Thread by @SethCotlar

Northam should resign. That said, I find it interesting that all of the conservatives who love to complain about “the Twitter mob” seem suddenly unconcerned about Twitter mobs.

1. I don't think this is just a matter of hypocrisy. I think it tells us something interesting and important about the folks who are often most concerned about "Twitter mobs." They are not afraid of "the mob" qua mob, they are afraid of what that supposedly mob stands for.

2. After all, I don't know how to describe what happened on conservative media in regard to Northam's recent comments on abortion other than "a Twitter mob." Virtually every single conservative with a large number of followers jumped all over Northam as a defender of infanticide.

3. This, of course, got their like-minded followers very upset who then piled on all day Thursday...and the goal was to tar and feather not just Northam but the entire Democratic party for this offense (and others).

4. But here's the thing, that anti-abortion Twitter mob is not going to have the policy or real world effect they want, because the majority of the community is not with them. It was a tempest in a moderately-sized Twitter teapot.

5. But the Northam response most likely will have an impact. He likely will (and should) resign. Conservatives are cool with this mob action because "a lib has been owned." And when it comes to owning libs, all conservatives are like Malcom X, "by any means necessary."

6. Conservatives will *tell you* they're cool with *this* Twitter mob because they hate racism so much. I'm skeptical of that...I think the right's response to Northam is 99% "we owned a lib!" and 1% "boy, I really hate racism." Also, a ton of Dinesh confirmation bias about Dems.

7. Warning: here comes a detour into the history of mobs (or crowd action) during the American Revolution. tl;dr--mob action was a key tool of mobilization through which a community (usually peacefully) enforced ethical norms that their leaders or neighbors violated.

8. This article provides an excellent summary of the role crowd actions played in the political culture of colonial & revolutionary era America. Ordinary people frequently formed mobs to intimidate either neighbors or leaders into changing their behavior. philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/crowds…

9. The 21st century Twitter mob obviously is different in one key way--the technology's reach makes it possible for more to join in the crowd action. The "community" enforcing its norms is more attenuated and abstracted. But many of the dynamics remain the same.

10. There's a huge debate amongst historians of the revolution as to whether the crowd actions of that era (like the Stamp Act riots or the Boston Tea Party, to take the two most famous ones) were proto-democratic.

11. Were these vestiges of a pre-modern political order (like the practice of charivari from the medieval period), or were these precursors of a democratized politics in which ordinary citizens insisted on having their voices heard and holding their leaders to account?

12. I think it was a little of both. Citizens formed mobs when their expectations of fairness were violated. This empowered ordinary people. It also meant that they exerted this power in extra-legal, extra-electoral ways.

13. In an era before universal suffrage and in an era of incredible corruption and a lack of accountability amongst political leaders, such actions made much sense.

14. As historian Barbara Clark Smith has shown, during the economic hardships of the revolution, women often formed mobs to force merchants to sell them food at a fair price.

15. At a time when merchants were jacking up prices to make big profits out of a moment of scarcity, women would storm into a store, take what they needed, and leave behind the amount of money they thought was fair recompense.

16. It wasn't stealing, it was "the people" asserting their conception of what was fair. If merchants resisted, things could get a bit uglier...but in almost all cases, the crowd actions of the revolutionary era resulted in little or no physical harm to people.

17. In the decades following the revolution, the meaning (and perceived legitimacy) of crowd action changed dramatically. The argument was "you are represented by the existing political system, therefore extra-legal crowd actions are unnecessary. Don't mob, vote."

18. But as with every political system, there were a host of ways in which the existing order did NOT effectively represent and advance the interests and rights of many people, whether those folks be women, African-Americans, or poor whites.

19. Just about every movement to advance the interests of marginalized groups in American history has been derisively labeled "a mob"--labor unions, feminists, Abolitionists, Civil Rights activists, BLM, etc. etc....

