Editor’s Note: These “First Drafts” are not meant to be full-fledged arguments. They are attempts to work through tensions and incoherences in our own thinking in real time, with you, the crowd, as our interlocutors. This week, it’s Damir’s turn. Please feel free to challenge us in the comments. We’ll read all of them and respond to as many as we can.
Rod Dreher wrote a post a few days ago titled “Who Killed George Floyd? George Floyd.” (The original title has since been changed in order to be less gratuitously inflammatory.) The outrage that swept through the commentariat was predictable, but I think it missed the mark. Go on and read the post, with its dozen “updates” by Dreher, and come back when you have. I’m not going to engage in a close reading of the full text here.
At the core of Dreher’s argument (such as it is) is a sense of moral whiplash. He claims that he had more or less bought into the Narrative (conservative code for what “the media and the liberal establishment” is telling you, his capitalization is a tell)—that Floyd’s murder was proof of explicit racist intent—and that after watching the full footage of the incident as captured by a police bodycam, he was angered at supposedly being misled. Floyd resisted arrest, and though he didn’t “deserve” to die, for Dreher, Floyd’s death was completely understandable within the context of what really happened. But Dreher didn’t stop there. As if to underline his outrage, he wrote: “All the George Floyd riots, all the George Floyd protests, have been based on a lie.”
Temperamentally, I recoil from the moral certainties of activism, so at least superficially I understand what Dreher thought he was doing with his post. Journalism in the age of Trump has become activism-inflected, with the New York Times, in particular, forcing readers seeking straight news to read more critically than ever before. But at the same time, Dreher’s own response was moralizing in the opposite direction—a kind of funhouse mirror image of that which antagonized him. People are lying! The truth is the opposite of what is being alleged!
Needless to say, it isn’t. It’s complicated.
But I bring up the Dreher episode not in order to wade into a substantive discussion of race or policing—I’m way out of my depth and have nothing substantive to offer—nor to litigate what was really in Dreher’s heart—I don’t personally know him and I don’t really care. Rather, I’d like to shine a light on something that has been gnawing at me for a while now. While I do firmly believe it’s dangerous that we in America are engaged in an escalating standoff between competing moral righteousnesses, our current moment of crisis has also forced me to grapple with the implications of my own preferred stance: that of analytical distance.
Can an individual living in America today really say in good conscience: “Well, the question of race and policing is all very complicated and it doesn’t do us any good to oversimplify”? In a different but related register, a podcast guest recently raised the question (after we had finished recording): at what point does explaining the phenomenon of populist discontent become apologetics for Trump? Is the analytical pose cowardly—an abdication of responsibility as a citizen of a democratic society?
My easy answer is that a politics driven exclusively by activists can lead to bad outcomes. “Defund the police” rolls off the tongue real pretty, but lands like a lead weight when actually implemented. And the kind of overheated rhetoric about Donald Trump—who was after all legitimately elected by American voters—leads to the undermining of democracy itself if taken too far. The analytical pose is at least useful in that context—as a counterweight to the increasingly strident demands of both sides of any debate in an increasingly polarized society.
But that answer elides an important question: namely, by what mechanism does social change work? Most activists will be quick to point out that even if their demands are not accepted 100 percent, they will have forced a mute, inert public to engage on their terms. This “shifts consciousness” and allows for a reframing of questions in ways that were impossible before. In that frame, those of us who analytically “complicate” matters are, in some sense, conservative by default. Real change doesn’t happen if all you’re doing is appreciating the problem. And if you believe that society needs reform, is doing nothing tantamount to acquiescence?
Though I tend to end up to the “right” on many debates, I don’t really consider myself a conservative. A conservative, ultimately, holds fast to a belief that there is something precious worth conserving. That’s not me. I’m a pessimist. When asked to choose between the devil I know and the devil I don’t, I tend to focus above all on the fact that both choices involve the devil. I see most social arrangements as delicate and precarious, and while I recognize that societies can evolve, I fret about when people blithely push for change with the assumption that change can only be for the better.
