606

Benjamin Harnwell, a Steve Bannon acolyte who heads the, ahem, “Institute for Human Dignity”, tells PRI why immigration is problematic:

 

But I’d like to point this observation out to you: Had it not been for the Hispanic vote, Mitt Romney would have won. And that’s an illustration. Whether you think immigration is fine in the States, whether it could be tinkered with, bandaged or whatever you think it is, you cannot deny that it is having a political consequence on the country. And I think given that reality, it is reasonable for people to say, “Is this the direction that we want to go in?”

This:

* Assumes the white voter in the United States is the default voter, and that votes counter to the will of white voters are somehow problematic.

And:

* Ignores the fact that Hispanics who vote are in fact American citizens.

The conservative position is this: Brown people probably vote Democratic, so brown people shouldn’t get to be citizens. That’s white supremacy, pure and simple, even if it doesn’t come wearing a Klan hood. You don’t even have to think white people are better than brown people to think that white people should have all the power. That’s evidently the case here.

I cleaned out my spam box today, which means that business deals from a dozen Nigerian princes, several “virgin hair” dealers, and many companies seeking to help me increase traffic to my blog got deleted.

How do people fall for such foolishness?

Well, why do people still support Trump?

****

419 schemes (named after the part of the Nigerian criminal code that addresses them, since so many of them come out of Nigeria) ask you to send in a little money in exchange for the promise of much more later. These advance-fee scams are lucrative business. In Nigeria, there is an entire industry of them, one that has turned into a kind of subculture, with its own criminal language and organization. This isn’t a technically sophisticated crime, and most of those involved probably don’t even know how to code. Instead, the crime is committed using old-fashioned fraud techniques, like counterfeiting letterhead, and social engineering–cultivating and then exploiting relationships. Victims lost about $5.3 billion last year in email scams, according to the FBI.

Nigerian pop singer Olu Maintain sings his wildly popular “Yahooze,” which celebrates the success of internet scammers. 

The Nigerian Prince scam continues to be effective, despite having been around for ages now. The target gets an email from someone claiming to be a Nigerian prince (or an astronaut). He asks you to wire transfer funds to him because of some terrible tragedy that has befallen his royal family, with the promise that you’ll get more in return as soon as he’s able to solve the problem he’s facing, if only you help him out. You do, and suddenly your money is gone forever, and the promised repayment is never happening.

Why do people agree to something so obviously stupid?

1. They want something for nothing. The Nigerian Prince scheme, after all, isn’t just a con: it’s an invitation to pull a con on someone else. Victims put in thousands of dollars with the expectation of getting a million bucks? The interest on their investment is coming from somewhere else, and they know it’s not a legitimate source. Still, they do it because, if given the opportunity, some people will be con artists. The thrill of cheating someone else is part of the attraction.
2. The fact that this isn’t really how the world works for most of us doesn’t dissuade them because they don’t think the rules of the world should apply to them. They don’t mind a world in which some people get something for nothing (which means that that “something” is coming from people who are losing it in exchange for nothing). They deserve more than others. In fact, scammers may keep the more ridiculous details of the scam (the Nigerian prince who has been kicked out of his corrupt family! treasure discovered by an Iraqi war veteran! a Nigerian astronaut abandoned in space by Russian who needs help getting home!) in order to keep the target’s thinking in the realm of fantasy. If targets think realistically, they know that this isn’t how the world works, so scammers don’t offer a realistic story.
3. They’re really, really stupid. This type of scam signals it’s a scam in order to weed out anyone who is smart enough to avoid it. Victims self-identify as naive/stupid enough to actually go down to Western Union and send thousands of dollars to a the scammers. The most profitable victims will continue doing so as the scammers up the charges and delay the promised repayment.  Embarrassment at their own stupidity in the first place keeps victims sending more money in and prevents them from asking for help. Sometimes, the continued hope of future riches–or at least recovery what they have lost–pushes them to send in more.

