There's a lot that's right about Sarah Downey's essay - that's why @mattyglesias tweeted it, approvingly. But there's a lot wrong with the framing of it, as he says. 1/
What's right about it is the toxicity of some 'mob' behavior. It can be morally right - even obligatory - collectively to disassociate from someone or something. But 'cancel culture' can get unhealthy. This 'no, but yes' is hard to pin just right. 2/
'If your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail' plus 'smashing is fun!' is a toxic combo, yet good identity politics is healthy and necessary. niskanencenter.org/defense-libert… 3/
What's right about the Medium post as well, as @mattyglesias says, is the cost. It's bad to be mobbed for no good reason. It's bad that fear of being at the bottom of some pile-on narrows discourse. 4/
One point Matt makes, that I hadn't thought of this way is: it's easy to be a full-time complainer about woke. There's space for that. There's too much space for that. 5/
Whining about 'woke' is a profitable grift for some, a standard bad faith opening gambit for many more, with the result that good faith critiques of 'woke' are hard to make, since you sound like well-known grifters, fools and bad faith actors. 6/
This is not to say that @SarahADowney is grifting/in bad faith. As she is saying, as Matt is saying: yes, it should be normal for progressives to be able to dissent from the consensus without fear of getting pointlessly and severely whacked into line for doing so. 7/
But now I'm going to pivot and indicate what's wrong with that Medium post. The "1984" framing is just bad. Seriously, it's misleading on a couple levels. It obscures the rightful goal and the dynamics of the problem. 8/
At the goal level, 'I want to be Winston/Neo' is you taking the blue pill so you can Mary Sue about having taken the red pill. It's feel-good narrative, not thinking straight about how to keep progressive identity politics - which is inevitable, and possibly good! - healthy. 9/
As to the dynamics of the problem? Well ... 10/
Everybody in the US is celebrating the 4th, so I'll just re-up these threads from the other day, in which I wisely lay down wisdom. First, it's hard to be a good consequentialist about this sort of thing. 11/
Second, here's how to be a good consequentialist about it. 12/
