most people in the room ( and vice versa, an educated person arguing that black is white and getting himself killed crossing the next pedestrian crossing ).
TLDR; "Science!" is one such orthodoxy.
In science, people hold many beliefs that have already been proven beyond a reasonable doubt and are working diligently to prove others.
This might be true for things like the conventional laws of physics. But there are many things scientists do not agree or argue over. Quantum physics and string theory are two examples. The 1994 book The Bell Curve is another example from social sciences.
And today, we have grave reproducibility crises in science. We have people trying to apply rules about the psychological and metaphysical worlds into the doctrine of hard science. In the current crisis, we have conflicting papers published almost every week, and there is a deep political climate that cannot be denied behind much of the current research.
Even for thing that we can agree on work under experiment, like a certain class of drug, we can't explain WHY it works. We can say drug x will stop a heart attack 99% of the time and is generally considered safe in 99% of human beings, but often we're guess at the very specific interactions, based on what we see in labs, because we have no real introspection into all the complex things happening at the micro-level within the incredible complex cell systems inside of us.
Maybe one day we'll be able to see what happens at that microlevel in human bodies, and that could lead us to discover the drug isn't working at all the way we thought it was.
Science is iterative.
Maybe I'm confused. Are you using _The Bell Curve_ as an example of pseudo-scientific pop publication gone wrong, or as a worthy scientific viewpoint which is worthy of debate and was unfairly crucified in academia?
Today, science has certainly become a new belief system over certain publications and ideas over others. In the US, there is no constitution protection for "science," only for religion. Many of the things currently placed under the umbrella of science are really religious beliefs (you could even argue to some extent that all scientific beliefs are religious; even if some things, like the laws of physics, can be proven to be absolutely true 100% of the time) and should be looked at under the lens of the 1st amendment, when they're clearly not.
What I find really distasteful is when people start with an argument like yours, then use it to argue their pet issue. eg to rail against the central dogma of genetics, the impossibility of evolution, or complain about "reproducibility/observability" and try to tear down whole areas of scientific research.
The "Progressive" camp, that has a few sub-genres that prioritize or disagree on different things.
The "Conservative" camp, that is more consistent at a high level.
The problem is that the more extreme factions in both tribes wield the power and tend to punish what they see as heresy within their own camps before going after the other tribe. Most groups treat apostates worse than those who never believed in the first place.
They just are not the same level of extreme. Quite the opposite, the democratic party is significantly more choosing toward center figures.
It also tend to choose less extreme tactics to get their way - there was no democratic goverment shutdown etc.
Having president, majority of supreme court, senate or house suggests you are not cornered. And both parties are represented in those.
Neither of them is president, not even nominated and neither managed to control the party. Neither sets agenda in any way.
The other voted the more extreme element for president.
Or maybe they drive very little.
As that calms down, compromises will be made and order will return. Recovery from economic catastrophe will be the priority.
The other one is harder to define because it's essentially not the social justice worldview.
In America, you tend to find the social justice worldview in urban and coastal areas, and you tend to find the latter in rural, interior locations.
Obviously this generalization breaks down in many ways, so [insert all the caveats].
My main beef with this is that even the philosophical father of social justice, John Rawls, would not recognize the means by which this movement is trying to achieve its ends as any form of justice and in any way aligned with his original position and veil of ignorance thought experiment.
The movement as currently practiced is one grand perversion with all the hallmarks of other populist illiberal (but believe they are liberal) movements that resulted in indisputable injustice.
Sit down, shut up, your crown bequeathe.
Group B would say that they "Support Free Speech". Group B would also say that people who disagree with Group B are Maoists
People distort it as if it was some kind of sport. You either like this team or the other, you are either with us, or against us. And they defend every little thing, even if they know it's wrong, because it's their team.
In regards to opinion safety the answer is clear: you don't get fired in a twitter shitstorm for expressing left-wing orthodoxy.
So the door does swing both ways, but I do agree that the majority of "cancellations" nowadays are coming from one side.
Three of my high school teachers were fired for being gay. One of them was outed by a parent who lived next door.
I was fired from my first job (at a secular for-profit company) for not tithing.
High-profile social media blowups are really trivial compared to the work-a-day homophobia and borderline theocracy that pervades vast swathes of America's land mass.
This is where I sort of miss the boat on the concern about cancel culture. Yes, those people shouldn't lose their jobs for expressing themselves. But also, where the hell has all this outrage been while LGBT people have been systematically excluded from any public-facing employment in huge swathes of the country?
[1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-ad...
[2] https://www.lgbtmap.org/file/LGBT-Workers-3-Pager-FINAL.pdf
If some sort of culture deems you impure, you're likely to be outcast. Different people just happen to run up against different cultures.
Discrimination based on immutable attributes is inherently much more unfair, but unfairness is still a battle waged on many fronts.
There's plenty of leftist fights. Trots vs Leninists, Authoritarians vs Anarcho-syndicalists, Red Scare vs TrueAnon, etc.
Insisting on politeness about guilt-free homosexuality or abortion isn't going to get you very far in many particularly conservative Presbyterian churches or Baptist colleges.
Note well: those institutions explicitly instruct people to "love thy neighbor" and to "not cast stones". Those calls are just empirically only so effective and there will always be a significant percentage of people for whom those commandments don't work.
