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Alla Nazimova in Salome (1923), via
Pinterest.
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The trouble right now is intellectual segregationism, where conservatives
are excluded from academic life, working class voices are excluded from
mainstream media, the Marxist left and theological right are marginalized,
groupthink is practiced by all, and writers are expected to act as the
representatives of a group, the left even more conformist than the right,
and 62% of Americans are afraid to share their beliefs. Fortunately there's
an obvious solution, in which the voices of nonconformity exclude everybody
who doesn't want to subscribe to their SubStack or Patreon site and make
lots of money from their self-selecting audiences.
It's intellectual feudalism replacing intellectual capitalism, a landscape
dotted with castles dominated by figures of daring and resistance like Yascha
Mounk, Andrew Sullivan, Judd Legum, Matt Taibbi, Jonah Goldberg, and David
French defending themselves from behind their moats and battlements. That'll
show those segregationists. Or, as David Brooks says,
Online writers don’t have to chase clicks by writing about whatever Trump
tweeted 15 seconds ago. They can build deep relationships with the few
rather than trying to affirm or titillate the many.
I would like
the record to show
that Judd Legum did not leave ThinkProgress, which he founded, because of
its relentless cancel culture, but because he got sick of being an editor in
chief, with which I can certainly sympathize:
I started out in this because I really got interested in blogs. I like
the work, the topic, the subjects, I like thinking about it. And when you
have a newsroom that’s 40 people, it’s great because you can do so much
stuff. But I found more and more of my time was not spent doing
substantive work, but managing a 40-person organization, which as it turns
out, having never done it before, is a lot of work.
And he seems to like writing about whatever Trump tweeted 15 seconds ago, to
his own
440,000 Twitter followers.
At the other end of the scale, I have my own tiny world of castle culture
subscriptions (
Edroso at SubStack
and
@dick_nixon, who is
actually the distinguished playwright Justin Sherin, at Patreon), where being
among a few really is part of the pleasure, and which is really a natural
outgrowth of the post-imperial anarchy of blogdom. I might well do it myself
if I had any confidence I could get and hold on to 500 subscribers, but I'm
probably having more fun this way.
Sullivan and Taibbi, on the other hand, have been looking to monetize
themselves in between uncomfortable bouts of being employed for decades (when
Taibbi was chastising Hillary Clinton for giving paid talks to Goldman Sachs
employees I looked up his own Speakers Bureau page, where he hawks his
repertoire of two speeches he is ready to dispense to anyone who pays the
fee), are definitely not doing anything new, and as I think I must have said
long ago the whole project of "subscribe to my newsletter"—of private
periodical opinionation on public matters—goes back to 18th-century England
and Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and my own beloved Dr. Samuel Johnson (who
said, sensibly, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money").
Or even anything wrong. What I have against Taibbi and Sullivan isn't the way
they make their hobbies work financially but the fact that they're lazy, bad
writers incapable of self-criticism or growth. Which brings us back to David
Brooks, of course.
I'm really getting sick of the complaint about conservatives being excluded
from academic life, when the reason there are so few conservative professors
in fields like comparative literature and sociology is plainly that
conservatives don't like studying those things, as
Joshua Dunn and Jon Shields
(authors of "Passing on the Right", the sad story of how conservatives are
forced to hide their identity on campus) admitted:
Dunn: With some of them, there’s a political orientation built into the field
itself, so that’s what excludes conservatives. If conservatism doesn’t
line up with the orientation, then conservatives aren’t going to be
welcome and are not going to be fit. But I don’t know that it’s the case
that conservatives aren’t interested in sex and gender or race.
Shields: It’s good not to think of intellectual interests as static, that you’re
born with and have this collection of intellectual interests. Our
interests in different fields are cultivated within the university. To
some degree, conservatives start marching down different paths early on:
They’re much more likely to gravitate toward the natural sciences as
undergraduates; they’re much more likely to gravitate toward economics.
Maybe to some degree they’re more interested in those things, but they may
also be alienated by the way other topics are presented. And there’s good
evidence that’s the case: There’s a survey that was done at the University of Colorado which found Republicans
much more likely to feel uncomfortable in the classroom in the social
sciences.
(I don't know about undergraduates, but natural scientists and engineers after
graduation are
significantly more likely
to be active Democrats than Republicans in recent years at least, probably for
the fairly obvious reason that Republicans are opposed to science.)
