I think that the time has come for those who support the Open Society paradigm to put as much energy into fighting back against those who would seek to put society back into a conformist straightjacket, as those like Ron De Santis, his Chief of Staff, Christina Pushaw, and the Reactionary Conservative blogosphere do into trying to inject it into the mainstream of society. You can't just shed bitter tears about it, you have to stand up and be loud about what you believe to be right and take the fight up to these people. That means you have to look around for people to challenge them who are good enough to beat them at their own game. Have the Progressive Left been to Harvard to find their Ron De Santis equivalent? They need to. Then get busy.
The use of state power to wage these culture war fights may be the most concerning thing going on in our politics right now, and DeSantis has excelled in this. This piece is a good analysis of his illiberal policy choices.
What's interesting, though, is that often his targets aren't something that he's creating himself, like Joseph McCarthy or, for that matter, Trump. As you document, people like Chris Rufo, the Daily Wire presenters, Rod Dreher frequently are the ones who find stuff to complain about and formulate intellectual arguments against -- and then these items gets picked up DeSantis and his political operation as fodder for a stunt or an awful illiberal policy.
There is also a second set of intellectuals who carry water for people like Rufo and Dreher by reposting, echoing, praising the latter, while ostensibly still defending the principle of pluralism and democratic governance, usually in the self-styled role of courageous outsider. The "Intellectual Dark Web" had this role for a bit, before many of them sank into the swamps of pure crankery, but people like Wesley Yang, Matt Taibbi and, occasionally, Andrew Sullivan, still do this.
We can only fight back against DeSantis and politicians like him by winning elections or winning in court. There's no conversation possible with Trumpy "intellectuals" like Rufo or Ben Shapiro, because their arguments are all iron-clad nonsense. Which leaves the second set of intellectuals who are not so shameless as to be impervious to intellectual embarrassment; in the right forum (i.e., not social media), one can, in fact, make arguments that have consequences, because they don't want to appear foolish, and so what matters, then, is finding that forum and making the argument effectively.
I'd be interested in hearing your view on this second category of writer/talking head. I'm also curious if you've thought about what forums are working or could work for this purpose (of course, this is one of the animating concerns of this publication)?
I think this is a very good post. Popper's vision is basic to any class of liberal, from "classical liberals" (who are usually called conservatives in contemporary politics, and were the core of the late 20th century GOP) to the liberals of today's Democratic Party. This is a clear outline of the ways DeSantis has positioned himseslf and Florida as leading forces of illiberalism.
But illiberalism can take multiple forms, as the recent controversy over the dismissal of a faculty member at Hamline University for showing an image of the Prophet Mohammed illustrates (detailed in last Sunday's New York Times, Jan. 8). There is no counterpart to DeSantis on the Left, because DeSantis uniquely mobilizes state power to close the open society. But, practically speaking, those on the Left will be in a much stronger position to criticize these forms of Right illiberalism if they are vocal in speaking out against illiberalism on the Left, particularly since Desantis has, in part, explicitly positioned himself as a response to illiberalism on the Left in academia.
My critique of DeSantis is certainly not a left-wing one, but rather a liberal one in the long tradition of Mill, Popper, and other liberty-minded thinkers.
The call I make here isn’t really tied to a position in the moral debates currently raging around either crt or drag shows (though I confess to having a position that would rub against the DeSantis view).
The argument is strictly about the use of state power in the hard sense (laws, policies) and the soft (public persuasion) to put excessive restraint on thought and expression. I don’t accept the notion that either racial content in education or publicly accessible drag shows are comparable to child slavery or any other egregious practice from the past. I actually think that it’s pretty indefensible hyperbole. But more to the point, I do not accept the terms under which DeSantis is limiting debate and expression or that actual limiting thereof as appropriate for a liberal democratic society.
The purpose of laws is not to encode "morality" -- this is a muddling of the issues at stake. Our legal systems and our moral codes are separate and each should be considered on its own terms. It's better to think of them as interacting and feeding back on one another. So, no, it's entirely wrong to believe that "all laws are the morals of a democratic society being imposed on the minority who don't wish to follow them." Your position appears to be: a relativistic morality is not only the necessary synecdoche of culture, but its entirety, and this is a ridiculous proposition if you state it plainly. I've written a long paper on a technical definition of laws and rights if you care to read a more detailed explanation of why your identity of morality and law misconstrues the latter:
The second problem in these notes is that you, apparently, don't believe that moral matters follow any kind of natural order. Which would be news for any conservative prior to 2015. The "morality" being pushed by people like Desantis, Rufo, etc. is too narrow and blinkered for the changes that have been visited on civilization since industrialization, and, at the same time, the understanding of the past used to justify this narrowness is warped and twisted. What's more, many of these people are massively hypocritical, and ill-suited to the role of moral paragon in any drama but a farce. Desantis chooses to use state power because he can't defend his "moral code" from the pulpit, so to speak.