I used to think that this number of people must be very small, that the world would run out of people who were greedy, stupid, and rich enough to fall for this. Then I look at the poll numbers and see that, somehow, Republican voters still approve of Donald Trump. I see no real concerted effort coming from the GOP to stop him. (Why would they? Doing so would mean that the stupid folks Trump has turned out will vote against them. I mean, they could fight Trump, maybe even bringing him down, and lose their jobs as politicians, which would be the right thing to do, but that seems to be beyond folks like Jeff Flake, who are losing their jobs anyway.)

I understand that locking immigrant babies in detention centers won’t shake many of Donald Trump’s fans. Lots of them are racist and all of them at minimum accept racism as the cost of getting their political way (which is… I’m not really sure any more. The only thing Trump really delivers for them is the racism.), and they like to see him be cruel to vulnerable people. (The sadism in this group takes my breath away some days.) But I had thought that perhaps the crash of soybeans or skyrocketing debt would be compelling. Nah. Trump supporters throw good money after bad, perhaps embarrassed by their losses but now, in shame, doubling down rather than backing off.

Trump devotees at a recent rally in Wilkes Barre, PA. Photo from Washington Post.

The targets for Trump’s scam are out there, signaling through their Q t-shirts and shitposting and continued attendance at Dear Leader’s rallies that they’re as stupid, as gullible, as greedy, and as ready to get to work getting taken advantage of as ever.

I don’t really think they are victims, of course. They freely chose to vote for a man who is exactly who he said he is: someone who takes advantage of others.

Rebecca

Hi Joel,

I’ve been thinking again this week about Snyder v. Phelps, the 2010 Supreme Court case in which the court decided, 8-1, that Westboro Baptists had the right to picket funerals, provided they complied with local and state regulations about the time, place, and manner of such pickets, and that the mere act of picketing was not an “intentional infliction of emotional distress” (IIED) upon those who witnessed it. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, concluded:

Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.

In the “facts before us” of Snyder, members of Westboro Baptist Church traveled to Maryland to picket the funeral of a Marine killed in a non-combat accident in Iraq. Though Maryland didn’t have any regulations regarding funeral picketing at the time, the church was still within the law that would later pass–in other words, what they did wasn’t illegal because there was no law against it and, even if there had been a law, they would have been within it. They picketed near but not within hearing distance of the Catholic church where Snyder’s funeral was held, the tops of their signs (but not the messages) visible from a distance. Albert Snyder, the father of the fallen Marine, saw that people were gathered where the church members were located, but he did not understand why they were there or what they were doing. Only when he turned on the local news later and saw coverage of the picket did he understand that the church had targeted his son.

Above, Westboro Baptists picketing outside of the Supreme Court the day the Court heard their case.

Church members brought a variety of signs–some engaging (if crudely) genuinely important political issues of the day, like homosexuality within the military. (This was pre-DADT repeal.) Others, though, weren’t really about politics: “God Hates You,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” and “Not Blessed Just Cursed” are theological statements aimed, in this case, at Snyder and his mourners–and also to the national audience that WBC’s pickets have created.

Chief Justice Roberts says we can’t squash “even hurtful speech on public issues,” but what is a “public issue” is unclear. In an online screed explaining why Snyder, specifically, was in hell, the church said that his parents’ choice to raise him in Catholicism was an effort to hand him over to Satan. They also criticize Matthew Snyders’ parents’ divorce. Had they known, at the time, that Albert Snyder was gay, I’m sure that would have been cited, too. All of these things, though, are facts available to the public  (in Matthew Snyder’s obituary, in the divorce decree), but they are not really public issues. Or, as Judge Richard D. Bennett said in the original ruling,

“[d]efendants cannot by their own actions transform a private funeral into a public event and then bootstrap their position by arguing that Snyder was a public figure” (italics mine

or as Justice Alito said in his dissent, issuing a press release saying terrible things about Snyder

“thus turned Matthew’s funeral into a tumultuous media event” (italics mine again).