20. One person's "mob" is another person's "emerging community consensus that X action or X word falls outside the boundaries of what we consider acceptable." Those boundaries of acceptability are not new, they exist in every society ever.

21. Twitter just changes how those boundaries get monitored and policed. Apparently, at a Virginia medical school in 1984 some white people thought it was totally acceptable to wear blackface and a KKK robe.

22. In 1984, many people would have been appalled by Northam's actions, but they were not at that institution (or did not have power within it) because they were either black or anti-racist whites.

23. Twitter breaks down the boundaries of those segregated communities of opinion (like Northam's 1984 med school) & exposes them to the light of a diverse public. This is a community articulating & enforcing its values not through the law, but thru crowd action/public opinion.

24. The challenge here, of course, is that "community values" are never entirely consensual, they are always contested. Revolutionary era mobs were coercive, just as Twitter mobs are coercive.

25. Drawing the line between beneficent coercion (i.e. if you wear blackface and a klan robe you will be shunned from public life) and overreaching coercion is never easy. I watch my students work through this challenge every time I teach the American Revolution.

26. Crowds of sailors and artisans nullify the Stamp Act by threatening snooty British officials and we all cheer them on. Then those same crowds destroy the printing press of a Loyalist in New York to shut him up and...um...well, not so sure.

27. Ordinary farming families--men, women, and children--decide to boycott British goods to protest the tyrannical overreach of the British government. Yay, democracy! But...

28. Those same farming families spy on their neighbors, catch someone drinking tea (who also happens to be a religious dissenter), and they give them a "ride on a rail" to change their behavior and accidentally kill them. Uh, yay democracy?

29. Because we know who won the revolution and because Americans tend to regard the winners of the revolution as "the good guys," many of us are inclined to give patriot crowds the benefit of the doubt, to excuse their excesses because the cause was just.

30. In an alternate universe where the Patriots lose in the 1770s and North America is still controlled by the British, those same crowd actions from that era that we now celebrate would be largely forgotten, or regarded as outrageous over-reaches.

31. Crowd actions (or Twitter mobs) are political actions designed to create a different and (in the minds of those in the mob) preferable future. I join the Twitter mob against Northam because I want to live in a less racist future w/ zero tolerance for blackface & the KKK.

32. Anti-choice conservatives join Twitter mobs to attack abortion providers as "baby killers" and to shame women who have had abortions because they want to live in a future where abortion is not a legal medical procedure.

33. There are many ways in which societies work to bend the curve of history, to try to carve a path into what it perceives to be a better future. Every time we build a monument to a civil rights leader or tear down one that celebrates a racist, we are making a bet on the future.

34. Mob actions work when a sufficiently large proportion of the community has arrived at the conclusion that, yes, that behavior/statement is something we will not forbear. They signal to the wavering that it's time to pick sides, and it better be the right one, or else.

35. Much of this boundary drawing work is accomplished by the law. Hate crimes, for example, are punishable by law, not just by being derided on Twitter. Other boundary work happens through electoral politics where leaders signal who "we" are, what "we" profess to believe in.

36. But a good portion of this boundary drawing work also happens in more informal ways, through shifting cultural norms. Since I was in college in the 80s, I've seen a huge shift in mainstream cultural attitudes about sexuality, to just take on example.

37. Homophobia is not dead, but it is now far less acceptable than it once was. Using a homophobic slur in most high schools in the 80s would have been standard operating procedure. Today, far less so. That is an unalloyed good thing, IMO.

38. But note that when that boundary gets informally policed, when someone faces consequences for using a homophobic slur, that's when the anti-PC crowd gets all up in arms about the intolerant politically correct mob.

39. To wrap up...(talk about tl;dr, sorry)...in every healthy, diverse society there is a place for forgiveness and forbearance, for tolerating each others' rough edges...but...

40. ...In every healthy, diverse society there is ALSO a place for determining that certain attitudes/actions are simply unacceptable vestiges from an oppressive past that we want to forever bury. Like blackface. Or the KKK. Or homophobia. Or transphobia. Or....