Here is one way to sum up the dialectic Alan is describing (even if this isn't exactly the argument he is making): the impulse to impose a "closed society" on others is rooted in moral failure; the impulse to participate in an "open society" is rooted in moral humility.
Yes, that humility aspect is key. It’s THE thing. It’s not moral or any other sort of relativism but epistemological humility. And the core of that premise is the notion that only a society that allows for all manner of ideas, politics, and lives to be expressed can hope to produce something like the “right” kind of society. And it’s hard. Decent, virtuous ideas don’t always win out. But limiting expression and the right of people to make a public claim about what’s good and true is the surest way to arrive at tyranny.
I explicitly reject your premise, and I've written at length about why it's not the proper approach to this subject. As I indicated previously, it's better to think of our moral systems and our legal systems as separate from each other, but interacting in important ways. Law has to factor more than morality's rudimentary anxieties and prerogatives: the physical world, bottom-up economic phenomena, technology, changes in our knowledge about the world, etc. Sometimes moral concerns are crucial to law-formation, but at other times they should be secondary or tertiary or even less; social systems are complex. In any case, moral "codes" are NOT a well-formedness condition of any law or right. Your position seems to be that law MUST BE merely derivative of moral feeling, because you want to be sure that our system of laws is emblematic of some moral sense; and this position leads to intellectual and practical problems that Alan has been critiquing in his article.
You've made a statement, but given opposition to that statement, you've yet to make any supporting argumentation beyond the mere repetition of your claim as a single clause. If you want to hold this position in a public forum, you need to do the work of defending your argument and engaging with the material that is up for discussion in good faith -- or cede the floor.
Well that’s only partly true, though. The idea of an independent judiciary is meant to cut against this impulse, even if it’s often failed to do so. And in the case of some of DeSantis’s recent policies, it has been federal judges who have intervened.
But I think we disagree about whether the anti-crt measures expand or limit freedom. I ultimately think vague language about racial sensitivities does not make academics freer to teach difficult content that may well include having to face down (or at least pose) some challenging questions about American history and society.
I think that the time has come for those who support the Open Society paradigm to put as much energy into fighting back against those who would seek to put society back into a conformist straightjacket, as those like Ron De Santis, his Chief of Staff, Christina Pushaw, and the Reactionary Conservative blogosphere do into trying to inject it into the mainstream of society. You can't just shed bitter tears about it, you have to stand up and be loud about what you believe to be right and take the fight up to these people. That means you have to look around for people to challenge them who are good enough to beat them at their own game. Have the Progressive Left been to Harvard to find their Ron De Santis equivalent? They need to. Then get busy.
The use of state power to wage these culture war fights may be the most concerning thing going on in our politics right now, and DeSantis has excelled in this. This piece is a good analysis of his illiberal policy choices.
What's interesting, though, is that often his targets aren't something that he's creating himself, like Joseph McCarthy or, for that matter, Trump. As you document, people like Chris Rufo, the Daily Wire presenters, Rod Dreher frequently are the ones who find stuff to complain about and formulate intellectual arguments against -- and then these items gets picked up DeSantis and his political operation as fodder for a stunt or an awful illiberal policy.
There is also a second set of intellectuals who carry water for people like Rufo and Dreher by reposting, echoing, praising the latter, while ostensibly still defending the principle of pluralism and democratic governance, usually in the self-styled role of courageous outsider. The "Intellectual Dark Web" had this role for a bit, before many of them sank into the swamps of pure crankery, but people like Wesley Yang, Matt Taibbi and, occasionally, Andrew Sullivan, still do this.
We can only fight back against DeSantis and politicians like him by winning elections or winning in court. There's no conversation possible with Trumpy "intellectuals" like Rufo or Ben Shapiro, because their arguments are all iron-clad nonsense. Which leaves the second set of intellectuals who are not so shameless as to be impervious to intellectual embarrassment; in the right forum (i.e., not social media), one can, in fact, make arguments that have consequences, because they don't want to appear foolish, and so what matters, then, is finding that forum and making the argument effectively.
I'd be interested in hearing your view on this second category of writer/talking head. I'm also curious if you've thought about what forums are working or could work for this purpose (of course, this is one of the animating concerns of this publication)?
I think this is a very good post. Popper's vision is basic to any class of liberal, from "classical liberals" (who are usually called conservatives in contemporary politics, and were the core of the late 20th century GOP) to the liberals of today's Democratic Party. This is a clear outline of the ways DeSantis has positioned himseslf and Florida as leading forces of illiberalism.