Underlying the Court’s decision, Alito argues in his dissent, is the idea that hateful language is somehow less hurtful if the purpose is creating a media spectacle rather than for some other more personal reason, like the fact that you just think the other guy is a jerk. Alito finds this ridiculous:

And as far as culpability is concerned, one might well think that wounding statements uttered in the heat of a private feud are less, not more, blameworthy than similar statements made as part of a cold and calculated strategy to slash a stranger as a means of attracting public attention.

The Court focused on those signs that did raise issues of public concern (the US invasion of Iraq, child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, DADT) but did not address those signs that were targeted more narrowly at Snyder and his family. These signs all invoked theological claims that are not falsifiable. That is, we can measure the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. We cannot measure whether soldiers go to hell.

Religious claims don’t get analysis by the Court because the Court can’t use empirical knowledge or logic to test them. In general, I think this is a good idea–the Court shouldn’t get into the business of deciding if eating pork is a sin or whether babies should be baptized.

But the consequence of Snyder‘s refusal to consider the place of these theological claims in the harm that Albert Snyder suffered is that the LESS factually supportable the claim, the MORE protected it is. Indeed, the Court said that Westboro Baptist Church’s words were protected BECAUSE they “were not provably false”–but, of course, it is impossible to “prove” any kind of religious claim.

Further, the MORE OUTRAGEOUS the claim, the MORE PROTECTION the speech gets. Westboro’s words “were expressed solely through hyperbolic rhetoric,” the Court said, which was probably a surprise to members of WBC. While they had hoped to stir emotions with their words, they were also dead serious about them. When WBC says, “Go to hell!” it is quite different from the guy who just cut you off from traffic saying it: they really mean it. There is no hyperbole here.

In other words, in Snyder, by disallowing the claim of an IIED torte, the court incentivizes the use of hateful (and potentially harmful) speech when it is done in public for the purpose of drawing attention to an issue of public concern, when it isn’t grounded in fact, and when it is so outrageous that decent people assume it’s hyperbolic (even when the speakers do not).

Which brings me to Alex Jones (and why I’m thinking about Alito’s dissent in Snyder).

****

Jones was recently banned from Facebook as part of that company’s effort to purge sites that “sought to inflame social and political tensions in the United States” and who may have engaged in “activity…similar — and in some cases connected — to that of Russian accounts during the 2016 election.” Which is pretty vague. “Similar to Russian accounts”? Like, how, exactly? Also, why is “inflaming social and political tensions” illegal? I’m not even sure it’s a bad idea. In fact, sometimes inflaming social and political tensions is a downright good idea. Sure, some problems have been solved with “inflammation,” but our worst ones–slavery, for example–have not.

On the other hand, if God hates anyone, it’s Alex Jones, who encouraged his devotees to harass and threaten the parents of kindergartners killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting. Somehow, conservatives who think that Fred Phelps was evil for causing grieving families further pain at their children’s funeral still put InfoWar bumper stickers on their cars, missing the parallels between these two men. (For what it’s worth, I think Jones, with his larger audience, is far more hateful and more dangerous. He is likely to get someone killed.)

Either Alex Jones has the world’s best cardiologist or he is just acting and really isn’t as upset as his on-air screaming and bawling suggests. Maybe if he doesn’t really believe the bullshit he spews, his fans shouldn’t either.  

So I’m not exactly crying over Jones’ temporary banning from one social media platform. And I don’t think that kicking him off Facebook, which is a private company after all, is a First Amendment violation. He has no more right to be there than I have to sell books in a particular bookstore. If the bookstore doesn’t want to sell my books, they don’t have to, and they don’t impinge upon my rights that way. That’s how freedom (and free markets) work.

But I am concerned that Jones will be a forefather of a movement that exploits Snyder (as well as a host of other laws, regulations, and practices). It’s not just Donald Trump who acts as if words don’t matter: the Court in Snyder said they don’t either. (Interestingly, the Court uses the same logic to defend the inclusion of “Under God” in the Pledge: because it is religiously empty–that is, no one really believes it–it gets to stay.)

Snyder opened up the possibility that the less supportable with facts and the more outrageous our words are, the more protected they are from claims that they hurt others–which just pushes people to make less supportable, more outrageous claims. In 2018, that’s how you get to be an internet star like Alex Jones. In 10 years, we could see far worse than him.