41. The line between what we will forbear/forgive and what we will mob against is forever shifting...pushing that line in one direction or another is how ordinary people try to shape the future, using one tool which they have available to them.

42. The people who find themselves on the wrong side of that line will always experience that mob as coercive. In an ideal world, what happens next (& what often happened in revolutionary America) is that people reconsidered the action/opinion that had drawn the ire of the crowd.

43. That tea drinking neighbor in 1773 Newton, MA who got called out said "oops, my bad, sorry folks, won't do it again" and then they were welcomed back into the circle of the "we."

44. That was a not insignificant part of the informal political process that enabled the American Revolution to succeed. It happened in community after community across the continent as a new consensus was coercively brought into existence.

45. For the Patriots, the cause on behalf of which they coerced their neighbor's tea drinking behavior was sufficiently important enough to justify those almost always low stakes forms of coercion. Like not drinking tea. Or finding a job other than governor of VA.

46. This is why conservatives are upset by what they call "SJW Twitter mobs." Those mobs seek to enforce a future in which those folks don't want to live. As evidenced by the anti-choice Twitter mobs they join in, it's not mobbing that's the problem...it's the goal of that mob.

47. Holding a public figure to account for homophobic, racist, or sexist statements is a way of trying to bring into existence a future world in which women, POC, and people who aren't straight can live fuller, safer, and more self-determining lives.

48. It's mostly "Twitter mobs" that seek such progressive political ends that conservatives and centrists get all upset about.

49. Put in a 1770s context, such people claim that they want the Revolution to succeed (that they revile sexism, racism, etc.), they just don't like the stark, mobbish boundary drawing. They want to keep drinking tea, but also get rid of the Brits. Change doesn't work that way.

50. Most of the leaders of the revolution, the people we usually think of as "the founders," did not particularly like mobs. They knew they were often useful means to serve their ends, but they feared that they might turn on them. In fact, they often did (see Shays Rebellion).

51. That said, many 18th century Americans shared Jefferson's more sanguine attitude (which he expressed in 1787 in the context of Shays Rebellion): "I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere."

52. One might argue that the Twitter mobs of our era have been like clarifying storms...crystallizing something that's in the air, raining down like a torrent, and leaving a slightly transformed landscape in its wake.

53. The Shaysites rebels didn't kill anybody. They shut down the courts to try to protect their land from being foreclosed upon (unfairly, in their estimation). Jefferson thought, "hear them out, there's probably a reason why this storm is happening." He was right.

54. Jefferson's Federalist opponents thought he was nuts. If we let this mob win this time, then what's next? They'll start redistributing property and killing the rich and destroying the churches and...and...and...

55. Behind almost every claim that one's opponents are "a mob," is the slippery slope argument that if you give an inch they'll put you in a gulag. That almost always grievously misrepresents the motivations behind those "mobs."

56. The Shaysites just wanted to keep their farms. The mob that's currently after Northam just wants to live in a world where the nation's most powerful people are folks who haven't done egregiously racist things as adults.

57. No huge mob is calling for Northam to be put in jail or to be harmed in any other way than for him to relinquish the elected office that the people of Virginia bestowed upon him before they knew of this episode from his past. It's called accountability.

58. It's important that this Jeffersonian "storm in the atmosphere" be resolved in this way...not to punish Northam, but as a way for us as a society to reaffirm who we are.

59. IMHO, Northam should be welcomed back with open arms when he (hopefully) does the sort of reckoning we would expect from someone who so egregiously violated social norms.

60. I have no idea how to end this but it really must end. Mobs can indeed sometimes do foolish, even violent things. That said, sometimes they function as a blunt instrument with which an emergent and beneficent community consensus articulates itself.

61. Anytime someone just inveighs against "the mob," it's always worth asking what ideals are motivating that "mob." Sometimes (oftentimes) it's the principles that the critics have a problem with, not the mobbing itself.

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