Thread by @DouthatNYT

A couple of thoughts on this @OsitaNwanevu essay, mostly in the interest of clarifying the debate:
newrepublic.com/article/158346…

Start with this section, which defends those institutions that appear to be narrowing their range of permissible debate against charges of "illiberalism":

I think the assumption made by Chait, Sullivan, and other ppl the essay criticizes *is* precisely that a healthy liberal culture depends not just on formal 1st Amendment guarantees, but also on having important cultural institutions committed to liberal values.

So yes, schools and newspapers certainly have a right to publish/platform who they please. But from what the essay terms the "reactionary liberal" POV, if Yale becomes Hampshire or the WaPost The Nation, something is lost for liberal culture even if no 1st Amend rule is violated.

And given corporate/academic/journalistic consolidation, and the decline of regional power centers, it seems plausible for partisans of liberal values to worry more about what happens in the Ivies or Google or the Times than one might in a more dispersed intellectual landscape.

(I would add that this might be especially true if the newer liberalism seems committed to weakening freedom-of-association protections for institutions - religious schools and colleges, say - that dissent from the emergent consensus at the more central institutions.)

Then this passage, where I think one rejoinder from Nwanevu's targets might be that he's sort-of right about what would happen if social media shut down, but not in the way he means.

Meaning that the illiberal or at least conformist turn in elite institutions, from the POV of its critics, is accelerated by social media's patterns and incentives - including internal social media like Slack as well as the external sort.

So if Twitter and all its works and pomps disappeared tomorrow, a lot of the mobbish social power would leak out of the evolved liberalism. The "reactionary liberals" would have less to react to, yes -- but that's because less of what they oppose would be going on.

Finally, Nwanevu's contention that the newer liberalism's only goal is "parity, not superiority," and that nobody is proposing giving a "group" identity any rights over the individual gets at the issue I was trying to draw out in this piece:
nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opi…

Which is to say that yes, many demands associated with progressivism right now are just for parity, equality, the fulfillment of liberalism's promise. But that is not the only thing going on.

In examples that range from the extant (campus sex-assault tribunals that don't offer men due process) to the hypothetical (Kendi's imagined Department of Anti-Racism), the new liberalism has a lot of ideas about using power to police groups and individuals it disfavors.

How real some of these ideas become is an open question. Nwavenu cites the cyclical nature of campus activism to suggest (I think) that this ideological surge too will die way - something my own book on decadence expected as well.

But if each surge carries an academic worldview a little closer to power, with what used to belong to Oberlin now setting the agenda for H.R. departments and major media enterprises, I'd say that anyone who doesn't share that worldview need not be "reactionary" to be concerned.

(Not that there's anything wrong with being reactionary, if the circumstances require.) /finis