Rebecca

PS. I still think Snyder was rightly decided–just not using the logic that the majority used. Proving an IIED is really hard, and I don’t think the facts of this case support the application of that torte here. But that doesn’t mean that another set of facts wouldn’t have.

 

 

 

 

 

This article by Dinesh D’Souza is a fun bit of work. It tries to suggest that Richard Spencer — white nationalist, best-known for being Nazi-punched — really has a lot in common with those racist Democrats, except Democrats suck, so naturally he’s going to make common cause with Trumpists.

It’s a not-so-nifty bit of “having your cake and eating it too” footwork that depends greatly on people not believing what they see with their own eyes.

Take this D’Souza paragraph on Spencer:

Thus Spencer, a man without a party, turns to Donald Trump. Now, there is very little on which Spencer and Trump actually agree. Trump is a flag-waving patriot who cherishes the American Founders; Spencer isn’t and doesn’t. Trump believes our rights come from God; Spencer is an atheist. Trump wants to keep illegals out so legal immigrants and other American citizens—whether white, black or brown—can thrive. Spencer wants more white immigrants, fewer if any black and brown ones. In sum, Trump is generally “conservative” in his ideology and Spencer is clearly not.

Let’s examine that paragraph point by point.

Trump is a flag-waving patriot who cherishes the American Founders; Spencer isn’t and doesn’t.

It may be that Trump is a flag-waving patriot, but I’m not sure what evidence exists that he reveres — or even understands the concepts — behind the founding. The evidence is that Trump isn’t all that familiar with the Constitution nor the rights therein. He might be good at giving lip-service to a crowd that lionizes the Founders, but what Trump most clearly cherishes is Trump.

Trump believes our rights come from God; Spencer is an atheist.

Does anybody really believe Trump thinks this? Not to get tired with this phrase, but I think it’s also clear that what Trump worships is Trump. I’m sure a few Trump supporters might believe in his faithfulness. They’re, to put it kindly, suckers.

Trump wants to keep illegals out so legal immigrants and other American citizens—whether white, black or brown—can thrive. Spencer wants more white immigrants, fewer if any black and brown ones.

Ahem. I refer you to this.

President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they discussed protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to several people briefed on the meeting.

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to these people, referring to countries mentioned by the lawmakers.

Trump then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway, whose prime minister he met with Wednesday. The president, according to a White House official, also suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt that they help the United States economically.

So D’Souza’s three big differences between Trump and Spencer rely on two examples where he has to basically  invent Trump’s views to create a distinction, and a third example — the most important, in terms of concrete US policy — in which public evidence is that there’s no real distinction at all!

What about this, then, from D’Souza?

As I interviewed Spencer, I kept saying to myself, obviously this guy is not a conservative, but what is he? He’s not a progressive in the contemporary sense, either. And yet his ideas are so familiar. Only toward the end of the interview did it hit me. Spencer’s views are virtually identical to those of the progressive racists of the Woodrow Wilson era

D’Souza’s whole project is to prove that Democrats are, historically, the party of racism. He’s not entirely wrong: Dems really do have Woodrow Wilson and a ton of Dixiecrats in their history. But D’Souza has to contort himself to translate that racism to the modern age, in large part precisely because of folks like Spencer. (For a thorough debunking of D’Souza, check out Princeton’s Kevin Kruse on the topic.)

How do you make this calculation work?

Democrats are the real racists + Richard Spencer is a racist in the Democratic mode = Richard Spencer is a Trump supporter?

Well, you do it by starting to change the terms of the debate.

Spencer should be a progressive Democrat. Progressive Democrats invented the ideology he espouses, and even today the Democratic Party is the party of ethnic identity politics. Spencer’s problem, however, is that the Democrats mobilize black, Latino and Asian identity politics against that of whites. Since whites are now the all-round bad guy, Spencer’s brand of progressivism is no longer welcome at the multicultural picnic.

So: Democrats are the real racists! Only that racism somehow no longer includes anti-black racism. If you’re Republican, the only real racism is racism against whites.

