The Culture Wars: A Reality Check
Cultural Systemism is a Serious Problem. But it's Not All Powerful Yet.
Those of us who come into regular contact with news about the culture wars really need a reality check from time to time. The reality is that there are very real problems out there, rooted in very problematic philosophies, originating from both the far-left and the far-right. We need to work extra hard to confront and challenge these anti-liberal philosophies, and push them back to the margins of the Western political landscape. But things aren't as dire as some people are saying either, and the exaggeration that is now common in some circles only serves attempts to usher in a new authoritarian politics amid the panic.
It would truly be a world gone mad if you were not allowed to acknowledge that rioting is rioting and it is bad. But is that what the world is like? I said that rioting was bad. Joe Biden said that rioting was bad, and he’s not rotting in a gulag, he’s sitting in the Oval Office. Conservatives like to pretend that Biden didn’t say that because, if true, that would be politically advantageous to them. Since a lot of people believe lies they are told by ideologically aligned media, that means lots of people believe this was a dark forbidden truth in progressive circles in 2020, but they’re just being misled. I think it would be accurate to say that a lot of media organizations went to extreme lengths to downplay the extent of looting and arson, but that’s different.
By the same token, you’re definitely allowed to say that there are differences between men and women. The problem conservatives have is that they don’t think liberals are drawing the correct conclusions from this fact. Which is a fine thing to argue about. But “people disagree about the implications of gender differences for trans rights and for understanding sex-linked disparate outcomes” is a different and much-less-crazy world from one in which “you’re not able to say out loud and in public that there are differences between men and women.”
-More courage, less fear by Matthew Yglesias
There is a real problem with free speech in some circles at the moment, and we need to do our best to defend the future of free speech, including by challenging philosophies and theories that are skeptical or hostile towards free speech. However, exaggerating is not helpful either, and we do need to acknowledge that exaggeration is happening all the time, because it suits the interests of some actors. These include media outlets that profit from click-bait headlines, as well as authoritarian movements that want to capitalize on panic to push through their authoritarian agenda. Moral panics have always been a favorite tool of wannabe authoritarians, which is why liberty loving people should never fall for them.
For [John Stuart Mill] is no ally of today’s so-called “conservatives”, who look to him for assistance in securing minuscule platforms in an otherwise dominant progressive academy or wider progressive social and political order. What they fail to understand is that the academy, as well as society as a whole, has been transformed in perfect conformity to Millian ambitions: institutions dominated by progressive elites who impose their social radicalism upon the rest of society. The charges that such “liberals” are hypocrites for failing to live up to the ideals of the university, or that they are “illiberal”, are therefore non-starters — progressive dominance is, in fact, the realisation of exactly the vision for society first articulated by Mill. Today’s “conservatives” pick up On Liberty and believe they are holding a shield against progressive despotism, but what they have found is a sword that progressives no longer need and now have readily discarded.
Rather than look to Mill, those seeking to resist today’s progressive totalitarianism should, as Orwell recommended, “look to the proles”. Just as Mill effected a “regime change”, we should look to do the same by aligning ourselves with the instinctive traditionalism of the demos that Mill deplored. In either regime, some theoretical condition of “true liberty” is purely fictional and not an aim requisite for a flourishing society. We will either have today’s “despotism of progress” or the “restoration of good custom”. In the hopes of encouraging the latter, it is time for a revolution against the revolution.
-JS Mill and the despotism of progress by Patrick Deneen in Unherd
One thing we also need to be aware of is the agenda of those who are pushing the culture wars, and encouraging the aforementioned exaggeration of the problems of wokeness. I'm particularly concerned about those 'anti-woke warriors' aligned, at least to some extent, with the emerging 'postliberal' thinkers on the authoritarian right. I think we should pay particular attention to the postliberals' attitude towards classical liberal thinkers, particularly John Stuart Mill. Postliberals simply can't see that Mill's defense of individual freedom to reject traditional norms is about building a free market of ideas. Instead, they see it as an attempt to allow radical ideas to be popularized. It's either all tradition or all radical, all black or all white, for them.
This shows us an important thing: these postliberals don't believe in the marketplace of ideas being a thing at all, and they don't believe in such fundamental liberal values like rational debate, compromise and the importance of allowing experimentation. Instead all they see is power play everywhere. This leads to a worldview where speech is necessarily only the tool of power play, which is in fact very similar to postmodernism. This is why classical liberals who are dedicated to free speech and the marketplace of ideas must see postliberal ideology as the threat it represents, and repel all attempts at advancing postliberalism into the mainstream. Including by the creation of moral panics, which I believe is currently happening.
Class war for Steven isn’t a war between preexisting classes, but a war that creates class — that rescues the key conceptual social category of the radical tradition from the political abyss. The stakes of Class War can be most clearly seen in its treatment of the form of violence that both opens and closes the book: the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the summer of 2020. On the opening page, Steven praises the “convulsions” of the BLM movement as “class warfare.” “The defenders of the establishment felt fear,” he writes, quoting one such defender who describes “a violent mob marauding through the streets of Chicago” as “a classic example of class war, not racial justice.”...
Radical political organizers have always recognized the need to turn theoretical common interests into practical shared struggle. And the catalyst is violence. The visceral experience of war, of terrorism, of riot, of protest, forges new disciplines, new communities — it turns the various social groupings of the oppressed into a class at war with its enemy. Violence motivates class.
Of course, frustration about 'wokeism', or as I prefer to call it, cultural systemism, is very real, and also very valid. What we are talking about is an ideology that aims to pit groups of people against each other, often based on their immutable characteristics, and wants these groups to fight endlessly in order to destroy the status quo. Any reasonable person would recognize that this is an extremist and dangerous ideology. While not every cultural systemist goes as far as what is quoted above, even in its more moderate forms, cultural systemism is still an ideology of hate not love, an ideology of destruction not cooperation, and a fundamentally anti-intellectual ideology. Those of us who oppose it are doing so on strong grounds indeed.
The fact that the authoritarian right is capitalizing on the frustration with wokeness doesn't mean the frustration isn't real in the first place, or that it should be ignored. Some are now saying that we shouldn't talk about 'wokeism' at all because this might benefit the authoritarian right. This is something I strongly disagree with. We can (and should) argue against cultural systemism on the left and religious authoritarianism on the right at the same time, there is no conflict between these arguments, indeed our commitment to liberal values tie these two arguments together very well.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).
"Intellectuals" as Deneen are more authoritarian than many who really are woke (left-wing collectivists=