- "We" are losing the battle against Covid-19;
-
"all Americans but especially white Americans" are rapidly learning about
the struggles involved in being an African American;
-
the American public is "vehemently rejecting" the Republican Party under
Trumpian leadership;
-
American cultural institutions are being taken over by the
"quasi-religion" of Social Justice, which sees history as "essentially a
power struggle between groups, some of which are oppressors and others of
which are oppressed", and speech as "a form of violence that has to be
regulated"; and
- we might be on the verge of a severe depression.
These five changes, each reflecting a huge crisis and hitting all at once,
have created a moral, spiritual and emotional disaster. Americans are
now less happy than at any time since they started measuring happiness nearly 50
years ago. Americans now express less pride in their nation than at any time since Gallup started measuring it
20 years ago.
Points 1 and 5 are real problems, though I think Brooks is too pessimistic
about the first—it's not a battle with an enemy that can win—the virus can
either run out of hosts to infect if we're all dead, or find a way of carrying
on without killing us all, but it can't declare victory and occupy a throne
somewhere; there's an other side that we'll all reach sooner or later, some of
us sooner because we're willing to change our behavior, others not. Governors
Abbot, Kemp, DeSantis, and Ducey certainly seem to be losing their wars. but
they're against the Democrats and the citizens, and I hear Abbot is starting
to negotiate for peace. On the last point, Brooks is too optimistic: this is a
very bad economic crisis, and it will take a lot to emerge from it.
It's hard for me to feel really bad about points 2 and 3, to the extent that
they're real. It's embarrassing to realize you've spent a lifetime on the
privileged end of a system of racial oppression that condemns millions of
people to a nerve-wracking existence of continual stress and insult and a very
significant number to poverty and/or early death, but those of us who didn't
know ought to be learning about it, at long last, and surely we'll be better
for getting through it and trying to do something about it. We may be unhappy
at the moment, but we shouldn't be taking pride in the situation
as it is—we should be hoping to take pride and win happiness from fixing it,
starting with ourselves and our social environment.
The same goes double or triple in all respects for the need to get rid of the
Republicans as currently constituted, if only because of their central role
for the last 40 years in reinforcing racial oppression, wrecking the
government's ability to manage economic crisis, and not being prepared for a
pandemic. The sooner, the better! It's going to be a bumpy ride, but both of
these things are plainly positive developments for anybody who's not blinded
by racism or partisanship. Oh, sorry, I see what you mean.
He means that you shouldn't push him too hard on points 2 and 3, because he
retains the right to whine about political correctness and indiscreet
statue-toppling. Thus point 4, an effort to bothsiderize the discussion. He's
saying, "I really don't want to know that stuff I was mentioning under no. 2."
He doesn't want to recognize the existence of social injustice, in
which the members of one group really are oppressed by the members of another
group, however nice David Brooks may feel he is when he takes a black friend
for a deli sandwich.
Then again, the social justice movement isn't only a "crisis", according to
Brooks; it's also a "theory of change":
Americans look around the world and see that other nations are beating
Covid-19 and we are failing. Americans look around and see state-sponsored
violence — rhetorical and actual — inflicted on their fellow citizens.
America doesn’t seem very exceptional.
In times like this, you’ve got to have a theory of change.
The loudest theory of change is coming from the Social Justice movement.
This movement emerged from elite universities, and its basic premise is
that if you can change the cultural structures you can change society.
We say the oppression is systemic, meaning that it is to a great
degree imposed by social structure, in which minority groups (including
economic minorities like the poor) are segregated by neighborhood and school
to begin with, with inadequate housing in the neighborhoods where the
minorities live and facilities for food shopping, banking, and medical care,
and public safety authorities are deployed as military forces and trained to
treat the the communities they're meant to serve as dangerous enemies, even
if they end up in the highway patrol busting black attorneys and professors
who likely don't even live in minority neighborhoods, for having
suspiciously nice cars.
There’s a lot [of] evidence to suggest that overt racism and
discrimination lead to worse health outcomes for people of color.
Researchers at Columbia University have found that the experience of racism can result in traumatic stress.
This stress is linked to negative mental health outcomes, such as
depression, anger, physical reactions, avoidance, intrusion,
hypervigilance, and low self-esteem.
Doctors and psychologists tell us that discrimination contributes to
poor health, both directly and indirectly. The presence of high levels
of stress hormones in the bloodstream for long periods of time can lead to wear-and-tear on the body. In addition, stress caused by
racism has been linked to heart disease in African-American populations.
Public health researchers surveyed a sample of 3,105 adults across three racial groups
(African-Americans, Latinos and whites) and found a positive correlation
between hypervigilance caused by race-based stress and a higher
incidence of heart disease amongst African-Americans. (Gina Torino, Center for Health Journalism, 2017)
The "elite universities" sneer is of course, as with Douthat, a way of
insinuating that the sufferers themselves have no role in thinking about the
problem; it's all "faculty lounge" chatter in Chicago and Cambridge.
To my mind, where social justice theory emerges from is the Old Testament
prophets, with their concern for oppressed groups ("widows and orphans" and
the "strangers" or outsiders to the Hebrew community for whom we are supposed
to care because we were strangers in Egypt) and the cry for justice that
"rolls down like a river", and a direct line from that through to the
19th-century abolition and suffrage movements whose promise remains as yet
unfulfilled, and the labor organizations that were so often poisoned by racial
exclusion up through the late 20th century and are now much less so as the
focus of labor itself moves from manufacturing to workers in agriculture and
services, where minority members play an increasingly visible role in the work
and in the organizing.