Here’s how D’Souza rationalizes it:

Look at it from Spencer’s point of view. If you’re a white nationalist who wants racial preferences for whites, would you rather go with the Democrats who want racial preferences against whites, or with the Republicans who want racial preferences for no one? Clearly the latter.

If you’re a white nationalist who wants to eliminate minority immigration altogether—legal and illegal—would you rather vote for the Democrats who encourage more illegals, with a view to gaining more future voters, or for the Republicans who generally support legal but not illegal immigration? Again, the answer is obvious.

It’s not that Spencer is really pro-Trump! It’s that he’s anti-Democrat!

Now: It’s not that D’Souza puts out a red carpet for Spencer, let’s be honest. But let’s be frank about what he’s just done there: He’s declared that in our two-party system, it’s completely rational for a big ol’ racist like Richard Spencer to join the Trumpist cause.

The real D’Souzian math:

Racists are bad + Democrats are worse = Racists love Trump.

And that’s it. That’s the conclusion. There’s no attempt to push Spencer out of the Trumpist coalition, a la Buckley reading the Birchers out of conservatism. Just a conclusion that  Democrats are worse. At best, this piece can be read as tacit acceptance of the situation.

The funny thing is, if you read D’Souza’s interview with Spencer, you come away with a realization of how much Spencer sounds like Michael Anton, the godfather of “intellectual” Trumpism, and the author of “The Flight 93 Election” that made the case for Trump.

I’ll give you two quotes. You tell me which one was said by the White Nationalist and which one by the Intellectual Trump Supporter.

 I’m against replacement immigration in the sense that I’m against immigration coming in from the Third World that is ultimately going to change the ethnic and cultural constitution of the United States.

and

The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.

Oooh. Let me throw in a bonus.

In some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people and they’re changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don’t like. From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically in some ways the country has changed. Now, much of this is related to both illegal and in some cases, legal immigration that, of course, progressives love.”

1. Spencer. 2. Anton. 3. Laura Ingraham.

I don’t think conservatism necessarily equals racism. Truly. But I don’t know how much clearer that Trumpism, at the very least, makes common cause with racism. And yes, Democrats and liberals have their own sins to repent of in this regard. But it’s Trumpists who are running the country, who are gladdening the hearts of Richard Spencer. At some point, there’s no amount rationalizing that’s plausible. It’s exactly what it looks like.

Hi Joel,

Of all the horseshit that Caitlin Flanagan could have written in her vapid Atlantic article about misogynist Jordan Peterson, this was the horseshittiest:

With identity politics off the table, it was possible to talk about all kinds of things—religion, philosophy, history, myth—in a different way. They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology.

(I’m glad that it’s the quotation you focused on, because it’s reveals how very difficult it is to find conservative thinkers with something smart to say. When Jordan Peterson is your intellectual leader and Caitlin Flanagan is where you turn to insightful commentary, you know that your movement simply doesn’t have a deep bench.)

What does this even mean–to have a “direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology”?

It means that Flanagan doesn’t know what ideology means. But she uses the word anyway–which is so much of the problem with conservative commentators. Peterson, Maclean’s suggested last fall, is a “stupid man’s smart person” (“he never seems to say ‘know’ where he could instead say ‘cognizant of’”), and Flanagan seems to have fallen for it.

I’ve taught a lot about ideology, including to the the type of young white men that Flanagan asserts have been marginalized by identity politics. And I’ve seen them thrash a bit as they learn about ideology for the first time. But, by and large, through careful reading, respectful conversation, and thoughtful analysis, they get it–and, unlike the young men Flanagan describes, they find it enriches their understanding of the world rather than diminishing it. They don’t give up, as Flanagan’s men do, because it is hard and because they prefer a world in which they can ignore ideology. Indeed, writes French theories Louis Althusser, denying it is a sign of its power over us:

what thus seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology [….] That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, “I am ideological.”