I therefore believe that politeness is probably a similarly ineffective solution to newer forms of orthodoxy (e.g., cancel culture).
Consider conservative college campuses. Not because I don't believe cancel culture exists at Harvard or wherever, but because it's a point of reference that is much more numerous and carries similar culture power within certain geographies/communities. In many of these institutions:
1. being an openly gay student can result in being expelled (or at least suspended and bullied into leaving by admin)
2. faculty need to submit statements of faith in their job applications. These statements of faith are not aptly named, since they're also political ideology litmus tests. E.g., supporting abortion publicly would definitely be cause for dismissal.
None of this is to dismiss or deny that maybe Harvard has its own orthodoxy, but I just have zero percent trust in someone like Jerry Falwell waxing poetic about free speech or cancel culture. His university cancels gay people.
The orthodoxy of silicon valley and elite college campuses exist in only a few relatively small parts of the country that are over-represented in places like HN.
I'm pointing this out for a specific reason: stifling social norms are nothing new. If you leave those places where implicit restriction on speech is a relatively new phenomenon and go to places where unspoken norms about what can/cannot be said has been the de facto norm for hundreds of years, you see why "simply giving it a name" and calls to "being polite" aren't going to help.
Try going to a conservative christian university and pointing out that "abortion is murder" is "orthodoxy" and that people who believe it are exercising an "orthodox privilege" not available to people who believe "abortion is a human right".
It an _NOT_ saying that cancel culture isn't a problem. It's more that it's _always_ been a problem, for hundreds of years, just not from the left in the USA until recently, and _history is a good tutor_.
The proposed solution probably isn't going to work.
I think its appropriate to advocate for gay students at these private schools. But I do question its significance to the economy, society, and public life relative to the university system. And constraining this problem to universities or silicon valley does it a disservice. This is becoming a general, corporate problem.
That's absolutely true, but the influence on society and the country of both aren't really the same.
The point is that if you say "X is how you address corruption" and "X" doesn't work even for mayors of small towns, then there's a good reason to think "X" also won't work in the president's office.
I believe the same is true for educational institutions. The one that will be visited by next account manager of the local branch of a national bank has less damage potential than the one that will be visited by the next CEO of that bank, the next President and the judges on the Supreme Court.
wheaton cedarville liberty byu gove city college of the ozarks point loma king's college convenant oral roberts...
Brand recognition is not always a good measure of power. Those institutions have a lot more cultural/political power in many circles than harvard.
Do you really doubt that the BYU alumni network is a lot more powerful than the Harvard alumni network in SLC, for example?
The same is true for other colleges in their own conservative regions.
To pick a random and specific example of an institution I consider more powerful than Harvard, how about... the Spanish Army?
That's like comparing GDP to net worth. It's not completely useless, but caveat emptor when comparing a first derivative to a zeroth derivative.
But yeah. The Spanish Military a strange example because a) it really depends on the community and b) we're talking about different types of power.
In terms of soft/cultural power, the Spanish Army might well be more influential than Harvard in Spain. But, again, only in a weird apples-and-oranges way.
I think maybe parent might have meant in terms of hard power. In a complete vacuum, the Spanish Army could probably topple the statue of John Harvard. But, again, it's completely unclear to me why that would be a useful/interesting/anything-other-than-amusing comparison.
The example I used in another thread, which I think actually works: In Utah, BYU is almost certainly more prestigious and powerful than Harvard.
I literally said that _three different times_ in my post:
>> None of this is to dismiss or deny that maybe Harvard has its own orthodoxy
>> The orthodoxy of silicon valley and elite college campuses
>> Not because I don't believe this happens at Harvard or wherever
That's not the point. That point is that the proposed solution -- calling out an "orthodox privilege" and insisting on politeness -- is not going to work. How do I know? Because "cancel culture" is not even close to new. It's existed on college campuses, in media, etc. for hundreds of years on the right. History is a tutor for what will/won't work.
If UC Berkeley (say) was called "UC Berkeley Marxist College" then perhaps people would have a better idea of what to expect.
Universities are always little labs for weird behavior and disputes, it's part of their nature. There's always something that puts conservative farmers or whatever in a twist. In the Nixon era it was anti-war protestors. In the 90s it was affirmative action. Today, it's the various gender/sexuality issues.
The politics of universities is such that these movements grow and succeed, then become the power brokers. A family member was a leader in LGBT causes on campus in the 90s -- very much fighting an uphill battle for attention, respect and resources. Today, that org is very powerful and alumni of the 90s version are all middle aged folks in positions of real power.
We have two loud extremes but, no, it's not a dichotomy. In particular, we need to distinguish between progressivism and old school liberalism since they have different core principles.
For any American trying to figure out what I'm talking about, there's a couple of Facebook groups that routinely explore this and related effects: "Things only Americans think are debatable" and "oh great, now we have to explain it for the americans."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA
He talks about how it was once offensive to translate the Bible into English, or suggest God didn't exist, or suggest there was nothing wrong with homosexuality. People who suggested such things were deplatformed, and sometimes arrested or killed, but those who considered themselves enlightened and on the side of the righteous, the virtuous, the good.
ML King beat women and Gandhi slept naked with his nieces to see if he could resist lust. They also led millions of people to freedom. You're attacking the person here, and not his argument. That's called ad hominem.