America, of course, is anything but a pessimistic place. Its relentless optimism is perhaps its greatest strength, and the source of its ability to constantly reinvent itself, even at its darkest moments. And as a (relatively) recent immigrant, I frequently find myself checking my pessimism. I am convinced that it is that very pessimism, so prevalent in the rest of the world, that leaves other societies struggling to cope with challenges as they arise.
Still, old habits are hard to break. And in times of crisis, that dirty old pessimism gains a luster that it doesn’t have when things are going just fine…
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Damir relays a pair of questions raised off-the-air by a recent guest - but they are ones that likely many of us have been asked, or have asked ourselves:
"[A]t what point does explaining the phenomenon of populist discontent become apologetics for Trump?Is the analytical pose cowardly—an abdication of responsibility as a citizen of a democratic society?"
There has been a quote jangling in my brain for the whole Wisdom of Crowds woke conversation, it came back to me as I listened to the ever-so-reasonable words of Christine Emba on the latest episode, and it seems relevant in response to (or as a rephrasing of) the above questions.
The quote is by the then very young (25) and determined-not-to-be-socially-accommodating Karl Marx. In his "Introduction" to a never-written "Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" (a work whose continuous argument-by-chiasm - "not this of that but that of this" - constitutes a proof that everyone needs an editor), Marx pauses after a chiasm and lays down his cards:
"In the struggle against this state of affairs, criticism is not a passion of the head but the head of passion. It is not a lancet but a weapon. its object is an enemy which it aims not to refute but to destroy. for the spirit of this state of affairs has already been refuted. It is not, in itself, an object worthy of our thought; it is an existence as contemptible as it is despised. Criticism itself has no need for further elucidation of this object, for it has already understood it. Criticism is no longer an end in itself but simply a means; indignation is its essential mode of feeling, and denunciation its principal task." (Karl Marx, "Early Writings, tr. T.B. Bottomore, 1964.)
So, when Christine said that Shadi was taking unjustified "leaps" in his characterization of the "woke" movement as one out to destroy its opponents, I would have liked to ask her whether her stance or the young Marx's is more characteristic of current woke culture, and to have argued that the second stance is at least not absent from it.
All of this circles back to Damir's opening illustration. Pace Rod Dreher, the question of whether George Floyd was resisting arrest has little bearing upon the perception that is driving the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police movement, i.e., that our mode of policing, out of bias, diminishes the health and safety and freedom of movement persons of color.
A great cause has risen in the wake of George Floyd's death. It's a cause that I support - and, different question, I do think it will have an impact. But it's a good wind that blows no ill. Great causes demand solidarity. Solidarity requires simplification of issues and its enforcement inevitably leads to intellectual bullying, the point at which even great causes are easily co-opted by thematically broader anti-systemic movements whose very raison d'etre seems to be to provoke a backlash. Raising the flag on the bullying, insisting on discussion of actionable proposals, underlining the importance of open debate along with protest - all these are precisely the means to unwind this dynamic. All of them insist that analysis has a productive role alongside that of passion.
Is there a test for the need for analysis? Yes. It's the dominance within a movement of just that for-us-or-against-us logic of the young Marx. At the point where a movement insists that discussion is opposition, where it insists that plainly different things are really the same, then it is time to recall those sayings on the outer wall of George Orwell's Ministry of Truth.
Enough said, enough leaps: Christine would point out that my term "movement" needs to be analyzed. Fair enough.
I'm not sure I buy this idea that activists really do effect substantive social change by pushing the cultural envelope, which seems to be what "woke" folks are trying to do. Social change frequently involves changes in class structure, economics, institutions, etc. Of course culture matters, but I would argue we live in a moment that tends to over-state its influence--this is why an openly Marxist website was publishing anti-1619 Project historians, because they felt the focus on race and narrative was a distraction from more important class divisions. Lots of these new changes in consciousness are very compatible with the interests of multinational corporations and current economic elites.