Here’s the short version:

Marx argues that ideology creates “false consciousness”–a false understanding of the way the world works. For example, women buy Virginia Slims cigarettes because smoking them promises “freedom”–when, in reality, the tobacco industry was built on slave labor, continues to place precious workers in dangerous situations, lies about health risks, passes the harms of its business to the public, and is in a business that literally kills its customers. Neither farm workers nor those dying of lung cancer are enjoying the kind of “freedom” that cigarette companies show in ads.

Above, a Virginia Slims ad from the 1970s. An attractive blonde woman steps toward the viewer. She wears trousers and a matching jacket and carries a briefcase under her arm, a cigarette extending from her hand. Behind her and on the left, women of the late 19th/early 20th centuries congregate. The familiar slogan–“You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby”–is printed above two packs of cigarettes on the right.

That’s not hard to see at all–capitalists lie to us (“You’ve come a long way, baby!”) to convince us to ignore reality (emphysema). And, yes, racial messages work the same. White people tell ourselves all kinds of lies (like that race is biological) in order to convince us to ignore reality (it’s a cultural invention used to justify oppression).

Althusser pushes the idea of ideology a different direction: there is no “reality” out there that we can penetrate if we just can see through the ideology. In part, this is because the only way we can access reality is through language: if we don’t have a word for it, we can’t think it, and so it’s not real to us. If that seems radical, do this experiment: ask both a man and a woman what color your hair is. In general, women have a larger lexicon of words to describe color (a “focal vocabulary”)–not because we see more colors but because we are inundated with messages about cosmetics and fashion. Unless a man is a hair dresser, he’ll probably describe your hair as brown. A woman is more likely to describe it as “chestnut” or “dark ash” or one of the dozens of other colors they can find in the hair color aisle at CVS.

So, for Althusser, the fact that we think in language always prevents us from thinking outside of ideology. Ideology informs our language, right down to the grammar–which is why, in some languages, certain objects are masculine and others are feminine (die/der in German and la/las in Spanish, for example). Through language, we tell a story about ourselves to ourselves, and how we tell that story has tremendous consequences, even if it’s a total lie. Or, as my students eventually grow tired of chanting at the start of each class session, “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Thesis 1 of Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus). Because we rely on language to define reality but language itself is ideological, we can only ever see the reality our language lets us create.

But ideology doesn’t stop with language–it “has a material existence” (Thesis II)–that is, it is enacted in rituals, practices, conventional behaviors, etc. We perform our ideology every day. For example, when an opposite sex couple walks hand-in-hand, it is most common that the man’s hand faces backward while the woman’s faces forward, just as an adult’s hand faces backwards when it clasps a child’s forward-facing hand. This is a practice that reflects a particular gender ideology (men’s protectiveness/possession/leadership of women).

We perform our ideology without even thinking about it. This is because, according to Althusser, “all ideology hails or interrelates concrete individuals as concrete subjects (Thesis III). That is, it calls to us–“Hey, you there!”–and we respond because we know it’s talking to us. Ideology does this to us from all directions–through what Althusser calls ideological state apparatuses (religion, family) as well as repressive ones (the police) but also through the media and popular culture (Horkheimer and Adorno’s insight into ideology).

And we’re always the subject of ideology–even before we are born! Althusser, writing in the mid-1900s, notes that, even before we’re born, we are identified as our father’s child and will bear his name. Gender theorist Judith Butler notes that it happens when the the obstetrician yells “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl.” But we don’t have to wait for the baby to be delivered to make them the subject of gender ideology: the wild popularity of “gender reveal” parties is evidence that Americans have a deep (and tacky) obsession with making even fetuses ideological subjects.

Above, snacks for a gender reveal party. A glass bowl with blue and brown candy-coated nuts sits next to one with pink, red, and white candies in it. A blue onesie made of paper sits in the first bowl with the word “Nuts?” on it, while a pink onesie sits in the second bowl, the words “No Nuts?” written on it. Get it? Get it? Guests are invited to bet on whether the baby has a penis or a vagina, according to the sonogram, and later in the paper, the parents will reveal the baby’s sex–perhaps by popping a ballon filled with either blue or pink confetti or cutting open a cake with either blue or pink icing inside.