But illiberalism can take multiple forms, as the recent controversy over the dismissal of a faculty member at Hamline University for showing an image of the Prophet Mohammed illustrates (detailed in last Sunday's New York Times, Jan. 8). There is no counterpart to DeSantis on the Left, because DeSantis uniquely mobilizes state power to close the open society. But, practically speaking, those on the Left will be in a much stronger position to criticize these forms of Right illiberalism if they are vocal in speaking out against illiberalism on the Left, particularly since Desantis has, in part, explicitly positioned himself as a response to illiberalism on the Left in academia.
Happily, I largely rely on Rufo himself.
My critique of DeSantis is certainly not a left-wing one, but rather a liberal one in the long tradition of Mill, Popper, and other liberty-minded thinkers.
The call I make here isn’t really tied to a position in the moral debates currently raging around either crt or drag shows (though I confess to having a position that would rub against the DeSantis view).
The argument is strictly about the use of state power in the hard sense (laws, policies) and the soft (public persuasion) to put excessive restraint on thought and expression. I don’t accept the notion that either racial content in education or publicly accessible drag shows are comparable to child slavery or any other egregious practice from the past. I actually think that it’s pretty indefensible hyperbole. But more to the point, I do not accept the terms under which DeSantis is limiting debate and expression or that actual limiting thereof as appropriate for a liberal democratic society.
The purpose of laws is not to encode "morality" -- this is a muddling of the issues at stake. Our legal systems and our moral codes are separate and each should be considered on its own terms. It's better to think of them as interacting and feeding back on one another. So, no, it's entirely wrong to believe that "all laws are the morals of a democratic society being imposed on the minority who don't wish to follow them." Your position appears to be: a relativistic morality is not only the necessary synecdoche of culture, but its entirety, and this is a ridiculous proposition if you state it plainly. I've written a long paper on a technical definition of laws and rights if you care to read a more detailed explanation of why your identity of morality and law misconstrues the latter:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351608819_The_Ineluctable_Person
The second problem in these notes is that you, apparently, don't believe that moral matters follow any kind of natural order. Which would be news for any conservative prior to 2015. The "morality" being pushed by people like Desantis, Rufo, etc. is too narrow and blinkered for the changes that have been visited on civilization since industrialization, and, at the same time, the understanding of the past used to justify this narrowness is warped and twisted. What's more, many of these people are massively hypocritical, and ill-suited to the role of moral paragon in any drama but a farce. Desantis chooses to use state power because he can't defend his "moral code" from the pulpit, so to speak.
Here is one way to sum up the dialectic Alan is describing (even if this isn't exactly the argument he is making): the impulse to impose a "closed society" on others is rooted in moral failure; the impulse to participate in an "open society" is rooted in moral humility.
Yes, that humility aspect is key. It’s THE thing. It’s not moral or any other sort of relativism but epistemological humility. And the core of that premise is the notion that only a society that allows for all manner of ideas, politics, and lives to be expressed can hope to produce something like the “right” kind of society. And it’s hard. Decent, virtuous ideas don’t always win out. But limiting expression and the right of people to make a public claim about what’s good and true is the surest way to arrive at tyranny.
I explicitly reject your premise, and I've written at length about why it's not the proper approach to this subject. As I indicated previously, it's better to think of our moral systems and our legal systems as separate from each other, but interacting in important ways. Law has to factor more than morality's rudimentary anxieties and prerogatives: the physical world, bottom-up economic phenomena, technology, changes in our knowledge about the world, etc. Sometimes moral concerns are crucial to law-formation, but at other times they should be secondary or tertiary or even less; social systems are complex. In any case, moral "codes" are NOT a well-formedness condition of any law or right. Your position seems to be that law MUST BE merely derivative of moral feeling, because you want to be sure that our system of laws is emblematic of some moral sense; and this position leads to intellectual and practical problems that Alan has been critiquing in his article.
You've made a statement, but given opposition to that statement, you've yet to make any supporting argumentation beyond the mere repetition of your claim as a single clause. If you want to hold this position in a public forum, you need to do the work of defending your argument and engaging with the material that is up for discussion in good faith -- or cede the floor.
Well that’s only partly true, though. The idea of an independent judiciary is meant to cut against this impulse, even if it’s often failed to do so. And in the case of some of DeSantis’s recent policies, it has been federal judges who have intervened.
But I think we disagree about whether the anti-crt measures expand or limit freedom. I ultimately think vague language about racial sensitivities does not make academics freer to teach difficult content that may well include having to face down (or at least pose) some challenging questions about American history and society.