The exclusion of "working class voices" from "mainstream media", if it means
that national-market print and broadcast newsroom jobs go mostly to graduates
of fancy private colleges and universities (Brooks says "coastal yuppies"
because he basically doesn't want to know what it really is), is more
interesting in a more complex way, because the diversity efforts of the
private schools have in fact led indirectly to a lot more ethnic-racial
minority faces in those newsrooms, no doubt not enough. Suggesting that what
Brooks is really missing from his "mainstream media" consumption is white male
faces, and putatively conservative (so saith the stereotype according to which
the lower orders, meaning the men of the lower orders, are natural gender
authoritarians and therefore within the fold of the right), just like the
writers in his list of exiled writer lords, which also includes the late
Christopher Hitchens and the annoying psycholinguist Steven Pinker.
What else strikes me about that list is that it's made up mostly of men whose
claim to being interesting and original goes back two or three or more
decades. Hitchens was once a fearless anti-authoritarian in spite of his
high-tone background who didn't hesitate to attack Mother Teresa but wound up
20 years ago as a sufferer from the stupidest kind of Islamophobia, a creature of
Tony Blair and George W. Bush. Pinker, who became famous (beyond his
spectacular hair) for a lunatic but very entertaining synthesis between the
right wing of evolutionary psych and the left wing of Chomsky's Cartesianism,
hasn't had an original thought in many years. The even crazier Jonah Goldberg,
who attempted to prove that Democratic-party liberalism is the direct heir of
the Nazis, now tweets dog photos and mumbles conventional horserace wisdom on
NPR. Even the relatively young Taibbi, once the scourge of Goldman Sachs, has
collapsed into stupid Russia denial and recycling himself. Andrew Sullivan, in his
farewell last week to New York magazine, congratulates himself for how great he is—
The quality of my work does not appear to be the problem. I have a long
essay in the coming print magazine on how plagues change societies, after
all. I have written some of the most widely read essays in the history of the magazine, and my column has been popular with readers. And I have no complaints about my
interaction with the wonderful editors and fact-checkers here — and, in
fact, am deeply grateful for their extraordinary talent, skill, and
compassion. I’ve been in the office maybe a handful of times over four
years, and so there’s no question of anyone mistreating me or vice versa.
In fact, I’ve been proud and happy to be a part of this venture.
What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the
staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in
a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to
afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and
this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer
not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender
identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in
the same virtual space.
—but has clearly no idea how boring, repetitive, and
stupefying he has
become with his obsessions (critical theory is the new Frances Fox Piven, but
if he thinks Ezra and Matty and Jonathan Chait are enslaved to it then he
doesn't have enough of a clue what it is). Andrew Sullivan the luxury item we
don't feel like budgeting for any more, perhaps because whatever satisfaction
we got out of him is long vanished.
Fox News
(!!!) comments,
The columnist reiterated thoughts he made years ago about how "we
all live on campus now," noting the increasingly limited exchange of
ideas on college campuses has spilled into everyday life and pointed to a
survey that showed only 1.46 percent of the faculty at
Harvard University identify as "conservative."
Exactly.
None of these people is excluded from everywhere. Sullivan's SubStack
site, The Weekly Dish, has 60,000 subscribers, Brooks tells us, and the
Goldberg-French-Hayes Dispatch is bringing in $2 million a year.
Where they feel excluded from, it occurs to me, is garden-variety liberalism
and leftism, from Barack Obama to you and me. President Obama used to single
out David Brooks for special praise; ex-president Obama doesn't mention him at
all. Pinker and Sullivan used to be popular citations for the moderate left to
show they paid attention to the moderate right; now they're not. Not that
David Brooks ever quotes Obama. It's like the roommate who depends on you to
be continually ready to validate the drama of his life successes but never
listens through to the end of one of yours, but is surprised and pained when
you stop listening in turn. It's expected of us that we should pay attention
to Andrew Sullivan, because we're liberal and that's the kind of
people we are.
But what's really the trouble right now is that we're living
through the Trump administration, our environmental and labor regulation is
going to hell, the lives of immigrants are being irreparably damaged, the
police are killing black and brown people, and trans people are being beaten
to death or killing themselves, there's a pandemic that may kill us all, and
the economic situation is in the toilet, and Andrew Sullivan is a luxury we
don't even like. Of course we'd better act as a group.
There's a war on!
If he wants to help, like David Frum or Dr. William Kristol, I'll put up with
him in silence. But as long as he's whining for attention, I don't have any to
spare.
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