This system works really well to reproduce society as it is. And lots of people like it! It’s pretty easy to convince men that they are superior to women, to convince whites that they are superior to people of color. In fact, if ideology is on your side, then you don’t feel “convinced” at all–you feel entirely free, as if you are, indeed, having “direct experience with ideas,” as Flanagan’s men yearn to have. Ideology is so smart–it tells that we are in fact free! That’s part of its appeal. And then, we freely accept our subjection to it.

Which is cool if ideology leaves you on top, like it does for Peterson’s fans. It’s less cool if it leaves you on bottom, though. Turns out that many people who are not well-served by the dominant ideology fight against it. Sure, there are oppressed people who buy into their own oppression, but many also fight back. There are Ben Carsons in the world but also Nat Turners. Just as defenders of ideology embody it in practice, so is it practiced on the bodies of the poor, vulnerable, and weak. For them, ideology isn’t a mental exercise performed by college students angry about their ethnic lit or world history requirement but a hungry belly and a broken back.

You know who doesn’t need Flanagan’s lecture on why ideology is a distraction from “real” issues? Everyone who is oppressed by the white supremacy and misogyny that Jordan Peterson advocates. Also, the enslaved Africans helping white enslavers get “direct experience with ideas” in Hale Woodruff’s Rising Up.

Still, Althusser’s version of ideology is much harder to get around that even Marx’s. But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck–or that you have an excuse to smoke Virginia Slims or be a white supremacist. Careful, honest, critical thinking helps us see that we are implicated in ideology–and we can resist it and change it and shape it, even if we can’t escape it.

Rebecca

Can we dedicate posts? If so, I dedicate this to Bobbie, Charlie, Claire, Meagan, and the many, many other first year college students who plunged into Althusser with me over the years.

Rebecca:

I haven’t really paid attention to Jordan Peterson, which is perhaps a mistake. I know that tons of young white men are flocking to him and are finding meaning in what he purveys, so maybe I should sit down with his book sometime.

That said, it’s not difficult for me to find fault with this Atlantic essay about “why the left is so afraid of Jordan Peterson.” Why? Because there are plenty of reasoned critiques of Peterson out there. And the essay’s author doesn’t deal with any of them, instead filling this piece with tired, sneering contempt for left-of-center folks who think Peterson maybe isn’t all that.

The author, Caitlin Flanagan, depicts Jordan Peterson’s appeal through the eyes of her young adult son.

The young men voted for Hillary, they called home in shock when Trump won, they talked about flipping the House, and they followed Peterson to other podcasts—to Sam Harris and Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan. What they were getting from these lectures and discussions, often lengthy and often on arcane subjects, was perhaps the only sustained argument against identity politics they had heard in their lives.

That might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. With identity politics off the table, it was possible to talk about all kinds of things—religion, philosophy, history, myth—in a different way. They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology. 

Emphasis added. Which I read to mean:

They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by … ideas.

They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by … how other people might be affected by them.

But let’s get down to brass tacks here: Deciding you don’t want to consider the racial implications of an idea is, itself, ideological. It presumes whiteness to be the default, to be objective and unbiased and the natural point of view. And that of course is nonsense.

An acquaintance objects that my objection to Flanagan is “very much like the followers of C.S. Lewis who have long assured me that by rejecting the teachings of their Church I was taking a stand just as religious as theirs.”

Well. No and yes, and the reasons for this deserve a little parsing. I’d agree that objecting to the Church is not (necessarily) an act of faith in the same way that, ahem, an act of faith is. But, like going to church, rejecting faith teachings *is* making a judgment on metaphysics.

Similarly, a snotty rejection of “identity politics” doesn’t actually place you outside the debates involving identity politics. You’ve made a judgment! It doesn’t make you more able to understand ideas, but thinking it does might make you actually blind to some of the implications of those ideas.

I’m not sure why so many legitimately smart people don’t understand this. I’m convinced, at this point, that the people who sneer most actively at “identity politics” are its greatest practitioners, operating under some bit of self-delusion.

Joel