Then again Brooks isn't talking about social justice but about Social Justice
in caps, which is more specialized—
Members of this movement pay intense attention to cultural symbols — to
language, statues, the names of buildings. They pay enormous attention to
repeating certain slogans, such as “defund the police,” which may or may not
have anything to do with policy, and to lifting up symbolic gestures, like
kneeling before a football game. It’s a very apt method for change in an age
of social media because it’s very performative.
The Social Justice activists focus on the cultural levers of power. Their
most talked about action is canceling people. Some person, usually mildly
progressive, will say something politically “problematic” and his or her job
will be terminated. In this way new boundaries are established for what has to be said and
what cannot be said.
Sitting in his patrol car in Wilmington, N.C., Officer Michael “Kevin” Piner predicted Black Lives Matter protests would soon lead to civil war. “I’m ready,” Piner told another officer, adding that he planned to buy an assault rifle.
“We are just going to go out and start slaughtering them f------ n------,” he said.
And it seems to have caused difficulties for a young Democratic data analyst, David Shor, to whom Jonathan Chait has devoted at least three articles and
Rod Dreher one of his gigantic numbers after a tweet falling the wrong way in the emotional aftermath of the murder of George Floyd got him fired (wrongly, in my view) from the consulting firm, Civis Analytics, where he was head of research (I'll get back to this), and President Ulysses S. Grant, the leader of Reconstruction in 1869-77, whose statue somewhere was threatened after some idiot heard he briefly owned a slave without learning about the (exculpatory) context.
I don't like some of these things—I disliked the "Defund the Police" slogan, as you'll recall—but I think some of the other things, like what happened to Officer Piner, are pretty great. I don't think you can sustain the idea of a Social Justice movement, separate and distinct from the social justice movement and given to evil, on the basis of these anecdotes. At the very least, Social Justice, as opposed to social justice, is hardly equal in importance to the Covid-19 crisis or the Black Lives Matter movement which has contributed so much to organizing the hugely influential protests since George Floyd.
And David Brooks thought it was immensely important, as
Driftglass notes,
And the reason I'm sure that David Brooks believes the Social Justice monsters are the worst crisis of all is that he spends literally half his column bed-wetting about them and their elite universities!
but then once he gets to paragraph 13 he doesn't seem to think it's important at all any more:
The core problem is that the Social Justice theory of change doesn’t produce much actual change. Corporations are happy to adopt some woke symbols and hold a few consciousness-raising seminars and go on their merry way. Worse, this method has no theory of politics.
So I'm not taking this seriously at all, except to say that the theory of lower-case social justice definitely does have a theory of politics, connecting the actions of nonviolent protest to electoral success. Which is where, as it happens, David Shor comes in.
The offending tweet was a note about a contribution to some research on this subject that I've been trying to pay some attention to over the last week or so (see
fivethirtyeight for a valuable survey), in this case by the political scientist Omar Wasow, here prefaced by the later apology:
The general research direction, which I've been learning about from a 2013 book by Daniel Q. Gillion,
The Political Power of Protest Minority Activism and Shifts in Public Policy, and a 2018 paper by Gillion and Sarah Soule, "
The Impact of Protest on Elections in the United States", is that increasing evidence shows that protest movements are actually effective in influencing election results and policy change:
protests that express liberal issues lead to a greater percentage of the two‐party vote share for Democratic candidates, while protests that espouse conservative issues offer Republican candidates a greater share of the two‐party vote. Additionally, results indicated that protest shines a light on incumbent politicians’ failure to address constituent concerns, which leads quality candidates to enter subsequent races to challenge incumbent politicians.
but that violence associated with protestors makes them less effective, while violent responses from the authorities (i.e. the cops) enhance the positive effect.
Coming at the time of the first George Floyd demonstrations, before the actual looting came to a halt as formally nonviolent organizations like BLM gained control, Shor's tweet seemed to be blaming looters rather than the racism, and was criticized by somebody called "disco socialist" with a brown Bart Simpson avi and other persons. Exactly how Shor got fired is unclear (he and the company are refusing to discuss it and have not spoken to Jonathan Chait at all, but his Twitter feed has resumed after a break and seems pretty cheerful and professional and engaging as ever). I'm of the secret opinion that he may still be working for Civis.
But the underlying research findings, in which David Brooks has no interest whatever, show that there is one thing going on in the learn-about-black-people tendency of Brooks's point 2, the "Social Justice movement" of his point 4, and the Biden campaign, which is citizen activism directly or indirectly helping out with the 2020 election, occasionally with regrettable excesses, but mostly in the way Gillion and Wasow and the others suggest it would, with the demonstrations and so on, including the statue-bashing, creating that new awareness among white people of the conditions of blackness and contributing to the remarkable rise in Democratic fortunes and fall of Republicans that we're seeing in the recent polls.
Not only does social justice have a political theory, in other words, but it works. Brooks writes,
Joe Biden is going to be nominated by the Democratic Party. He came to public life when it wasn’t about performing your zeal, it was about crafting coalitions and legislating. He exudes a spirit that is about empathy and friendship not animosity and canceling. The pragmatic spirit of the New Deal is a more apt guide for the years ahead than the spirit of critical theory symbology.
But as a matter of fact, "symbolism" in the form of lively social protest, street theater and marches, was an invaluable aid to Franklin Roosevelt in pushing the New Deal through, as Seymour Lipset explained in 1984 ("
Roosevelt and the Protest of the 1930s", Minnesota Law Review):
And it was the protestors, not the balky conservative pundits of the day, that Roosevelt needed. I'm hoping Biden knows.
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