Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
OK, so here's the main point I was trying to make about the piece: There's some preamble that I didn't quote about how the author used to have great conversations in the olden days when everyone was reasonable. Then there are the three paragraphs I quoted, which are a discursive mess but lay out something like an argument about what has changed. Let's leave alone for a second whether we agree or disagree with him there -- it's such a mess that, as you say, one can find something to like in it if one tries hard enough. But take those three paragraphs as his argument. My point to you is, there is *nothing* in the two paragraphs that follow about the 1619 Project that support his argument *at all.* If you are already familiar with the 1619 Project and you already share his views, you will nod out of tribal affinity, but only because he uses rhetorical tricks to sympathize with the eminent historians who weren't listened to, not because he actually shows anything about who said what to or about them. This from someone extolling the lost art of evidence-based argument! There's nothing in it at all. Is that what he thinks we lost? It's shite.
It doesn't mean that his larger argument, whatever it is, is right or wrong. It just means his writing is crap. He blows off anything the 1619 Project people said without considering it or them in any serious way. Isn't that exactly what he is complaining about?
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As I noted earlier, that isn't the greatest piece. I can't defend it against your criticism of the way it treats 1619. But it does touch a subject that few others have -- the intolerant "new truth" emerging on the extreme left. And it does describe that new truth, and the logic or lack thereof behind it. That broader argument can be made without reference to specific facts showing the new truth's intolerance because those facts are around us every day. It's near impossible to argue against the presence of a growing intolerance and orthodoxy on the extreme left.
This new truth is really hard to understand. I used to think it worked like the right wing's delusions, but it's more complex than that. The right wing simply lives in fantasyland. They make shit up, convince themselves it's real and run with it. Mostly immoral rather than amoral.
The new truth of the left appears to assert that when a grievance is so deeply felt, so long standing, so severe, those seeking to redress it must be allowed to do so. That even where they fail to make sense in some of their positions, where data may not bear out certain of their claims, such critiques must be squelched in service to the urgency of what they are doing. Hence, Taibbi is not considered a critic. He is dismissed as a racist - banished. No time is lost considering what he says, debating his points, for those would only Slow Down the Movement.
The new truth seems to believe that logic and facts used to critique its points can be dismissed as a form of violence. They are wrong. They are tools of those Adder would call racists for merely arguing with antiracists.
It's binary thinking. It's all or nothing thinking. But I don't think it's intentional delusion of the sort practiced by the right. These people really believe that their cause is so urgent and so important that no critique may be applied. Debate can only invite reconsideration, and reconsideration could harm the movement.
The new truth understands momentum. It understands the power of numbers, of mobbing those in its way.
I think this article tries to explain the new truth's incoherence. I'm not sure anyone can do that quite well as what's incoherent is by definition quite difficult to describe. And I agree with you that it is cheap and goes against the author's message for him to dismiss 1619 out of hand the same way Adder dismissed Taibbi.
But I think the article is a good example of what's become of our discourse in this country, sadly. The author argues for empirical rigor and then violates his own rule. But in so failing, and attempting to describe this "new truth," he's caused me to analyze what it is. I've found it looks a lot like religion. Urgency, stridency, anger... the belief one is on the side of righteousness, and that the train must not be held up, for anything, even our belief in free speech and exchange of ideas.
